Blasts mar Hagel's trip to visit troops in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan -- U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday for his first visit since taking the post, but his trip was marred by insurgent suicide bombings.

Nineteen Afghans were killed -- including eight children -- in two separate suicide attacks in Kabul and in the eastern Khost province Saturday. A U.S. contractor was killed and four soldiers injured when attackers thought to be Afghan soldiers stormed their base and opened fire Friday, just hours before Hagel arrived.

"This attack was a message to him," Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in an email to reporters about one of the bombings, which was outside the country's Defense Ministry in Kabul. Hagel was not near the Kabul blast.

The violence also shows the Afghan security forces' struggle to contain the Taliban as NATO troops slowly withdraw, even as Afghan President Hamid Karzai argues for his government to have more control over Afghanistan's security.

NATO officials view the weekend violence as part of the Taliban's annual spring campaign. "There's a series of attacks that have started as the snow is thawing. We had a potential insider attack yesterday ... and there's been a number of attacks on the border," said Brigadier Adam Findlay, NATO's deputy chief of staff of operations.

In the first attack Saturday, a suicide bomber on a bicycle struck outside the Afghan Defense Ministry, just as employees were arriving for work. About a half-hour later, another suicide bomber targeted a joint NATO and Afghan patrol near a police checkpoint in Khost city, the capital of Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, said provincial spokesman Baryalai Wakman.

Nine Afghan civilians were killed and 14 were wounded in the bombing at the ministry, and two Afghan policemen and eight children died in the blast in Khost, while another two Afghan civilians were wounded.

Karzai called the attack un-Islamic.

"The perpetrators of such attacks are cowards who are killing innocent children at the orders of foreigners," he said in a statement emailed to reporters. Karzai usually uses the term "foreigners" to refer to Pakistan, which he blames for failing to crack down on Taliban militants who take sanctuary there.

Hagel told reporters traveling with him that he wasn't sure what the explosion was.

"We're in a war zone. I've been in war, so you shouldn't be surprised when a bomb goes off or there's an explosion," said Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran. Asked what his message to the Taliban would be, he said that the U.S. was going to continue to work with its allies to insure that the Afghan people have the ability to develop their own country and democracy.

A suspected insider attack by Afghan soldiers against their U.S. allies occurred in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan several hours before Hagel arrived Friday. Three men presumed to be Afghan soldiers forced their way onto a U.S. base and opened fire, killing one U.S. civilian contractor and wounding four U.S. soldiers, according to a senior U.S. military official.

The official said investigators were "95 percent certain it was an insider attack," because the three men came from the Afghan side of the joint U.S.-Afghan base, and rammed an Afghan army Humvee through a checkpoint dividing the base, before jumping out and opening fire on the Americans with automatic weapons. All three attackers were killed.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Taliban said it was not behind the Tagab base attack, and has not yet weighed in on the attack in Khost, but the group claimed responsibility for the morning attack at the Defense Ministry shortly after it happened.