AFGHANISTAN - Nov. 18 - UN To Halt Some Relief Operations.

The UN refugee agency announces that it is temporarily pulling 30 foreign staff members out of large areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan and closing refugee reception centers in 4 provinces. Analysts said the closures were a victory for resurgent Taliban forces and could affect thousands of refugees trying to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan.The suspension of operations comes after three attacks on UN offices and employees in the last week by suspected Taliban fighters. The shootings and bombings, which appear to be growing in sophistication and lethality, are believed to be part of a campaign to drive aid workers from southern Afghanistan, the Taliban heartland. The group appears to be trying to gain support from ethnic Pashtuns already frustrated by a lack of aid from the international community and a lack of power in the national government.The most chilling attack came on Nov. 16, when two suspected Taliban pulled up beside a clearly marked UN vehicle in Ghazni, just south of Kabul. One of the men opened fire with a pistol at point-blank range, killing Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old French woman working for the refugee agency. "We cannot do this alone",says the head of the mission in Afghanistan for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi. "This murder tragically proved it". Grandi said his agency would review the situation in two weeks and consider reopening the offices. Goislard, described as a tireless young woman, worked for the refugee agency in Rwanda as a volunteer before arriving in Afghanistan. She spent two years in Ghazni helping refugees return to the city she "just loved," according to her colleagues, and died in. Haji Asad, the governor of the province, said Goislard was well known and well liked in the city. He said angry residents helped police capture the two assailants and wanted to burn down the attackers' homes. Goislard's killing staggered the aid community in Afghanistan. It came amid an intensifying spate of killings, kidnappings and attacks on foreign and Afghan aid workers. On the same day Goislard was killed, an improvised explosive device detonated near a UN vehicle in Paktia Province in the east. On Nov. 11, a car bomb detonated outside the UN office in Kandahar. Goislard was the second international aid worker killed this year in Afghanistan. In March, an engineer from El Salvador working for the International Red Cross was executed by suspected Taliban north of Kabul. Several Afghan aid workers have also been killed. On Nov. 18, a half-dozen aid groups held an emergency meeting in Kandahar to decide whether to join in the withdrawal of foreign workers. In a statement released Nov. 18 afternoon, the groups called on the international community to do more to stabilize an "unacceptably dangerous security situation". For more than 18 months, Afghan officials and some aid groups have called for the expansion of peacekeeping operations from Kabul to other cities. "There is time now to get ready, rather than waiting for us to get picked off one by one", says the southern Afghanistan area coordinator for the Mercy Corps charity, Anne Wood, based in Portland, Oregon. Goislard apparently was aware of the danger she faced, but she did not run from it. She left a will, says UN officials as they prepared for her funeral. In it, she asked to be buried in Afghanistan.