Oregon Live: The recent NATO summit in Lisbon officially declared that NATO troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan and replaced by Afghan security forces by 2015.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...

The Vancouver Sun: We should have known it was too good to be true. Harper’s many, many repetitions of his government’s commitment to get all the troops out by July 2011 are well known. I think he may actually have meant it because by these repeated statements he framed the issue so strongly that all Canadians expected – and supported – the withdrawal.      Full news...

AFP: The economic downturn and the trauma of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed more US veterans to suicide, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said Thursday. As Americans across the United States and around the world celebrated the contributions of men and women in uniform on Veterans Day, Shinseki outlined a sobering picture for the approximately 23 million veterans in the United States.      Full news...

Global Post: The U.S. military has destroyed hundreds of Afghan civilian homes, farm houses, walls, trees and plowed through fields and buildings using explosives and bulldozers in war-torn Zhari district, a practice that has begun to anger Afghan villagers. The much anticipated third phase of the Kandahar campaign, called Operation Dragon Strike, has U.S. troops from the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division...      Full news...

VOA: Afghanistan's independent human rights commission has criticized Australia's decision to train with militiamen reportedly loyal to an Afghan warlord. The six men have been in Australia to instruct the country's special forces in how to tackle the Taliban insurgency.      Full news...

The Express Tribune: In late January 2009, General Petraeus approached one of his team members for an update on the ongoing Afghanistan strategy review and received the unexpected analysis: “It is the blind leading the blind,” said Derek Harvey, from the Defence Intelligence Agency. He further told Petraeus that “we know too little about the enemy to craft a winning strategy.”      Full news...

The Guardian: The Ministry of Defence has nearly tripled the number of rehabilitation beds available for severely wounded soldiers from Afghanistan to accommodate a sharp rise in the number of soldiers who have lost one or more limbs in the conflict. The military's Headley Court rehabilitation centre, near Epsom, Surrey, recently opened a second new 30-bed extension, expanding its total capacity to 96, up from 36 beds in 2007.      Full news...

WSWS: Britain’s armed forces stand accused of torture and murder, perpetrated in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scale of the abuses involved cannot be attributed to a few “rogue” individuals, or covered up by the routine excuse that Britain simply got “too close” to the United States and is guilty only by association. They present prima facie evidence for war crimes charges.      Full news...

The Guardian: One year ago Hamid Karzai was declared re-elected as president of Afghanistan, ending an election that had no legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Afghans. The presidential election last year was a fraud, with ballot stuffing, vote buying and massive corruption reported by the world’s media. Even if the independent election commission had not cancelled the planned run-off between Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, it would have represented only a choice of the “same donkey with a new saddle”.      Full news...

Socialist Worker: The Ministry of Defence has released detailed reports of British troops’ actions in Afghanistan—and they reveal a lot about the crisis of the occupation. The reports were released in response to a Freedom of Information request made by the Guardian newspaper after Wikileaks revealed vast military logs from British and US forces in Afghanistan.      Full news...

The Sydney Morning Herald: AUSTRALIA’S decision to train militiamen loyal to an Afghan warlord is senseless and harmful to the long term future of Afghanistan, experts say. The Herald revealed last week that six men loyal to Matiullah Khan, a tribal strongman who dominates parts of Oruzgan province, had trained with Australian troops in this country.      Full news...