http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Taliban+fire+rockets+embassy/5397999/story.html

 KABUL . Taliban fighters fired rockets at the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on Tuesday and attacked police in three other areas in the biggest assault the insurgent group has mounted on the Afghan capital.

At least nine people were killed and 23 wounded in the four attacks, and a gun battle around a half-built high-rise building raged on into the evening as NATO and Afghan attack helicopters circled overhead.

The fighters had chosen a strategic and heavily fortified main target for the well-coordinated attacks. But analysts said the attack with light arms, machine guns, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades was never going to breach the heavily-fortified compounds in the area.

"It's clearly a symbolic attack," Christian Leuprecht, a political and military expert at Queen's University, said in a statement. "The U.S. Embassy is always the most fortified building in a developing country. It's a Kabul equivalent of a World Trade Center.

"The timing is significant - just a few days after Sept. 11. The Taliban were probably planning an attack on the West but their plans got thwarted so this is the best they could do - an attack on the West within Afghanistan. They are trying to show they are still credible by attacking the single most symbolic target in Afghanistan. The Taliban are trying to say, 'We can strike anywhere, anytime and nobody is safe.' "

Scott Stewart, an analyst with the U.S.-based STRATFOR global intelligence firm, said, "For the Taliban this is kind of a sensitive time. They are trying to show basically that they are a force to be reckoned with and that if the U.S. wants to find any sort of settlement or negotiated peace in Afghanistan, the Taliban has to be brought into those negotiations and they have to be dealt with."

Although the Taliban have attacked multiple targets in Kabul in the past, this is the first time they have organized simultaneous assaults on such separate areas.

"The scale of today's attack is unprecedented," said Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New American Security. "There was almost certainly either a breakdown in security among the Afghans with responsibility for Kabul or an intelligence failure."

A squad of about five insurgents took over a shopping centre under construction on the outskirts of Kabul's diplomatic district armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s and suicide vests.

Explosions were interspersed with gunfire all afternoon and several rockets landed in upmarket Wazir Akbar Khan district, near the British and other embassies.

One hit a school bus but it appeared to have been empty at the time.

The gun battle around Abdul Haq square went on into the early evening, with three attackers killed and one or two still at large nearly eight hours after the assault began, the Interior Ministry said.

Four policemen and three civilians were killed in the attack and 17 people wounded, said Mohammad Zahir, head of the Kabul police's Crime Investigation Unit.

The U.S. and British embassies and the NATO-led coalition said all their employees were safe.

In western Kabul, a few kilometres away, a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a police building, killing a policeman and wounding two. A second bomber killed a civilian at a regional police centre and wounded four.

And at a road near the airport, a suicide bomber was killed by police and 7kg of explosives were seized, the Kabul police chief said in a statement.