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December 27, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Fiscal Times: In its bid to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan’s teeming population, the United States has spent more than $55 billion to rebuild and bolster the war-ravaged country. That money was meant to cover everything from the construction of government buildings and economic development projects to the salaries of U.S. government employees working closely with Afghans. Full news...
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December 25, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
VOA: Growing insecurity and unemployment in Afghanistan is forcing Afghans into the capital, across borders and into the insurgency looking for work. Every day hundreds of men gather at Kote Sangi; one of the busiest intersections in Kabul. They fill the intersection waiting for work; they pass time talking and joking over cups of tea. Full news...
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December 24, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The New York Times: NATO forces, acting on apparently faulty intelligence, killed two Afghan private security guards and wounded three others in a gun battle early Friday that could lead to renewed criticisms of foreign forces by President Hamid Karzai. Full news...
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December 23, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Associated Press: U.S.-donated medicines and pharmaceutical supplies meant to keep the new Afghan army and police healthy have been disappearing before reaching Afghan military hospitals and clinics, and the government said it is removing the army’s top medical officer from his post as part of an investigation into alleged corruption. Full news...
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December 22, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Rethink Afghanistan: It’s obscene how much money we’re spending on the Afghanistan War while millions of Americans are out of work. Case in point: We’re spending about $3,000,000.00 a pop on rocket launcher systems. Each HIMARS rocket launcher system costs $3,000,000.00. HIMARS systems were in the news earlier this year after U.S. forces killed more than a dozen civilians when a rocket landed in a compound in Marjah. Full news...
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December 22, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Huffington Post: You would think there would be more of an uproar in a country with the highest maternal death rates. No other country in the world loses more women in childbirth than Afghanistan. None. Rarely has being first at something meant so much loss. It's not just the women either, lest you callously chalk it up to the inevitable argument over women's oppression in a country like Afghanistan... Full news...
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December 21, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Washington Post: The president’s review only confirmed what informed observers already know. U.S. troops can win nearly any firefight. But ultimately we are no more secure, and Afghanistan is no closer to becoming a stable and developing country. No matter how light or agile their “footprint,” U.S. and allied occupying forces end up generating as many enemies as they kill, not only in Afghanistan but in other Muslim lands. Full news...
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December 21, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Inter Press Service: The Barack Obama administration’s claim of “progress” in its war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October. But those tactical gains came at the price of further exacerbating the basic US strategic weakness in Afghanistan - antagonism toward the foreign presence shared throughout the Pashtun south. Full news...
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December 20, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Reuters: Waste and fraud in U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan while fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban may have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, a special investigator said on Monday. Arnold Fields, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said the cost of U.S. assistance funding diverted or squandered since 2002 could reach “well into the millions, if not billions, of dollars.” Full news...
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December 19, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Associated Press: At two in the morning on Sept. 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's protective detail returned to their compound drunk, with a prostitute in tow. Less than a week later, three of these same guards got drunk again, this time in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand. Full news...
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December 19, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Reuters: Afghan Abdul Wahab swings a heavy sledgehammer down onto a red hot piece of metal to mold it into a truck part, sweat dripping down a face marked with grime and soot from the fire, and with a focus rare for an 11-year-old. Wahab is one of about 1.2 million Afghan children in part or full time work, the government says... Full news...
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December 18, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Independent: During the mid-1960s, America’s goal during a crucial stage in the Vietnam war was to defeat the enemy militarily. But it had no realistic political strategy to underpin the goal, and it was this which ultimately led to failure. America’s strategy in Afghanistan is now suffering from a similar weakness. Full news...
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December 18, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Time: Night-time raids by Special Forces have become a mainstay of the U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but they have turned much of the local population in the war zone against the Western presence. The conflicting narratives over what transpired in an Oct. 3 raid in the rugged farming hamlet of Loyi Rud, near the Pakistan border, is typical of the disconnect between the NATO mission and many of those it purports to protect. Full news...
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December 16, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AFP: Four Afghan soldiers were killed in an overnight NATO airstrike in a Taliban flashpoint of southern Afghanistan, the country’s defence ministry said Thursday. “Initial reports we have indicate that an air strike last night killed four Afghan National Army soldiers who were on a patrol mission in Musa Qala district,” defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP. Full news...
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December 16, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
NBC News: A crackdown on private security firms in Afghanistan has created a power vacuum in the country’s capital city, with one security contractor saying Afghan forces have become like “kids in a candy store” as they harass and solicit bribes from expatriates and those who protect them. Full news...
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December 16, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IRIN: At 4am, Abdul Malek and his pregnant wife were in a rented car heading to Boost Hospital in Lashkargah, capital of southern Helmand Province. The couple decided to leave their home in the Sangeen District as early as possible to avoid roadblocks by pro-government forces or being seen by anti-government forces. Full news...
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December 16, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
AOL News: Rampant illiteracy among Afghanistan's army and police recruits is fueling corruption and slowing training, according to a U.S. Army official working with the nascent security forces. “Estimates range, but we think right now when we're recruiting that only 15 percent of the soldiers and policemen that we recruit are literate,” Col. John Ferrari, the deputy commander for program at NATO Training Mission Afghanistan, told reporters in a conference call. Full news...
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December 16, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Reuters: A roadside bomb killed 14 civilians and injured four when it ripped through a minibus in western Afghanistan on Thursday, a government official said, the latest casualties of escalating violence in a once-peaceful area. The blast came days after a similar homemade bomb in the south of the country killed 15 people, and six Afghan soldiers died in separate NATO air strikes that were meant to target insurgents. Full news...
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December 15, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Los Angeles Times: A Pentagon report due out this week will probably try to convince us that the war in Afghanistan is on the right track. And yet a poll released this month surveying Afghan public opinion says otherwise. Although the poll results showed some bright spots, after spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, security and day-to-day life in many regions of Afghanistan aren't improving. Full news...
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December 15, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IRIN: The war in Afghanistan shows no sign of abating and conflict-related misery such as internal displacement, lack of access to essential health services and civilian casualties, is set to rise in 2011, aid agencies and analysts warn. Full news...
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December 13, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
Xinhua: Eleven people including three policemen and eight demostrators were injured as they clashed in eastern Paktia province on Saturday, provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Safi said. “Eight demonstrators and three police sustained injuries as police opened fire to disperse the demonstrators but the demonstrators resisted and hurled stones on police in provincial capital Gardez city today,” Safi told Xinhua. Full news...
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December 13, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Huffington Post: General David Petraeus, in a rare public show of indecorum, last week suggested that corruption has been a part of Afghan culture since the country came into existence, which is a sentiment that is not only, from a historical and anthropological perspective, wholly ignorant, but one that exposes intentions on the General’s part that seem both dubious as well as misplaced. Full news...
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December 13, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IWPR: While the world may have been shocked by the image of a 20-year-old woman simply known as Aisha who had her nose and ears cut off by her father-in-law after fleeing her violent Taliban husband, Zaiba understood the risk she faced when she ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage in order to wed the man she loved. Full news...
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December 13, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Independent: The most extraordinary failure of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan is that the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars has had so little impact on the misery in which 30 million Afghans live. In a series of interviews, they paint a picture of a country where $52bn (33bn Pounds) in US aid since 2001 has made almost no impression on devastating poverty made worse by spreading violence and an economy dislocated by war. Full news...
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December 12, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The New York Times: When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons. Full news...
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December 12, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Independent: Mariana lies on her bed in the Sanga Amaj clinic in Kabul. She shares a small ward with 12 women enrolled in the clinic's 45-day residential drug rehabilitation programme. At 22, she is five months pregnant with her fourth child. Her one-year-old son lies in a separate room of the clinic. He is also addicted to opium. Full news...
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December 11, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IRIN: The financial costs and serious risks faced by Afghan asylum-seekers in making the long and arduous journey to Europe are no real deterrent when the alternatives are seen as poverty and political uncertainty at home, young Afghans told IRIN. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says 26,800 Afghans requested refugee status in 2009 - a 45 percent increase on the year before when 18,500 claims were made. Full news...
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December 10, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
RAWA News: Let me begin with the unreported news from the ground in Afghanistan exactly nine years ago, that is on November 30, 2001. The relentless U.S aerial bombing and strafing of the Kandahar area in late November and early December 2001 led to dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent civilians dying. Full news...
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December 10, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
The Associated Press: Several hundred demonstrators, some holding photographs of victims of three decades of war, shouted for justice and peace .... In recognition of International Human Rights Day, about 300 people participated in a demonstration in the capital, Kabul, organized by the Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers. Full news...
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December 10, 2010 :: RSS :: Print :: Email
IWPR: Although production is illegal, the cannabis grown in Balkh has long been prized throughout Afghanistan for its quality. Three years ago, a successful eradication campaign by international and Afghan forces virtually wiped out opium poppy cultivation in the province. Full news...
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