Authorities see al Qaeda links in suicide attacks that killed 44 people in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past week that appeared aimed at showing Osama bin Laden's network remains a potent force.
But officials and analysts say they have yet to find evidence the bombings were coordinated by a central figure, least of all by bin Laden himself.
On Wednesday, a suicide bomber detonated explosives in a mosque in the Afghan city of Kandahar as mourners gathered to pay respects to assassinated anti-Taliban cleric Abdullah Fayaz.
It was the first ever suicide attack on a mosque in Afghanistan. It came two days after a suicide attack on a minority Shi'ite Muslim mosque in Karachi in neighbouring Pakistan and five days after a similar attack on a Muslim festival in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Pakistani editor and commentator Najam Sethi said the attacks were clearly aimed at destabilising Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, two of President George W. Bush's main allies in his global war on terrorism.
"It's a backlash against the campaign against al Qaeda and political Islam in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the aegis of the United States," he said.
"I don't think these are incidents without any relationship," he said. "But it's not that some supreme leader is coordinating all these attacks. This does not mean Osama bin Laden is orchestrating all these attacks."
The governor of Afghanistan's Kandahar province, Gul Agha Sherzai, blamed al Qaeda for the blast there and said the dead bomber appeared to be an Arab.
Pakistani intelligence officials said the attacks in Pakistan both appeared to be the work of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a militant groups with close links to al Qaeda.
A Pakistan intelligence official said there was suspicion al Qaeda was trying to show it it was still a threat after Musharraf said recently al Qaeda's back had been broken.
"The suicide attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan could possibly be reactions to the arrest of al Liby," said one intelligence official, who declined to be identified.
But analysts said there was a lack of hard evidence to show the attacks were jointly planned.
"It's a possibility, yes; whether it's a probability, I'm not sure," said Pakistani strategic analyst Shaukat Qadir.
A spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Colonel Jim Yonts, said the possibility of a connection was being investigated, but no link had been found.
Analysts say a crackdown on al Qaeda in Pakistan, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests, and the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan had forced militants to operate in small, isolated groups. Sophisticated U.S. eavesdropping has made communication between these cells dangerous.
More bomb attacks were a reflection of the success of the U.S. and Afghan campaign against the Taliban insurgency, Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said.
"The enemies of peace and stability have been defeated in the frontline of war and now they're focusing on soft targets."
Pakistani Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on Afghanistan, noted that anti-Taliban cleric Abdullah Fayaz was killed the same day pro-government tribal leader Faridullah Wazir was killed in Pakistan.
"It shows targetted killings are going on here and in Afghanistan and the same is happening in Iraq. But it does not necessarily mean they are cooperating with each other," he said.
While militants might not be able to cooperate, they were getting inspiration from one another and adopting similar, increasingly brutal tactics, Yusufzai said.
"It's a dangerous trend." |
KANDAHAR: Two people were killed as a suicide bomber tried to ram a car bomb into a convoy of Afghan and foreign troops in Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing himself and a 10 year-old boy and wounding one Canadian soldier, officials said. A US-led foreign forces spokesperson said that the blast occurred outside a Canadian civilian and military reconstruction teamâs office on the road leading to the airport from Kandahar.
US forces have killed a senior Taleban commander responsible for a spate of attacks in southern Afghanistan, the US military said on Monday. The man, identified as