BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, June 6 (UPI) -- U.S. military officials believe an attack on the American Embassy in Kabul is being planned for the day after the end of the loya jirga, the Afghan tribal council that is supposed to determine the country's political future later this month.
On Wednesday, U.S. Marines guarding the embassy in Kabul detained a man who was photographing the walled, strongly fortified compound from a slow-moving white van. Military intelligence and other sources said it was the second such incident in two weeks.
Earlier, another man in a maroon van had also been detained in the same circumstances. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes first reported the two detentions Thursday.
Violence is widely expected in Kabul during or immediately after the six-day meeting that will bring together representatives of Afghanistan's complex and conflict-ridden patchwork of ethnic groups and tribes.
"Something is definitely going to happen," a military official told United Press International.
U.S. officials are on special alert for car bombs. Suicide bombers are not expected to be part of the assault, according to another military official who spoke to UPI.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul's New City quarter was reopened earlier this year following the collapse of the Islamic militant Taliban regime.
The loya jirga, which ends on June 16, faces the complex task of choosing a new interim government that will draft a new Afghan constitution and organize democratic elections.
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch published the report of a fact-finding mission to the still-troubled south of Afghanistan, warning that the credibility of loya jirga was threatened by a resurgence of violence there. Local warlords were "stepping into a power vacuum" caused by the absence of peacekeepers outside of Kabul, the group said.
Last week a bomb went off in the grounds of the governor of Kandahar's compound during a meeting to choose local delegates for the loya jirga, and one man present was injured.
"Warlords are making a power grab by brazenly manipulating the loya jirga selection process," said Human Rights Watch's Sam Zia-Zarifi, who returned from Afghanistan at the end of May.
He said independent candidates for the jirga were being detained or beaten by local commanders intent on sending their own delegates. Often, warlords simply drew up their own lists of delegates and insisted that the local populace approve them.
Many of these figures are people associated either with the Taliban, or with the Hizb-i Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who has lived in exile in Iran for the last six years.
Taliban remnants and Hekmatyar's forces -- alongside Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network -- top the United States' list of those thought to be plotting attacks in Kabul.
A member of the majority Pashtun ethnic group, Hekmatyar received the lion's share of U.S. funding to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. During the civil war that followed the Russian withdrawal, Hekmatyar -- angered by his exclusion from the mujahedin government -- shelled Kabul, killing thousands of its inhabitants and reducing much of the city to rubble.
In 1995, Hekmatyr briefly served as prime minister. When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996, he fled to Iran, returning in February, having pledged his support to the Taliban against what he called the American invasion. The CIA recently attempted to kill him with a Hellfire missile mounted on a Predator drone. The attempt was unsuccessful but killed two or three of his associates, according to a U.S. government official.
