AGI: Six children and three women were killed during a NATO air raid in the province of Helmand, southern Afghanistan. The new accidental killing of civilians was reported by Daud Ahmadi, spokesperson of the provincial governor. The raid, which claimed the life of 4 armed Taliban, was ordered as a reply to an attack against a convoy of NATO and Afghan forces in a village located in the Nad Ali district.      Full news...

PAN (translated by RAWA): Five years old Fazila was killed in Sayad villige of Gosfande district in Saripul province yesterday morning. Fazila has been kidnapped and taken to a room by 40 years old Alem, one of the residents of the area, Ghulam Haider the security chief of Saripul told Pajhwok Afghan News.      Full news...

OpEdNews: After eight long years, the so-called “good war” in Afghanistan has become the “unpopular and high cost war”—and it is becoming a quagmire.General Stanley McChrystal recently requested an additional 45,000 troops for Afghanistan, on top of the 21,000 additional troops sent earlier this year. If honored, this request would bring the total number of troops stationed in Afghanistan to approximately 100,000. Even that large number would be less than what the non-public portion of the McChrystal report states as necessary to “win” the war – 500,000 troops.      Full news...

AFP: A young Afghan girl died after a box of public information leaflets, dropped by a Royal Air Force plane over Afghanistan, landed on her, a newspaper said Wednesday. The Ministry of Defence said it was investigating the accident which it described as "highly regrettable," The Times said. The drop occurred over a rural area of Afghanistan's southern Helmand province on June 23 as part of an information campaign, the newspaper said.      Full news...

AFP: AT least 30 civilians were killed when a bus hit a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan in an attack blamed on the Taliban, the interior ministry said. The dead included 10 children and seven women, the ministry said, revising an earlier toll from the local governor's office. "Thirty people were killed," the ministry said in a statement, adding that 39 others were wounded.      Full news...

GlobalPost: The Afghan election results are finally in and, to no one's surprise, they have inflamed a crisis of credibility. Afghanistan’s latest effort in democracy was marred by widespread fraud, violence, and intimidation. The U.N.-backed Independent Election Commission awarded President Hamid Karzai 54.6 percent of the vote, putting him over the critical 50 percent necessary to secure victory without a runoff. Experts estimate it will take the U.S. at least 12 to 18 months for signs of progress to show. Now, half of that time will be spent under a cloud of illegitimacy even if Karzai wins reelection.      Full news...

The Associated Press: A Taliban ambush on a highway left six truckers dead, and a roadside bomb killed another six Afghans in a crowded van, the government said Monday — the latest sign that insurgent violence is spreading across the countryside. Afghanistan's civilian death toll has risen alongside that of U.S. and international forces this summer to more than 1,500 this year — three-quarters of them at the hands of militants, according to a recent U.N. report.      Full news...

PTI: Parts of ISI are supporting Taliban and protecting their chief Mullah Omar and other militant leaders in Pakistan's Quetta city, where US officials have discussed sending commandos to capture or kill the terrorists, a media report said on Sunday. The US is threatening to launch air strikes against Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan, 'The Sunday Times' reported.      Full news...

PAN: US forces shot dead a schoolboy on his way home in the southeastern province of Paktika on Monday, the victim's father said. Ghulam Shah, father of the 13-year-old Zeeshan, told Pajhwok Afghan News his son was returning home on a bicycle from school. He alleged NATO-led soldiers opened fire on the boy in Madatkhel area on the outskirts of Sharan, the provincial capital.      Full news...

The Christian Science Monitor: Gen. Stanley McChrystal reportedly wants 40,000 troops for Afghanistan. But Obama is worried that the government of President Hamid Karzai is too corrupt. Comments by President Obama and his advisers this week suggest that the administration is slowly coming to the conclusion that the Afghan government - and not the Taliban - is perhaps the most serious impediment to progress in Afghanistan.      Full news...

PAN: The man identified as Ahmadullah shot his wife, his children, wife and children of his brother before turning the gun on himself at the family's home in Ghuli village of the district, said district chief Yousuf Siraji. Siraji said the reason behind the suicide and murders is said be a family dispute that emerged in the family last week.      Full news...

The Australian: One Afghanistan veteran, in his early 20s, is in a private hospital in NSW. He has lost both his legs. The doctors and nurses treating him are sworn to secrecy. Were someone to ring the hospital's reception, asking for him by his real name, he would not exist. As far as the public knows, his terrible injuries never happened. There was no media release from the Defence Department giving even cursory details of this man's suffering.      Full news...

Reuters: Seventeen-year-old Nowruz was celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid with his father, mother and 11-year-old sister when 50 Taliban gunmen attacked their home with rockets and gunfire and killed him. The Taliban's target on Tuesday night was Nowruz's father Esmatullah, a police commander whose job had obliged him to move his family to the mainly Pashtun Guzara district of western Afghanistan's mainly stable Herat province.      Full news...

PAN: Six people were killed and several others wounded in an air strike by foreign forces in Arghandab district of the volatile southern Kandahar province, residents said Thursday. The air raid was conducted late Wednesday night in Nagahan area that lasted one hour, according to residents, who had brought their injured relatives to the Mirwais Civil Hospital in Kandahar City.      Full news...

PAN (translated by RAWA): Eight civilians are killed and four others wounded in the air strike by foreign troops, a number of residents from the Marja district of Helmand province are claiming... Another resident named Norullah from the same district told PAN that there were no Taliban near this village but the armed Taliban from the nearby village had fired on helicopters.      Full news...

The Age: THE US scarcely knew what a complex disaster it was confronting when it went to war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It will eventually - perhaps years from now - suffer the same fate as Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviet Union: defeat. What is called ''Afghanistan'' is really a collection of tribes and ethnic groups - Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and more. There are seven major ethnic groups, each with its own language.      Full news...

CounterPunch: I want the women of Afghanistan to be liberated. Do I have to support the war? Short answer: No. In fact, supporting the war only works against their liberation. If you can’t stand the idea of The Handmaid’s Tale come to life; set in a dusty, third world country and despise the thought of women being kept out of schools and in large respects the outright chattel property of their fathers or husbands, then in fact you must      Full news...

FT.com: Nato forces are losing ground against the insurgency in Afghanistan. Afghans look as though they will continue to be led by a corrupt and warlord-influenced government, of doubtful legitimacy after the flawed and still inconclusive recent elections. As casualties mount and spread, a backlash is building in allied countries against a war their citizens increasingly see as both pointless and doomed.      Full news...

IWPR: A year after her family died in an airstrike, a young girl still lives in the same village, alone and constantly in fear. Seven-year-old Zahra looks like a typical Afghan girl in her traditional long dress and scarf, her short black hair peeking out from her head covering. On the night of August 22 2008, all of Zahra’s immediate family was killed by American bombs. In pursuit of Taleban commander Mullah Siddiq, United States Special Forces and the Afghan army launched an airstrike on the village of Azizabad in Shindand district of Herat. An investigation by the United Nations said that 90 people, 60 children and 30 adults, died.      Full news...

BBC Persian (Translated by RAWA): Poverty in the month of Ramadan shows itself with much harsher face in the dinning cloth of most of the families in Kabul city.... The monthly income of Marzia is 1,500 Afghanis equivalent to 30 dollars which she takes from the government as her husband's pension. Once her husband has been a worker of municipality but now extremely needs to be cured and this money is even not enough for the cost of his sickness. This man already was paralyzed and now he is also suffering from mental problem and is always needs someone to take care of him.      Full news...

IRIN: As the van passed along the bumpy road, groans could be heard coming from the three wounded passengers, but once on asphalt near Kandahar city, southern Afghanistan, only one person was still murmuring; the two others (teenagers) had passed away. The three were injured in an air strike on their village in Shah Wali Kot District, Kandahar Province, earlier this month, according to Abdul Aleem, the surviving injured man.      Full news...

CNN: Afghanistan's reputation as the world's leading narcotics supplier is well-known, but in a squalid ruin in Kabul, the country hides a darker secret -- a huge home grown drug addiction problem now on the brink of fueling an HIV/AIDS epidemic. Here junkies lie in their own filth, wasted limbs poking out of blood-spattered clothing as they blank out the abject misery of their surroundings. In one room, a veritable narcotics bazaar offers pills and drug paraphernalia -- with hits retailing at less than $4.      Full news...

Xinhua: A mass grave containing remaining of over 30 bodies have been discovered in Kunduz province north of Afghanistan, a local official said Tuesday. "These bodies which speak from barbaric wars during past decades were found in Ali Abad district on Monday," Habibullah Mutasim, the governor of Ali Abad told Xinhua.      Full news...

IRIN: Twenty-eight deaths from cholera and/or acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) have been reported in Afghanistan in the past two months, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has said. At least 673 cases of AWD and/or cholera had been reported in 11 of the country’s 34 provinces, it said. According to the World Health Organization, cholera, which is rarely reported in Afghanistan, is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingestion of the bacterium vibrio cholerae.      Full news...

The Christian Science Monitor: A retaliatory NATO airstrike that killed scores of civilians. The kidnapping of New York Times journalist Stephen Farrell. The deadly shooting of his Afghan translator and the death of a British soldier in a violent and controversial rescue operation days later.The events of this week have drawn attention to the unraveling security in northern Afghanistan in a way months of the creeping insurgency had not. Long considered one of the most stable and peaceful parts of the country, the northern provinces have seen rising violence as heavy insurgent activity has spread to 80 percent of the country – up from 54 percent two years ago.      Full news...

The Independent: Edward Stourton's last day on the Today prog had him appropriately serious-voiced about Operation Panther's Claw, which has been very heavy on the troops in Helmand. The BBC's man in Afghanistan said that while just over 4,300 votes for that popinjay Karzai had been counted in Babaji, a local election observer claimed that only 15 people had turned up. Ed left his listeners in no doubt that 10 British soldiers had sacrificed their lives for this grand-scale piece of electoral fraudulence.      Full news...

The Independent: The military raid to free the British-Irish journalist Stephen Farrell from his Taliban captors was successful in the narrowest possible sense. The rescuers got Mr Farrell out of the hands of his kidnappers in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan. Two Afghan civilians are said to have died in the operation. And Mr Farrell's Afghan interpreter, Sultan Munadi, was shot dead, quite possibly by Nato forces.      Full news...

IRIN: Afghanistan’s anti-begging commission has arrested hundreds of beggars in Kabul in the past few months, but most are released if relatives guarantee they will not beg again, officials said. The government outlawed street-begging in November 2008 and set up a commission - made up of different government bodies and the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) - to end street-begging in the capital.      Full news...

RAWA News: The magic cut-off is revealed to be about 30-40. Such revealed facts tell far more than mere words.... In the past few years, U.S. officialdom and the mainstream press barely take note of dead Afghans unless the number exceeds thirty. On the other hand, when a Taliban’s improved explosive device kills innocent bystanders, meters of newsprint spews forth often accompanied with victims’ photos. For the U.S. press, Human Rights Watch, and U.S. citizenry clearly some bodies are worthy of mention whereas others are not.      Full news...

IRIN: It was almost midnight when a massive bang awakened residents of Kabul’s fifth district on 5 September. A rocket had landed on a house killing three members of the family: the father, mother and a child. In the past month at least 10 rockets have been fired on different parts of Kabul, often killing or wounding civilians, according to the Ministry of Interior (MoI).      Full news...