The Guardian: The depths of crime and drug-dealing in Afghan society are highlighted in lurid terms by the US intelligence reports. One log claims to describe how a "notorious criminal" was recruited to spy for Iran. It says he returned to Afghanistan and then became a police chief, gaining power and wealth by drug-dealing. This byzantine story comes from Bala Beluk, a district in the country's south-western province of Farah. Full story ...
Fox News: We’re shown in the last three weeks the police have shut down three different operations all doing business in our area. In one of them the police say a man recruited minors as prostitutes, used Craigslist to advertise for clients and did it all while never leaving New York City. In a second and separate case police say Arash Abbas ran an organization using adult girls he would book into high end hotel rooms across the county. Full story ...
The Guardian: The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. Full story ...
The Guardian: Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called "blue on white" events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventuall Full story ...
The Nation: According to a report form Helmand province, Friday evening (July 23) at about 6:00 pm local time, as many as 40 innocent non-combatant civilians were martyred and 34 more were seriously injured in Rigi area of Sngin, Helmand. The report indicates the deadliest incident occurred while several dozens defenseless villagers including children and women, fearing the US savage invaders’ air strikes, gathered in Hajji Mohammad Husain house Full story ...
PAN: Seven children were injured when coalition forces bombed a village in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday, health officials said. Three girls and four boys were injured in the air strike in Sangin district, the director of Mirwais Hospital, Dr. Abdul Qayyum Pukhla, told Pajhwok Afghan News. He said the condition of the seven was improving. Full story ...
The News: Afghan leader Malalai Joya is resistance personified. She is the most vocal critic of both US occupation of Afghanistan and the ruling warlords. At the same time, she speaks dismissively of the Taliban: "Their violence is no resistance". However, Malalai Joya hardly grabs headlines in the Pakistani media that often glorifies the mindless violence of the Taliban. But she is a household name in Afghanistan and a known figure internationally. She was called "Afghanistan's most famous women" by the BBC a few years ago. Full story ...
AFP: Women living in Afghanistan's safest region are retreating behind the veil amid fears they are being stalked by a resurgent Taliban determined to trample their rights. Human rights groups are concerned that plans by the Afghan government to make peace with the Taliban could lead to an erosion of women's liberties. But as attacks escalate across the previously peaceful north, and the insurgency's footprint expands, women are losing confidence that their hard-won rights are inviolable. Full story ...
ISN Security Watch: A recent survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) shows a sharp expansion in corruption in Afghan society. Most Afghans now see the payment of bribes as a routine part of obtaining government services. In the three years since IWA came out with its previous corruption survey, the amount paid in bribes more than doubled, the watchdog group found. Afghans paid an estimated $1 billion in bribes in 2009, whereas IWA pegged the figure in its 2006 survey at $466 million. Full story ...
PAN: Residents of the eastern province of nangarhar are worried about deteriorating security, blaming corrupt officials and "irresponsible" foreign forces for the surge in violence. Over the past one-and-a-half months, there have been at least 28 incidents of violence in nangarhar, including three rocket attacks on the provincial capital, 11 roadside bombs targeting NATO vehicles and at least t Full story ...
AP: The inspector general investigating fraud, waste and abuse in the USD51 billion Afghanistan reconstruction program has received a failing grade from his peers. The council of government auditors who reviewed the work asked Attorney General Eric Holder to consider suspending or rescinding law enforcement powers of the Afghanistan reconstruction watchdog. Full story ...
The Independent: Women in Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan say they are once again being threatened, attacked and forced out of jobs and education as fears rise that their rights will be sacrificed as part of any deal with insurgents to end the war in Afghanistan. Women have reported attacks and received letters warning of violence if they continue to work or even contact radio stations to reques Full story ...
CNN: More U.S. soldiers killed themselves last month than in recent Army history, according to Army statistics released Thursday, confounding officials trying to reverse the grim trend. The statistics show that 32 soldiers killed themselves in June, the highest number in a single month since the Vietnam era. Twenty-one of them were on active duty, while 11 were in the National Guard or Army Reserve in an inactive status. Full story ...
The Wall Street Journal: Beware Taliban revisionism. You’re going to hear much more of it in the coming months as policy makers from Kabul to Washington seeking to reintegrate Taliban fighters try to explain why the enemy isn’t so bad after all. Bombs that slaughter civilians, acid attacks that disfigure school girls, assassinations of women in public life-all of this will be swept under the carpet. Full story ...
IRIN: Esmatullah, 24, has been injecting heroin for over two years but he is unaware that sharing needles could infect him with HIV, hepatitis or other highly contagious blood-borne diseases. “I don’t know anything about these diseases and how they’re transferred from one person to another,” he told IRIN; he had recently been deported from Iran where he had become an addict. Full story ...
Care2.com: An article from Time poignantly describes the conditions inside the women's ward of the Istiqlal Hospital burn unit in Kabul, where young women who have attempted to commit suicide by self-immolation lie unconscious or in serious pain. According to the Ministry of Women's Affairs, 103 women who set themselves on fire between March 2009 and March 2010... Full story ...
AFP: This year has been the most violent since the Afghan war began in 2001 and civilian deaths have risen slightly with the increased insecurity, a local rights group said Monday. A massive US-led increase in troops has failed to quell the Taliban-led insurgency, Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) said. “In terms of insecurity, 2010 has been the worst year since the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001,” it said. Full story ...
ANI: The United States is building secret bases in Afghanistan from which they intend to attack Russia, said Kremlin officials. According to the Daily Express, the claim has emerged in the wake of the most elaborate spy swap since the Cold War, which saw 10 Moscow-controlled sleeper agents traded for four Russians spying for the West. Full story ...
Tribune Media Services Inc.: As Gen. David Petraeus assumed his new command in Afghanistan earlier this month, he took up a strategy that has already failed - though not for the reasons most people assume. Certainly, as most everyone knows, the battle plan appears hopeless. Every night in Marjah, Taliban killers post "night letters" in mosques and other public places, warning city residents they will be killed if they cooperate with the Americans. Full story ...
AFP: International troops fighting the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan killed six civilians, NATO said Saturday, a day after conceding that six Afghan soldiers had died in a "friendly fire" incident. Civilian casualties are an incendiary topic with Afghans, who increasingly regard the presence of international troops in their country as the main cause of violence that has wracked Afghanistan for almost nine years. Full story ...
The Independent: Samia is a rape victim, but now it's the morning of her wedding. By late afternoon, she will be married in a private ceremony in Karte Se, Kabul. One of the 150 guests at this extraordinary marriage ceremony will be the activist and suspended MP Malalai Joya: Samia's handsome husband-to-be, Faramarz, has been one of Ms Joya's bodyguards for more than four years. Full story ...
The Washington Post: Corruption has soared in recent years as the United States and other international donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Afghanistan, giving the Taliban a powerful tool to delegitimize the Afghan government, according to a new national survey. The survey, which was scheduled to be released Thursday by the Kabul-based anti-corruption group Integrity Watch Afghanistan, suggests that Afghans see their country’s police and judicial officials as the most corrupt in the government Full story ...
PAN: Clerics in northern badakhshan province Wednesday issued a resolution, asking women to refrain from venturing out of home without an immediate male relative. The resolution was issued by members of the provincial ulema council members, who met in the Juram district two weeks after unidentified gunmen shot dead two women allegedly involved in prostitution. Full story ...
ABC News: Brigadier General Mohammed Asif Jabarkhel sits with folded arms in his office, just a few steps away from the security checkpoint at Kabul International Airport. "Of course I know what's going on here," the 59-year-old head of the airport's customs police grumbles from beneath his thick moustache as a fan whirs in the background. "But, in this country, who's allowed to speak the truth?" Full story ...
The Indian Express: More than USD 4.2 billion in cash has moved from Kabul airport during the past three-and-a-half years, far exceeding the earlier estimate and raising fresh concerns about corruption in the war-torn country. “Our records show that USD 4.2 billion has been transferred in cash through Kabul International Airport alone during the last three-and-a-half years,” Omar Zakhilwal, the Afghan Finance Minister wrote in a letter to Nita Lowey, a US Congresswoman. Full story ...
CNN: Violence isn't the only major problem in Afghanistan. Corruption is also hampering the war effort. Last week, US lawmakers voted to cut billions of dollars in aid to the Afghan government because of corruption. But Afghan officials say Western contractors are also to blame. In Kabul, a film-maker has his own unique take on the issue. Atia Abawi has that. Full story ...
The Canadian Press: Master Cpl. Jody Mitic was a sniper on patrol with his unit in Kandahar province in January 2007 when he stepped on a land mine and lost both legs below the knee. In the split second it took for the charge to explode, Mitic's life changed instantly, irrevocably. Mitic is one of the more than 500 Canadian soldiers who have been wounded in action in Afghanistan; even more suffer from "invisible wounds" that range from mild depression to debilitating post-traumatic stress syndrome, experts say. Full story ...
The Huffington Post: After nine years of war the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan lacks support at home and is widely recognized as a drain on the domestic economy in a time of severe economic contraction. The billions of dollars in U.S. economic assistance to the Hamid Karzai government has created an unsustainable class of Afghans who are dependent upon the American largesse and military presence that would be impossible to sustain by local taxes. Full story ...
Reuters: Afghan police clashed on Tuesday with dozens of stone-throwing protesters who gathered at a religious school on the outskirts of the capital to complain about arrests by foreign forces. Reuters witnesses saw police firing rounds into the air and on the ground to disperse the protesters, and also what appeared to be three lifeless bodies being carried away by a police vehicle. Full story ...
BBC News: Meet Sorarya and you meet “attitude”. It has something to do with the way she wears her red tunic and trousers, her short cropped black leather jacket, and the way she chews gum and rolls her eyes. “What are you here for?” I ask as we sit in a makeshift beauty parlour, surrounded by a group of Afghan women in less flamboyant attire. “Should I tell her?” she asks the other women with a mischievous grin. Full story ...
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