A suicide bombing deep inside the heart of an Afghan ministry in Kabul has raised concerns about the ability of the country’s new security forces to tackle the Taliban, the country’s former fundamentalist rulers who were ousted by the U.S. in 2001.

One person was killed and nine wounded on Thursday morning at the Ministry of Information and Culture in central Kabul in an explosion believed to have been set off by a man disguised as a police officer. Part of the Ministry wall was destroyed in the blast.

Akhtar Muhammad Amir, an official at the state-run Bakhtar news agency, said he was on the fifth floor when he heard shooting and then a huge explosion. “Thick dust covered all the corridors, and all the windows of the offices were shattered,” he told the New York Times. “Some of our staff were wounded by the flying glass from the windows,” he said.

The explosion comes a week after the Taliban claimed responsibility for shooting to death a 34-year-old British aid worker in Kabul whom it accused of spreading Christianity. A few days prior the Taliban executed 30 passengers on a bus en route to Kandahar.

Also in the last week, the head of DHL, an international courier company, was shot to death by a security guard from Saladin, a private military contractor, for blocking a major heroin shipment.

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. military has requested a surge of an extra 20,000 American troops to tackle the increase in religious and drug-related violence, a request that Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama, is likely to grant if he wins next week's elections.

Our interviews with people in Kabul as well as the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif suggest that the vast majority of Afghans support the candidacy of Barack Obama, particularly as he has vowed to attack the Taliban in the neighboring country of Pakistan.

Yet, at the same time, almost everyone we have spoken to believes that U.S. foreign policy in the region will not change, no matter who wins.

This suggests that winning a war against the Taliban will be hard, because several investigative reporters like Ahmed Rashid suggest that much of the U.S. funding for Pakistan is finding its ways into the Taliban’s coffers.