KABUL—On a day when Taliban and U.S. officials met in the Gulf state of Qatar for another round of talks to end the Afghan war, insurgents detonated a captured Humvee loaded with explosives at the gate of a base operated by the country’s intelligence agency and stormed the compound, spraying gunfire.
By the time the Taliban assault in Maidan Wardak province was over on Monday, dozens of agency personnel lay dead in what even by the war’s gruesome standards was a stunning loss of life and a deep embarrassment to the country’s security establishment.
How many died in the early morning attack wasn’t certain, as local and national officials offered wildly divergent tolls. Sharifullah Hotak, a local government official, said at least 30 military personnel were killed. But a security official in Kabul put the number of dead at “around 80,” while unconfirmed reports, citing unnamed Afghan security officials, said 126 soldiers and police had perished in the assault.
The reasons for the divergent death tolls weren’t immediately known, but the attack was likely to focus unwanted scrutiny on the National Directorate of Security, which operates the base and training center in the provincial capital, Maidan Shahr.
The attack was a grave breach of security, the official in Kabul suggested: Following the initial explosion, three Taliban suicide bombers succeeded in entering the busy training center and blowing themselves up.
Some 10 hours after he announced that the Taliban had carried out the horrific attack, the group’s spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid tweeted that American representatives had met Taliban representatives during the day in Qatar’s capital, Doha. Discussions were to continue Tuesday, he said.
The U.S. Embassy in Kabul neither confirmed nor denied the talks in Qatar, and referred reporters to the twitter feed of Zalmay Khalilzad, the veteran American diplomat leading the Trump administration’s Afghanistan negotiating effort. Late Monday, there was no mention of the meeting on his twitter account.
Mr. Khalilzad, on his fourth tour of the region since his appointment as special envoy in September, is seeking to rally the support of the Taliban, the Afghan government and Afghanistan’s neighbors for a negotiated settlement of the war.
Last week, the Taliban threatened to end contact with Mr. Khalilzad, accusing him of attempting to expand the talks beyond the Taliban’s core demand: the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country. He has insisted that a peaceful end of the conflict requires the insurgents to engage in direct talks with the Afghan government, which they have refused.
As diplomacy to end the Afghan war has gained pace, neither side has eased up. U.S. officials have spoken often of continuing to prosecute, even escalate, the war to “try to set the conditions for a political outcome,” according to U.S. Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the commander of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces here.
On Saturday, Mr. Khalilzad insisted that the Trump administration wasn’t pursuing contradictory goals: “I see that many are concerned that the United States is willing to both talk and fight. Let me be clear: the US wants peace…But pursuing peace still means we fight as needed.”
Yet while the U.S. is doing much of its fighting from the air and carrying out limited commando missions against mostly Islamic State and al Qaeda targets on the ground, the bulk of the combat against the Taliban is borne by Afghan forces, who are drawing heavy losses almost daily.
For years, the Afghan government refused to release specific casualty figures, with U.S. and Afghan officials privately acknowledging that their disclosure would undermine morale among the security forces.
In November, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told a Washington audience by video link that more than 28,000 Afghan officers and soldiers had been killed since 2015, an average of about 19 dead a day. U.S. and Afghan security officials describe the current rate as “unsustainable.”
Write to Craig Nelson at craig.nelson@wsj.com
