Global Research: These military forces will not be going to Afghanistan to set up vaccination programs or conduct literacy classes for Afghan girls. They are going there as part of the most destructive military machine on the planet, to wreak violence. The military machine that has bombed wedding parties, that has held thousands of young Afghan men in Bagram prison without charges, that kicks down doors in the middle of the night—this machine is being strengthened and further unleashed.      Full news...

PAN: Sixty civilians were killed and 102 others wounded in various violence-related incidents over the past one week, the Ministry of Interior has said. Most of the civilian casualties occurred in volatile southern provinces of Ghazni, Helmand and Kandahar as a result of roadside bombs, rocket attacks, ambushes and suicide attacks, the ministry added.      Full news...

IRIN: Over two million Afghans have been killed or wounded in armed conflicts and violence over the past three decades but the desire for peace and stability has always been strong, nine NGOs say in a report published today. “A whole generation has grown up never having experienced peace and many Afghans are struggling to cope with the psychological, economic, social and physical ramifications of the conflict, past and present,” says the report entitled The Cost of War, Afghan Experiences of Conflict, 1978-2009.      Full news...

IPS: The revelation by the New York Times on Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg of heavy dependence by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency forces on Afghan warlords for security, according to a recently published report and investigations by Australian and Canadian journalists.      Full news...

Quqnoos: The sixth-grade schoolchild who has been working part time at a tailoring shop in Baghlan-e Markazi district told Quqnoos that nephew of the district governor, Amir Gul, kidnapped and raped him nearly two weeks ago. “They took me and fasten my mouth, eyes and feet and then did the thing to me,” the boy, Ahmad, (not his real name) described. “I went to governor with my letter, he took me to a private room and said that this [the rape] issue can be resolved in gathering with elders, not the government, so don’t disgrace me,” Ahmad’s father described the behavior of the governor.      Full news...

The New York Times: After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations. “At the White House, nobody said ‘no’ to an investigation, but nobody ever said ‘yes,’ either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. “The first reaction of everybody there was ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.’”      Full news...

Windsor Star: Afghan women - particularly in the volatile south, where the Taliban was born - rarely appear in public without burkas and often show deference to the opposite sex, lowering gazes to the floor, almost shrinking when a man approaches. Given that some hard-line Islamists believe the Koran decrees women to be subservient to men, improving conditions for women in a war-torn country with one of the world's lowest literacy levels requires more than education. It requires social engineering.      Full news...

IWPR: Khadija Ahadi used to be the most active journalism student in town. At press conferences in Herat, she would always be there with her video camera, usually the only woman in the room. Nobody was surprised that she landed a job as the deputy editor-in-chief of Radio Faryad after her studies. But now her successful career has suddenly been stopped – by force. “Some men threatened me because I am a reporter, but initially I kept working and I didn’t tell my family because they would have stopped me,” said Ahadi, 32. “Then one day they threw two grenades in my house. I have not gone to work since.’’      Full news...

The National: Juma Gul’s muffled crying became noticeable only when she wiped the tears away using her burqa or slumped forward with her head in her hands. Speaking Uzbek, she described how she made the equivalent of about Dh440 by selling her baby daughter off for marriage. The girl’s fianc? had memorised the Quran and his father promised that her virginity would be respected until she was an adult. The couple eventually wed four years ago, when she was eight and he was in his late twenties.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: Many Americans are profoundly ignorant of history, even regarding distant countries where the United States finds itself at war. One need not know much about Afghanistan's rich and ancient history, however, to learn some important lessons regarding the tragic failures of U.S. policy toward that country during the past three decades.... The Reagan administration sensed the most hard-line elements of the resistance were less likely to reach negotiated settlements, but the goal was to cripple the Soviet Union, not free the Afghan people. Recognizing the historically strong role of Islam in Afghan society, they tried to exploit it to advance U.S. policy goals.      Full news...

MADRE: Women in Afghanistan are routinely denied basic human rights, including education, healthcare, freedom from violence, and freedom of movement. Afghan women who fight to change this reality are attacked and even assassinated by ultra-conservatives. Meanwhile, US airstrikes that kill civilians further endanger Afghan women and their families. They also increase the power of the Taliban and other reactionary forces as more Afghans turn to them for protection from the United States.      Full news...

Boise Weekly: American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don't have that problem. They know exactly what they're fighting for: rapists. America's media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women.      Full news...

The Sunday Times: One of Afghanistan's most wanted terrorists is to be offered a power-sharing deal by the government of President Hamid Karzai as the country's warlords extend their grip on power. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on America's "most wanted" terrorist list, is to hold talks with the Kabul government within the next few weeks. Hekmatyar is the leader of Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting Nato troops alongside the Taliban.      Full news...

Reuters: The U.N. mission head in Afghanistan begged President Hamid Karzai not to name as his running mate an ex-guerrilla chief linked to accusations of human rights abuses but was ignored, a diplomatic source close to him said on Monday. Karzai registered to run for re-election on Monday and named former vice president and defence minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim to stand with him as the senior of two vice presidents.      Full news...

Asia Times: Nearly 30 years after their first foray into the land-locked buffer state, married couple and journalist-historians Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould could not have chosen a more appropriate time to publish their comprehensive Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story. A chronically disinformed US public should leap at the chance to familiarize themselves with an honest overview of their country's historically scandalous involvement in the region.      Full news...

PAN: The family of a 10 year old child who was sexually abused by his neighbor in Sarobi district of Kabul province demanded justice from the government. He said Perviz, 10 was molested by a son of former Jehadi commander Muhammad Dad, 22. He said: "Parviz, a mentally retard child was playing outside the house and son of Muhammad Dad took him to an empty yard and molested him".      Full news...

Times Online: Tom Coghlan, reporting for The Times in Kabul, has been leaked the full text of new laws in Afghanistan, under which a woman from the minority Shia community will not be able to leave the house without her husband's permission and cannot refuse him his marital rights. 'The wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires,' the law says. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the new law legalises the rape of a woman by her husband.      Full news...

IRIN: "We feel disappointed, isolated and oppressed," said Ravil Singh, a Sikh leader in Nangarhar Province, eastern Afghanistan, adding that local people "are good to us". "We have too many problems but we get no help to solve them. A lot of our houses, shops and other properties have been seized by powerful people, commanders and warlords.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Residents of Kandahar province say that lack of job opportunities is the main reason that some youths in the province join the Taliban. Although unemployment has turned into a big problem all over the country, youths in Kandahar province believe that the government can overcome the problem by creating job opportunities for the people.      Full news...

Dawn: Western officials, the Afghan government and Taliban-linked mediators have been engaged in secret negotiations to bring elements of the group into Afghanistan’s political process, the Al Jazeera netwrok is reporting. The talks are reportedly taking place in Dubai, London and Afghanistan since the beginning of the year and revolve around the return of Gulbaldin Hekmatyar, the former Afghan prime minister, who has been in hiding for seven years, to Afghanistan.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Coordination Council 15th anniversary Fifteen years from today on Jadi 11, 1372 (December 31, 1993) the Afghan civil war began in Kabul. This day is remembered as one of the worst days in the recent history of Afghanistan, as some analyst recall, “Rockets and heavy missiles were being fired from every direction in Kabul". It was the starting date to change Kabul city from a typical capital to ruins,Countless dead bodies were on the streets of Kabul in the following days. Kabul hospitals became full of wounded people and there weren’t enough medicine for them, and people were dying on daily bases.      Full news...

Tolo TV (Translated by RAWA): Rape victims demand severe punishments for the people involved in the crime. Two girls, thirteen and twelve years old, were gang-raped by powerful men and regional commanders in Sar-e-Pul about four months back. They say that till now no measures have been taken against the people who had raped them. They demanded justice from the government and legal and judicial bodies. Increasing cases of rape, especially those of children, have greatly worried people in the country. Human rights organizations have also expressed concern over the terrible aftermath of the rapes.      Full news...

CounterPunch.org: After early speculation that the recent Mumbai attacks were linked to Pakistan, a former U.S. Defense Department official now asserts that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) had a hand in training the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. Earlier this year Afghan president Hamid Karzai blamed Pakistan for a brazen assassination attempt from which he barely escaped, and U.S. officials contend that the July 7, 2008 bombing of India’s Kabul Embassy, which claimed 41 lives, had also been aided by the ISI.      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime. When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers. Dostum's men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): This year, the rate of violence against women in Kunduz, especially rape of small girls has increased by two times compared to last year. Expressing concern over this situation, Nadira Gyah, head of the Women’s Affairs in Kunduz told PAN that this year 60 cases of violence, including that of rapes, beatings, coerced marriages and running away from homes due to lack of substantial sustenance; were recorded in the administration.      Full news...

The Associated Press: The Taliban and other warlords could clear almost half a billion dollars from Afghanistan's opium trade this year — money that will help finance insurgent attacks, the U.N.'s drug czar said. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, said the Taliban also appears to be stockpiling the drug to manipulate its price, after several years in which production surpassed world demand. Afghanistan produces over 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw ingredient for making heroin.      Full news...

Workers World: For months now Afghanistan has been deadlier for U.S. troops than Iraq, even though there are 32,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq. A total of 1,004 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Some 625 of the casualties were from the United States. Forty percent of them occurred in the past two years. (icasualties.org)      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...

CounterPunch.com: The antiwar movement in the U.S. can no longer afford to ignore the war in Afghanistan without fading into irrelevance. The original aims of the war on terror have been resuscitated, and as Obama has repeatedly emphasized in recent months, its “central front” is shifting back to Afghanistan. The Afghan people have endured seven long years of misery thanks to U.S. occupation, and it is high time to take a principled stand against U.S. imperial aims in Central Asia. The war on Afghanistan is no more justified than the war on Iraq.      Full news...

The Washington Post: Rape is an endemic problem in Afghanistan. Whether women are forced into arranged marriages as child brides, or attacked by family members or local warlords, they are often held responsible for their own victimization. Afghan culture views a woman's virginity as sacrosanct, but Afghan law rarely gives her the chance to defend herself. Many women are thrown out of their families following, or even jailed.      Full news...