RAWA News: Let me begin with the unreported news from the ground in Afghanistan exactly nine years ago, that is on November 30, 2001. The relentless U.S aerial bombing and strafing of the Kandahar area in late November and early December 2001 led to dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent civilians dying.      Full news...

Rethink Afghanistan: With millions of Americans out of work, you'd hope that our elected officials would be focused on putting people back to work instead of wasting money on war. If only. While it takes an act of God to get unemployment insurance benefits extended for people who lost their jobs, politicians are spending freely on a war in Afghanistan that's not making us safer.      Full news...

Washington Post: Afghans are more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident in the ability of the United States and its allies to provide security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than they were a year ago, according to a new poll conducted in all of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.      Full news...

The Wall Street Journal: Kidnapped British aide worker Linda Norgrove was killed by a grenade thrown by U.S. special operations forces in a botched rescue attempt, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said an investigation has confirmed. Ms. Norgrove’s death in Afghanistan in October was initially blamed on her Taliban captors before U.S. forces said they may have been responsible and set up a joint investigation into the death with British military experts.      Full news...

Rethink Afghanistan: Here’s something to think about when you hear politicians talk about the federal budget deficit: every single Hellfire missile fired in Afghanistan costs USD 58,000.00. U.S. and allied forces are dropping huge numbers of these bombs in Afghanistan this year: So far this year, coalition aircraft have used 4,615 bombs and Hellfire missiles, already exceeding the 4,184 dropped in all of last year.      Full news...

Orlando Sentinel: Once sharply curtailed because of complaints over civilian casualties, U.S. and NATO forces have ramped up the air war in Afghanistan since this summer. Coalition aircraft dropped 1,000 bombs and missiles in October — one of the highest monthly totals of the 9-year-old war.... So far this year, coalition aircraft have used 4,615 bombs and Hellfire missiles, already exceeding the 4,184 dropped in all of last year.      Full news...

Associated Press: Locals in this southern Afghan valley have accused U.S. Marines of regularly killing civilians since they launched an aggressive campaign against the Taliban here over a month ago — claims the Marines say are untrue and fueled by insurgent propaganda. But the Marines acknowledge that unless they can change people’s minds, they stand little chance of winning the local support necessary to tame a key area of Afghanistan...      Full news...

Channel 4 News: Channel 4 News spoke to three of the biggest hospitals in southern Afghanistan, which have all seen major increases in the number of civilian casualties they have treated this year. They agreed that the increased intensity of the war is a factor. In January, President Barack Obama sent 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, many of which have been deployed in major strikes such as Operation Moshtarak in Helmand in February.      Full news...

Huffington Post: When will the Obama administration stop damaging its credibility by denying the failure of the Afghanistan War? It seems every day we get another report showing that the Taliban’s momentum continues despite President Obama’s massive troop increase. But, somehow, the administration's talking points seem to stay the same.      Full news...

The Telegraph: Breaking news: secret US diplomatic cables tell us there’s corruption in Afghanistan. Ahmed Zia Massoud, Afghanistan’s former vice-president, was found to be carrying $52 million in cash – which a message from the American Embassy in Kabul, made public by Wikileaks over the weekend, said he was “allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination”.      Full news...

Oregon Live: The recent NATO summit in Lisbon officially declared that NATO troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan and replaced by Afghan security forces by 2015. But participants were quick to point out that the date was “aspirational,” “transitional” and conditions-based rather than absolute. Also, the Obama administration plans to conduct a strategic review of the Afghan imbroglio in early December...      Full news...

Reuters Canada: Opposition legislators blasted the Canadian government on Monday after it emerged that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan captured children suspected of working with the Taliban and then handed them over to an Afghan security unit alleged to have abused prisoners.      Full news...

Green Left Weekly: Tough talk by the warmongers at the November 20-21 NATO conference in Lisbon, Portugal, obscured the growing opposition in the US and Europe to the nine-year occupation of Afghanistan. Ten thousand people took to the streets of London on November 20 to protest the war. Angry at the British government’s recent cuts to services and pensions, many carried “Cut war not welfare” placards.      Full news...

The Guardian: Mark Sedwill's claim that children in Kabul are better off than those in many western cities (Children safer in Kabul than in Glasgow, says Nato spokesman, 22 November) deserves attention, not because it is accurate (which it is not) but because it illustrates a shocking disregard by senior Nato officials for the dire situation of children in Afghanistan.      Full news...

International Business Times: The U.S. Department of State is working overtime sending messages to ally capitals warning the impending release of classified documents by WikiLeaks could harm relations in what is seen as a pre-emptive move of unprecedented scale to neutralize the impact of the unveiling of embarrassing and compromising details about the inner workings of the government apparatus.      Full news...

The Washington Post: For those who have escaped Afghanistan's worst violence, some things are hard to forget: the sight of a woman's hair entangled in the mulberry branches, her legs strewn far away in the dirt. Or the sounds they heard as they hid in an underground hole, counting the bombs to pass the time, praying the American troops would leave.      Full news...

CAF: Save the Children has criticised a top NATO representative for stating that children are safer in Kabul than they are in London, Glasgow or New York. The comments came from a civilian NATO spokesperson in Afghanistan, who spoke to the BBC's Newsround programme yesterday (22 November).      Full news...

The Economic Times: The secret talks between the Afghanistan government and the Taliban to end the conflict in the country—that were “showing promise”—seem to have hit a dead end, with a revelation that the militant leader at the other end of the table was an imposter.      Full news...

The Tribune Democrat: Our present wars are not against terrorists. Iraq was clearly not a terrorist threat (or any threat to the United States), although the Bush administration tried to confuse us on this. Initiating a war against the then-ruling Taliban in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was not the right way to oppose al-Qaida, the group responsible for the terrorist bombing.      Full news...

ABC News: Compass Integrated Security Solutions is owned by Peter McCosker, the son of former Australian cricket player Rick McCosker. Compass provided convoy guards for a food and fuel supplier in Afghanistan. The Armed Services Committee report last month alleged the company hired untrained guards and paid an Afghan major-general to recruit guards from the army.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: The United States is now spending nearly half a billion dollars a year in an attempt to establish the “rule of law” in Afghanistan. The central problem, according to the report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), is that corruption in Afghanistan is so widespread and entrenched that it severely undermines any effort to establish confidence in government institutions.      Full news...

ANSWER Coalition: Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.      Full news...

The Guardian: Thousands of protesters have marched through London against the war in Afghanistan as as Nato leaders agreed a strategy to withdraw their troops from the country. The demonstration, which organisers said was 10,000-strong, came as the prime minister, David Cameron, said the withdrawal of British combat troops from Afghanistan by 2015 was a “firm deadline” that would be met.      Full news...

Once Upon a Time...: There is one aspect of this Washington Post article that I fear will be appreciated by very few people. Before I get to that, let’s set out the basic facts...      Full news...

IRIN: NATO and the Afghan government must stop using local militias against the Taliban; the poorly trained forces are doing more harm than good, and risk causing a new civil war, say 29 local and international NGOs in a message to NATO leaders ahead of their Lisbon summit on 19-20 November.      Full news...

AFP: More Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan than support it, a new poll showed Thursday, the latest sign of waning public backing for the US-led mission. The Quinnipiac University poll also found a large majority of Americans want to see an end to the ban on gays serving openly in the military, including voters with a family member in uniform.      Full news...

The Register Guard: The panel’s co-chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, identify $100 billion in defense cuts that could be made in 2015. That would be too little and too late, but what’s almost revolutionary is the notion that if we’re ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” down to size.      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: The coal dug here fires Afghanistan’s only working cement factory, a strategic industrial asset 150 miles north of Kabul that should be supplying building material for much of the country, generating cash and jobs and improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. Instead, the Ghori Cement Factory and the nearby Karkar Coal Mine have become symbols of the corruption, nepotism and mismanagement that pervade President Hamid Karzai’s government.      Full news...

The National Forum: It is estimated that one littoral combat ship costs $613 million. According to World Bank figures, that sum would be enough to educate 6.8 million children in Afghanistan for nine years - or we could buy one warship. Which investment would do more to strengthen Afghanistan and Afghan civil society? The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have estimated that $287 billion dollars has been spent on the war in Afghanistan. Senator Cameron provided us with some of the forward estimates, and they are breathtaking. This translates to a $300,000 cash payment to everyone in Afghanistan for the price of the deployment and the war - or, incidentally, a cheque for $13,400 for every Australian.      Full news...

The Age: THE plight of women in Afghanistan is no excuse for Western “occupation” of the country, a leading Afghan opponent of the war and former MP has declared. Malalai Joya - the youngest woman elected to the Afghanistan Parliament, in 2004, who then faced death threats for her outspoken criticism of tribal warlords - said the image of Afghan women was being unfairly used to justify the foreign presence.      Full news...