Middle East Times: A new book by a German journalist takes an in-depth look at the West's failing attempts to win the war in Afghanistan. Merey's book is reporting in the best sense -- it includes several chapters detailing Afghanistan's key problems: the corrupt and inefficient government of Hamid Karzai; the drug industry that no one has been able to contain or even destroy; NATO bombings that have led to civilian casualties; Pakistan's secret financing and influencing of the Taliban. He tells the story of a man who wants to join the Taliban together with his two sons, because ISAF troops accidentally killed his third boy.      Full news...

AFP: Mohammed Hashim Wahaaj, a large Afghan doctor with a bushy beard, thought he was going to die. He says his abductors were not from the extremist Taliban insurgency, who have kidnapped and killed scores of people they accuse of working for the government or its international allies. These were just criminals profiting from a climate of lawlessness and impunity in which government officials at the most senior levels are getting away with crime and corruption, the softly spoken doctor said.      Full news...

IWPR: The competence and credibility of the Afghan judiciary is being called into serious question by two controversial convictions which have caused an international outcry. The two cases, the most recent concluded last month, concern alleged transgressions of Islamic law, with critics claiming the convictions are deeply flawed and should be overturned on appeal. Some have suggested that the cases expose what they see as the creeping Islamicisation of the judiciary, insisting that the bench is composed of religious hardliners with Taliban sympathies.      Full news...

Reuters: Afghanistan is facing one of its worst food shortages in years as winter approaches, with prices of the staple wheat rising 60 percent in the first half of the year after Pakistan slapped export bans, a poor harvest and drought. Rising prices are hitting what is already one of the poorest countries in the world, with more than half of the population living below the poverty line. Households dependent on wage labour can afford to buy a quarter of the wheat they bought in 2007, according to the World Food Programme. This in a country where the majority of household wages are spent on basic foods such as cereals.      Full news...

IRIN: Population growth and the construction boom in Kabul over the past few years have resulted in the daily production of over 3,000 tonnes (109,500 tonnes annually) of solid waste. Some of this has been accumulating, causing serious health and environmental damage, according to Kabul Municipality. Medical doctors at Kabul’s Indira Gandhi Child Hospital (IGCH) said many children had picked up diarrhoea, dysentery or cholera from contaminated water. “Unsafe drinking water causes almost half of the diseases among children,” said Khalilullah Hodkhil, head of the IGCH.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Unknown armed men stole 20 to 30 historical relics including a Buddha statue from the National Museum of Herat. Three unknown armed men had entered the museum (in Arg Ikhtyaruddin of Herat) from the rooftop two nights back and stolen about 30 historical literary objects. The missing artifacts included a Buddha statue; two stone-made literary works from the Buddhism era; and other relics of the pre-Islamic and Islamic era, including some dishes of the Ghaznawyan era.      Full news...

Xinhua: The war-torn Afghanistan has experienced a deadliest year in 2008 since the collapse of Taliban regime in late 2001 as so far this year more than 4,000 people including 1,445 civilians have been killed. Driving factors towards increasing instability, according to Afghans, is high rate of unemployment and poverty in the war-wrecked country. Many of those fighters joining Taliban insurgents are illiterate tribal people, young seminarians and low educated jobless youths.      Full news...

The Sunday Times: Nobody seriously thinks the Taliban could take Kabul. The capital is surrounded by mountains, has only a few routes in and remained almost untouched during the Russian occupation. Afghanistan has more than 71,000 foreign troops under the leadership of Nato and the US, neither of which can contemplate defeat. It is hard to find any Afghan families who hanker after a Taliban regime that banned everything from girls’ schools to television and regarded public amputations and executions as entertainment. However, the fear among Kabulis is palpable. “There is a sense of dread of return to the dark days of the past,” said a western diplomat.      Full news...

Canwest News Service: As Afghanistan's most senior and most famous female police officer, based in the country's ultra-conservative south, Lieut.-Col. Malalai Kakar knew she was a marked woman. On Sunday, two days after taking part in a Canadian event to mark the end of Islam's holiest month, insurgents grimly confirmed her fears, shooting Kakar dead as she left her house.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Head of the attorney of Kunduz claims that drug-trafficking is taking place in Sher Khan Bandar (Port) but it's not being stopped, but the authorities of Sher Khan Bandar deny the claims. Hafizullah Khaliqyar, the head of the attorney of Kunduz told PAN in an interview that alcoholic drinks are imported into Afghanistan from Tajikistan and drugs (heroin and opium) are smuggled by Afghanistan into Tajikistan.      Full news...

BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): The police of Kabul say that they have arrested seven people for having raped a 12-year old girl in the city. The command police of Kabul said that the matter of the rape of the girl had been reported to them two days earlier and the girl had claimed that she had been raped by twelve men.      Full news...

PAN: Almost sixty percent residents of Yaka-wolang district of central Bamyan province are facing starvation with some families reportedly relying on consumption of fodder, officials said Thursday. Muhammad Nasir Fayaz district chief of Yaka-wolang told Pajhwok Afghan News agriculture crop were affected by different infections the very reason faced the locals to hunger and posed great threat to their lives.      Full news...

LEFT PARTY group in German Parliament: “By inviting the former warlord Haji Mohammed Mohaqeq to Berlin, the German government demonstrates once again that it supports the wrong concepts, the wrong instruments, and the wrong people”, explains MP Heike Hänsel. The spokes woman for development politics of the LEFT PARTY parliamentary group announced that she and her fellow MPs would establish a support network for democratic groups in Afghanistan.      Full news...

BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): A family in Qunduz province in North Afghanistan has claimed that four people had raped their 12-year old daughter. This girl who herself was present in the binoculars of the press told reporters that first she had been kidnapped on the way from her home to the city and kept in an unknown place for a night. This 12-year old also said that four men had raped her.      Full news...

The National: RAWA was founded in 1977 by a group of female Afghan intellectuals with the aim of building a government along democratic and secular lines. In the ensuing decades it has protested against foreign occupation and religious extremism, while carrying out such social work as running schools and medical services for refugees who fled to Pakistan. RAWA has never been able to operate openly in this deeply conservative society. Its leader was assassinated in the late 1980s and members now believe US-backed warlords and officials are among those who      Full news...

IRIN: More than 600 primary, secondary and high schools are closed, mostly in the volatile southern provinces, because of prevalent insecurity and attacks on formal education, the MoE said. Consequently, more than 300,000 students have been deprived of an education in 12 provinces, according to MoE officials.      Full news...

Daily Times: Resurgent Taliban, according to a new report, “have turned much of Afghanistan into ‘No Go’ zones for aid workers and civilians”. The report, issued by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) this week, says the security situation in Afghanistan is assessed by most analysts as having deteriorated at a constant rate through 2007. Statistics show that although the numbers of incidents are higher than comparable periods in 2006, they show the same seasonal pattern.      Full news...

Online: Forty per cent of the civilian victims of recent military operations and fighting in Afghanistan are children and women, a local child protection agency said. The Afghan Children Protection Organization (ACPO) said in a statement that among 700 civilians killed in the past six months in conflict, 40 per cent were children and women.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Five people including a police commander of the security of Hazar Samch had gang-raped this girl who lived in her home with some children. This incident had occurred three nights backs to an 18-year old girl in the Hazar Samch district. The girl told one of the rapists that she had recognized him and he had intended to kill her with a bullet of his gun but she got away with an injury.      Full news...

VOA: New U.N. figures show a sharp rise in the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan during the first eight months of this year, compared to the same period in 2007. The report was released by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.      Full news...

The New York Times: One of the most experienced Western envoys in Afghanistan said Sunday that conditions there had become the worst since 2001. He urged a concerted American and foreign response, even before a new American administration took office, to avoid “a very hot winter for all of us.”      Full news...

AHN: Suspected Taliban militants "punished" a schoolteacher for working for the government by dragging him out of a mosque and cutting off his ears in Afghanistan. Zabul provincial education chief Mohammad Nabi Khushal said the armed rebels barged into the mosque while worshippers were at a late night prayer, and took another dozen people and beat them up on similar chargers.      Full news...

BBC: Elements in the Iranian state are sending weapons across the border to the Taliban in Afghanistan, a BBC investigation has uncovered. Taliban members said they had received Iranian-made arms from elements in the Iranian state and from smugglers.      Full news...

IOM: Trafficking in persons is a crime that can impair a personality and even destroy a human life and it gravely affects today’s Afghanistan as a source, transit and destination country. The traffickers ruthlessly exploit men, women and children by violating their basic human rights and this modern-day form of slavery continues to thrive with impunity.      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...

Reuters: Seven years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the event that sparked off the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, many Afghans say life is no better and some say its worse. A recent spate of civilian deaths caused by U.S.-led air strikes has added salt to their wounds.      Full news...

IRIN News: Hundreds of Pashtun refugees who have returned from Pakistan to Afghanistan's northeastern Takhar Province say their properties have been seized by local people and militias from other ethnic groups. Their allegations were confirmed by the Ministry of Refugees and Returnees (MoRR).      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...

Reuters: Relatives of Afghans killed in a US-led coalition raid in western Herat province have offered to dig up graves to support claims of large-scale civilian deaths. The Aug. 22 air strike in Shindand district has outraged Afghans and opened a rift between coalition forces on the one hand and the Afghan government and the UN on the other, which both say that more than 90 civilians were killed.      Full news...

PTI: Concerned over continuing civilian casualties in the airstrikes by the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a leading human rights watchdog has criticised them for major 'collateral damage' and asked to fix the issue.      Full news...