bomber attacked a convoy of US-led troops as it passed through a market in Afghanistan on Thursday killing a US soldier and 10 bystanders, the US military said. Fifty-eight civilians were wounded in the attack on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad a day after suicide bombers killed 12 people in attacks in the south. The United Nations called for an end to “this cycle of senseless violence”, that included an acid attack on schoolgirls in the city of Kandahar on Wednesday. Security has deteriorated sharply in Afghanistan, with violence at its worst over the past year since the Taliban's overthrow in 2001. Doubts are increasing about prospects for international efforts to bring peace and to develop the country. Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said the bomber rammed his vehicle laden with explosives into the convoy as it was passing through a crowded market just outside Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan. “The enemies of Afghanistan committed another barbaric act,” Bashary said, referring to Taleban insurgents and their Al Qaeda allies. Separately, two British soldiers were killed in the southern province of Helmand while on patrol on Wednesday with Afghan soldiers, when their vehicle was blown up by a bomb, the British Ministry of Defense said. Most of the violence is in the Afghan south and east, in provinces on the border with Pakistan. But there has also been fighting and bomb attacks in the west and north, which until recently were largely peaceful. Alarmed about the slide in security more than seven years after the Taleban were ousted, the United States has been attacking militants in remote strongholds in northwest Pakistan. Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters control territory in Pakistan's Pashtun border lands from where they attack into Afghanistan, and launch bomb attacks elsewhere in Pakistan. The United States has about 32,000 troops in Afghanistan and is sending more. President Hamid Karzai condemned an acid attack on schoolgirls in the southern city of Kandahar, that he said was carried out by the enemies of education. Men pulled off the girls' head scarves and threw acid in their faces outside their school on Wednesday. Britain resists call for more troops Britain downplayed Thursday the prospect of it sending more troops to Afghanistan in the near future, after Afghan President Hamid Karzai held talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London. “The UK is committed to maintaining troops in Afghanistan until the government of Afghanistan has built sufficient capacity to maintain a stable security situation and the rule of law.” But asked after the Downing Street talks if extra British forces were set to be deployed, he said: “I don't agree with the assertion that we now look like we are sending more troops.”
