Reuters Canada: Opposition legislators blasted the Canadian government on Monday after it emerged that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan captured children suspected of working with the Taliban and then handed them over to an Afghan security unit alleged to have abused prisoners.      Full news...

Green Left Weekly: Tough talk by the warmongers at the November 20-21 NATO conference in Lisbon, Portugal, obscured the growing opposition in the US and Europe to the nine-year occupation of Afghanistan. Ten thousand people took to the streets of London on November 20 to protest the war. Angry at the British government’s recent cuts to services and pensions, many carried “Cut war not welfare” placards.      Full news...

Reuters: The hills around dusty Nor Aaba are laced with gold but villagers have blocked work on a new mine in a dispute over jobs, a warning that Afghan plans to ramp up mining may bring trouble as well as treasure. Security and corruption problems that have made fighting the insurgency and setting up a credible central government so difficult...      Full news...

The Washington Post: The number of Afghans who are fleeing their country and seeking political asylum abroad has spiked dramatically during the past two years, a sign that people here are giving up the dream of a peaceful homeland to seek security and employment elsewhere. The increase has coincided with a sharp escalation in U.S. troop levels and has made Afghanistan the world’s top country of origin for asylum seekers worldwide...      Full news...

Wall Street Journal: A fresh controversy is threatening to further mar the already messy aftermath of Afghanistan’s fraud-ridden parliamentary elections with the emergence of a videotape that appears to show an elderly Western woman soliciting an alleged bribe to fix the results. Afghan prosecutors and electoral officials identified the woman as a Hungarian...      Full news...

The Guardian: Mark Sedwill's claim that children in Kabul are better off than those in many western cities (Children safer in Kabul than in Glasgow, says Nato spokesman, 22 November) deserves attention, not because it is accurate (which it is not) but because it illustrates a shocking disregard by senior Nato officials for the dire situation of children in Afghanistan.      Full news...

AFP: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government came under withering attack Friday, accused of trying to manipulate parliamentary election results by the political opposition and a senior vote official. The accusations threaten to ignite nationwide anger over the second Afghan parliamentary election since the 2001 US-led invasion...      Full news...

International Business Times: The U.S. Department of State is working overtime sending messages to ally capitals warning the impending release of classified documents by WikiLeaks could harm relations in what is seen as a pre-emptive move of unprecedented scale to neutralize the impact of the unveiling of embarrassing and compromising details about the inner workings of the government apparatus.      Full news...

The Washington Post: For those who have escaped Afghanistan's worst violence, some things are hard to forget: the sight of a woman's hair entangled in the mulberry branches, her legs strewn far away in the dirt. Or the sounds they heard as they hid in an underground hole, counting the bombs to pass the time, praying the American troops would leave.      Full news...

CAF: Save the Children has criticised a top NATO representative for stating that children are safer in Kabul than they are in London, Glasgow or New York. The comments came from a civilian NATO spokesperson in Afghanistan, who spoke to the BBC's Newsround programme yesterday (22 November).      Full news...

The Economic Times: The secret talks between the Afghanistan government and the Taliban to end the conflict in the country—that were “showing promise”—seem to have hit a dead end, with a revelation that the militant leader at the other end of the table was an imposter.      Full news...

The Tribune Democrat: Our present wars are not against terrorists. Iraq was clearly not a terrorist threat (or any threat to the United States), although the Bush administration tried to confuse us on this. Initiating a war against the then-ruling Taliban in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was not the right way to oppose al-Qaida, the group responsible for the terrorist bombing.      Full news...

The Guardian: Acute care for the troops most seriously injured in Afghanistan is costing the government more than 500,000 Pound every week, figures suggest. The military wards at the Birmingham NHS foundation trust receive over 2m Pound every month from the Ministry of Defence to care for the dozens of troops who need the most specialised trauma care.      Full news...

ABC News: Compass Integrated Security Solutions is owned by Peter McCosker, the son of former Australian cricket player Rick McCosker. Compass provided convoy guards for a food and fuel supplier in Afghanistan. The Armed Services Committee report last month alleged the company hired untrained guards and paid an Afghan major-general to recruit guards from the army.      Full news...

The Huffington Post: The United States is now spending nearly half a billion dollars a year in an attempt to establish the “rule of law” in Afghanistan. The central problem, according to the report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), is that corruption in Afghanistan is so widespread and entrenched that it severely undermines any effort to establish confidence in government institutions.      Full news...

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...