The Independent: The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. In a series of interviews, they paint a picture of a country where $52bn (33bn Pounds) in US aid since 2001 has made almost no impression on devastating poverty made worse by spreading violence and an economy dislocated by war.      Full news...

Reuters: The United Nations on Saturday launched a $678 million humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan, where despite inflows of millions of foreign aid dollars, the world body said about a quarter of the population goes hungry. U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Catherine Bragg said some 7.4 million Afghans were living with hunger and fear of starvation, millions more rely on food help and one in five children die before the age of five.      Full news...

IRIN: Uncertain harvests are a perennial risk for rural Afghans, but two events stand out as exacerbating poverty - ill health, and the high cost of getting married, according to a new report. “While health expenditures placed considerable financial strain on households across different wealth groups, they hit the poor particularly hard,” says research by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU).      Full news...

IRIN: Ali Ahmad, the sole breadwinner of an extended family in Kabul, has to decide whether to buy firewood to keep his children warm in winter or food to save them from hunger. “Everything is expensive… wheat flour, ghee, sugar, fuel and wood and I cannot afford them,” he complained.      Full news...

The National Forum: It is estimated that one littoral combat ship costs $613 million. According to World Bank figures, that sum would be enough to educate 6.8 million children in Afghanistan for nine years - or we could buy one warship. Which investment would do more to strengthen Afghanistan and Afghan civil society? The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have estimated that $287 billion dollars has been spent on the war in Afghanistan. Senator Cameron provided us with some of the forward estimates, and they are breathtaking. This translates to a $300,000 cash payment to everyone in Afghanistan for the price of the deployment and the war - or, incidentally, a cheque for $13,400 for every Australian.      Full news...

IRIN: Afghanistan has climbed over a dozen places up the annual UN Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) - from 181 out of 182 countries in 2009, to 155 out of 169 this year. Described as a human development indicator, the HDI "measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living."      Full news...

Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET): Internally displaced households and repatriated Afghan refugees from Pakistan in cereal deficit areas in east, south, and central Afghanistan are expected to be moderately to highly food insecure. There food security condition will worsen as Afghanistan's lean season starts in January.      Full news...

PAN: Ten out of 100 families in northern Balkh province earn a living with the assistance of others while 80 percent people are living in extreme poverty, an official said on Tuesday. Dr. Fardin, food in charge at the ActionAid International Organisation in the north, told a press conference in Mazar-i-Sharif that the 10 families out 100 included widows, disables, orphans and labourers who fulfilled their daily life needs with the help of others.      Full news...

CNN: The grease-covered orange overalls can't hide 14-year-old Nazer Ahmad's frail frame. As he leans under the hood of a wrecked car, torn plastic sandals on his feet, I know I cannot possibly understand the life this young boy is forced to lead in war-torn Afghanistan -- where jobs are few, pay is appalling, and young children must work rather than go to school and play with their friends.      Full news...

The Nation: The Afghan War has now entered its 10th year. It has become the longest US war. As of 7 October 2010, the 9th Anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the human cost of the Afghan War has been estimated as about 4.9 million violent deaths or non-violent avoidable deaths from Occupier-imposed deprivation.      Full news...

France 24: Afghanistan’s health authorities Friday appealed for international help in dealing with a parasitic disease that is believed to threaten millions in the impoverished country. Leishmaniasis, transmitted by a species of sandfly, threatened the health of 13 million Afghans, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report on neglected tropical diseases.      Full news...

The Guardian: Sala Khan Khel, 40 miles outside Kabul, looks like a rural paradise at harvest time. Women and children play behind the high mud walls of the old houses, the men thresh the wheat, teenagers pick walnuts and the water coming straight off the snowy mountains high above the village gurgles through the irrigation canals. But the rural idyll hides conflict, deep poverty and growing environmental degradation.      Full news...

The Financial Times: In the ornate Shahista restaurant in Dubai, Afghans in traditional robes break the Ramadan fast with fare from their homeland, including “zaban” – or sheep’s tongue. Yet the fleet of tinted and customised Mercedes parked outside the restaurant shows that the diners are not Afghan labourers who toil on the United Arab Emirates’ construction sites but scions of their country’s elite.      Full news...

PAN: During Ramadan, Dowlat Hussain wakes before the sun to perform his morning prayers, but there is nothing to eat for Sahari, he says, as “we live in a cave like animals”. Hussain and his family, like hundreds of others too poor to build or rent their own home, live in the honeycomb network of caves that surround the two destroyed Buddha statues in central Bamyan province.      Full news...

UKPA: According to a latest research, Afghanistan tops the list of 163 countries which face the risk of food shortages. The ongoing violence and the country’s vulnerability to climate extremes like drought and flood have made food security hit rock-bottom. Afghanistan is at greater risk of suffering disruption to its food supplies than any other country, new research has found.      Full news...

Tribune Media Services Inc.: As Gen. David Petraeus assumed his new command in Afghanistan earlier this month, he took up a strategy that has already failed - though not for the reasons most people assume. Certainly, as most everyone knows, the battle plan appears hopeless. Every night in Marjah, Taliban killers post "night letters" in mosques and other public places, warning city residents they will be killed if they cooperate with the Americans.      Full news...

The Washington Post: For rent on Street 6 in the neighborhood of Sherpur: a four-story, 11-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub. Price: $12,000 a month. It’s a relative bargain in this district favored by former warlords and bureaucrats — Kabul’s version of Beverly Hills.      Full news...

Amnesty International: Afghan people continued to suffer widespread human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law more than seven years after the USA and its allies ousted the Taliban. Access to health care, education and humanitarian aid deteriorated, particularly in the south and south-east of the country, due to escalating armed conflict between Afghan and international forces and the Taliban and other armed groups. Conflict-related violations increased in northern and western Afghanistan, areas previously considered relatively safe.      Full news...

PAN: High unemployment and deteriorating security is forcing hundreds of Afghan youths to risk an often perilous journey with ruthless smugglers in the search of a better life. Some pay with their lives. Others, such as Sher Rahman, spend thousands of dollars for the journey only to find themselves right back in Afghanistan.      Full news...

IRIN: It is well known that the Taliban, local criminals and international drug cartels profit enormously from the drug trade; that corruption is rife; and that huge amounts of aid money are pouring into Afghanistan. Less clear is the effect of all this on government power and the rule of law on which humanitarian aid organizations depend to carry out their mandate.      Full news...

Reuters: The world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency rather than providing humanitarian relief, Save the Children said on Wednesday. According to the British charity, a child dies in the impoverished, war-torn nation every two minutes - mainly due to poverty, malnutrition and a lack of basic healthcare - and Afghan children have the worst chance in the world of surviving to their fifth birthday.      Full news...

The Associated Press: The majority of Afghans live in dire poverty, despite an estimated $35 billion in aid being poured into the country between 2002 to 2009, the United Nations said Tuesday.A report by the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights claims that over a third of Afghans live in "absolute poverty" and about the same number are only slightly above the poverty line.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan is the hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for UNICEF said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse. "The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child," Daniel Toole said on a visit to Afghanistan this week.      Full news...

The Los Angeles Times: The men come at dawn, a ragged, anxious collection of faces peeking through scarves and hoping for work as they stand in a traffic circle beneath billboards advertising war heroes and washing machines. They are bricklayers, gardeners, hole diggers and carpenters. Sometimes they are tapped on the shoulder, most times they are not, so they hunch amid the cars and fruit stands, knowing that the higher the sun climbs the lower their chances of returning home with money in their pockets.      Full news...

DAWN: Almost half of school-age children in Afghanistan do not have access to education, President Hamid Karzai said Saturday as he inaugurated the new school year. “Five million school-age children in our country do not go to school, some because of war or because their schools have been closed by the Taliban or others, some because they do not have the ability to go to schools,” he said.      Full news...

The Washington Post: Afghanistan’s biggest private bank -- founded by the Islamic nation’s only world-class poker player -- celebrated its fifth year in business last summer .... Less publicly, Kabul Bank's boss has been handing out far bigger prizes to his country’s U.S.-backed ruling elite: multimillion-dollar loans for the purchase of luxury villas in Dubai by members of President Hamid Karzai’s family, his government and his supporters.      Full news...

The Canadian Press: There's a lot the sooty-faced boy doesn't know. His own name, for one thing. Or how much money he earns dishing out bowls of rice from his weathered metal stand. But he knows it's his job to feed his family. The boy leans an arm on the counter to chat with a visitor. If he had a dish rag tossed over one shoulder and a white T-shirt stretched over a beer gut, he'd look like a short-order cook at some Canadian greasy-spoon diner.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: In Shinwar, a district of Nangarhar province, there are two markets, one called Shadal and the other, Pikheh... these markets have one main commodity. And that commodity is women. In Nangarhar markets exist where women are sold. Cases have been reported where a woman was sold with her five children. Another woman was sold to five different people and returned back to the original man who sold her, then killed her.      Full news...

AFP: From the watchtower at an Afghan outpost, the Dutch soldiers can follow the growth of the pretty poppies that may one day pay for the weapons that kill them or their comrades. Taliban insurgents waging an increasingly deadly campaign against foreign troops make at least 100 million dollars a year from taxing Afghanistan's opium trade -- the world's biggest, US and Afghan officials say.      Full news...

Channel 4 News: Women were promised greater protection after the invasion of Afghanistan, but Nima Elbagir finds an increasing number have forced to self-inflict injuries to escape abuse. When the Taliban were still in power the liberation of Afghanistan’s women was a cause celebre in the west - a moral justification for the invasion. Yet by the end of last year the United Nations was worriedly reporting that the number of violent incidents against women had risen to their highest since the fall of the Taliban.      Full news...