US helicopters and hundreds of troops are searching for soldiers who went missing in Afghanistan just before a helicopter coming to their aid was shot down in Kunar province June 28, killing the 16 on board, all Navy Seals and… Read moreChinook down in Afghanistan; historians have deja vu
A suicide bomber crashed his car into a US military patrol just outside Kandahar June 13, killing himself and wounding four US soldiers, one seriously. The US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, condemned such attacks as “cowardly acts of desperation,… Read moreUS troops under attack in Afghanistan
Just four days after the last one, another mosque was hit by a suicide bomber in Pakistan last night. This time the blast, at a Shi’ite mosque in Karachi, killed five and wounded 18. It also sparked a night of… Read morePakistan: still more sectarian terror
Violence against women and girls in Afghanistan is pervasive, says Amnesty International today, releasing its latest report “Afghanistan: Women Under Attack.” “Throughout the country, few women are exempt from violence or safe from the threat of it,” the report finds…. Read moreAfghanistan: women still under attack
At least 25 are dead in an apparent suicide bombing at the Bari Imam Sufi shrine at Nurpur village outside Pakistan’s capital Islamabad this morning. Thousands of devotees were attending the last day of a five-day festival at the time… Read morePakistan: more sectarian terror
Allegations in the May 9 Newsweek that U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had abused a Koran, and even flushed one down a toilet, led to riots that left several dead in Afghanistan May 11. By the next day, protests… Read moreNewsweek “retraction” on Gitmo Koran controversy: rush to judgement?
Last week, Doonesbury‘s GI Ray Hightower blogged home bitterly from Baghdad that “Iraq is the new Afghanistan”—meaning the American public has largely forgotten that there is a war going on. Today’s news indicates Afghanistan may actually be becoming the new… Read moreIs Afghanistan the “new Iraq”?
With Afghan opium cultivation up 64% in 2004 over the previous year, far exceeding even the gravest predictions, the Pentagon is broadening the scope of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan to allow direct involvement in drug enforcement. Writes the NY… Read moreU.S. into Afghan opium war
In a gunbattle in a village near the Pakistan border in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, US troops apparently killed Raz Mohammed, described by a US commander as a "high-level Taliban." "Coalition troops were fired on by Raz Mohammed and other Taliban… Read moreU.S. forces kill Taliban bigwig—and, oh yeah, woman, children
Up to 50 worshippers are dead and twice as many wounded in a bomb blast at a shrine to the 19th century Sufi saint Pir Rakhel Shah at Gandhawa in Pakistan’s conflicted province of Baluchistan March 19. The bomb went… Read moreTerror in Baluchistan
Condoleezza Rice’s March 18 visit to Afghanistan ironically coincided with evident setbacks for the country’s nascent democracy. President Hamid Karzai announced that parliamentary elections scheduled for May have been pushed back until September due to ongoing logistical chaos. The day… Read moreKarzai postpones Afghan elections
Two US soldiers have now been charged in the deaths of two Afghan prisoners who died in US custody in December 2002, after they were apparently chained to the ceiling before being savagely beaten at the Bagram Control Point, just… Read moreMore charges in Afghan torture case
