KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launched a sustained attack Thursday against a U.S. base in Kandahar. No coalition casualties were reported in the hours long confrontation in the heart of the country’s main southern city.
The attack, which began in mid-afternoon and stretched into the evening, targeted a joint civilian-military installation housing what is known as a provincial reconstruction team, mainly devoted to development projects. The base was run by troops from Canada until this past summer, when that nation ended its combat mission in Afghanistan.
One of NATO’s biggest bases, Kandahar Airfield, is a short distance from the city and sometimes serves as a deterrent to insurgent attacks in the area. Provincial reconstruction team bases, however, are typically positioned so as to give immediate access to the surrounding community and aid in the task of trying to win public support.
Afghan officials, who described the attack as “failed,” said the assailants took over a three-story complex close to the U.S. base and used it as a staging ground. That echoed the tactic employed in a 20-hour siege of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last month, when assailants used an unfinished multistory building to fire rockets at the diplomatic compound.
A second and apparently coordinated strike took place outside a combat outpost in the Panjwayi district outside Kandahar city, where a car bomb exploded, according to a spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. The spokesman, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Christopher DeWitt, said the base’s perimeter was not breached.
The dual attacks came a day after Afghan government officials said they were finalizing plans to hand over all or part of 17 provinces to Afghan security forces. Afghan police and soldiers began taking over security responsibilities in July in seven Afghan cities or provinces, a prelude to the envisioned end of the Western combat mission in 2014.
U.S.-led forces last year staged a costly offensive to secure key provinces surrounding Kandahar city and said the Taliban had been driven from longtime strongholds. Local people say the insurgents keep a low profile these days but are still present in considerable numbers around Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said all personnel in the provincial reconstruction team were safe and accounted for but that there had been unconfirmed casualty reports. Afghan officials said a police officer and a civilian were hurt.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for both of Thursday’s strikes.
Meanwhile, two American drone strikes hours apart destroyed a hide-out in Taliban strongholds in Pakistan’s rugged tribal regions Thursday and a vehicle with a number of fighters inside. A close ally of one of the area’s top militant commanders and 10 others were killed, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
The United States refuses to acknowledge the CIA-run drone program in Pakistan publicly, but officials have said privately that the drone strikes have killed many senior al-Qaida and Taliban commanders. Pakistani officials regularly criticize the U.S. attacks in public as violations of the country’s sovereignty, but the government has actually supported them in private and allowed the drones to take off from bases within Pakistan.
That cooperation has become strained this year as the relationship between the United States and Pakistan has deteriorated, especially after the arrest of a CIA contractor in January and the covert American raid that killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town in May.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday defended U.S. cooperation with Pakistan to lawmakers who questioned the willingness of Afghanistan’s neighbor to clear out terrorist sanctuaries within its borders.
“Many of our successes against al-Qaida would not have been possible withoutclose cooperation between the United States and Pakistan,” Clinton said to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Clinton faced questions about the Obama administration’s decision to certify Pakistan’s cooperation against terrorism, a prerequisite for some U.S. assistance.
“On balance, Pakistan met the legal threshold,” she said, adding she had considered “a number of factors.”
In her prepared remarks to the House panel, Clinton also sought to counter pressure by Republican lawmakers to cut U.S. funding for Afghanistan and Pakistan, saying the stability and economic development of the war-torn region is critical to U.S. security.
In other developments, a top U.S. general said Thursday that cross-border radio communications with Pakistan’s military collapsed after the raid that killed bin Laden and are still not consistent or up to what the United States would like to see.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who directs dayto-day military operations in Afghanistan, said officials are trying to re-establish military communications along the border, particularly between Afghan and Pakistani units that are facing each other.
Information for this article was contributed by Laura King of the Los Angeles Times; by Ishtiaq Mahsud, Riaz Khan, Rasool Dawar and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press and by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 6 on 10/28/2011