Just this week, Afghan authorities blamed the Taliban for an attack on a wedding in southern Afghanistan, which killed nearly 40 people.  The Taliban denied responsibility, but the groom had links to anti-Taliban groups.  Also, Monday was the deadliest day so far this year for international forces in Afghanistan. Ten NATO soldiers, seven of them Americans, were killed in separate attacks in the eastern and southern parts of the country that day.

With this new violence, the director of Afghanistan’s Center for Research and Policy Studies, Haroun Mir, told me that he believes next month’s scheduled international conference in Kabul might not happen.

“I don’t think that it would be appropriate for a foreign minister from Europe to attend the Kabul conference when we know that there’s a huge risk, tremendous risk, that they could be eliminated by one rocket attack,” said Haroun Mir. “All we need is one rocket attack, and all these ministers are flying back to their homes and that would be a big humiliation.”

Even the top U.S. commander in the country, General Stanley McChrystal, said this week he expects the Kandahar offensive to take longer than anticipated.

“There are going to be tough days ahead,” said General McChrystal. “Violence is up, and I think violence will continue to rise, particularly over the summer months.  It is necessary that we roll back Taliban influence as we move toward increased security in the future.”

But McChrystal said that despite the violence, he thinks the perception of the insurgent’s momentum is reversing.  It’s this reversal in momentum that President Karzai and analysts hope will convince the Taliban to sit down for peace talks.

Amrullah Saleh has a different idea.  Saleh is the former head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security.  He resigned from the post, along with the country’s interior minister, following the insurgent attack on the peace jirga earlier this month.

Saleh criticized Mr. Karzai for wanting to reconcile with the Taliban.

“I want a dignified peace, a peace which will not reverse our achievements, a peace which will not undermine our constitution, a peace which will not allow a small terrorist group to dominate the political scene in Afghanistan,” said Amrullah Saleh. “Therefore, I am in favor of peace, but I am against bowing to the Taliban.”

He also has said that he believes President Karzai is taking a softer approach toward Pakistan in a bid to negotiate with the Taliban.  Saleh referred to Pakistan as Afghanistan’s enemy number one for its alleged support of the Taliban.

Ayaz Wazir is Pakistan’s former ambassador to Kabul.  He told me that he disagrees with Saleh, and he wonders about his motives for making these statements now, especially after his resignation.

“Had Pakistan been the ‘enemy number one’, then why was the intelligence chief not saying so before?  Now when he is resigned, he is accusing a neighboring country,” said Ayaz Wazir.

In another blow to the coalition, Britain’s newly elected government says it will not pledge more troops, despite being one of America’s biggest partners in the country since the toppling of the Taliban-led government in 2001.

Haroun Mir with Afghanistan’s Center for Research and Policy Studies says all these factors teach the Taliban an important lesson.

“You know with one or three rocket fires, they were able to get the resignations of two important ministers, and now the NATO  countries have lost their will,” he said.

He also says it seems unlikely that the Taliban will want to negotiate if they believe they have the upper hand against a coalition in flux and what Mir calls a dysfunctional government.

Do you think the Taliban has the upper hand?  What do you think needs to come out of the Kabul conference?

There were some 2,000 of us under a massive tent at the Polytechnic University in the western part of Kabul Wednesday morning:  1,600 delegates, members of the media and assorted foreign dignitaries.  (Some of my media colleagues came in late because:  1. we had to sit on the buses forever before the drivers took us to the event and 2. organizers split us into small groups for the long and thorough security process.)

Early in Mr. Karzai’s speech to open the three-day peace assembly, an explosion sounded outside the tent, briefly interrupting the president.  Watch how the situation evolved (also, click here for more info, along with my immediate phone interview with VOA’s Sarah Williams):

Everyone reacted calmly to the initial rocket, but the situation changed after President Karzai’s speech.

As my colleagues and I scrambled to conduct interviews with delegates outside the main tent, a piercing whistle sounded directly overhead.  My initial thought in the split second I heard the sound was “fireworks,” but then logic quickly hit me.  Instantly, I grabbed the camera and tripod (despite my interviewee still being attached by microphone), ducked and looked up, but by that time, we heard the explosion.

I understand that this rocket exploded closer than the first one.  Below is the picture I captured from the media center overlooking the jirga campus. 

The long white structure in the middle is the main jirga tent.  I’m told that the second rocket exploded near the outer green fence, close to the guard tower.

As you can see in my video above, jirga organizers were quick to usher journalists out, much to the amusement of delegates walking calmly among us.

It was a constant battle:  us journalists trying to talk to delegates and shoot video of the exterior of the event, and organizers and Afghan security forces rushing us away.

You could argue they were doing it for our safety.  Which is no doubt true… up to a point.  Once they took us outside the barricades of the jirga campus, they left us standing in the middle of a completely exposed parking lot.  The handful of Afghan policemen there seemed pretty unconcerned by the gunfire ringing out down the street.

I will give the organizers this though… while the buses took some time to show up, the drivers felt no need to hang around.

AndrewRT, Wikimedia Commons

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a television interview that the United Nations wants to replace more than half of the country’s 380 district election heads as one way to make the second round more credible.

But the U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan told me today that staffing is just one of the many things Afghan election officials have to consider in the coming weeks.

Click here for the story.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, authorities closed many schools a day after two suicide bombers attacked the International Islamic University in Islamabad, killing four people at a faculty building and a women’s cafeteria.

Separately, surveillance video footage from one of last week’s attacks in Lahore made its rounds on local media channels.  The attack was on the country’s Federal Investigation Agency, which is similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY5xe_aRk2c

Also, Pakistani helicopter gunships attacked Taliban strongholds near the Afghan border on the fifth day of an offensive in the tribal region of South Waziristan.

Officials say troops are facing fierce resistance as they fight to gain control of Kotkai, the hometown of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-10-15-voa8.cfm

Click here for VOA’s News Now segment.

Late Thursday, a bomb blast hit a government residential area in Peshawar.

Click here for the story.

There have been nine attacks in Pakistan in the last 10 days.  In that time, we’ve seen attacks on the army’s headquarters, security checkpoints, police training stations and the country’s equivalent of the FBI.

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik says it appears the militants are focusing their sights on symbols of the country’s security.  But Malik vowed that these attacks will not deter the government from pursuing the militants.

Looking at the local media, it appears the government is on the defensive.  Sure you hear about the daily skirmish in the country’s northwest between the military and militants, but in terms of shock value, the militants are winning the PR war.

Several Pakistanis have told me that the situation has come to the point where there isn’t a target that could shock them now.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-10-12-voa8.cfm

Click here for the story.

The militants have shown their reach, whether it is in Pakistan’s northwest, a high-security area of the capital or one of the most unthinkable targets in the country: the army headquarters.

The interesting thing about the attack on the army HQ (known as the GHQ) is that not all the militants involved in the fighting were from South Waziristan.

Several were from Punjab province, and army spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said the sole militant captured in the attack also was involved in the assault on Sri Lanka’s cricket team earlier this year.

The attack on the cricket team in Lahore was one of several operations that analysts believe are relatively new collaborations among Pakistani Taliban from the tribal areas and outlawed militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

Overall though, Abbas said the militants in South Waziristan are responsible for more than 80 percent of all terror attacks inside Pakistan.

I spoke to the former security chief of Pakistan’s tribal regions, Mahmood Shah, and he repeated his insistence that the military needs to tackle militants based in the tribal region soon.

In the meantime, the militants have vowed more attacks.  The question is: Where will they strike next?