* From the ‘poverty creates terrorism’ department:
HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) — A Taliban suicide bomber dressed as a beggar blew up an Afghan government building Saturday, killing six people, as two NATO soldiers and a dozen other people died in more unrest, officials said.
More on P 2
U.S. forces and Afghan police kill over 20 Taliban
U.S.-led soldiers, backed by air support, and Afghan police killed more than 20 Taliban fighters in two separate clashes, officials said on Sunday.
A U.S. military statement said its forces killed more than 10 insurgents during an operation in the southeast province of Khost on Saturday, and did not mention any casualties on its side.
Continued P2
Hamid knows who is to blame: the Brits!
Hamid Karzai blames Britain for Taliban resurgence
 Security analysts in Afghanistan say the situation has become ’even more dire’
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U.S. forces and Afghan police kill over 20 Taliban
In Helmand, a southern province also regarded as a Taliban stronghold, militants lost 10 men in an assault on a police post, provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal said. Four police were wounded defending their post.
The Taliban could not be reached immediately for comment.
Ousted from power in 2001 after refusing to surrender its al Qaeda guests, the Taliban militia intensified a campaign in 2005 to drive out foreign forces and bring down President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Suicide bombers and roadside bomb attacks, ambushes and kidnapping are the guerrillas’ favored tactics.
On Sunday, a suicide bomber killed himself in an attack on a NATO convoy in the western province of Herat, but there were no other casualties, according to witnesses.
On Saturday, the Taliban abducted four Afghan employees of a security firm in Maidan Wardak province, on the main highway southwest of Kabul, a provincial official said.
(Writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
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‘Beggar’ suicide blast, other attacks kill 21 in Afghanistan
The disguised bomber gunned down a security guard and then detonated explosives at the government offices, with two state prosecutors among his victims, Nimroz provincial governor Ghulam Dastgir Azad said.
The blast brought down the single-storey building in the town of Zaranj on the southwestern border with Iran, the governor told AFP.
“We have recovered so far six bodies,” he said. The dead were provincial attorney Anwar Shah Khan, his 20-year-old son, his deputy and three civilians, Azad said.
“The whole building has collapsed. There might be more casualties,” he added.
A spokesman for the rebel Taliban movement said the bomber was a member of the militia, which has dramatically stepped up attacks this year.
There has been a wave of suicide blasts in Afghanistan in the past three years, most of them claimed by Taliban extremists who are waging an insurgency against the US-backed government in Kabul.
Elsewhere in Nimroz, about 150 Taliban militants attacked a police post early Saturday, killing two policemen but losing eight of their own fighters, Azad said.
Also Saturday, insurgents killed two soldiers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in eastern Afghanistan, the alliance’s force said.
It did not give the nationalities of the troops or details of how they were killed. Most soldiers in eastern Afghanistan are US nationals.
The deaths took to 195 the number of international soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.
Elsewhere insurgents attacked a police post in Laghman province, near the Afghan capital Kabul, leaving one policeman and two rebels dead, provincial police chief Abdul Karim Omeryar said.
The hardline Islamist Taliban ruled Taliban between 1996 and 2001, when it was ousted in an invasion led by the United States and supported by Afghan anti-Taliban factions.
They have regrouped to put up an insurgency that is said to have support from other extremist factions, including Al-Qaeda, and radical elements based across the border in Pakistan.
The Afghan government is supported by about 54,000 soldiers in a NATO-led force and a few thousand more in a separate US-led force as it fights to rebuild its security forces and fight back the extremists.
A top US commander working in Afghanistan, Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, Friday called for more troops to counter the growing insurgency violence amid signs the rebels were preparing for a winter campaign for the first time.
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We should be campaigning to have the idiotic terms of engagement, which amount to basically handcuffing and blindfolding our forces, removed.
’bout time we napalmed the poppy fields, after all 90% of the heroin used in Britain is supposed to come from there… sorry if it would effect their economy, but it sure screws ours!