Afghan president calls for probe into Taliban offensive

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called for an investigation into the biggest coordinated Taliban attack on Kabul in 10 years of war. Karzai said on Monday that intelligence failures by US-led forces allowed the militants to sneak into the city’s most secure neighborhoods, AFP reported. "The terrorists' infiltration in Kabul and other provinces is an intelligence failure for us and especially for NATO and should be seriously investigated," he said in a statement. Sunday’s offensive on the capital and elsewhere left over 50 people, including four civilians and 11 Afghan soldiers, dead. Washington has dismissed Karzai's claim, saying the attacks were likely carried out by the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. Washington has often pressed Pakistan to take on the Haqqani network, the Afghan group fighting Western occupation forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan says its forces are too stretched battling its own militants and cannot chase members of the Haqqani network in the semi-autonomous North Waziristan region, bordering Afghanistan. On Sunday, the Taliban targeted US, British, German, and Japanese embassy buildings and NATO's headquarters in some of Kabul’s most heavily guarded neighborhoods. They even tried to storm the parliament building, which sparked a gun battle as lawmakers and bodyguards returned fire from the rooftop.