KABUL, Afghanistan -
Intelligence reports indicated that the Taliban had the ability to carry out suicide attacks near the main U.S. base in Afghanistan even before a bloody bombing during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, NATO said Wednesday.
Col. Tom Collins, the top spokesman for NATO's force in Afghanistan, said suicide bomb cells were present in the capital, Kabul, just 30 miles south of Bagram Air Base.
"We know for a fact that there has been recent intelligence to suggest that there was the threat of a bombing in the Bagram area," Collins told reporters. "It's clear that there are suicide bomber cells operating in this country. There are some in the city of Kabul."
Tuesday's bombing killed 23 people, including two Americans, outside Bagram while Cheney was meeting with officials inside. The Taliban claimed the attack was aimed at Cheney, but officials said it posed no real threat to the vice president.
The attacker never tried to penetrate even the first of several U.S.-manned security checkpoints at Bagram, instead detonating his explosives among a group of Afghan workers outside the base.
"The Taliban's claims that they were going after the vice president were absurd," Collins said.
Collins said it was unclear whether the Taliban had really known of Cheney's visit, or if the timing of the attack was a coincidence. The last suicide bombing at Bagram was in June 2006, when an attack aimed at a U.S. convoy wounded two Afghans near a market area outside the base.
U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann said he did not believe the Taliban had responded to Cheney's presence, given that he arrived on Monday and only stayed the night because bad weather forced him to postpone a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
"I just have not seen the ability to react that quickly, to grab your handy-dandy latest suicide candidate, who is usually not your brightest fellow around, and get him mobilized and get him up to the gate," Neumann said. "It strains credulity for me."
He said Cheney "could have been in New York for all the threat" the bomb posed.
Afghanistan's Interior Ministry said a preliminary investigation suggested the bomber was a foreigner. But Collins said there was "not much left" of the man to assess and that there were not yet any indications he was non-Afghan.
