KABUL (Agencies) - A top Taliban commander has said his fighters are poised and ready to attack Kabul and could strike virtually anywhere in the city. It would be tempting to put this down to Taliban propaganda except one of Kabul's top cops is saying the same thing. "We are working on a security strategy for the city and if we don't get it right, they [the Taliban] can attack at any minute, at any hour, any time," Taliban Commander Muhammad Daud Amin, in charge of securing the Kabul district that includes the Presidential Palace and many government ministries, told CNN on Thursday. Proof of the menacing threat came just last month when eight Taliban fighters, bristling with weapons and suicide vests, burst into three government buildings in the centre of Kabul. Police and security forces managed to kill all the attackers before they could detonate their vests, but 20 people were killed and dozens were wounded. "Staff... staff," Amin pointed to pictures of dead Justice Ministry staff from his evidence book of the crime scene of last month's attack. "Police went looking for the Taliban and they went after them inside. We are convinced the Taliban wanted to hold ministry employees hostage." said Amin. Meanwhile, in an interview with PBS television, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said any political reconciliation with elements of the Afghan insurgency must be under terms set by the Kabul government. He said most insurgencies eventually are resolved through a political settlement. He said there were some fanatical members of the Taliban that had no interest in reconciliation. "There are elements of the Taliban that are absolutely irreconcilable and frankly will have to be killed. "But there may be other elements that are willing to and maybe a majority who do it because it's a job because they get paid, there may be some who do it for other reasons but I think there is the potential for reconciliation," Gates said. The US Defence Chief said US presidents will likely take a more cautious approach before launching pre-emptive attacks after the intelligence failures of the Iraq war. "The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence," Gates told in the interview. Any future president is "going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago," he said. Appearing on the "Tavis Smiley show", Gates also said the previous administration - which he joined in 2006 - made a serious mistake in planning for what it believed would be a "very quick, largely conventional conflict". The previous administration believed "Saddam Hussein would be put out of power and then the situation turned back to the Iraqis themselves," he said. "I think most people would agree that there was clearly inadequate planning for the situation not turning out that way, and for us to be involved for a protracted period of time," he said. "I think that was one of the biggest mistakes that was made. I think we just didn't anticipate at the time that this could be a protracted counter-insurgency kind of challenge and it clearly turned out to be that."