?A car bomb exploded outside a compound housing Westerners in Kabul on Wednesday hours after U.S. President Barack Obama signed a security pact during a short visit to the city.
The city remains vulnerable to a resilient insurgency.
Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on the eastern outskirts of the capital that killed at least six people including a young girl, a Gurkha guard and five passers-by, and wounded 17.
The Taliban said it was in response to Obama's visit and to the long-term strategic partnership deal he signed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a pact that sets out a long-term U.S. role after most foreign combat troops leave by the end
of 2014.
Obama's visit came a year after U.S. special forces troops killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in a raid in neighbouring Pakistan.
In a televised address to the American people from a base north of Kabul, he said the war in Afghanistan was winding down.
“As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it's time to renew America,''Obama said, speaking against a backdrop of armoured vehicles and a U.S. flag.
“This type of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.”
Nearly 3,000 U.S. and NATO soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the Taliban rulers were ousted in 2001.
The Taliban, ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces for harbouring bin Laden and other militants, quickly claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attack at Green Village, one of several compounds for Westerners on the main road heading east out of the capital.
“This attack was to make clear our reaction to Obama's trip to Afghanistan.
“The message was that instead of signing of a strategic partnership deal with Afghanistan, he should think about taking his troops out from Afghanistan and leave it to Afghans to rebuild their country,'' Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Hundreds of police and intelligence agency troops surrounded the area around Green Village after the attack.
Ruined cars were seen in front of the compound gates but officials said no attackers made it inside the heavily guarded complex.
“I was going to the office when the car in front of me blew up. I got on my bicycle and fled,'' 40-year-old Farid Ahmad Mohammad told Reuters near the scene of the explosion.
A worker at the compound, Jamrod, said at a hospital where the wounded had been taken he had been showing his identity card at the compound's main gate when the vehicle exploded.
“I heard a bang and then I slammed into the wall,''Jamrod, still clad in blood-stained jeans, told Reuters.
The Taliban's Mujahid maintained fighters had made it inside the compound and inflicted “very heavy casualties''.
The Islamist group often exaggerates accounts of attacks involving foreign troops or Afghan government targets.
A spokesman for the NATO-led coalition force said the attack had been put down.
Western witnesses inside the compound said Afghan commandos killed the attackers, with direction from Norwegian special forces.
Wednesday's attack was the latest in a recent surge of violence after the Taliban announced they had begun their usual “spring offensive'', and that they had suspended tentative steps towards peace talks with the U.S.
Such incidents raise troubling questions about the readiness of Afghan forces to take over when militants remain able to stage high-profile attacks, even when already tight security had been beefed up even further for Obama's visit.
Insurgents staged coordinated attacks in Kabul last month, paralyzing the city's centre and diplomatic area for 18 hours.
The Taliban also claimed responsibility for those attacks, but U.S. and Afghan officials blamed the militant, al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network.
Obama's visit was clearly an election-year event.
He spoke to U.S. troops during a stay in Afghanistan of roughly six hours and emphasised bin Laden's demise, an event his re-election campaign has touted as one of his most important achievements in office. (Reuters/NAN)