Daily Telegraph: Nato has "lost in Afghanistan" and its failure to bring stability there could provoke a regional sectarian war "on a grand scale", according to Lord Ashdown.      Full news...

USA TODAY: The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate scheduled for release today.      Full news...

The Independent: President George Bush will have spent more than $1 trillion on military adventures by the time he leaves office at the end of next year, more than the entire amount spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.      Full news...

Reuter: Eleven members of an Afghan family have been killed in an air strike by Western forces near Kabul, the head of a provincial council said on Tuesday.      Full news...

RFE/RL: Helmand, with a population of 1.4 million and an area roughly the size of Switzerland, is among the largest of Afghanistan's southwestern provinces. Its vast expanse of desert and arid mountains border Pakistan and stretch to within 100 kilometers of Iran. At the heart of the battle for Afghanistan's future, Helmand also is inarguably the country's most troubled province.      Full news...

AFP: The US-led "war on terror" has been a "disaster" and Washington and its allies must change their policy in Iraq and Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda, an independent global security think tank said.      Full news...

Pajhwok Afghan News: Thousands in the eastern Kunar province took to the streets to demand removal of military bases from residential areas in face of mounting civilian casualties in attacks and clashes between militants and Afghan and foreign troops.      Full news...

BBC News: A woman and child were among the civilians killed in a raid by a US-led coalition force against a Taliban hideout in Afghanistan, officials say. The coalition said its forces responded to an attack by destroying the building in which militants were hiding.      Full news...

Dawn: A US congressional panel was warned on Thursday that the Bush administration's Afghan policy had totally failed and Afghanistan was on its way to be lost forever.      Full news...

AP via CNN: Violence in Afghanistan has surged this year with suicide bombings inflicting an especially high toll on civilians, a new United Nations report says. The report said Afghanistan is averaging 550 violent incidents a month, up from an average of 425 last year. It said three-fourths of suicide bombings are targeting international and Afghan security forces, but suicide bombers also killed 143 civilians through August.      Full news...

The Canadian Press: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's speech to Parliament last year was written by the Canadian military as part of an "elaborately staged political stunt," the NDP is charging.      Full news...

CanWest News Service: Afghans shouting "Death to Canada" and other slogans blocked a main road in the hotly disputed Zhari District of Kandahar during a protest Wednesday against the rule of President Hamid Karzai and a house-to-house search operation by foreign forces that the demonstrators said had resulted in the death of two brothers who were mullahs.      Full news...

Reuters: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost at least $190 billion in 2008, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, making it the most expensive year in the conflicts since they were launched by President George W. Bush.      Full news...

AFP: NATO warplanes killed six Afghan civilians, most of them women and children, in an air strike during a battle with Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, a district governor told AFP Friday.      Full news...

CBS News: American doctor Dave Warner is on a mission in eastern Afghanistan to show people back home how billions of taxpayer dollars sent here are being wasted.      Full news...

The Los Angeles Times: Former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld says in the current edition of GQ magazine that the war in Afghanistan has been "a big success," with people living in freedom and life "improved on the streets." To anyone working in the country, there is only one possible, informed response: What Afghanistan is the man talking about?      Full news...

Melbourne Herald Sun: AFGHANISTAN is sliding ever further into conflict with more than half of the country affected and several regions out of reach of humanitarian aid, a senior international Red Cross official warned today.      Full news...

Gulf News: Today is the 6th anniversary of September 11, 2001 attacks on the US as if you didn't already know. When we turn on our televisions we will once again watch planes hurtling into the twin towers, terrified ash-covered individuals escaping the scene and rescue workers scouring the rubble for signs of life.      Full news...

Newsday.com: Nearly six years after the United States toppled the Taliban regime in the wake of Sept. 11, Nuristan, like the rest of the country, has no effective government. For this province half the size of New Jersey and home to about 750,000 people, Gov. Tamim Nuristani is authorized 300 police officers -- barely more than the number assigned to a typical Long Island precinct. When he begged to hire 180 men as auxiliary cops last year to help stop guerrillas infiltrating from neighboring Pakistan, the government agreed, but then said it had no money for salaries and fired them.      Full news...

Pajhwok Afghan News: A senior police officer Tuesday alleged foreign security firms were involved in kidnappings, robberies and dacoities in Kabul. In his testimony before a parliamentary commission, crime investigations chief Gen. Alishah Paktiawal said both foreign and local employees of the security agencies were involved in such crimes.      Full news...

The Afghan Victim Memorial Project: During the night of August 25/26, 2007, in a village located ~25 kms south of Musa Qala town, Helmand Province, at least two homes were bombed by US/NATO aircraft after an earlier firefight.      Full news...

The Guardian: Enthusiasts for the catastrophe that is the Iraq war may be hard to come by these days, but Afghanistan is another matter. The invasion and occupation that opened George Bush's war on terror are still championed by powerful voices in the occupying states as - in the words of the New York Times this week - "the good war" that can still be won. While speculation intensifies about British withdrawal from Basra, there's no such talk about a retreat from Kabul or Kandahar. On the contrary, the plan is to increase British troop numbers from the current 7,000, and ministers, commanders and officials have been hammering home the message all summer that Britain is in Afghanistan, as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, insisted, for the long haul.      Full news...

The Guardian: The strain on US forces of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was exposed yesterday when the Pentagon published a report showing that the number of suicides among US troops is at its highest level since the 1991 Gulf war.      Full news...

CBS News: American doctor Dave Warner is on a mission in eastern Afghanistan to show people back home how billions of taxpayer dollars sent here are being wasted.      Full news...

The Ledger: A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.      Full news...

The Daily Telegraph: The commander of British forces in Helmand Province has predicted that the British army deployment to Afghanistan will last at least as long as the 38 years that it took British forces to pull out of Northern Ireland.      Full news...

The Afghan Victim Memorial: At 4:00PM on Thursday, August 2, 2007 in the Taliban-controlled village of Qaleh (Qal’eh) Chah in the district of Baghran in Helmand Province, US/NATO forces bombed the village as part of an alleged decapitation strike (targeting “two Taliban commanders”). A group of people had gathered near the popular shrine of Ibrahim Shah Baba (though the reason for the gathering remains unclear).      Full news...

Associated Press: Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world's near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.      Full news...

VOA News: Afghan officials and residents say civilians are among the dead and wounded following U.S. coalition airstrikes in southern Afghanistan.      Full news...

The Mail on Sunday: This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried. All the right things were said about this brave soldier, just as, on current trends, they will be said about one or more of his colleagues who follow him next week.      Full news...