Four days after anti-government insurgents hit central Kabul with a car bomb and a team of suicide bombers that paralyzed the commercial district for hours, the Afghan government is moving to ban live coverage of such attacks.

Yesterday, Afghanistan's domestic intelligence agency summoned a small group of reporters and informed them that journalists would face detention if they filmed insurgent attacks while they were happening.

Afghan officials said live coverage of attacks helped insurgents track security forces responding to the incidents and created a bigger risk for the government forces.

The intelligence decree drew immediate condemnation from journalist groups and Afghan civil liberties activists.

"The government should not hide their inabilities by barring media from covering incidents," Laila Noori, who monitors media issues for Afghanistan Rights Monitor, told Reuters. "People want to know all the facts on the ground whenever security incidents take place."

"We believe broad, pre-emptive bans on coverage are inconsistent with a democratic society," John Daniszewski, AP senior managing editor for international news, said in New York. "Experience shows there are many ways to cover important breaking stories without interfering with police or security operations."

Today, Waheed Omar, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai came up with a unique explanation for the ban: It's to protect journalists.

"What we want is, number one, to avoid giving the enemy the possibility of using live broadcasts to instruct or to get in contact and issue number two is protection of the journalists," Omar told journalists on Tuesday at his semi-regular briefing.

Omar's explanation was oblique.

At the end of the news conference, it was still unclear exactly how and when the new restrictions would go into effect.

In January, Afghan stations aired live coverage of a three-hour Taliban attack in Kabul. And, last Friday, reporters were on-the-scene outside a Kabul hotel while Afghan security forces were involved in a prolonged gunfight with the last remaining insurgent holed up inside.

During the fighting, Afghan security officials warned journalists gathered in the street that they would have their cameras confiscated if they filmed the ongoing attack.

But the threat was laxly enforced.

Along with my colleague Nooruddin Bakhshi, I was able to join other journalists right outside the guest house as waves of soldiers and police entered the building to confront the last attacker. We could hear the gunfight going on inside, but police did little to keep us from taking pictures and watching the unfolding drama.

We were easily able to join firefighters and police investigators as they examined the smoldering car bomb crater.

While the Taliban took credit for the attack, most of the post-blast speculation focuses on the Haqqani network that shares common interests with the Taliban, but has its own agenda.

"My assumption is that it was the Haqqani network," said Army Gen. Michael Flynn, the head of American intelligence in Afghanistan. "To me, if somebody said 'who was responsible?' I would say, without skipping a beat, the Haqqani network."

Flynn also questioned the Taliban's insistence that the attackers were not targeting Indians living in Kabul, even though the car bomb blew up right outside a small guest house filled with Indian doctors and the gunmen stormed a second nearby hotel filled with Indians.

"If it walks like a duck..." Flynn said Monday during a whirlwind visit to Marjah.