© Jalil Rezayee/EPAAfghan army soldiers on guard duty at a beefed-up checkpoint following the Taliban attack.
The Taliban killed 21 Afghan soldiers on Sunday at a remote outpost near the border with Pakistan, and took at least five others prisoner, in a show of military strength just weeks before a critical election.
The night raid was one of the deadliest single attacks in recent years on the Afghan military, who are stronger and more disciplined than the police and less often targeted directly by insurgents.
President Hamid Karzai cancelled a planned trip to Sri Lanka to deal with the fallout from the deaths, and in a swipe at his neighbour condemned Islamabad for tolerating havens for the insurgents just inside its border.
The fighting came less than two months before a presidential election that, if it goes ahead smoothly, would give Afghanistan a first peaceful and democratic transfer of power.
The Taliban have denounced it as a "waste of time" and have begun attacks on candidates and election workers, but the government says the increasingly confident security forces will be able to secure voters and polling stations even in areas on the fringe of Taliban strongholds. Candidates rushed to condemn the killings and Karzai's ally Zalmay Rassoul paid tribute to the "bravery and sacrifices" of the police, army and intelligence services.
Yesterday's attack began in the morning when dozens of militants, some of them foreigners, converged on an army checkpoint in the mountainous Kunar province, Afghan officials said.
The insurgents outnumbered the government troops and were also possibly helped by a Taliban sympathiser inside the base, officials said. The scale of the onslaught gave most of the soldiers little chance and several were shot in their sleep, a source said.
Fighting to recapture the base continued into afternoon; reinforcements sent to the area were ambushed by a suicide bomber but none of them were killed, the defence ministry said. Officials said the bodies of the 21 soldiers would be returned to their families on Monday, and the search would continue for those believed to be held captive.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a text message, saying that only one insurgent had been killed and two others injured. The militants had collected weapons abandoned by the troops a spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said.
The deaths came shortly after the Taliban announced they were suspending talks with the US over the return of the country's only prisoner of war, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who went missing near the border more than four years ago.
In a brief statement, the group said only that they had suspended talks because of "the political complexity of the current situation in the country".
A week ago, the Pakistani Taliban, who are linked to the Afghan group but focused more on fighting in their own country, killed 23 of Pakistan's Frontier Corps paramilitary soldiers they had captured.
Islamabad said the men were on Afghan soil when they died and protested to the Afghan government, which denied the killings took place inside their borders.
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