ANSWER Coalition: Borrowing a page from its infamous “pacification” effort in South Vietnam, where peasant villages were napalmed and burned to the ground to “save them from the communists,” the Obama-ordered surge in Afghanistan has been secretly blowing up thousands of homes and leveling portions of the Afghan countryside.      Full news...

The Guardian: Thousands of protesters have marched through London against the war in Afghanistan as as Nato leaders agreed a strategy to withdraw their troops from the country. The demonstration, which organisers said was 10,000-strong, came as the prime minister, David Cameron, said the withdrawal of British combat troops from Afghanistan by 2015 was a “firm deadline” that would be met.      Full news...

Once Upon a Time...: There is one aspect of this Washington Post article that I fear will be appreciated by very few people. Before I get to that, let’s set out the basic facts...      Full news...

IRIN: NATO and the Afghan government must stop using local militias against the Taliban; the poorly trained forces are doing more harm than good, and risk causing a new civil war, say 29 local and international NGOs in a message to NATO leaders ahead of their Lisbon summit on 19-20 November.      Full news...

AFP: More Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan than support it, a new poll showed Thursday, the latest sign of waning public backing for the US-led mission. The Quinnipiac University poll also found a large majority of Americans want to see an end to the ban on gays serving openly in the military, including voters with a family member in uniform.      Full news...

Indiana Daily Student: It was pushed back by the Taliban, but now, some experts say it’s making a comeback. It’s something so controversial that most Afghans refuse to talk about it or to even acknowledge its existence. It’s 1 a.m. in northern Afghanistan, and a group of armed, powerful older men are gathered around a very young boy dressed in women’s clothing with fake breasts and bells around his ankles.      Full news...

The New York Times: “Why did you burn yourself?” asks the doctor. “If I threw myself from a building, I’d break an arm or a leg, but I wanted to die,” Halima answers. “That’s why I set myself on fire. I thought I would die instantly.” As an answer it is more how than why, but it is enough for Dr. Arif Jalali, the senior surgeon ...      Full news...

Xinhua: Afghanistan remains the country most affected by international terrorism, a UN official said here on Monday. Despite progress on the political, social and economic fronts, the terrorist activities of the Taliban, Al-Qaida and other extremist groups continue to be the main challenge to Afghanistan' s security, reconstruction and development, Afghanistan's UN Ambassador Zahir Tanin told a Security Council meeting.      Full news...

The Register Guard: The panel’s co-chairmen, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, identify $100 billion in defense cuts that could be made in 2015. That would be too little and too late, but what’s almost revolutionary is the notion that if we’re ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” down to size.      Full news...

The First Post: At the Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul, home to 150 female inmates and 70 of their children, the chief warden, Lt Col Zarafshan, lowers her voice. “Because of my pain, my hurt and my sense of injustice, I am telling you this,” she says. “If we had a good justice system only about ten of these women would be in prison.” A recent UN report stated that at least half of women imprisoned in Afghanistan are there for moral crimes. Zarafshan puts the proportion a lot higher.      Full news...

IRIN: Ali Ahmad, the sole breadwinner of an extended family in Kabul, has to decide whether to buy firewood to keep his children warm in winter or food to save them from hunger. “Everything is expensive… wheat flour, ghee, sugar, fuel and wood and I cannot afford them,” he complained.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: It was another day on the rocky hillside, as archaeologists and laborers dug out statues of Buddha and excavated a sprawling 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery. A Chinese woman in slacks, carrying an umbrella against the Afghan sun, politely inquired about their progress.      Full news...

McClatchy Newspapers: The coal dug here fires Afghanistan’s only working cement factory, a strategic industrial asset 150 miles north of Kabul that should be supplying building material for much of the country, generating cash and jobs and improving the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. Instead, the Ghori Cement Factory and the nearby Karkar Coal Mine have become symbols of the corruption, nepotism and mismanagement that pervade President Hamid Karzai’s government.      Full news...

The National Forum: It is estimated that one littoral combat ship costs $613 million. According to World Bank figures, that sum would be enough to educate 6.8 million children in Afghanistan for nine years - or we could buy one warship. Which investment would do more to strengthen Afghanistan and Afghan civil society? The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom have estimated that $287 billion dollars has been spent on the war in Afghanistan. Senator Cameron provided us with some of the forward estimates, and they are breathtaking. This translates to a $300,000 cash payment to everyone in Afghanistan for the price of the deployment and the war - or, incidentally, a cheque for $13,400 for every Australian.      Full news...

The Age: THE plight of women in Afghanistan is no excuse for Western “occupation” of the country, a leading Afghan opponent of the war and former MP has declared. Malalai Joya - the youngest woman elected to the Afghanistan Parliament, in 2004, who then faced death threats for her outspoken criticism of tribal warlords - said the image of Afghan women was being unfairly used to justify the foreign presence.      Full news...

The Vancouver Sun: We should have known it was too good to be true. Harper’s many, many repetitions of his government’s commitment to get all the troops out by July 2011 are well known. I think he may actually have meant it because by these repeated statements he framed the issue so strongly that all Canadians expected – and supported – the withdrawal.      Full news...

AFP: The economic downturn and the trauma of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have pushed more US veterans to suicide, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said Thursday. As Americans across the United States and around the world celebrated the contributions of men and women in uniform on Veterans Day, Shinseki outlined a sobering picture for the approximately 23 million veterans in the United States.      Full news...

Global Post: The U.S. military has destroyed hundreds of Afghan civilian homes, farm houses, walls, trees and plowed through fields and buildings using explosives and bulldozers in war-torn Zhari district, a practice that has begun to anger Afghan villagers. The much anticipated third phase of the Kandahar campaign, called Operation Dragon Strike, has U.S. troops from the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division...      Full news...

The Canadian Press: Essa Mohammad was tending to his family’s flock of sheep in Kandahar’s Arghandab district this summer when a sudden bang and flash of light knocked him unconscious. When the 12-year-old boy woke up several days later, he was missing his right leg, left arm and right eye — the toll taken by an improvised explosive device planted by insurgents.      Full news...

IRIN: The International Criminal Court (ICC) should start investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by various warring groups in Afghanistan since 2002 to help end a culture of impunity, says Sima Samar, chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).      Full news...

CNN: Armed men burned down a girls’ primary school in eastern Afghanistan Monday night, an act that also destroyed hundreds of Qurans, a government official said Tuesday. Ministry of Education spokesman Asif Nang tells CNN that the Sangar girls’ primary school, located in the Alengar district of Laghman province, was destroyed.      Full news...

VOA: Afghanistan's independent human rights commission has criticized Australia's decision to train with militiamen reportedly loyal to an Afghan warlord. The six men have been in Australia to instruct the country's special forces in how to tackle the Taliban insurgency.      Full news...

AFP: The Afghan government has dropped corruption charges against a top aide to President Hamid Karzai who was indicted by a US-backed taskforce for taking a bribe, an official said on Tuesday. Mohammad Zia Salehi, a senior official in Karzai's National Security Council, was arrested by the Major Crimes Task Force...      Full news...

IRIN: Afghanistan has climbed over a dozen places up the annual UN Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) - from 181 out of 182 countries in 2009, to 155 out of 169 this year. Described as a human development indicator, the HDI "measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living."      Full news...

IWPR: Until recently, bus driver Ustad Toryalai said that there were plenty of passengers looking to travel between Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. But over the last six months, Toryalai said, traffic has declined dramatically, with passengers refusing to travel at night and even hesitant to make the trip during daylight hours because of the possibility of attacks by the Taliban.      Full news...

The New York Times: Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.      Full news...

The Express Tribune: In late January 2009, General Petraeus approached one of his team members for an update on the ongoing Afghanistan strategy review and received the unexpected analysis: “It is the blind leading the blind,” said Derek Harvey, from the Defence Intelligence Agency. He further told Petraeus that “we know too little about the enemy to craft a winning strategy.”      Full news...

The Wall Street Journal: Afghanistan's election authorities are being pressured by President Hamid Karzai and by Iran to alter the preliminary results of September's parliamentary races, adding new controversy to a fraud-marred election, officials and candidates say.      Full news...

The Guardian: The Ministry of Defence has nearly tripled the number of rehabilitation beds available for severely wounded soldiers from Afghanistan to accommodate a sharp rise in the number of soldiers who have lost one or more limbs in the conflict. The military's Headley Court rehabilitation centre, near Epsom, Surrey, recently opened a second new 30-bed extension, expanding its total capacity to 96, up from 36 beds in 2007.      Full news...

Xinhua: Conflicts and militancy had claimed the lives of 229 civilians in the militancy-plagued Afghanistan in October, spokesman for Interior Ministry Zamari Bashari said on Thursday. “Two hundred twenty nine civilians had been killed in different security incidents with majority of them in Improvised Explosive Device (IED), roadside bombings and suicide attacks alone in October...      Full news...