Los Angeles Times: Mirza Mohammed Dost stood at the foot of his son's grave, near a headstone that read, "Raheb Dost, martyred by Americans." His son was no insurgent, Dost said. He was walking home from prayers on the night of May 5 when he was shot and killed on a busy Kabul street by U.S. security contractors. "The Americans must answer for my son's death," Dost said as a large crowd of young men murmured in approval.      Full news...

PAN: Three civilians were killed and fourth injured in an air strike by NATO-led troops in Chora district of southern Uruzgan province, officials said on Monday. Deputy police chief Col. Mohammad Nabi Khan told Pajhwok Afghan News the people came under attack in Sanger village soon after they climbed a mound to make a call from their mobile.      Full news...

CBC: Five farmers were killed by an air strike from Western forces, Afghan police said Thursday. The farmers were loading cucumbers into a taxi in the rural Zhari district near Kandahar city when a military helicopter fired on them, said district police Chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi. Sarhadi alleged the strike was conducted by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Lt.-Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker said the U.S. military believes the air strike hit a group of militants loading munitions into a van.      Full news...

PAN: Four civilians three of them children - were killed during an attack of foreign troops Tuesday night in Arghandab district of southern Kandahar province, civilians said. Dozens of protesting villagers brought the bodies this morning from their village to the governor's house in Kandahar City, about 12 kilometers away.      Full news...

Democracy Now: US Army Specialist Victor Agosto faces up to one month in jail for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. After returning from thirteen months in Iraq, Agosto became a victim of the stop-loss program that has extended the tours of more than 140,000 troops beyond their contracts since 9/11. Just hours before his court-martial, Agosto speaks out from his military base at Fort Hood, Texas. [includes rush transcript]      Full news...

e-Ariana: There is a common consensus that armed violence will increase across Afghanistan in the summer months, most probably into unprecedented levels since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Summers have consistently witnessed the peak of insurgency-related violence over the past seven years as insurgent fighters find the weather and the geography suitable to launch hit-and-run attacks, raid and terrorize villages, perpetuate suicide and roadside explosions, and create a situation of widespread insecurity.      Full news...

BBC News: More than 1,000 people were killed in the first six months of 2009, according to a UN report. The UN blamed insurgents for using increasingly deadly modes of attack. It also said air strikes by government-allied forces were responsible. There has been widespread concern in Afghanistan about civilian death tolls. In June the US military called for better training in an effort to reduce the numbers of civilian deaths.      Full news...

Inter Press Service: The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can move on to another insurgent stronghold. But that strategy poses an acute problem: The police in the province, who are linked to the local warlord, have committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders who met with British officers.      Full news...

The Independent: I am not sure how many more days I will be alive," Malalai Joya says quietly. The warlords who make up the new "democratic" government in Afghanistan have been sending bullets and bombs to kill this tiny 30-year-old from the refugee camps for years – and they seem to be getting closer with every attempt. The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for.      Full news...

BBC News: Afghanistan's people are trapped between powerful enemies, according to Malalai Joya, an outspoken member of the Afghan parliament. Ms Joya named those "enemies" as Nato forces who bomb from the sky, the resurgent Islamists of the Taliban, and the country's "warlords". Speaking to anti-war activists in London she insisted Afghans were capable of governing themselves. Ms Joya technically remains an MP, but has been suspended since 2007, on charges of insulting the parliament after she compared it to a zoo.      Full news...

Pakistan Daily: The Israel Lobby boy from Bush era – US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, admitted defeat in Afghanistan – as quoted by Las Angeles Times on July 19: “The troops are tired. The Americans people of pretty tired. The US-lead forces must gain ground against militants (as if Taliban are the only people carrying guns while Americans, British, Canadian, Australian and Nato – are in Afghanistan to feed hungry people and spread Christianity!) in Afghanistan by next summer to avoid a public perception that war is unwinable. Taliban would not be defeated within one year (it would be 9th year, idiot) but it’s critical that the US military and its allies showed that they are making progress….”      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: As the United States steps up its civilian presence in Kabul, residents of the ancient capital say they're beginning to feel like a city under siege. Huge intimidating convoys of armored SUVs now are common sights in the city's growing traffic jams. Newly erected concrete barriers block off many buildings from nearby thoroughfares. Nearly every day, there's some incident involving security teams pointing guns out of windows at frightened commuters.      Full news...

IPS News: It is easy to understand why epithets such as brave and courageous often accompany the name of Malalai Joya. Slight of stature and serenely demure, the young Afghan woman’s past and present encapsulate the plight of her countrywomen. alalai Joya returned to Afghanistan in 1998 - she had spent most of her life until then in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan - as an underground volunteer educator of girls, a decidedly dangerous and difficult role given that the hardline Taliban were in power.      Full news...

BBC News: Hundreds of prisoners at the US-run Bagram jail in Afghanistan are refusing basic privileges to protest about their basic rights, officials say. The US military considers inmates there to be "unlawful combatants" who can be held for as long as deemed necessary. It is estimated that about 600 inmates are being held at the prison. The prisoners are reported to be protesting against what they say are a lack of basic rights such as access to lawyers or independent reviews of their status.      Full news...

Reuters: The U.S. military said on Thursday it was investigating an incident in southern Afghanistan in which residents said some civilians were killed and up to 16 wounded in a possible air strike. Residents said up to six people were killed and 16 wounded in two Kandahar districts they identified as Shah Wali Kot and Miawand. Television footage taken inside Kandahar City hospital showed a number of wounded, including children, being treated.      Full news...

RFE/RL: Nine-year-old Zahra was orphaned after coalition forces bombed her village in a remote area of western Afghanistan last year. The attack killed 90 people, 60 of them children. Two days after the bombing, Sharafuodin Stanakzai, a correspondent for RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, noticed a little girl dancing among the dead and decided to interview her.      Full news...

The Guardian (Editorial): British soldiers are notionally dying to allow a national election to take place in Helmand. Unless miracles happen, this poll will usher in four more years of a corrupt narco-regime whose leader, Hamid Karzai, is the not-so-private despair of everyone from Barack Obama downwards. Even the US commander in charge of two provinces on Kabul's doorstep voices his frustration by warning in this newspaper today that Mr Karzai's re-election could trigger a violent backlash from Afghans yearning for a government they can trust. Colonel David Haight put it pithily: "Four more years of this crap?"      Full news...

The New York Times: After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations. “At the White House, nobody said ‘no’ to an investigation, but nobody ever said ‘yes,’ either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. “The first reaction of everybody there was ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.’”      Full news...

AFP: Suicides in the US Army are on the rise with 88 suspected cases in the first six months of the year, compared to 67 in the same period in 2008, according to Pentagon figures issued. The latest figures confirmed warnings from top US military officers that the number of suicides among active-duty soldiers this year was on track to surpass a record level set in 2008.      Full news...

Xinhua: Air raids against suspected hideouts of Taliban militants in Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan, however, claimed the lives of eight civilians including two women, a member of the Provincial Council Abdul Nabi said Wednesday. In talks with media, Nabi added that the raids took place at 3 a.m. local time (2330 GMT) in Gero district during which eight non-combatants were killed.      Full news...

TomDispatch: In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind--or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war--and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.      Full news...

The Nation (Pakistan)/ANN: A Canadian think-tank, CIFP, has produced a thorough report on Afghanistan under Fragile States. It is a worthy effort to define the prevailing pandemonium posted by the neo-cons in the wake of 9/11. After delving deep into doomsday details about the AfPak area based on Millennium Goals etc, the treatise indulges in imagining the worst/best case-scenarios. It underlines the fact that: "Indeed, 98 percent of Afghan civilians are directly affected by the present conflict and Afghanistan has the tenth highest average of the people killed per million per year."      Full news...

Green Left Weekly: For Joya, who is currently touring Australia to promote her political autobiography Raising My Voice, it is a familiar situation. She grew up in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. She returned to Afghanistan in 1998 to engage in the extremely dangerous activity of conducting underground classes for girls. Female education was banned by the misogynist Taliban, then in power. This makes her assessment of Afghanistan today, more than seven years after it was supposedly liberated by the US-led invasion, particularly damning.      Full news...

The New York Times: The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population. Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.      Full news...

Guardian.co.uk: Grana is the sole survivor of a coalition bombing in southern Helmand province that took her arm and her leg, and killed nine members of her family. Grana is just 12 years old, she is lucky to be alive. Grana and her family were victims of a coalition bombing. Locals claim over 70 people lost their live along whole of her family.      Full news...

Antiwar.com: In a ruling widely expected given the judge’s previous comments, US District Judge John Bates ruled that Haji Wazir, an Afghan citizen captured by the US in 2002 and held in detention at the Bagram internment facility in Afghanistan, has no legal right to challenge his detention in US courts. In the seven years he’s been held in US custody Wazir, who is reportedly a businessman, has never been charged with any offense, and US officials have declined to even publicly say what he is being charged with.      Full news...

IRIN: Civilian deaths resulting from armed hostilities between insurgents, the US military, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and government forces have increased by 24 percent so far this year compared to the same period in 2008, according to a report by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. In May alone, 261 non-combatants lost their lives in conflict in Afghanistan, John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told members of the Security Council at a meeting on 26 June.      Full news...

The Wall Street Journal: Today, the good, the bad and the ugly all flourish in Afghanistan—sometimes together, sometimes apart. But it’s not clear who is benefiting most from the drug trade. Is it the Taliban and al Qaeda or members of ?Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government? Statistics vary wildly, but the U.N. estimates that drugs bring in upward of $300 million annually to the Taliban’s coffers. That still leaves billions unaccounted for.      Full news...

Reuters: The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem. Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known - but more evil - twin. Thousands of prisoners have been “through the system” at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.      Full news...

The Independent: Some still think of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan as a “good” war. They may change their minds after watching the latest Dispatches, Afghanistan’s Dirty War. Last August, US troops went looking for Taliban insurgents in Aziz Abad, a small village 400 miles west of Kabul. After a brief firefight, they called in an air strike, whereupon an AC-130 gunship tore the village apart.      Full news...