KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — As NATO troops replace U.S. forces on southern Afghanistan's battlefields, insurgents are waging a suicide bombing campaign that appears aimed at shaking the alliance's public support in Europe and Canada.
Four years after the Taliban regime was toppled, the test of wills threatens to set back the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan, American and Afghan analysts say.
Suicide bombings were rare in Afghanistan until last fall, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began debating a move into southern Afghanistan.
The mission is expected to draw NATO into the first ground combat in its 57-year history. Fighting Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in rugged, often mountainous terrain would be a major step beyond NATO's previous peacekeeping missions or the alliance's 78-day air war against Serbia in 1999 to end atrocities in Kosovo. The NATO forces are set to take over from U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan this spring, but will depend on American attack helicopters and other aircraft for support.
The decision to take on the mission came only after considerable debate within the alliance. The formal discussion began in September, about the time insurgents launched a wave of suicide attacks. At least 22 suicide bombers have struck since then, more than double the total for the previous three years.
Bombers have targeted Canadian, German, Italian, Portuguese and other NATO troops, whose main mission has been peacekeeping and building schools and hospitals, not fighting insurgents..
Mir Akbar Ansari, a senior prosecutor in Afghanistan's anti-terrorism courts, believes that the suicide bombers are going after NATO troops because they see them as weak links in the efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
"I think the rise of attacks in Afghanistan nowadays is aimed at the weak forces, such as Canada and others, and that is because these countries can easily be threatened," Ansari said.
"The terrorists want the Americans to be alone in Afghanistan, so that they can deal with them later. Al Qaeda doesn't want to leave its nest in Afghanistan."
Afghan officials say the bombers are overwhelmingly foreigners, mainly Arabs and Pakistanis who usually enter the country from Pakistan.
Officials in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, insist they are doing everything they can to prevent that. But in talks this week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai pressed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for a "more intensive pursuit of terrorists, wherever they may be."
