(Adds comment from Karzai, security agency says foils Kabul attack) By Hamid Shalizi KABUL, Nov 13 (Reuters) - A suicide car-bomber attacked a convoy of U.S.-led troops as it passed through a market in Afghanistan on Thursday killing a U.S. soldier and 10 bystanders, the U.S. 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 Taliban 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 Defence 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 Taliban were ousted, the United States has been attacking militants in remote strongholds in northwest Pakistan. Taliban and al Qaeda fighters control territory in Pakistan's ethnic 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. Separately on Thursday, the main security agency said it had foiled a suicide attack by a bomber in a car packed with ordnance and explosives on the outskirts of Kabul, following a tip-off. Taliban spokesmen could not be contacted for comment. (Additional reporting and writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Robert Birsel and Valerie Lee)
Locals gather around a destroyed car after a suicide blast in Nangarhar province November 13, 2008. Twenty Afghan civilians and a U.S. soldier were killed in a suicide attack on Thursday ...
