Islamabad - Gauging the strength of the factions, particularly the Taleban, fighting coalition and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, is an imprecise science.
Both sides have significantly stepped up operations against each other in the past few months, but they tend to talk up the overall impact their strikes have.
The Americans recently characterised the Taleban as a declining force.
However, some analysts say Afghanistan is witnessing an increase, not a decrease, in what they describe as the Taleban's sophisticated attacks and they believe that will continue during the coming months.
Increased attacks
As winter turned to spring in Afghanistan and the Taleban resumed guerrilla style offensives in the south and east, American commanders were declaring them a weakened, losing force.
They say they are down to around 2,000 men with declining appeal to former leaders and to the population.
But the American belief, that they are still funded and armed by al-Qaeda, coupled to the frequency and deadliness of their attacks in the past two months, tests that theory to the full.
One Kabul-based analyst said that although the Americans had stepped up anti-Taleban operations, he expected attacks by the rebel movement to increase in the coming months.
He said the real measure of their strength was not their numbers but the sophistication and degree of co-ordination of those attacks.
Sending a message
The assassination of Mawlawi Fayaz, he said, followed by a strike inside the mosque during his funeral, proved just how sophisticated.
Since the cleric was a close ally of Hamid Karzai, it served as a message to the Afghan president of the Taleban's continuing threat.
The killing of Kabul's recently appointed police chief, another ally, sent the same message.
If the Taleban were responsible for the Kandahar mosque attack, in the analyst's words, "they got a lot of bangs for their bucks."
http://www.sabawoon.com/news/miniheadlines.asp?dismode=article&artid=23329
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This article ties in with the last part of the article posted above:
Suicide bomber's part of Al-Qaeda network: Governor Kandahar
June 1, 2005
KANDAHAR - Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha Sherzai said the suicide bomber's body had been found and he was part of Osama bin Laden's terror network.
"The attacker was a member of al-Qaida. We have found documents on his body that show he was an Arab," Sherzai told reporters.
Kandahar was a stronghold of the hard-line Taliban regime that was ousted from power in late 2001 by U.S.-led forces for harboring bin Laden.
A foreign media reported that it received a call from a man claiming to be a Taliban member who said the movement was responsible for the attack. It did not identify the caller or say if the report had been verified.
But a purported Taliban spokesman, Mullah Latif Hakimi, said in a telephone call to The Associated Press that the group was not responsible for the bombing.
http://www.sabawoon.com/news/miniheadlines.asp?dismode=article&artid=23331
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Journalist Samir Kassir assassinated in Beirut blast
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
Thursday, June 02, 2005
BEIRUT - Prominent anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir was assassinated Thursday when his parked car blew up in a residential sector in the Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh.
Prominent opposition figures immediately blamed the blast on the Lebanese regime and its political masters in Syria, which was forced to end its harsh 29-year military presence in the country after the February murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri.
Excerpted
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=15594