The Christian Science Monitor: After US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly walked off a US base in Kandahar last March and went house to house, killing a total of 17 Afghan civilians, many worried that the Taliban would capitalize on the incident and the long restive province would revert to violence. Yet more than five months later, violence in Kandahar remains at record lows. Full story ...

Prensa Latina: A little more than 10 years after the invasion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Afghanistan is still the main generator of opium with calculations estimated just over 90 percent of world production. This element, translated into the inner realities of the invaded country, implies a figure close to 500 million USD in the gross domestic product (GDP) a year and that obviously Hamid Karzai’s regime does not take into account. Full story ...

The Express Tribune: Outside Peshawar’s mosques, after Friday prayers, magazines with articles and pictures of attacks by the Afghan Taliban and violence carried out by Nato forces are distributed, most of the time for free. The magazines are usually accompanied by guidance on Shariah law. These magazines are available in a number of languages including Urdu, English, Farsi and Dari, reachin Full story ...

National Times: Senior Defence Department officials feared the WikiLeaks expos? of secret US military reports would undermine public support for the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, according to newly released briefing papers. Reports about a corrupt Afghan warlord who works closely with Australian special forces were considered particularly sensitive. Full story ...

PAN: A local reporter on Saturday complained that he was beaten by security guards of the governor of central Uruzgan province. Najibullah Latif, who works for Yawali and Paiwastoon radio stations, said he was thrashed at 7:30 am when his car struck a vehicle of the guards. Full story ...

IWPR: A decree by Afghan president Hamid Karzai ordering government to improve the quality of the country’s media has created fears that the government will try to censor the press and broadcasters. Karzai gave the information and culture ministry two months to come up with an action plan to impose “minimum quality standards” on both state-run and private media outlets. Full story ...

PAN: Workers of industrial companies, moneychangers, doctors, jewellers and traders went on strike in protest against rising kidnappings in western Herat province. Moneychangers, auto spare businessmen and jewelers closed their shops in the provincial capital, where business centres wore a deserted look. Full story ...

NBC News: Afghanistan seems as fragile as ever. There is a sense that with the U.S.-led NATO draw-down expected in 2014 the country could slip back into some of its darkest most socially-restrictive and violent days. Most Afghans you speak to in Kabul or outside of the capital fear that their country will once again be overrun by the Taliban or be engulfed by a civil war. Full story ...

TOLOnews.com: A recent TOLO News investigation revealed that more than USD 1 million USD was deposited into the bank accounts of Afghanistan’s Finance Minister, Hazarat Omar Zakhilwal, over the past five years. While some funds were deposited into Zakhilwal’s accounts at Standard Chartered Bank and Alfalah Bank in Kabul, most of the money was transferred to other bank accounts outside of Afghanistan. Full story ...

Khaama Press: According to local authorities in eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan at least 250 missiles have been fired in three districts in this province since Saturday night in fresh wave of cross border attacks from Pakistan. Provincial governor Syed Fazlullah Wahidi confirming the report said the missiles were fired in Dangam, Shegal and Nari districts where at least three Afghan civilians were injured. Full story ...

PAN: Violence against women, including murder, has increased in the western province of Farah this year, officials said on Wednesday. “My daughter’s hands and feet were tied up with chains and hot water poured all over her body by her husband. He killed my daughter before cutting her lips, ears, nose and other body parts with scissors,” said the victim’s father. Full story ...

RFE/RL: Afghanistan’s former warlords and militia leaders have slammed the leaked findings of an unpublished report that implicates hundreds of them in atrocities committed during the country’s devastating civil war in the 1990s. Titled “Conflict Mapping In Afghanistan Since 1978,” the damning report accuses up to 500 members and leaders of rival ethnic and political groups... Full story ...

The Associated Press: For Razi Khan, a debt of almost $900 has condemned him and his family to years of work in a brick factory in an eastern Afghan city, with little or no hope of ever paying it off. Khan has eight children. Six of them, including a 4-year-old, toil at the brick factory to pay off a crushing debt that has followed him for the past six years. Full story ...

The New York Times: The atrocities of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s are still recounted in whispers here — tales of horror born out of a scorched-earth ethnic and factional conflict in which civilians and captured combatants were frequently slaughtered en masse. Stark evidence of such killings are held in the mass graves that still litter the Afghan countryside. One such site is outside Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north. Full story ...

The Herald: When at the Bonn conference in 2001 Hamid Karzai was appointed Afghanistan’s interim president by his international supporters, he came to occupy this position without any local backers. He had no traditional constituency and no political party, but has been able to exert his power for the past 10 years through his strong associations with the international community... Full story ...