Credit: Asia >Times Barack Obama’s surprise visit to Kabul on Tuesday provides telling evidence that he has a game plan for Afghanistan going into and beyond his bid to be re-elected United States president. Everything in the strategy, including renewed traction for closer ties with neighboring countries, is built around […]
Source: The Guardian (Author): (Reuters in Kabul) Hackers have for the third time in less than a year attacked the main website of the Afghan Taliban. The Taliban has blamed western intelligence agencies amid an intensifying cyberwar with the insurgents. The unidentified hackers broke into the Taliban’s El Emara website […]
Dawn.com Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul. But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers and their school buildings, usually in the more conservative south and east of the country, from where the Taliban […]
BEIJING, April 16 (Xinhua) — China on Monday confirmed the safety of Chinese citizens during attacks in Afghanistan on Sunday. Read More…
By ASSOCIATED PRESS ARABNEWS KABUL, Afghanistan: The Taleban launched a series of coordinated attacks across the Afghan capital and at least three eastern provinces on Sunday, targeting NATO bases, parliament and foreign embassies in a complex assault that shows the insurgents can still penetrate Afghan security and hit Western and […]
Source: BBC Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he is considering either bringing forward the 2014 date for presidential elections or speeding up the handover of security to his forces. The president told a briefing that he had been thinking about such a move for several months. He also said he […]
Source: The Express Tribune Author: M. Hassan Khan For the last decade or so, the global community has been fighting a war in Afghanistan which has its roots originating from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s. The current war has various stakeholders involved who are vying for greater influence in […]
During the early 1970s – during the days of King Zahir Shah – Afghanistan was a more open society than now. Schools were available for boys and girls. Ladies could wear the burka or not wear it. In Kabul many ladies wore European clothing. Still, Islamic values were adhered to. […]
Source: Reuters Authors: Sanjeev Miglani and Hamid Shalizi Afghanistan wants the United States to clearly spell out what sort of military presence it will leave behind once most of its combat troops leave by the end of 2014, a senior Afghan official said. It is also pressing Washington in talks […]
By Omar Sacirbey Religion News Service (RNS) Jean Younis won’t be wearing an Easter bonnet at church this Sunday. Instead, the office manager at Bonita Valley Adventist Church in National City, Calif., will don an Islamic headscarf to support the family and friends of Shaima Alawadi, the Iraqi immigrant and […]
Source: Reuters (Blogs) Author: Sanjeev Miglani As in any conflict, the prisoners that the players in Afghanistan hold are a key part of their political and military strategy as they head into 2014. For the United States, the more Taliban fighters or even potential Taliban are kept off the battlefield, […]
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — A study by The Genographic Project has found that the majority of all known ethnic Afghans share a unique genetic heritage derived from a common ancestral population that most likely emerged during the Neolithic revolution and the formation of early farming communities. Through detailed DNA analysis […]
Source: Al-Arabiya News A 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy have been killed in an acid attack in Afghanistan, an official said Saturday, with witnesses claiming it was because of their friendship in what is an ultra-conservative country. The bodies were discovered on Friday in wasteland in the Esfandi area […]
Source: New York Times Author: Farooq Jan Mangal and Matthew Rosenberg KHOST, Afghanistan — A member of a militia promoted by the American military to protect rural villages drugged his Afghan colleagues and killed at least nine of them as they slept on Friday, a police official said, in the […]
Source: BBC Author: Tahir Qadiry For economic and social reasons, many Afghan parents want to have a son. This preference has led to some of them practising the long-standing tradition of Bacha Posh – disguising girls as boys. When Azita Rafhat, a former member of the Afghan parliament, gets her […]
Source: BBC Author: David Loyn After an Afghan National Army lieutenant shot dead a British soldier and Royal Marine, injuring a third serviceman, the spotlight has fallen on relations between international and Afghan troops. For a soldier there is nothing worse than facing the prospect of death at the hands […]
Source: New York Times Author: Matthew Rosenberg and Sangar Rahimi KABUL, Afghanistan — The families of 16 Afghan villagers who were killed this month by a rampaging American soldier were given $50,000 by the United States for each of their relatives who died, Afghan and American officials said. The payments […]
Credit: Asia Times: By Brian M Downing Over the past 10 years, the Taliban have recovered from their ouster and established a presence in half of Afghanistan’s districts, where they have become a de facto government in many of them. The Afghan government is frail and unwilling to reform. The […]
Credit: TOI KANDAHAR: The United States has paid $50,000 in compensation for each Afghan killed in the shooting spree attributed to a US soldier in southern Afghanistan, an Afghan official and a community elder said on Sunday. The families of the dead received the money on Saturday at the governor’s […]
Credit: Asia Times: The continuing lull in US-Pakistan relations complicates the Afghan withdrawal process for European forces, with Central Asian routes more expensive and diplomatically complex than the Pakistani link closed over last November’s friendly fire incident. Anger at “negative acts” by US troops is also high among US allies. […]