“The attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai Sunday came as the latest sign of a trend” that the insurgency in Afghanistan “is spreading from the Taliban stronghold of the south to the central and northern regions of the country,” Christian Science Monitor reports. The attack on Karzai was the “biggest in Kabul since mid-March”:
A recent study by Sami Kovanen, an analyst with the security firm Vigilant Strategic Services of Afghanistan, echoed this assessment. He reported 465 insurgent attacks in areas outside the restive southern regions during the first three months of 2008, a 35 percent increase compared with the same period last year. In the central region around Kabul there have been 80 insurgent attacks from January through March of this year, a 70 percent jump compared to the first three months of last year.