Kabol, Afghanistan News

Afghan officials said Sunday that 26 militants were killed in a gun battle with border security guards along the Pakistan frontier.

About 30 Taliban insurgents were killed in a NATO-led air strike in eastern Afghanistan after they attacked an Afghan police post, a police official and the alliance said today.

As daylight faded and the winter cold set in, soldiers huddled inside a crude wooden hut to tuck into Thanksgiving turkeys the unit itself had fattened and to give thanks for having survived a year of combat in Afghanistan.

The week before a major presidential speech on Afghanistan strategy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal told lawmakers touring the combat zone that it could take until almost 2013 to stabilize the country and allow the drawdown of U.S. forces.

Saturday, November 28, 2009 KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday marked the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Azha with a call on the Taliban to join peace talks.

The American-backed campaign to persuade legions of Taliban gunmen to stop fighting got under way here recently, in an ornate palace filled with Afghan tribal leaders and one very large former warlord leading the way.

A dozen prisoners escaped jail through a tunnel they dug from their cell to the outside in western Afghanistan, police said Saturday.

Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul earlier this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.

Moussa Khan had just been making his way back from a long day's work at a copper mine south of Kabul thinking about the son he lost a week earlier to a landmine blast.

A senior ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel has quit the cabinet after being accused of covering up details of an air strike that killed civilians in Afghanistan when he was defence minister.

Let's see the e-mails. All of them, unredacted. Post them on a website. Then we'll know who's lying and who isn't. Until Canadians see Richard Colvin's reports to Ottawa in 2006 and 2007, which he says contained explicit warnings that detainees turned over to Afghan forces by Canadian soldiers were routinely tortured, we won't know the truth.

A helicopter belonging to an international military contractor has gone missing in Afghanistan, officials said Thursday.

In this Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 file photo, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Kevin Elllenbrock, fom Cincinnati , Ohio , belonging to Alpha troop of the 3-71 Cavalry squadron, left, conducts a survey with townspeople near the town of Baraki Barak, Logar province, Afghanistan .

Unhappy with the behaviour of Pakistan over terrorism, particularly the Mumbai attacks, India [ Images ] is not too keen to have a foreign ministerial meeting with Pakistan, even though both Union Foreign Minister S M Krishna [ Images ] and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi are in Port of Spain in to attend an international summit.

The onset of winter means freezing nights, cold-related diseases and more problems for the children at an informal settlement of internally displaced people in the western outskirts of Kabul city.

Canada's former top official on Afghanistan is challenging claims that the military handed over Afghan prisoners to face torture despite warnings.

The United States is scrambling to coax NATO allies to send 10,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as part of President Obama's strategy for the region.

Germany's top soldier has resigned over a Nato air strike in Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, the defence minister said.

Barack Obama will announce next Tuesday that the US is sending 34,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to "finish the job", in an announcement that will finally bring to an end three months of deliberation.

Warrants have been signed for the arrest of two Afghan cabinet ministers on charges of theft and fraud, highlighting the extent of alleged corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai.