Blasts at Afghan dogfight kill 8

A pair of explosions tore through a group of spectators at an illegal dogfight in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing eight people and injuring more than a dozen in the latest of a string of deadly insurgent attacks carried out in crowded public places.

In the past five weeks, more than 100 people, most of them Afghan civilians, have been killed in bloody assaults that have leapfrogged the length and breadth of the country. The targets -- a supermarket, shopping mall, bank, wedding hall, government records office and sporting event -- have one thing in common: people congregated there.

Officials from the NATO force and the Afghan government see a pattern: The Taliban and other militant groups, they say, are feeling squeezed militarily and are retaliating with a wave of urban terror. The violence appears meant to pre-empt the start of the “fighting season,” when conventional military confrontations are likely to intensify with the advent of warmer weather.

The sense of fear and insecurity inspired by carefully calculated attacks in populated areas undermines the Western goal of building confidence in the Afghan government and security forces, officials say. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, the U.S. Embassy and the government of President Hamid Karzai have condemned the strikes, with Karzai denouncing the latest bombings as “wicked” and un-Islamic.

The village targeted Sunday was a relatively small one, in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province. But it lies not far from Kandahar city, the main hub of the country’s south, where at least 16 people were killed this month in a coordinated assault by gunmen and suicide bombers in the heart of the city.

Dogfights are banned, and police had already arrived to break this one up when the blasts occurred -- apparently triggered by remote control, officials and witnesses said. Several police officers were reported to be among the dead.

In a series of assaults that began in late January with the bombing of a Western-style supermarket in Kabul, the Taliban movement has sometimes suggested that Afghan security forces, government workers or private security contractors were the primary target. But it is civilians, including women and children, who are dying in the greatest numbers; all have occurred in venues where they too were likely to be present.

Afghans this month were sickened by grainy but graphic security-camera footage from an insurgent attack on a branch of Kabul Bank, the country’s largest private financial institution, in the eastern city of Jalalabad. The video, obtained by a popular Afghan TV network, captured gunmen coldly shooting terrified bank patrons at close range in the attack, which left dozens dead.

Karzai and his government subsequently called for the death penalty for that attack’s masterminds. One of the assailants was captured alive.

The Taliban movement, which claimed responsibility for most of the recent attacks, said the Jalalabad strike was staged because members of the Afghan security forces were collecting their pay that day. But about half those killed were civilians -- ordinary bank customers.

Independent groups for some time have blamed the bulk of civilian casualties on insurgents rather than the Western military. But occasional high-profile instances of civilian deaths at the hands of the NATO force tend to lead to a greater sense of public grievance against foreign troops than the Taliban -- although the latest assaults may be changing that dynamic.

Western military officials say the Taliban sometimes claims responsibility for attacks carried out by factions, including the Haqqani network and Hezb-i-Islami, led by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both organizations are based in Pakistan, and in recent days, Afghan authorities have paraded captured would-be suicide bombers before the press, prodding them to publicly recount the training and instructions they received across the frontier.

laura.king@latimes.com