Mullah Mohammed Omar

KABUL, Afghanistan — The governor of the violent southern province of Kandahar escaped an assassination attempt today, even as President Hamid Karzai renewed his calls to insurgents to lay down their weapons. A remote-controlled roadside bomb exploded beneath a convoy carrying the governor, Turyalai Wesa, as he was on his way to prayers on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the holiest Muslim holiday of the year. Wesa was unharmed, but a policeman helping guard him was injured, the governor's office said.

The head of intelligence for the province of Kandahar pledged Tuesday to help the United States hunt down Mullah Mohammed Omar if asked, and stood by his reports that the Taliban leader retreated to the north with troops and heavy arms 12 days ago. If Omar is captured, he will be put on trial and executed in Afghanistan, vowed Haji Gulalai, unless the United States or the United Nations wants him handed over.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government Wednesday denied reports that secret high-level talks with the Taliban had begun, although signals from various quarters suggested that back-channel contacts with the insurgency were gathering momentum. Renewed attention to the prospect of engaging the Taliban leadership in negotiations comes against a backdrop of growing violence, particularly in Afghanistan's south, where NATO forces are stepping up operations against Islamist insurgents.

Pakistani authorities have reacted angrily to a study released this month by the London School of Economics, which concludes that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence has been systematically funding and maintaining top-level ties with the Taliban, and on a larger scale than generally believed. Despite the attention it has garnered, the report affirms what has been common knowledge among academic specialists on Afghanistan and journalists with extensive experience in that country. The ISI, together with the armed forces, has long amounted to a state-within-a state in Pakistan.

If the latest reports of Mullah Mohammed Omar's demise are greatly exaggerated, they nonetheless show the strength of rumor and media frenzy in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the death of Osama bin Laden. A Taliban spokesman Monday vehemently denied claims that the movement's spiritual leader had died or been killed, even as Afghanistan's main intelligence service asserted that the reclusive cleric had disappeared from his alleged Pakistani hide-out. The spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said by telephone that the one-eyed, self-declared "leader of the faithful," who has long been thought to be hiding in Pakistan, was alive and well, directing the Taliban's military campaign in Afghanistan.

In Karachi's Baldia neighborhood, a working-class mix of Pashtun and other Pakistanis, it took an accidental explosion amid piles of suicide vests and grenades to unearth a cell of Taliban militants in a house that neighbors believed sheltered a quiet Pashtun family. "We thought they were fruit sellers," said Mohammed Zahid, 24, who lives across the path from the heavily damaged house. Police said the Jan. 8 blast killed seven Taliban militants who had been planning to attack a Baldia police training center.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his allies in Washington are hoping that Osama bin Laden's demise will prod the Taliban into joining peace negotiations. But the aftermath of the raid in Pakistan that killed the Al Qaeda leader could just as easily embolden the Afghan insurgent group in its long struggle against the West. The dramatic U.S. strike against Bin Laden may provide the Taliban with greater incentives to talk rather than fight, not least the fear that its own senior leadership could suffer the same fate as the chief of its longtime ally.

Call it Chez Omar, or the palace under the mountain. The sprawling pink monstrosity that was home to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has become Kandahar's main tourist attraction. On Wednesday, hundreds of men in baggy trousers who had followed their tribal leaders to the compound for consultations with Afghanistan's new interim leader, Hamid Karzai, clambered up and down piles of broken bricks, leaped into bomb craters and scrambled onto roofs.

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden was devising a strategy for overthrowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and controlling Afghanistan once the U.S. left the country, said a former U.S. official familiar with the cache of notes and letters that were seized last year in the raid on the terrorist leader's compound. Bin Laden had discussed his plans with the Taliban leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, and the Haqqani network, which controls the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while discussing the intelligence.

In Karachi's Baldia neighborhood, a working-class mix of Pashtun and other Pakistanis, it took an accidental explosion amid piles of suicide vests and grenades to unearth a cell of Taliban militants in a house that neighbors believed sheltered a quiet Pashtun family. "We thought they were fruit sellers," said Mohammed Zahid, 24, who lives across the path from the heavily damaged house. Police said the Jan. 8 blast killed seven Taliban militants who had been planning to attack a Baldia police training center.