IT came with the grim ironic timing that only the Taliban can conjure: just hours after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, claimed the United States was now engaged in peace talks with Taliban fighters – offering the prospect of an end to a decade-long war that began on September 11, 2001 – a group of insurgents launched a deadly attack in Kabul.

Talks may have started, the attackers were making clear, but the killings continue, too. The attack by Taliban suicide bombers claimed the lives of nine people. It provided a sharp contrast to the speech delivered by President Karzai earlier, in which he gave the first official confirmation of US involvement in negotiations.

Karzai said that peace talks between the Afghan government, the Taliban movement and the US had begun.

He said that “foreign military and especially the US itself” were involved in negotiations with the group. His comments come as the US prepares to start withdrawing its 97,000 troops from Afghanistan, starting next month.

The US aims to gradually hand over all security operations to Afghan security forces by 2014. The violence yesterday, though, puts into question how well the Afghan forces could cope without foreign assistance.

Shortly after Karzai’s address, witnesses reported gun shots echoing through the streets as suicide bombers stormed a police compound near the finance ministry in the Afghan capital. It is the second major assault in the city in less than a month. The Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the latest assault, vowed last month to carry out attacks on foreign and Afghan troops and government officials, and have assassinated several senior police commanders since the start of the year.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said three of their fighters carried out the attack, but gave no further details. Three policemen, an intelligence agent and five civilians – including two finance ministry employees who worked in an office beside the police station – were killed in the attack, officials said. Two other policemen and 10 civilians were wounded.

A Kabul police spokesman said the insurgents were wearing Afghan army uniforms, a trademark of recent attacks which has led the government to clamp down on a once-flourishing black market in security uniforms. At the site of the assault, the body of one of the bombers – who was shot before he could detonate his suicide vest – lay on the ground dressed in green camouflage trousers and a jacket, beside pools of blood and pieces of flesh.

The Interior Ministry said in a statement that one of the attackers detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates while the others rushed in and began shooting. Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said: “One bomber blew himself up at the gate to pave the way for the others to enter, and a second one was shot dead by the police.”

The last attacker was holed up in a building on the compound where he fought for around an hour before he was also shot dead. Meanwhile, insurgents attacked two convoys supplying Nato troops in the eastern province of Ghazni, police said. Four Afghan security guards escorting the trucks were reportedly killed by roadside bombs.

Also, yesterday, a British soldier from the 3rd Battalion The Mercian Regiment (Staffords) died of his injuries after being shot while on patrol in Helmand Province. Despite the presence of up to 150,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government. The United Nations reported that May was the deadliest month on record for Afghan civilians.

On May 21, a suicide bomber killed six people and wounded 23 at a military hospital in a heavily guarded area of Kabul, not far from the US embassy. Such bloodshed could be providing the impetus for negotiations to begin.

A month before that, a suicide attacker in an army uniform sneaked past security at the Afghan Defence Ministry, killing three people. In January, a suicide attack on a supermarket frequented by foreigners killed nine people in the capital’s embassy district.

Shortly before yesterday afternoon’s bloodshed, however, Karzai revealed that an Afghan push towards peace had taken significant steps forward. “In the course of this year, there have been peace talks with the Taliban and our own countrymen,” he said. “Peace talks have started with them already and it is going well. Foreign militaries, especially the United States of America, are going ahead with these negotiations.”

The US embassy refused to comment directly on Karzai’s announcement but said the US supports Afghan reconciliation and has assisted Afghan government-led “reintegration initiatives” aimed at the Taliban.

A US official in Kabul said: “We must help create conditions necessary to enable a political settlement among the Afghan people. This includes reconciling those insurgents who are willing to renounce al-Qaeda, forsake violence and adhere to the Afghan constitution.”

The UK said it supported “Afghan-led efforts to reconcile and reintegrate members of the insurgency who are prepared to renounce violence, cut links with terrorist groups and accept the constitution”.

A statement from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office added: “In view of the death of Osama Bin Laden, it is time for the Taliban/insurgency to positively engage in the political process.”

Karzai was speaking the day after the UN Security Council split the UN sanctions list for Taliban and al-Qaeda figures into two, which envoys said could help bring the Taliban into talks on a peace deal in Afghanistan.

But despite hopes that meetings with the Taliban could provide the political underpinning for a staged US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the discussions are at a very early stage.

Diplomatic sources claim there have already been months of preliminary talks, but the US has never confirmed any contact.

The closest anyone in the US establishment has come to acknowledging efforts to kick-start talks was when Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said there could be talks with the Taliban by the end of this year, if the Nato alliance kept making military advances on the ground. The Taliban’s official position regarding peace talks is that it will only negotiate once international forces leave Afghanistan, and that it will only talk to the Afghan government.

But there are many Afghans, among them women’s and civil society activists, who fear talks with the Taliban may undo much of the progress they have made in the decade since the Taliban were swept from power. Suraya Parlika, a senator in the Afghan parliament, said: “We should not give up 10 years of achievements in Afghan women’s rights. If that happens, these peace talks will be incomplete and unjust.”

Yesterday’s events came just weeks before Afghan forces in seven areas across the country, including Kabul, prepare to take over security responsibilities from the ISAF soldiers.