Afghan blast kills 19 during Cheney visit

BAGRAM, Afghanistan – A suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded 11 outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan today during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, though the vice president was apparently not in danger, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The blast happened near the first security gate outside the base at Bagram, killing 19 people, said Khoja Mohammad Qasim Sayedi, chief of the province’s public health department. Zemeri Bashary, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the blast was caused by a suicide bomber, though he didn’t know if it was a man on foot or a car bomb.

Maj. William Mitchell said it did not appear the explosion was intended as a threat to Cheney.

“He wasn’t near the site of the explosion,” Mitchell said. “He was safely within the base at the time of the explosion.”

The blast followed Cheney’s unannounced visit to the Pakistani capital Monday, the latest signal of renewed U.S. pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to crack down on Islamic militants in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

But complex domestic considerations in Pakistan, and a keen awareness on Musharraf’s part that the Bush administration sees no palatable alternative to his leadership, diminish the prospect of any dramatic Pakistani move against the militants, diplomats and analysts said.

“There is only so far that he is prepared to go,” said Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading British think tank on security matters. “Some of this is dictated by the (Pakistani) military’s view of things and some by the fact that this is not politically popular in large parts of Pakistan.”

In his unannounced Pakistan stopover, Cheney became the highest-ranking U.S. official lately to press Musharraf to rein in what American officials characterize as a volatile mix of homegrown Pakistani militant groups, Taliban strategists and al-Qaida elements, all operating with increasing freedom in the tribal zones along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In a written statement, the Pakistani leader’s office acknowledged that Musharraf had come under at least indirect criticism from the vice president. Cheney “expressed U.S. apprehensions of (the) regrouping of al-Qaida in the tribal areas and called for concerted efforts in countering the threat,” the statement said.

Musharraf hewed to his government’s scripted reply that Pakistan is doing all it can and that the burden of confronting the Taliban and its allies must be shared by other parties, including the Afghan government and NATO.

The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.