KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- As NATO troops replace U.S. forces on southern Afghanistan's battlefields, insurgents are waging a suicide bombing campaign that appears aimed at shaking the alliance's public support in Europe and Canada.
The test of wills threatens to set back the U.S.-led war on terrorism in Afghanistan more than four years after the Taliban regime was toppled, American and Afghan analysts warn.
Suicide bombings were rare in Afghanistan until fall, when NATO began debating a move into southern Afghanistan.
The mission is expected to involve the first ground combat in NATO's 57-year history. Fighting determined Taliban and al-Qaida militants in rugged, often mountainous terrain would be a major step beyond NATO's previous attempts at peacekeeping or the alliance's 78-day air war against Serbia in 1999 to end atrocities in Kosovo.
The decision to take on the mission came only after considerable debate within the alliance, beginning formally in September. About the same time, insurgents launched a wave of suicide bombings. At least 22 suicide attackers have struck since then, more than double the combined total for the previous three years.
Several attacks have targeted Canadian, German, Italian, Portuguese and other NATO troops, whose main mission has been peacekeeping and building schools and hospitals, not fighting a counterinsurgency war. Although U.S. combat troops are set to hand over control to NATO forces in the south this spring, the alliance will depend on American attack helicopters and other aircraft for support.
Mir Akbar Ansari, a senior prosecutor in Afghanistan's anti-terrorism courts, believes that the suicide bombers are going after NATO troops now because their strategists see the allies as weak links in the foreign effort to stabilize Afghanistan.
"I think the rise of attacks in Afghanistan nowadays is aimed at the weak forces, such as Canada and others, and that is because these countries can easily be threatened," Ansari said.
"The terrorists want the Americans to be alone in Afghanistan, so that they can deal with them later. Al-Qaida doesn't want to leave its nest in Afghanistan."
Afghan officials say the bombers are overwhelmingly foreigners - mainly Arabs and Pakistanis who usually enter the country from neighboring Pakistan.
Pakistan insists that it is doing everything it can to prevent that. But in talks last week, Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, pressed Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for a "more intensive pursuit of terrorists, wherever they may be."
