CounterPunch.org: After early speculation that the recent Mumbai attacks were linked to Pakistan, a former U.S. Defense Department official now asserts that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) had a hand in training the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. Earlier this year Afghan president Hamid Karzai blamed Pakistan for a brazen assassination attempt from which he barely escaped, and U.S. officials contend that the July 7, 2008 bombing of India’s Kabul Embassy, which claimed 41 lives, had also been aided by the ISI.      Full news...

The First Post: Qadir, a short plump man constantly on the phone making social arrangements, did not join the Taliban for ideological reasons. He was in Kabul on an infrequent shopping trip, ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid. With deep black hair, beard and eyes, Qadir is Pashtun - the ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support - and he sprawled low in the back of the taxi until we were able to stop and find a private room with draped windows where he propped himself up on a pile of cushions and smoked ferociously while we talked. "To begin with I thought the international forces would bring peace and stability," Qadir said. "Then they started treating Afghans as their enemies. Their Apache helicopters killed civilians working in the fields."      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime. When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers. Dostum's men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.      Full news...

Reuters: The Taliban hold a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, a think-tank said on Monday, but NATO and the Afghan government rejected the report, saying its figures were not credible. The findings by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) come in the wake of a series of critical reports on Western-led military and development efforts to put an end to the seven-year Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Vancouver Free Press: The 101 Canadians who have been killed in Afghanistan believed that they were serving our country, and for that they deserve our respect and gratitude. We must not forget or trivialize their ultimate sacrifice. But there is an awful truth that we tend to avoid, a truth that must be proclaimed if we are to end the killing on all sides of that bloody conflict. The truth is that those 101 brave Canadians died for nothing. Their lives were taken away from them, and from their loving families and friends, for a lie. More accurately, they died for a series of lies.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Friday’s riots in Kabul, caused by the death of an Afghan civilian at the hands of foreign troops, were just the latest sign of the anger felt by many Afghans at continuing civilian casualties. Figures show that at least 540 Afghans civilians were killed in the first nine months of 2008. Of these, 367 were killed by the Taliban and other militants, many in suicide attacks. Two suicide bombers have struck Kabul in the last week. Seven people have been killed and 27 were wounded. All of them were civilians. The children of Nasir Ali - a road sweeper killed in a suicide bomb on Sunday.      Full news...

Herald Tribune: Breaking with a military tradition of keeping silent about policy, a top German general has branded his country's efforts in Afghanistan a failure, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid. The comments came from General Hans-Christoph Ammon, head of the army's elite special commando unit, or KSK, whose officers are in Afghanistan fighting alongside U.S. forces against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.      Full news...

The Associated Press: The Taliban and other warlords could clear almost half a billion dollars from Afghanistan's opium trade this year — money that will help finance insurgent attacks, the U.N.'s drug czar said. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, said the Taliban also appears to be stockpiling the drug to manipulate its price, after several years in which production surpassed world demand. Afghanistan produces over 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw ingredient for making heroin.      Full news...

The Independent: The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.      Full news...

Chicago Tribune: Ramzan Bashardost drives a beat-up black 1991 Suzuki with a cracked windshield and often sleeps in a tent—habits hardly befitting a respected member of parliament. "In the Afghan administration now, money is the law," said Bashardost, the former planning minister. "When you have money here, you can do anything. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where corruption is legal." Not exactly legal, but definitely rampant. Increasingly, corruption is driving a wedge between the government and the Afghan people, who are growing more and more resentful of their leaders, experts say.      Full news...

AmericanFreePress.net: The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons. Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.      Full news...

AFP: Waheeda's arms were blown off in a suicide attack in the Afghan capital a few years ago. Flesh was also torn from one of her legs and she lost much of her vision. Her mashed face is split by an uneven scar. Now about 35, she has six children but not much else. "I cannot even drink water by myself," she weeps silently, dabbing at a tear with one of her stumped arms.      Full news...

Spiegel Online: It's all too often that the US military accepts civilian casualties as a necessary evil. An internal Air Force report describes its excessively violent methods as well as how officials have been trying to placate surviving family members with money. There have been times when artillary shells have killed innocent civilians after landing several kilometers off-target. That is what happened in Paktika Province in the country's southeast on July 19. In other instances, such as that of last Monday -- as well as on July 6 and other previous occasions -- wedding parties have been misidentified as groups of insurgents -- with deadly consequences.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Jobless refugees turfed out of Iran turn to lives of crime, officials say. Rising unemployment has forced many people living in the south-western province of Nimroz to turn to crime, militancy or drugs for money, officials say. About 30,000 illegal Afghan immigrants have been ordered out of Iran since the start of October for not having work permits. The returnees say they are willing to work in Nirmoz for $2 a day, but they complain that there are no jobs available for them.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: The U.S. military acknowledged Saturday that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting last week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces. The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president's office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar.      Full news...

VOA: Pakistani security officials say suspected Taliban militants have killed two Afghan men, accusing them of spying for U.S. forces. Officials said the militants left the bodies on a road in the North Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan's volatile northwest.      Full news...

CNN News: The U.S. military is investigating two airstrikes this week that Afghan officials say killed as many as 60 civilians. Many Afghans accuse the United States of not taking caution when carrying out airstrikes in civilian areas and Karzai has been under enormous political pressure to stop the strikes.      Full news...

Workers World: For months now Afghanistan has been deadlier for U.S. troops than Iraq, even though there are 32,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq. A total of 1,004 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Some 625 of the casualties were from the United States. Forty percent of them occurred in the past two years. (icasualties.org)      Full news...

AFP: With three deaths Monday, the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001 has passed 1,000, including 97 Canadians, according to the icasualties.org website Monday. This includes two coalition troops killed in a suicide bombing in the northern province of Baghlan on Monday. A third international soldier died after a bombing in the west the same day.      Full news...

Canada.com: Thousands of people took to the streets of eastern Afghanistan Friday to protest against the killing of 27 civilians by Taliban insurgents. Witnesses said the victims, some as young as 15, were ordered off a bus by armed gunmen in the troubled Kandahar province on October 14 as they travelled to Iran in search of work. Organizers said more than 10,000 people attended the rally to protest against what they called an "un-Islamic" act.      Full news...

Los Angeles Times: Taliban gunmen on a motorbike shot and killed a Western woman aid worker in the Afghan capital today, fueling a sense that insurgents are increasingly encroaching on the country's seat of government. A suicide bomber also killed two Western soldiers and five children in the north of Afghanistan, where violence is relatively rare.      Full news...

The Independent: It is time to face facts in Afghanistan: the situation is spiralling downwards, and if we do not change our approach, we face disaster. Violence is up in two-thirds of the country, narcotics are the main contributor to the economy, criminality is out of control and the government is weak, corrupt and incompetent. The international coalition is seen as a squabbling bunch of foreigners who have not delivered on their promises. Although the Taliban have nowhere near majority support, their standing is growing rapidly among some ordinary Afghans.      Full news...

Rueters: Taliban insurgents killed 25 Afghan civilians, including a child, after firing on one bus and seizing control of another in the southern province of Kandahar, a local police chief said on Sunday. Violence in the war-torn country has surged this year with attacks at their highest level in six years, the United Nations' top envoy in Afghanistan said this month. Some 4,000 people have died so far this year, a third of them civilians.      Full news...

Spiegel: It is one of the last mild summer evenings in Kabul. A group of Western diplomats and military officials is meeting for a private dinner in one of the embassies in Wazir Akbar Khan, an upscale residential neighborhood. Almost all of the 12 envoys and generals represent countries that have troops stationed in southern Afghanistan and the mood is somber. "Nothing is moving forward anymore, and yet we are no longer able to extricate ourselves," one of the ambassadors says over dessert, a light apple pastry. He gives voice to that which many here are already thinking: "We are trapped."      Full news...

TomDispatch.com: Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war -- close to $36 billion a year -- but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief found that "a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries." The economy is so underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the country's gross domestic product.      Full news...

New York Times: A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document. The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence from militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.      Full news...

The Nation Magazine: Seven years after the US invasion of Afghanistan, our devastated country is still chained to the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban; the country is like an unconscious body breathing its last. The US government and its allies exploited the plight of Afghan women to legitimate its so-called "war on terror" and attack on Afghanistan. The medieval and brutal regime of the Taliban was toppled, but instead of relying on Afghan people, the United States and its allies pushed us from the frying pan to the fire and brought the infamous criminals of the "Northern Alliance" into power--sworn enemies of democracy and human rights, who are as dark-minded, evil, anti-women and cruel as the Taliban.      Full news...

Middle East Times: A new book by a German journalist takes an in-depth look at the West's failing attempts to win the war in Afghanistan. Merey's book is reporting in the best sense -- it includes several chapters detailing Afghanistan's key problems: the corrupt and inefficient government of Hamid Karzai; the drug industry that no one has been able to contain or even destroy; NATO bombings that have led to civilian casualties; Pakistan's secret financing and influencing of the Taliban. He tells the story of a man who wants to join the Taliban together with his two sons, because ISAF troops accidentally killed his third boy.      Full news...

AFP: Mohammed Hashim Wahaaj, a large Afghan doctor with a bushy beard, thought he was going to die. He says his abductors were not from the extremist Taliban insurgency, who have kidnapped and killed scores of people they accuse of working for the government or its international allies. These were just criminals profiting from a climate of lawlessness and impunity in which government officials at the most senior levels are getting away with crime and corruption, the softly spoken doctor said.      Full news...

IWPR: The competence and credibility of the Afghan judiciary is being called into serious question by two controversial convictions which have caused an international outcry. The two cases, the most recent concluded last month, concern alleged transgressions of Islamic law, with critics claiming the convictions are deeply flawed and should be overturned on appeal. Some have suggested that the cases expose what they see as the creeping Islamicisation of the judiciary, insisting that the bench is composed of religious hardliners with Taliban sympathies.      Full news...