Photo: Afghan demonstrators shout slogans during a protest in Jalalabad, the provincial capital of Nangarhar province, east of Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov, 11, 2007. Over 1,000 university students of Nangarhar province demonstrated seeking the death penalty for a former journalist Mohammad Ghaws Zalmai, who is accused of insulting the Quran by misinterpreting the holy book. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

Security Incidents on November 9, 2007

A district governor and his three bodyguards were killed in a Taliban attack while the US-led coalition troops claimed killing 'several Taliban' in the volatile southern zone of Afghanistan.

A British soldier was killed in a road accident in southern Afghanistan. It rolled off a bridge near the town of Sangin in Helmand province. Two others were injured in the accident.

One soldier of the NATO-led International Occupation Force was killed and another was injured when an improvised explosive device exploded in northern Afghanistan, it was announced Friday.

Security Incidents on November 10, 2007

Six U.S. soldiers, three Afghan troops killed in ambush

Security Incidents on November 11, 2007

In Helmand province, the suicide bomber detonated himself near the NATO convoy in the town of Gereshk. None of the soldiers was hurt, but three civilian bystanders were critically wounded, said Helmand police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal. [Other reports say five civilians were killed. – dancewater]

A service member with the U.S.-led coalition died of wounds suffered during a gun battle Saturday near the Tagab Valley of Kapisa province, 40 miles northeast of Kabul, the coalition said in a statement. It did not disclose the soldier's nationality.

Taliban militants also ambushed a police checkpoint near the city of Lashkar Gah in Helmand, leaving three policemen seriously wounded, Andiwal said.

In the eastern province of Khost, police patrolling on foot Saturday were hit by a land-mine blast that killed one officer and wounded two civilians, said Wazir Pacha

On Saturday, Taliban militants attacked a police checkpoint near Qalat city in Zabul province. The ensuing gun battle left two policemen dead and one wounded, said provincial highway police commander Jailali Khan. Another policeman was missing, he said.

Unknown gunmen on motorbikes shot dead six pro-government tribal elders Sunday as they headed to a prayer service in western Afghanistan, a provincial police chief said. The gunmen opened fire on the elders as they were traveling to a mosque in Herat province, Juma Khan Adil told AFP.

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REPORTS

How to Help Afghanistan people

Afghanistan Pushes Reconciliation Effort

After nearly two years of increased bloodshed, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is reaching out to Taliban militants, who have been waging battle against his government, in a renewed push for a political settlement to a conflict that increasingly seems unwinnable militarily, analysts and diplomats say. Speaking of the need for national reconciliation, Karzai has invited insurgents to lay down their arms and talk, and even join his administration. His overtures have met with responses that range from contempt to cautious consideration by various elements within the Taliban, the radical Islamic movement that U.S.-led forces ousted from power in 2001. But observers say that those differences can be exploited and that the signs of flexibility, however tentative or fleeting, are encouraging. "There's more space than there's ever been for a solution to this other than endless conflict," said Adrian Edwards, a United Nations spokesman here in the Afghan capital. The push for dialogue comes after a summer of deadly militant attacks. The country was hit Tuesday by its most devastating suicide bombing yet, which killed as many as 73 people, including more than a dozen children and six lawmakers. The Taliban has denied responsibility.

External pressures probably play a part as well in the Afghan government's decision to engage with the insurgents. Meeting last month in the Netherlands, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization declined to significantly boost its commitment of 41,000 troops in Afghanistan, more than a third of whom are American. The decision elicited a harsh response from U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Britain and Canada, whose soldiers patrol the volatile, Taliban-ridden south, are under pressure at home to cut back or withdraw their troops. British officials, diplomats and military commanders have begun emphasizing the need for Afghanistan's problems to be "resolved politically" - through talks with some insurgents. The U.S. has reacted more cautiously, but has left the door open to selective negotiations. "It's very important to be precise about this," U.S. Ambassador William B. Wood said last month in an interview on Afghan television. "The United States is not opposing the invitation of the government of Afghanistan to talk to elements of the Taliban who are willing to come in and respect the constitution and respect the authority of the democratically elected government. . . . "We also, of course, agree with [Karzai] that this can have no effect on military operations, that this cannot include people who were associated with Al Qaeda."

British forces stretched to the limit by the fight against the Taliban

On a hillside outside Kabul, Warrant Officer Harising Gurung of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Gurkha Rifles, is putting Afghan officer candidates through their paces. "How do you show your men where to aim their fire?" he bellows, an interpreter echoing him. "That's right: you point your rifle at the target!" The men have been selected purely for their ability to read and write, and acceptable physical fitness. So early in their training there is no indication whether they are suited to lead soldiers into battle against the Taliban. The trainers accept that of each intake of 120 officer recruits, at least a sixth are unlikely to complete the 23-week course, either because they are rejected as unsuitable or they walk away. As we join WO1 Gurung, his commanding officer, Major Mark Dommett, learns that the first candidate has dropped out.

Afghan bomb victims buried as toll rises to 68

Families of children killed in Afghanistan's deadliest suicide bombing buried their relations yesterday, while witnesses said some of the victims may have been killed or wounded by guards who opened fire after the blast. The death toll from Tuesday's bombing rose to 68, most of whom were children. Six MPs were among the dead. President Hamid Karzai and dozens of other leaders watched a guard of honour carry the MPs' coffins at Kabul's main airport, after they were flown by helicopter from the blast site, 95 miles north of the capital. Two Afghans were arrested in connection with the attack, which came as a crowd welcomed a delegation of MPs to a sugar factory. The provincial police chief, General Abdul Rahman Sayed Khail, said the two had ordered women to leave the blast site before the bombing, raising officials' suspicions. A deputy education minister, Abdul Ghafor Ghazniwal, said students he had visited in Kabul hospitals told him that a conservative cleric had told female students to go home because they should not be out in public. Hundreds of mourners gathered at a mosque near the site of the bombing in the town of Baghlani Jadid before moving to a hilltop graveyard. Bodies were lined up, covered with colourful carpets, as men in turbans knelt beside them.

Fifty Nine Children Killed in Afghan Suicide Attack

A suicide attack in Afghanistan this week killed 59 children and five teachers, the education ministry said Friday, taking the death toll to 75 in the deadliest attack in the insurgency-hit country. Six lawmakers and five bodyguards were also killed in the blast on Tuesday in the northern province of Baghlan. "We have got 59 school children, aged from eight to 18, and five teachers killed in that blast," education ministry spokesman Zuhor Afghan said. The children were among a crowd of people who had gathered to welcome a visiting delegation of parliamentarians to a sugar factory outside the town of Pul-i-Khumri, north of Kabul. Officials said earlier Friday that 64 people had been killed in the attack. Afghan said that after the blast Education Minister Hanif Atmar had reissued a ban on children being assembled to welcome visitors to such functions. "The students were already banned from attending those kinds of ceremonies," Afghan said. "But after this attack, the minister has ordered again that no-one can force any student to participate in those kind of ceremonies any more," he said.

Afghanistan: Student Attendance Banned After Deaths

The government yesterday banned students from public ceremonies for politicians or dignitaries after a deadly suicide blast earlier in the week killed 59 schoolboys. Five teachers and six members of parliament also were killed in Tuesday's blast in relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan in an attack that has shaken public faith in the ability of the government and foreign troops in the country to provide security. The attacker blew himself up as schoolboys lined up to greet a visiting delegation of opposition parliamentary deputies in the town of Baghlan. "We have 64 martyrs, 59 of them are children and five of them are teachers," Education Ministry spokesman Zahoor Afghan said. "There are 96 wounded. Of those, three are teachers; the rest are students."

Afghan demonstrators demand death penalty for 'Koran abuse'

More than 1,000 university students demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan Sunday to demand the death penalty for an official accused of insulting the Koran, police and witnesses said. The attorney general's spokesman, former journalist Mohammad Ghaws Zalmai, was arrested at the Pakistan border a week ago trying to flee after being accused of misinterpreting the Muslim holy book in a new translation. "Death to Ghaws Zalmai!" shouted the angry mob in the eastern town of Jalalabad, an AFP reporter in the crowd said. "We want him hanged!" "He has insulted our religion and must be killed," the group said. The demonstrators blocked a main road linking the eastern town to the capital, Kabul, for several hours. Dozens of police officers were on hand to prevent violence. The conservative parliament last week banned Zalmai from leaving the country days after the distribution of about 6,000 copies of his Dari-language translation, called "Koran-i-Pak" or "clean Koran".

UK's New Afghanistan Plan: Pay Farmers to Ditch Opium

Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism. The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication. Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the World Bank. British and allied forces are also looking at destroying drug factories inside Afghanistan, and a much better-targeted drive against the big traffickers responsible for 90% of the opium which reaches the west.

U.S. ponders future of spraying Afghan opium crops

A heated debate within the Bush administration over Afghanistan's surging opium trade could lead the United States to shelve a contentious plan to spray poppy crops with herbicide from the air, officials say. Aerial spraying, used by the United States to fight cocaine production in Latin America, is championed by counternarcotics officials in the White House and State Department as the most effective way to destroy poppies in Taliban-controlled areas and cut a key source of funding for the Islamist militants. But it has run into broad resistance from Afghan officials, the U.S. Congress and Defense Department, and European allies who fear it could backfire on efforts to win over the Afghan people, according to officials and experts involved in the discussions. Critics say spraying would give the Taliban a powerful propaganda tool among villagers devastated by a Soviet campaign that destroyed food crops with aerial defoliant. "Aerial spraying would likely have a serious detrimental effect on the counterinsurgency front," said Seth Jones of the RAND Corp, a global policy think tank based in California.

Photo Essay: Harvest Season in Helmand

Counter-narcotics officers are fighting a losing battle in Afghanistan, which last year supplied a record 93 per cent of the world’s opium, according the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. More than 50 per cent of Afghanistan’s opium was grown in the southern province of Helmand. Most of that opium is processed into heroin, feeding the habits of addicts worldwide.

AFGHANISTAN: Landslides and avalanches threaten Badakhshan locals

Over 1,000 poor people living on the steep slopes of a mountain in Badakhshan province in northeast Afghanistan are being urged by aid agencies and authorities to move as they are at risk of being killed in landslides and avalanches. A joint survey conducted by the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS), the UN and the provincial government found that seismic activity is creating widening gaps in the middle of Sia Shakh mountain in the Batash area of Faizabad city, the provincial capital of Badakhshan. Concerns are that this movement could dislodge large boulders which would cause severe damage to settlements below. "We have recommended that all residents should evacuate the area before winter," said Mohammad Othman Abuzar, president of the ARCS in Badakhshan. In winter, rain and snow typically blocks access to rural areas in Badakhshan’s Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges. In addition, heavy weather conditions would increase the probability of landslides and avalanches.