The Associated Press: Afghan civilians will bear the brunt of an escalation in the Afghan war this year as thousands more U.S. troops deploy unless more is done by NATO forces and Taliban militants to protect them, a top Red Cross official said Monday. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are "significantly higher" today than a year ago, and an intensification of the conflict this year could mean that consequences for many more Afghans will be "dire in the extreme," said Pierre Krahenbuhl, the director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross.      Full news...

Dawn: Western officials, the Afghan government and Taliban-linked mediators have been engaged in secret negotiations to bring elements of the group into Afghanistan’s political process, the Al Jazeera netwrok is reporting. The talks are reportedly taking place in Dubai, London and Afghanistan since the beginning of the year and revolve around the return of Gulbaldin Hekmatyar, the former Afghan prime minister, who has been in hiding for seven years, to Afghanistan.      Full news...

Amnesty International: President Barack Obama approved the deployment of extra troops in Afghanistan last week and urged NATO allies to follow suit. "2008 was the most violent year for civilians since the fall of the Taleban and Afghans are increasingly resentful about civilians casualties caused by international forces during night raids and other actions of this sort," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director.. "The challenge for the USA and its allies is to ensure that the surge of international troops into the country will provide better security for Afghans, and not put them at greater risk."      Full news...

RIA Novosti: Hundreds of Afghans in the southern city of Kandahar protested the deaths of two boys, believed to have been killed by a Canadian rocket. Some media sources reported the children were killed when a missile hit a house in the Panjwai village. Five other people were injured. However Canadian media reported that the children may have died when an unexploded bomb detonated as they searched for scrap metal in the Panjwai valley. A local police chief said the deaths may have been caused by a Taliban attack.      Full news...

The Mail: President Obama has angered human rights groups by saying terror suspects seized in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in US courts. The US Justice Department says 600 ‘enemy combatants’ held at Bagram air base have no constitutional rights. Human rights groups had hoped Mr Obama would take a different stance to George W. Bush’s.      Full news...

IPS: Despite the heavy military presence of the United States and other Western powers, Afghanistan remains the world's largest illicit producer of opium, according to a new study released by experts who monitor the worldwide trade in narcotics on behalf of the United Nations. "Afghanistan is the source of over 90 percent of the illicit opium in the world," Mylven Levitsky, a member of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), told a news conference after releasing the board's latest study on the global trade in illicit drugs.      Full news...

The Telegraph: Barack Obama has taken the fatal step: he has made himself a war president, like George W Bush before him. Farewell, Prince of Peace. He has been even more injudicious than Dubya in the fight he has picked, choosing Afghanistan, the unwinnable war that will destroy his reputation. Trying to occupy Afghanistan - like invading Russia - is one of those bad career moves that politicians should regard as strictly off-limits if they have any survival instinct.      Full news...

IWPR: US forces in Afghanistan claim to have killed up to 15 militants associated with an infamous warlord in Herat province in an airstrike, but district officials and eyewitnesses say that the dead were a family of Kuchis, or nomads, who were camped out nearby. Ghulam Mahboob Afzalzada, district governor of Gozara, insisted the strike had claimed the lives of Kuchis, a nomadic people who shepherd their animals throughout the country. Eyewitness say six women, five men, and four children in the village of Karez Sultan were killed in the strike. Several hundred animals are also said to have been killed there.      Full news...

AP: The number of Afghan civilians killed in armed conflict surged to a record 2,118 people last year as the Afghan war turned increasingly bloody, the U.N. said in a new report Tuesday. The deaths rose 40 percent last year, and the numbers could grow as the United States plans to shift tens of thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan this year to take on the Taliban and other militants.      Full news...

Bloomberg: Iran is helping Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, said General David Petraeus, who is in charge of US forces in the Central Asian nation and Iraq. “There is a willingness to provide some degree of assistance to make the life of those who are trying to help the Afghan people difficult,” Petraeus told a conference today in the Qatari capital, Doha. Petraeus gave no details of the Iranian assistance, which he described as taking place at “a small level.”      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan condemned on Friday the killing of civilians in a raid by Australian soldiers in the south of the country which it says was not coordinated with Afghan forces. The Australian Defence Force said five children had been killed in a shootout between Taliban insurgents and Australian Special Forces in southern Uruzgan province on Thursday, where they were "clearing" a number of compounds.      Full news...

PAN: US forces in southeastern Khost province killed a principal of a middle school and injured his wife and a child, an official said Saturday. He said that the school principal Qabol Khan was traveling along with his wife and a child when came under fire by the US forces. Qabol, his wife and the child sustained bullet injuries, he added. The spokesman said that the troops shifted all the injured to Bagram Air Base for treatment, but Qabol died of his wounds.      Full news...

CNN: A British army officer has been arrested in Afghanistan for allegedly supplying sensitive civilian casualty figures to a human rights campaigner, a British newspaper reported Wednesday. The Ministry of Defence confirmed that an officer was being returned to Britain for questioning on suspicion of leaking state secrets. The figures are controversial, The Sun reported, because critics question official estimates. The paper added that the U.S. military was angry over the reported leak.      Full news...

RAWA News: Much official ado has been made in Washington D.C. and in the U.S. corporate press about how the new Administration will be taking far greater care as regards Afghan civilians. Data analyzed below for January 2009 suggests that the deadliness of the Afghan war for civilians under the Obama clock significantly exceeds that registered under the outgoing Bush regime. Boys, women, girls, tribal leaders all have perished at the hands of the foreign occupiers.      Full news...

The News: Illicit drugs production, an issue of global concern in Afghanistan, has set a new record of peak escalation in the war on terror period as compared to previous Taliban-led rule over the land-locked country. “Almost a twenty times additional land has been brought under drugs cultivation in seven years of US-led forces’ control and Karazi administration in Afghanistan,” said official sources while handing over the latest statistics on the neighbouring country.      Full news...

Wikinews: January 15, a United States military strike in the Afghan province of Laghman killed 15 people, according to U.S. officials. The U.S claims only militants were killed, but on Saturday, village elders disputed that claim with the allegation that the casualties were all civilians. However, this version of events was contested when a statement from the Afghani president's office declared that 16 civilians were killed, not 15 militants. That statement also claimed that two women and three children were among the dead.      Full news...

Antiwar.com: A "team of rivals" is how the Obama administration is being portrayed by the head-over-heels media, which started out by likening the new president to Lincoln and may end up comparing him – favorably – to God. Yet I'm not optimistic, for two very good reasons: Dennis Ross, whose appointment as plenipotentiary for Middle Eastern affairs seems to undercut what is likely to be the Mitchell approach, and Richard Holbrooke, whose dual domain of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the focus of U.S. military action in the coming years. Specifically, more than 14 years – at least, that's what Holbrooke told us in a pre-election piece in Foreign Affairs magazine:...      Full news...

The New York Times: The outrage over civilian deaths swelled again over the weekend. Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated here in Mehtarlam, the capital of Laghman Province, on Sunday after an American raid on a village in the province on Friday night. The raid killed at least 16 villagers, including 2 women and 3 children, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai. They agreed that 13 civilians had been killed and 9 wounded when American commandos broke down doors and unleashed dogs without warning on Jan. 7 in the hunt for a known insurgent in Masamut, in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan. The residents were so enraged that they threatened to march on the American military base here.      Full news...

The Times: The BBC said yesterday that it had received a number of complaints from servicemen about the shared wards at Camp Bastion in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan, which was built at a cost of £10 million and opened in February last year. “A lot of people are getting injured out there and the last thing they want to see when they come round is the Taliban on the same ward,” one soldier told the BBC.      Full news...

South Asia News: US-led forces claimed Saturday they killed 15 rebels, including a female fighter, in eastern Afghanistan. However, a provincial lawmaker and local villagers said that 21 Afghan civilians were killed in the operation. Eleven militants were killed in the firefight, while four others were killed in an airstrike, it said, adding that a female fighter was killed 'while maneuvering on coalition forces and was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.' However, Abdul Rahimzai, head of Laghman's provincial council, said that Friday night's attack killed 21 civilians and wounded several others.      Full news...

PAN: Locals and tribal elders Tuesday claimed the US-led coalition troops killed 25 civilians including five women; however coalition troops claim eliminating 18 militants during an operation in central Kapisa province. The sweep was conducted in Anzari Village of Tagab district in the central province late Monday night. Bai Jan, a resident of Anzari Village told Pajhwok Afghan News the US-led soldiers blew up five houses of ordinary people at approximately 2:00am.      Full news...

La Dépêche.fr: Fundamentalism and corruption could lead to the collapse of Afghanistan in the very near future – not to the democratic and peaceful country that the world promised to create seven years ago. In the past 11 months, more than 4,000 people, including civilians, Nato troops and aid workers, have been killed. The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops but has said that he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan.      Full news...

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Even as new figures point to gains in the battle against Afghanistan's drug problem, the issue remains deeply contentious for the government in Kabul and NATO-led forces. No one, however, is willing to assume ultimate responsibility or to say whether Afghanistan has turned a corner. It remains unclear how much of the decline in opium poppies is a result of government action and how much is owed to weather conditions like drought or cold. Afghan officials tend to emphasize the constraints under which they operate. The country's counternarcotics minister, Colonel General Khodaidad, complains that the drug trade is an "international problem" fueled by Western demand and that the Afghan government has insufficient resources at its disposal.      Full news...

BBC News: Nato's secretary general has said corrupt and inefficient government in Afghanistan is as much to blame as insurgents for the chronic instability. In the Washington Post newspaper, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the international community had paid enough, in blood and money, to demand government action. He said Afghans needed a government that deserved their loyalty and trust.      Full news...

The Journal: After NATO's invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, most people thought the world had finally remembered and rescued a country drowned in pain and sorrow. But despite the attention paid by the international community, today Afghanistan is one of the poorest, most under-developed countries in the world. RAWA believes that no other nation can liberate Afghan women, and it is their own responsibility to raise and fight for their rights. In this hard fight we need the support and solidarity of peace-loving and democratic-minded people of the world.      Full news...

Human Rights Watch: On October 1, 2008, the Department of Defense published a summary of a report by Brig. Gen. Michael Callan of its investigations into USairstrikes on the village of Azizabad in Herat province on August 21-22, 2008. Since that time, Human Rights Watch has conducted additional research into theevents surrounding the Azizabad airstrikes, reviewed the facts presented in the summary, and analyzed the Callan investigation’s methodology. “The weaknesses in the Callan investigation call into question the Defense Department’s commitment to avoid civiliancasualties,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.      Full news...

The Earth Times: Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday condemned the reported killing of 17 civilians, including women and children, in a US-led coalition operation in eastern Afghanistan, the presidential palace said in a statement. Several demonstration have been staged in Afghan cities and rural areas to condemn the killing of civilians by foreign forces. Unable to seek revenge independently, many Afghan men in southern and eastern Afghanistan have joined the Taliban ranks after losing members of their families in international military operations, according to Afghan officials.      Full news...

The Nation: President-elect Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq, he argued for the need "to end the mindset that took us into" that war. So it's troubling that he ramped up his rhetoric during the campaign about exiting Iraq in order to focus on what he calls the "central front in the war on terror"--Afghanistan. His plan now calls for an escalation of 20,000 to 30,000 additional American troops over the next year--nearly doubling the current 32,000. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman criticized the Dems' position on Afghanistan as ill-conceived "bumper sticker politics."      Full news...

Sunday Herald: But just 30 miles from Kabul, it is Taliban country. Over the past year, the militants have established a stronghold in Wardak, which borders the capital to the south and west. As it reasserts control over large swathes of countryside, the Taliban has been installing a shadow government to answer civilian needs. In the absence of effective local governance, the militants have been arresting criminals, providing courts, dispensing justice, running prisons and organising public executions - all within an hour's drive of Kabul.      Full news...

PAN: Locals of Sangin district of southern Helmand province Tuesday warned that majority of the residents were compelled to flee the area due to the airstrikes carried out by NATO-led ISAF forces without even informing the local security forces. Locals claimed that over 17 civilians most of them elders and children had been killed by ISAF soldiers during the last fortnight. The locals also criticized the irresponsible strikes of ISAF soldiers in a gathering participated by governor.      Full news...