Vancouver Free Press: The 101 Canadians who have been killed in Afghanistan believed that they were serving our country, and for that they deserve our respect and gratitude. We must not forget or trivialize their ultimate sacrifice. But there is an awful truth that we tend to avoid, a truth that must be proclaimed if we are to end the killing on all sides of that bloody conflict. The truth is that those 101 brave Canadians died for nothing. Their lives were taken away from them, and from their loving families and friends, for a lie. More accurately, they died for a series of lies.      Full news...

Quqnoos: DRUG smugglers are using the cars of high-ranking Afghan officials to traffic drugs through the country, the Ministry of Anti-Narcotics has said. Officials are trying to break the smugglers network, a ministry spokesman said.      Full news...

The Independent: The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.      Full news...

This deliberate fostering of culture of impunity was based on political compromises as the President did not want to offend warlords and criminals by punishing the members of their syndicates. This approach of the government offered the most conducive medium for corrupt officials and culprits to get protected in the criminal networks and safe havens. Criminal warlords, human rights violators, kidnappers, and notorious commanders who are currently in the state institutions or have their members of their networks actively working in key government positions further deepened this problem.      Full news...

Chicago Tribune: Ramzan Bashardost drives a beat-up black 1991 Suzuki with a cracked windshield and often sleeps in a tent—habits hardly befitting a respected member of parliament. "In the Afghan administration now, money is the law," said Bashardost, the former planning minister. "When you have money here, you can do anything. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where corruption is legal." Not exactly legal, but definitely rampant. Increasingly, corruption is driving a wedge between the government and the Afghan people, who are growing more and more resentful of their leaders, experts say.      Full news...

AmericanFreePress.net: The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons. Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.      Full news...

BBC: Although millions of Afghan children have gone back to school since the fall of the Taliban, full time education remains a distant dream for many. Continuing poverty means many children, including some as young as six, are forced to work to help their families. Twelve-year-old Izatullah was pushing a cart containing heavy sacks of flour. "I take this load to another shopkeeper. They will give me 10 or 20 Afghanis (21 pence or 42pence). I am poor, I don't have bread. My father is an old man. I earn our living," he said.      Full news...

IWPR: Residents of Mazar-e-Sharif suffer ill effects of polluted environment caused by urban expansion on land seized by warlords. A decades-old land grab has left Mazar-e-Sharif and much of the rest of Balkh province with little or no open areas or green spaces. While the government tries to cope with the nearly impossible task of reclaiming the land, residents are suffering the ill effects of living in a polluted environment devoid of trees and other vegetation. Mazar-e-Sharif has been losing its open spaces for decades, ever since the 1990s free-for-all that is known as the “era of the warlords”.      Full news...

King’s Journalism Review: A journalism student was sentenced to 20 years in an Afghani prison. He is charged with downloading and distributing an article he found online that criticized the rights of women in Islam. Yaqub Ibrahimi vividly remembers the day his brother, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was arrested. It was around ten in the morning on October 27, 2007. Four guards from Afghanistan’s national security service came to their small apartment, arrested Parwez and left. The security officers took Parwez to the Mazar-i-Sharif Prison and after a four-minute trial, sentenced him to death on January 22, 2008.      Full news...

Canada Free Press: If you want to know what life was like in the seventh century, Afghanistan is the place to go. It is largely devoid of anything passing for modernity, by which we mean medical facilities, schools, roads, and such. Never mind the telephones and other detritus of modern life, the conversations have not changed in centuries. The only reliable element of Afghanistan’s economy is poppy cultivation for the opium trade which the CIA estimates generates “roughly $4 billion in illicit economic activity.” This is another way of saying that none of this money reaches what passes for a central government except in the form of bribes. It is a major source of funding for the Taliban.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): The beggars of Hazrat Ali (ra)’s shrine in Balkh who earn a little money with a lot of difficulties, have to pay 30 to 40 Afghanis daily to the police of the shrine. The police officers who are not satisfied from the monthly wages they get from the government, say that 5000 Afghanis in a month is too less to fulfill their needs and so they are forced to take bribe from beggars. On average, everyday almost 250 beggars enter the Mazar-e-Sharif Shrine and each earns a little more or less than a 100 Afghanis everyday. The police officers take 30 Afghanis on average from each beggar and this makes 220,000 Afghanis ($4500) per month.      Full news...

AFP: Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country, with security, unemployment and high prices dominating concerns, according to an annual mood survey released Tuesday. Thirty-eight percent of respondents this year said Afghanistan was moving in the right direction, compared with 42 percent in 2007 and 44 percent in 2006.      Full news...

The Independent: It is time to face facts in Afghanistan: the situation is spiralling downwards, and if we do not change our approach, we face disaster. Violence is up in two-thirds of the country, narcotics are the main contributor to the economy, criminality is out of control and the government is weak, corrupt and incompetent. The international coalition is seen as a squabbling bunch of foreigners who have not delivered on their promises. Although the Taliban have nowhere near majority support, their standing is growing rapidly among some ordinary Afghans.      Full news...

Quqnoos: The head of the law enforcement commission has called the new attorney-general and the commerce minister before Parliament to answer allegations of corruption. But Commerce Minister Mohammad Amin Farhang, whose ministry is accused of widespread corruption, failed to turn up to Parliament.      Full news...

Spiegel: It is one of the last mild summer evenings in Kabul. A group of Western diplomats and military officials is meeting for a private dinner in one of the embassies in Wazir Akbar Khan, an upscale residential neighborhood. Almost all of the 12 envoys and generals represent countries that have troops stationed in southern Afghanistan and the mood is somber. "Nothing is moving forward anymore, and yet we are no longer able to extricate ourselves," one of the ambassadors says over dessert, a light apple pastry. He gives voice to that which many here are already thinking: "We are trapped."      Full news...

The Huffington Post: America's local allies in Afghanistan, the politicians and warlords who overthrew Taliban in 2001, are up to their turbans in the heroin trade. Drug money is the blood that courses through Afghanistan's veins and keeps the economy limping along. The U.S.-installed Karzai regime in Kabul propped up by US and NATO bayonets has only two sources of income: cash handouts from Washington, and the proceeds of drug dealing.      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): The Police Chief accused the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) of supporting criminals. Atmar said, “One of the main problems of the police is that the police arrests the dangerous criminals but then the Human Rights supports them; when a police is killed no one asks about him or the reason of his killing.”      Full news...

PAN (Translated by RAWA): Tens of residents of Sar-e-Pul accused Payinda Mohammad in the “Complaints Hearing Commission” of the Parliament, the representative of Sar-e-Pul in the parliament, for rape, murder, seizure of land and other crimes and claimed that Younis Qanooni, Speaker of the Parliament, supports this MP; but the other side called the allegations “false”. About nine months back, Payinda Mohammad’s son had also raped a 12-year old girl in Sar-e-Pul.      Full news...

The Financial Times: It shows he (General Ali Shah Paktiawal) owns four houses, one apartment, three farms, eight commercial properties and two factories in Dubai - a $2m (£1m, €1.5m) property portfolio far beyond the means of a senior policeman in Afghanistan. Western and Afghan security officials are adamant that Kabul's top cop is also one of its top criminals, profiting handsomely from the gangs who extract huge ransoms from the families of the wealthy Afghans.      Full news...

TomDispatch.com: Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war -- close to $36 billion a year -- but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief found that "a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries." The economy is so underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the country's gross domestic product.      Full news...

New York Times: A draft report by American intelligence agencies concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban’s influence there, according to American officials familiar with the document. The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence from militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan.      Full news...

Quqnoos: Residents in Kabul have accused former militia commanders of snatching up the capital’s green spaces illegally and building large houses on them. The city council has confirmed that ex-jihadi commanders forcefully seized green land in the city and it promised to prevent future illegal land-grabs.      Full news...

New York Times: The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in interviews last week. Neither the Drug Enforcement Administration, which conducts counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, nor the fledgling Afghan anti-drug agency has pursued investigations into the accusations against the president’s brother.      Full news...

Telegraph.co.uk: In the diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the deputy French ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is also quoted as saying that the coalition's military presence is "part of the problem not the solution". In the cable, dated Sept 2 and published in the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîne, Sir Sherard is quoted as having said that "the current situation is bad. Security is worsening, but also corruption, and the current government has lost all credit."      Full news...

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...

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...

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...