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was no immediate word on casualties, but gunshots also were heard in the area.
• Separately Sunday, Afghan officials said that an apparent NATO airstrike had killed 15 people -- nine of them civilians, including women and children -- in an eastern province where the Taliban are strong. NATO said 10 militants died in the strike, and that it had no reports of any civilian deaths.
• Hazrat Janan, who is a member of the council that governs Wardak province, says the blast shattered windows of buildings in a wide stretch of Maidan Shahr city. Maidan Shahr lies around 40 km (25 miles) from Kabul, and the apparent attack underscored the spreading insecurity across Afghanistan as U.S.-led forces reduce their presence and hand over more responsibility to Afghan troops.
• According to Janan, gunshots were heard in the area immediately after the explosion, suggesting that militants could be staging a multi-faceted attack.
• Meanwhile, conflicting reports emerged from the airstrike in the Watapur district of Kunar, a province that lies along the border with Pakistan. It's a militant stronghold, and many Arab and other foreign insurgents are believed to operate there alongside the Afghan Taliban. Some are suspected of links to the Al-Qaida terrorist network.
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• ISLAMABAD (AP) -- Militants in Pakistan's most populous province are said to be training for what they expect will be an ethnic-based civil war in neighboring Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw in 16 months, according to analysts and a senior militant.
• In the past two years the number of Punjab-based militants deploying to regions bordering on Afghanistan has tripled and is now in the thousands, says analyst Mansur Mehsud. He runs the FATA Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank studying the mix of militant groups that operate in Pakistan's tribal belt running along much of the 2,600-kilometer (1,600-mile) Afghan-Pakistan border.
• Mehsud, himself from South Waziristan where militants also hide out, says more than 150 militant groups operate in the tribal regions, mostly in mountainous, heavily forested North Waziristan. Dotted with hideouts, it is there that Al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri is thought by the U.S. to be hiding, and where Afghanistan says many of its enemies have found sanctuary.
• While militants from Punjab province have long sought refuge and training in the tribal regions, they were fewer in number and confined their hostility to Pakistan's

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