Taliban may be expanding in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan - Eight Afghan policemen gunned down at a checkpoint. Campaign workers kidnapped. Spanish trainers shot dead on their base.

A spurt of violence this week in provinces far from the Taliban's main southern strongholds suggests the insurgency is spreading, even as top U.S. and NATO commander Gen. David Petraeus insists the coalition has reversed the militants' momentum in key areas of the ethnic Pashtun south where the Islamist movement was born.

Attacks in the north and west of the country, though not militarily significant, demonstrate that the Taliban are becoming a threat across wide areas of Afghanistan even as the United States and its partners mount a major effort to turn the tide of the nearly 9-year-old war in the south.

The latest example occurred yesterday when about a dozen gunmen stormed a police checkpoint at the entrance to the city of Kunduz, 150 miles north of the capital, Kabul. Eight policemen were killed.

Also yesterday, a candidate in next month's parliamentary elections, Fawzya Galani, said 10 of her campaign workers were kidnapped while traveling in the northwestern province of Herat, 450 miles west of Kabul.

Those incidents followed Wednesday's fatal shooting of three Spaniards - two police trainers and an interpreter - at a base in Badghis province, 230 miles northwest of Kabul. The shooter, who was also killed, was a police driver who local officials said was a brother-in-law of a local Taliban commander.

In a BBC interview Monday, Petraeus said NATO forces had reversed the momentum the Taliban had gained in recent years in Helmand and Kandahar and in the Kabul area, but he added that tough fighting lies ahead.

Yesterday, President Hamid Karzai criticized the U.S. plan to begin withdrawing troops next July. The Afghan government maintains that the United States should be doing more, including pressuring Pakistan to shut down the insurgent sanctuaries.