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...

The Los Angeles Times: U.S. and allied forces have failed to reduce the number of civilian fatalities caused by them in Afghanistan despite a two-year effort by American commanders, internal U.S. military statistics show. Civilian deaths have risen 11% from 144 at this time last year to 160 in 2010.      Full news...

Postmedia News: The figures, reported in the recently released Canadian Forces Provost Marshal 2009 report, show reports of sexual assaults have decreased slightly, from 166 in 2008, but the numbers are still very troubling, said Michel Drapeau, a retired colonel now practising military law.      Full news...

USA Today: Army Spc. Daus Hempker, 22, sits listlessly on the edge of a hospital bed, still shaken and ashen-faced three days after a buried explosive detonated a few feet away from him during a foot patrol. He looks physically unharmed. But the symptoms Hempker describes — a momentary loss of consciousness when the bomb went off, vomiting, blurred vision, dizziness, sensitivity to light and monster headaches — are evidence of a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury...      Full news...

BBC News: The US government has spent about $55bn on rebuilding in Afghanistan since 2001 but cannot easily show how the money was spent, a government watchdog says. The special inspector general's office for Afghanistan reconstruction talked of a “confusing labyrinth” of spending.      Full news...

The New York Times: A senior Pentagon official broke Defense Department rules and “deliberately misled” senior generals when he set up a network of private contractors to spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning last year, according to the results of an internal government investigation. The Pentagon investigation concluded that the official, Michael D. Furlong, set up an “unauthorized” intelligence network to collect information in both countries      Full news...

The Nation: Several high-ranking officials in the Obama administration are once again trying desperately to minimise the damage done to America by WikiLeaks, a website that released nearly 400,000 classified US military documents on the Iraq war. Without a doubt, everyone believed Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, when he declared that his website had only tried to reveal the truth about USA’s war in Iraq.      Full news...

The Guardian: Leaks of classified war documents by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks accuse British troops of carrying out attacks on Afghan civilians. The Ministry of Defence today disclosed its version of the incidents after a freedom of information request by the Guardian. Although an incomplete picture, the details provide a rare and compelling account of British errors in the field.      Full news...

VOA: NATO says it is investigating allegations of civilian casualties during a coalition airstrike in southern Afghanistan. The alliance said Monday that 15 insurgents were killed overnight in a joint Afghan-NATO operation against a senior Taliban leader in the Baghran district of Helmand province.      Full news...

Postmedia News: The Canadian military has launched an investigation into claims by an Afghan farmer that troops “totally destroyed” as many as 10 mud-walled homes three years ago in a hamlet in the Horn of Panjwaii in order to protect a small firebase.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghan officials accused NATO-led troops of killing two school boys in central Afghanistan on Saturday after a patrol came under fire by Taliban insurgents, but foreign troops said the circumstances were unclear. Civilian casualties caused by international troops while fighting insurgents are an emotive issue in Afghanistan, causing friction between President Hamid Karzai's government and its Western allies.      Full news...