Afghan bomb near U.S. base kills 23 during Cheney visit

BAGRAM, Afghanistan -- In what the Taliban claimed was an assassination attempt, a suicide bomber attacked the main gate of a U.S. military base Tuesday within earshot of Vice President Dick Cheney. The explosion killed 23 people, including two Americans.

The bomber struck about 10 a.m., and U.S. military officials declared a "red alert" at the sprawling Bagram Air Base while Cheney was rushed to a bomb shelter. Cheney, who had been stranded at the base overnight by a snowstorm, met with President Hamid Karzai in the capital before heading back to the United States.

"I heard a loud boom," Cheney told reporters aboard Air Force Two. "The Secret Service came in and told me there had been an attack on the main gate."

Many of the victims were said to be Afghan truck drivers waiting to get inside the base. A dozen men -- many of them sobbing heavily -- left the base holding a stretcher bearing their loved ones wrapped in black body bags. Tears streamed down the face of one man sitting in the passenger seat of a sport utility vehicle that carried another victim away.

Although the bomber did not get closer than roughly a mile to the vice president, the attack highlighted an increasingly precarious security situation posed by the resurgent Taliban. Five years after U.S.-led forces toppled their regime, Taliban-led militants have stepped up attacks. There were 139 suicide bombings last year, a fivefold increase over 2005.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said Cheney was the target of the attack carried out by an Afghan named Mullah Abdul Rahim.

But it appeared unlikely the bomber would have been able to reach the vice president, who was in a "very safe and secure place" roughly a mile from the blast site, said U.S. spokesman Lt. Col. David Accetta. The bomber, he said, never tried to get by any U.S.-manned security checkpoints and instead walked into a group of Afghans outside the base and detonated himself.

"To characterize this as a direct attempt on the life of the vice president is absurd," Accetta said.