Reuters: It seems every Afghan has a story about bribes. .... "If you want to do business in Afghanistan, you must bribe people every step of the way, otherwise your business will collapse. I think it seems almost impossible to root out corruption, because we can't live without it."      Full news...

EricMargolis.com: Truth is war’s first casualty. The Afghan War’s biggest untruth is, `we’ve got to fight terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home.’ Politicians and generals keep using this canard to justify a war they can’t otherwise explain or justify. Many North Americans still buy this lie because they believe the 9/11 attacks came directly from the Afghanistan-based al-Qaida and Taliban movements.      Full news...

The FINANCIAL: Human rights activists have noted a large-scale growth in violence toward Afghan women, hundreds of whom are beaten, intimidated or sexually assaulted by men daily. According to the human rights activists' publication, the number of suicides among women has also grown... Over the last week, there were five such incidents.      Full news...

The Telegraph: Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, but three decades of war and an increasingly brutal Islamist insurgency have left it rich in martyrs and the misery their deaths leave behind. In little more than three months, in Kabul alone, devastating suicide attacks have killed around 100 people. About 300 people have been injured.      Full news...

Irish Sun: Children in Afghanistan are suffering from serious child abuse and high levels of mortality. United Nations officials, speaking in Kabul, have said children are being deprived in the worst possible ways with their rights being neglected despite vast flow of Western aid into the country.      Full news...

Reuters: "I was seven-year-old when I got married. I did not have kids till the age of 12. I became a mother of four kids. My husband is a drug user. I asked him to stop using drugs many times, but he wouldn't stop. I warned him that I would have no choice but to kill myself if he didn't quit using drugs. He couldn't do it, and that is why I burned myself."      Full news...

PAN: Sixty civilians were killed and 102 others wounded in various violence-related incidents over the past one week, the Ministry of Interior has said. Most of the civilian casualties occurred in volatile southern provinces of Ghazni, Helmand and Kandahar as a result of roadside bombs, rocket attacks, ambushes and suicide attacks, the ministry added.      Full news...

PAN: Department of Women's Affair in Baghlan province reports a worrisome increase in the scale of violence against women, including murder and suicide, this year as compared to the previous year. With heightened concern, the department says up to 74 cases of violence were recorded since the beginning of this year, against last year's 67 cases.      Full news...

National Post: In Afghanistan ruling politicians have publicly called Malalai Joya a "prostitute," "infidel," "traitor" and "communist." Some, whom he calls "criminals," "killers," "warlords" and "mafia drug lords," have threatened to rape her and, on four occasions, tried to kill her. But overseas, the tiny 31-year-old political activist and former school teacher has been hailed as "the bravest woman in Afghanistan" and compared to Burma's jailed democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.      Full news...

The Times: “People hate the Americans from the bottom of their hearts,” Haji Akhtar Mohammed Shinwari said as he recalled how the US military had brought death to his homeland. For residents of Shinwar, a village in distant Nangahar province, the message from President Karzai’s address yesterday that the Americans would hand over security over the next five years was disappointing.      Full news...

Reuters: Eight years after a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the war-ravaged state is the most dangerous place in the world for a child to be born, the United Nations said on Thursday. It is especially dangerous for girls, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in launching its annual flagship report, The State of the World’s Children.      Full news...

McClatchy: President Hamid Karzai began his second term Thursday ... On one side of the cavernous room sat Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who's warned that the international community is losing patience with Karzai. On the other side was Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Afghan warlord who's become a symbol of cronyism and government corruption.      Full news...

Washington Post: The Afghan minister of mines accepted a roughly $30 million bribe to award the country's largest development project to a Chinese mining firm, according to a U.S. official who is familiar with military intelligence reports. In the case of the minister of mines, there is a "high degree of certainty," the U.S. official said, that the alleged payment to Mohammad Ibrahim Adel was made in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.      Full news...

IRIN: Over two million Afghans have been killed or wounded in armed conflicts and violence over the past three decades but the desire for peace and stability has always been strong, nine NGOs say in a report published today. “A whole generation has grown up never having experienced peace and many Afghans are struggling to cope with the psychological, economic, social and physical ramifications of the conflict, past and present,” says the report entitled The Cost of War, Afghan Experiences of Conflict, 1978-2009.      Full news...

TomDispatch.com: Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies -- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid -- that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country's new vice-president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Afghanistan’s Finance Ministry denied all kinds of government intervention in the one-year contract of renting out 31 armored vehicles (each car costing $500 per day) for high-ranked officials of Defense Ministry.... Jangul Karger, the representative of Parwan province in the parliament gave this report to PAN according to which each armored Land Cruiser is rented out for $500 each day.      Full news...

PAN: Afghanistan, a recipient of billions of dollars in international aid, achieved another dubious distinction on Tuesday when an influential global watchdog ranked it as the second most corrupt nation of the world. The Berlin-based Transparency International said in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) Somalia stayed the world's most corrupt country, followed by conflict-torn Afghanistan and Iraq.      Full news...

The Guardian: Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex–military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahideen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort. In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting.      Full news...

Democracy Now!: In a last-minute dissent ahead of a critical war cabinet meeting on escalating the Afghan war, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has cast doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Meanwhile, a report reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack.      Full news...

Health News: New Delhi - Eight years after the start of the international campaign to end Taliban rule in Afghanistan, more than half of all children under age five suffer from malnutrition, a UNICEF official told the German Press Agency dpa Wednesday. 'Nutrition is somewhat better (now), but not much,' said Daniel Toole, UNICEF's South Asia director, as the UN agency for children released a report tracking global progress in maternal and child nutrition.      Full news...

Morning Star: Anti-war Lance Corporal Joe Glenton has been arrested and faces 10 years in jail for bravely honouring his moral responsibility to speak out against the illegal occupation of Afghanistan. The serving soldier faces up to seven charges after he defied orders to address 10,000 demonstrators last month in Trafalgar Square and told the media that he did not believe the war was legitimate or in the nation's interest.      Full news...

The Associated Press: Warlords helped drive the Russians from Afghanistan, then shelled Kabul into ruins in a bloody civil war after the Soviets left. Now they are back in positions of power, in part because the U.S. relied on them in 2001 to help oust the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks. President Hamid Karzai later reached out to them to shore up his own power base as America turned its attention to Iraq after the Taliban's rout.      Full news...

South Asia News: A US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, while television footage showed Taliban insurgents sorting and transporting what appeared to be US military ammunition sized by militants in two remote outposts in October. The US soldier was killed in a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, the US military said in a statement without giving more details.      Full news...

The Guardian: With his 9mm Smith and Wesson at the ready, the Afghan police chief strode through the bazaar of rickety wooden stalls, grabbed a hapless shopkeeper by the hair and slapped him across the face three times. One officer hit a man in the knees with his rifle butt. This was an afternoon raid on shops suspected of selling illegal radio equipment used in the making of IEDs (improvised explosive device). Moments later the contents of all the shops was thrown outside in a large heap of "evidence".      Full news...

PAN: Artillery and mortar shelling by the NATO-led international troops killed nine civilians in southern Afghanistan, locals said. People, who brought bodies of their slain relatives to Lashkargah, said the dead included three children and six men. They died as a mortar shell landed in the fields covered with maize crop, said the locals.      Full news...

FPIF: As President Obama and his advisors debate future troop levels for Afghanistan, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) muddies the water on one of the most important issues in the debate — the effects of Afghanistan's drug production. The report, entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," gives the false impression that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan's skyrocketing drug production.      Full news...

IRIN: The average per capita monthly expenditure of nine million Afghans is less than 66 US cents a day, and millions of other Afghans spend about $42 a month, according to a summary of Afghanistan’s new National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (NRVA). NRVA 2007/08 was produced by the government with European Union funding and in collaboration with aid agencies. A bleak picture is painted.      Full news...

The Gargoyle: Last month, Barack Obama became the third U.S. president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. But unlike the countless followers of the lunatic Glenn Beck who think our 44th president is turning our country into Stalinist Russia, there is a more rational argument to be made against Obama’s recent award. The Nobel Peace Prize was given to a man who, like a character in a George Orwell novel, kills in the name of peace.      Full news...

The Independent: Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still are – and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election.      Full news...

Foreign Policy In Focus: While President Barack Obama reviews his strategy on Afghanistan, a perfect moment to send a strong unified message to end the war is slipping through our fingers. Whether it's because we seem to have bought into the lies about the goals of this war or because we mistakenly feel that a Democratic president is going to come to the right conclusion on his own, one thing is clear: There's no debate within the Democratic Party or in the White House about whether to end the war.      Full news...