Xinhua: As many as 37 civilians have been killed in an airstrike of U.S.-led troops in southern Afghanistan while attending a wedding party, local Afghan villagers said Wednesday. Haji Roozi Khan, owner of the mentioned house, told Xinhua on the spot that the air bombing and firing meant to retaliate on militants who hit the wedding gathering, killing 10 women, 23 children, and four men, all civilians.      Full news...

Canada Free Press: If you want to know what life was like in the seventh century, Afghanistan is the place to go. It is largely devoid of anything passing for modernity, by which we mean medical facilities, schools, roads, and such. Never mind the telephones and other detritus of modern life, the conversations have not changed in centuries. The only reliable element of Afghanistan’s economy is poppy cultivation for the opium trade which the CIA estimates generates “roughly $4 billion in illicit economic activity.” This is another way of saying that none of this money reaches what passes for a central government except in the form of bribes. It is a major source of funding for the Taliban.      Full news...

Reuters: Nearly 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking medical care from the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department have suffered sexual trauma, from harassment to rape, researchers reported on Tuesday. Kimerling said in a telephone interview the term "military sexual trauma" covers a range of events from coerced sex to outright rape or threatening and unwelcome sexual advances. "If you think about military service where you are living and working so closely with the same people, that even if it is not sexual assault ... it is possible that severe sexual harassment is just as traumatic," she said. The study does not cover active-duty servicemen and women, as VA services are only available to discharged veterans.      Full news...

AFP: Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country, with security, unemployment and high prices dominating concerns, according to an annual mood survey released Tuesday. Thirty-eight percent of respondents this year said Afghanistan was moving in the right direction, compared with 42 percent in 2007 and 44 percent in 2006.      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...

Green Left Weekly: While the war in Afghanistan has dropped off the front pages, seven years on, 56% of Australians say the 1000 Australian troops there should be brought home. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s talk about reconstructing the country haven’t fooled many. Most of the rebuilding projects have been handed over to profit-driven private corporations. Most roads and buildings remain in tatters. Average life expectancy is 44 years. Between 53% and 80% of Afghan people live below the official poverty line (depending on which part of the country).      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...

CISDA: The ridiculous sentence against Parwiz Kambakhsh shows that the justice programme designed and run by the Italian government has completely failed. This failure looks even worse if we consider the huge amount of money spent. In addition, this is also a defeat for Karzai and for Western governments that have dressed some well-known criminals with jacket and tie, named them "democratic" and put them in power.      Full news...

AlterNet: “I believe war is the crime of our times,” Blake Ivey, a specialist in the U.S. Army, said over the phone in a slow, deliberate voice. Ivey, currently stationed in Fort Gordon, Ga., is publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. The 21-year-old soldier filed for conscientious objector status in July but was ordered to deploy while his application was being processed. Despite the threat of steep punishment, Ivey remains steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. “I am against organized war,” he says. “It is flat-out murder.”      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...

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...

Times Online: A Nato airstrike in Helmand this afternoon may have killed as many as 18 women and children, according to local officials in the province. Angry local people brought the bodies of at least six women and children, some of them badly disfigured, to the provincial capital Lashkargar and placed the bodies outside the house of the provincial governor, according to witnesses who spoke to The Times in Lashkargar.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: America's local allies in Afghanistan, the politicians and warlords who overthrew Taliban in 2001, are up to their turbans in the heroin trade. Drug money is the blood that courses through Afghanistan's veins and keeps the economy limping along. The U.S.-installed Karzai regime in Kabul propped up by US and NATO bayonets has only two sources of income: cash handouts from Washington, and the proceeds of drug dealing.      Full news...

The Belfast Telegraph: All kinds of horrors flop on to my Beirut doormat. There's The Independent's mobile phone bill, a slew of blood-soaked local Lebanese newspapers — “Saleh Aridi's blood consolidates (Druze) reconciliation”, was among the goriest of the past few days — and then there are files from the dark memory lane through which all Middle East history has to pass.      Full news...

The Globe and Mail: Canada's efforts in Afghanistan will carry a total price tag of about $14-billion to $18-billion by the time troops are withdrawn in 2011, about $1,500 extra for every household in Canada, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page reported today. Mr. Page's report says the real extra cost of the Canadian military mission — over and above what would have been spent for the upkeep of the military anyway — is billions more than Ottawa has estimated, and perhaps almost twice as high.      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...

AFP: Up to 3,200 civilians have been killed in NATO and US action in Afghanistan since 2005 but compensation payouts have been far lower than in other global cases, according to research by a US professor. The use of air power is growing, raising risks for civilians, University of New Hampshire professor Marc W. Herold says in research released on the anniversary of the October 7, 2001 launch of the invasion of Afghanistan.      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...

RAWA News: US/NATO bombs kill about ten times more Afghan civilians with a ton of our “precision” bombs than we killed Serbs in 1999. More than 80% of Afghan civilian deaths today caused by the US/NATO are due to close air support attacks. They (Afghans) are only worth one-tenth of an Alaskan sea otter rather than forty camels. We spend ten dollars on the military in Afghanistan to pursue our geo-strategic aims and less than $1 on reconstructing the everyday lives of Afghans devastated by thirty years of war.      Full news...

Telegraph.co.uk: In the diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the deputy French ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is also quoted as saying that the coalition's military presence is "part of the problem not the solution". In the cable, dated Sept 2 and published in the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîne, Sir Sherard is quoted as having said that "the current situation is bad. Security is worsening, but also corruption, and the current government has lost all credit."      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...

Reuters: Afghanistan is facing one of its worst food shortages in years as winter approaches, with prices of the staple wheat rising 60 percent in the first half of the year after Pakistan slapped export bans, a poor harvest and drought. Rising prices are hitting what is already one of the poorest countries in the world, with more than half of the population living below the poverty line. Households dependent on wage labour can afford to buy a quarter of the wheat they bought in 2007, according to the World Food Programme. This in a country where the majority of household wages are spent on basic foods such as cereals.      Full news...

The Sunday Times: Nobody seriously thinks the Taliban could take Kabul. The capital is surrounded by mountains, has only a few routes in and remained almost untouched during the Russian occupation. Afghanistan has more than 71,000 foreign troops under the leadership of Nato and the US, neither of which can contemplate defeat. It is hard to find any Afghan families who hanker after a Taliban regime that banned everything from girls’ schools to television and regarded public amputations and executions as entertainment. However, the fear among Kabulis is palpable. “There is a sense of dread of return to the dark days of the past,” said a western diplomat.      Full news...

LEFT PARTY group in German Parliament: “By inviting the former warlord Haji Mohammed Mohaqeq to Berlin, the German government demonstrates once again that it supports the wrong concepts, the wrong instruments, and the wrong people”, explains MP Heike Hänsel. The spokes woman for development politics of the LEFT PARTY parliamentary group announced that she and her fellow MPs would establish a support network for democratic groups in Afghanistan.      Full news...

Online: Forty per cent of the civilian victims of recent military operations and fighting in Afghanistan are children and women, a local child protection agency said. The Afghan Children Protection Organization (ACPO) said in a statement that among 700 civilians killed in the past six months in conflict, 40 per cent were children and women.      Full news...

VOA: New U.N. figures show a sharp rise in the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan during the first eight months of this year, compared to the same period in 2007. The report was released by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.      Full news...

The New York Times: One of the most experienced Western envoys in Afghanistan said Sunday that conditions there had become the worst since 2001. He urged a concerted American and foreign response, even before a new American administration took office, to avoid “a very hot winter for all of us.”      Full news...

BBC: Elements in the Iranian state are sending weapons across the border to the Taliban in Afghanistan, a BBC investigation has uncovered. Taliban members said they had received Iranian-made arms from elements in the Iranian state and from smugglers.      Full news...