Global Policy Forum

By David E. Sanger

The audacity of a suicide-bomb attack on Tuesday at the gates of the main American base in Afghanistan during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney underscores why President Bush sent him there - a deepening American concern that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are resurgent. American officials insisted that the importance of the attack, by a single suicide bomber who blew himself up a mile away from where the vice president was staying, was primarily symbolic. It was more successful at grabbing headlines and filling television screens with a scene of carnage than at getting anywhere near Mr. Cheney.

But the strike nonetheless demonstrated that Al Qaeda and the Taliban appear stronger and more emboldened in the region than at any time since the American invasion of the country five years ago, and since the Bush administration claimed to have decimated much of their middle management. And it fed directly into the debate over who is to blame. The leaders with whom Mr. Cheney met on his mission to Pakistan and Afghanistan have appeared increasingly incapable of controlling the chaos, and have pointed fingers at one another. Mr. Cheney said the attack was a reminder that terrorists seek "to question the authority of the central government," and argued that it underscored the need for a renewed American effort. His critics, on the other hand, said the strike was another reminder of how Iraq had diverted the Bush administration from finishing the job in Afghanistan.

The blast Mr. Cheney said he heard from his quarters deep inside Bagram Air Base took a terrible toll. At least 23 people were killed, including an American soldier and an American contractor, along with a South Korean soldier. About 20 Afghans died, including a 12-year-old boy. An additional two dozen or so were wounded. By Tuesday evening, long after Mr. Cheney wrapped up his visit and headed home to the United States, it remained unclear whether the suicide bomber had known that Mr. Cheney was on the base at the time of the attack. One military official at United States Central Command, which oversees operations in Afghanistan, said he strongly believed that the bomber was unaware of Mr. Cheney's presence. In Washington, American officials said their intelligence had detected no specific threat against Mr. Cheney, whose entry into Afghanistan had been kept secret after an equally clandestine visit to Pakistan on Monday.

But word of his presence in Afghanistan leaked out on Monday after a snowstorm delayed his meeting with President Hamid Karzai, and Mr. Cheney decided to stay at Bagram Air Base overnight. That fact was widely reported on Internet sites and on radio programs that have significant audiences in Afghanistan. It was possible that the attack outside the gate at Bagram was arranged quickly, or redirected to the air base from another target.

The attack, which occurred between the perimeter of the base and the first American checkpoint, occurred at 10 a.m. Tuesday. An administration official said an initial American review had found that the attack "doesn't look, at first pass, like something that was carefully planned out." The bomber appeared to have made his way past an Afghan-guarded gate. But American military officials in Afghanistan said the suicide bomber detonated his weapon before he got to the first United States checkpoint, at a point where fuel trucks and vehicles carrying other goods park outside the gates to await inspection before being sent in.

Master Sergeant Chris Fletcher, a spokesman for the military operation in Afghanistan, said in a telephone interview that the bomber "did not penetrate the outer ring of security." That account suggested that the security around the base had kept the bloodshed of an Afghanistan under attack by both Taliban and Qaeda forces outside the high walls of the base, the hub of American military activity in the country. But it also suggested a widening spiral of insecurity in Afghanistan, which had nearly 140 suicide bombings last year, including in Kabul, making the conflict and tactics here increasingly reminiscent of the chaotic struggle in Iraq. Critics have charged that the Iraq war has precluded the United States from sending sufficient forces to Afghanistan. Concerned about a spring Taliban offensive, the United States has increased its force in Afghanistan to about 26,000. More than 20,000 troops from other NATO nations are also deployed there.

The scenes that Mr. Cheney flew over on his way in and out of Bagram - the devastation outside the gate and the bombed-out landscape of Kabul - was a reminder of how far the reality of Afghanistan is from the goals that President Bush set just short of five years ago, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute. At the time, Mr. Bush repeatedly invoked the memory of Gen. George C. Marshall, the man behind the reconstruction that followed World War II, in expressing confidence that a "stable government" and a "national army" would help to achieve peace in Afghanistan. But in testimony on Tuesday in front of the Senate armed services committee, the new director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, painted a grim picture of what he called a "pivotal year for Afghanistan," in which the country's leaders would have to "confront pervasive drug cultivation and trafficking, and, with NATO and the United States, arrest the resurgence of the Taliban."

Mr. Cheney's mission was to figure out how to bolster the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the NATO force, and to try to ease an openly hostile relationship between Mr. Karzai and another American ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Mr. Karzai has argued that many of the attacks in Afghanistan have been launched from Pakistan. Mr. Musharraf has said Mr. Karzai is looking for a scapegoat.