Afghan president vows to continue terror fight

BAZARAK, Afghanistan -- After praying at the grave of a legendary anti-Taliban commander slain by a suicide bomber last year, President Hamid Karzai vowed Saturday to fight terrorism despite an attempt on his own life two days ago.

Karzai flew by helicopter through northern Afghanistan's rocky Panjshir Valley to pay his respects at the tomb of Ahmed Shah Massood, mortally wounded in a Sept. 9 suicide bombing blamed on Osama bin Laden.

"We will continue to fight. We will continue to go and fulfill the objectives and desires of the man who is lying buried under the ground here," Karzai told reporters after visiting Massood's grave.

Karzai has been moving around under a phalanx of American and Afghan bodyguards since a governor's security guard tried to gun him down Thursday in the southern city of Kandahar. Some 17 people have been detained for questioning. All served as guards for the provincial governor, who was also wounded in the shooting.

Security has also been stepped up in Kabul, after a car bombing Thursday left 30 people dead and dozens more wounded. Two men were arrested in connection with Thursday's bombing, but one has been released.

Speaking in Bazarak, Karzai said more terrorist attacks were likely -- not only in Afghanistan, but in the rest of the world.

"It's part of our life. They're doing it everywhere. Everybody has to get used to it," he said.

Karzai said Friday that he'd been "reckless" about his personal safety recently. On Saturday, he was taking few chances.

Several heavily armed American bodyguards walked alongside the president as he arrived at a hotel conference room in Kabul for a two-day seminar in tribute of Massood, the military leader of anti-Taliban forces.

Outside the hotel, two dozen Afghan soldiers kept watch beside several American Humvees mounted with machine-guns.

The same bodyguards accompanied Karzai to Massood's grave, a tomb of black marble inside a green-topped dome. The tomb, flanked by tablets of poetry, lies under a chandelier. It is covered with a green carpet, on which yellow verses of the Quran are written.

Massood, celebrated as the "Lion of Panjshir," led Afghan soldiers for more than two decades in battles against the Soviets, the Taliban and his Afghan rivals. Just meters from his grave sits a rusting Soviet tank, sunken into the hillside with its cannon pointing westward.

Massood's ethnic Tajik followers formed the leadership of the alliance which took over Kabul when the Taliban, made up mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, fled the capital in November.

In Kabul, Maj. Gen. Hilmi Akin Zorlu, the Turkish commander of the 5,000-strong International Security Assistance Force, said "security measures were much tougher" than before the twin attacks on Thursday.

He said security would be even tighter on Monday's anniversary of Massood's assassination, and the anniversary Wednesday of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Zorlu said the multinational force had "always been aware of the risk of an attack like this, but the only way to stop this completely would be a complete security clampdown -- soldiers in every alley, checkpoints in every street, searches in every vehicle."

"But this would inflict wartime conditions on the ... people of Kabul. We will not give the terrorists that victory," he said.

Zorlu declined to discuss the investigations into Thursday's violence, but said the peacekeepers would arrest any suspects and hand them over to the Afghan authorities if they were in a position to do so.

Thursday's attacks have posed the greatest threat yet to Karzai's interim government, which has inherited a devastated country controlled in large part outside the capital by different warlords.

No proof has surfaced to indicate who was behind the attacks -- or if they were linked -- but authorities have blamed remnants of the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorist network, who were ousted last year by U.S. bombs and Afghan northern alliance troops.

Some Afghan officials have speculated the attacks could have been orchestrated by former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is purportedly trying to forge a new alliance with the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Zorlu said there was no evidence of Hekmatyar's involvement in this week's terrorist attacks. However, at a press conference in Kabul last month, he said Hekmatyar had linked up with al-Qaida.

The gunman who tried to kill Karzai has been identified as Abdul Rahman, 22, from Helmand province, where sympathy for the Taliban remains strong. The shots came within inches of Karzai's head as he was leaving governor's palace in Kandahar.