Photo: An Afghan victim killed in a suicide bombing is transported in Paghman district of Kabul, Afghanistan on Saturday, Nov. 24, 2007. A suicide bomber targeting Italian soldiers constructing a bridge instead killed six Afghans, including three children, Afghan officials said Saturday. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

Security Incidents on November 24, 2007

A Taliban suicide attacker killed seven people, including three children and an Italian military engineer, when he blew himself up Saturday in a scenic Afghan town near Kabul, officials said. Three more Italians and nine Afghans, five of them children, were wounded in the attack in the town of Paghman, about 25 kilometres (15 miles) west of Kabul, Italian and Afghan officials told AFP.

A soldier from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) died Saturday morning from injuries sustained in a vehicle-rollover Friday night in southern Afghan province of Wardak, said an ISAF statement on Saturday.

Gun battle between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police in Afghanistan's central Ghazni province has left a dozen persons including 11 insurgents dead, a local official said Saturday. "Taliban and police came in contact in Gilan district of Ghazni province Friday afternoon, 11 rebels and one policeman were killed," Mahboubullah, the district chief of Gilan told Xinhua. Two more policemen and four insurgents sustained injuries in the firefight that lasted for some two hours, he added.

A series of clashes in southern Afghanistan left 43 suspected Taliban militants dead on the same day that a roadside bomb killed two Canadian soldiers, officials said Saturday. http://snipurl.com/1u5i8

US soldiers mistakenly shot dead an Afghani policeman late Saturday.

Security Incidents on November 25, 2007

Nearly 80 Taliban Killed in Afghan Air Strikes: Official About 65 were killed in a single air assault late Saturday in eastern Paktia province on a "large group of Taliban," said Din Mohammad Darvish, a spokesman for the local administration. Four others were killed in a second assault targeting a vehicle carrying rebels in the same region of the province, Patan district, and four in a nearby area, he said. Another three were killed in an air strike near Gardez, capital of the restive province, he said.

A bomb hit a border police convoy Sunday in southern Afghanistan, killing two policemen and injuring a third, officials said. The roadside bomb struck the police convoy in the morning in Kandahar provinces's Spin Boldak district near the Pakistan border.

Security Incidents on November 26, 2007

A roadside bomb killed four civilians on the outskirts of Kabul Monday, a police official said. The bomb was planted on a dirt track in the Charasayab area of the capital and was apparently detonated by remote control, just as a car carrying four Afghan villagers passed by, all of whom were killed.

Four Afghan soldiers were killed as a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in Afghanistan's eastern Paktia province Monday, spokesman of provincial administration Deen Mohammad Darwish said. "The Taliban rebels detonated a roadside bomb by remote control in Zarmat district today at noon, destroying a military vehicle and killing four soldiers on the spot," Darwish told Xinhua. Two more soldiers were injured in the incident, he added.

Thanks whisker for many of the links above.

REPORTS

How to Help Afghanistan people

The Taliban's northern front

While the attention of the Afghan government and the media is focused on major battles in the south of the country, the Taliban are making major headway in a northern region. Badghis, a north-western province wedged between Herat and Faryab, has been the scene of heavy fighting for the past two months, and the insurgents have occupied three of the province's seven districts. They have also established intelligence and operational networks in most district centers. This was the first of the north-western provinces to fall to the Taliban in 1997. Now the insurgents are looking to repeat their earlier success, using Badghis as a launch pad for operations in the provinces further east, which include Jowzjan, Balkh, Takhar and Badakhshan. In Faryab, directly to the north of Badghis, the Taliban have established a foothold in mountainous areas, and are trying to expand their networks there as well. The Taliban have launched several sorties in both provinces in the past two months and claim that the Bala Murghab, Ghormach and Qades districts of Badghis are largely in their hands.

Civilians killed in Australian attack on 'Taliban'

Two women and a child were killed during an Australian attack on an alleged Taliban compound of mud brick huts in which Australian commando Luke Worsley also died. On Friday afternoon, the Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said he did not believe there had been any civilian deaths. However, the website of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) subsequently revealed the bodies of the three civilians had been found. It was not until after that, on Saturday morning, that the Australian Defence Force acknowledged that deaths of the women and child. A Defence spokesman said the cause of the deaths had not been established and maintained that the attack by the Australian Special Forces was based on intelligence of bomb making in the compound.

Too few development dollars are actually spent in Afghanistan

Six years after the fall of the Taliban, the reconstruction of Afghanistan is a booming business for the private sector, but much of the work is still going to big foreign firms, say Afghan officials and development workers. The building boom is no more evident than in Afghanistan's capital, where a five-star hotel, western-style mall and revamped U.S. Embassy have sprouted up in recent years. "Construction is one of the motors of the economy," said Afghan Economy Minister Mohammad Jalil Shams. "Four years ago, Kabul was nothing like it is now." Reconstruction is also moving forward in the more secure regions of the country, such as the areas around Herat in the west and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. But much of the rebuilding is funded by foreign-aid agencies, which often award contracts to a select pool of multinational companies based outside Afghanistan. "The biggest amount, let's say about two-thirds or even three-quarters, is going through the foreign budgets," Mr. Shams explained in an interview. "They, of course, choose their contractors." Major donor nations, including Canada, spent about $1.36 billion in official development assistance to Afghanistan over a one-year period ending March 2006. But only $424 million, or about 31 per cent, had a "local impact," according to a study released this spring. Peace Dividend Trust, an Ottawa non-profit agency, conducted the study for the Afghan ministry of finance. Local impact is defined as the proportion of aid money spent locally on goods and services.

U.S. Notes Limited Progress in Afghan War

A White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan has concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration set for 2007 have not been met, even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials. The evaluation this month by the National Security Council followed an in-depth review in late 2006 that laid out a series of projected improvements for this year, including progress in security, governance and the economy. But the latest assessment concluded that only "the kinetic piece" -- individual battles against Taliban fighters -- has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said. This judgment reflects sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban's unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating. The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

Afghanistan: Fatal Military Quagmire

The American led western adventure in Afghanistan seems to be stumbling towards failure. With every passing day it appears that the Americans and their allies are stuck in a fatal military quagmire; their political and military weaknesses and limitations have been exposed by their inability to defeat an armed resistance which is intensifying daily. The western alliance has serious difficulty in harmonizing their military actions and unifying their political purpose. And the opposition to the war amongst the people of western countries involved in Afghanistan has been growing. All signs indicate that not only are the occupying powers unable to resolve the crises in their favour, but that their troubles are going to intensify in the coming years. The continuous brutalities of war and occupation, the broken promises, the corruption of the puppet regime, and people’s mounting miseries under the occupation have increased resentment towards the occupying forces and their puppet government in the country. This constant unrest and turbulence is spreading across the land, in cities and villages. Both the occupying authorities and the puppet regime realize the direness of the situation and have recognized that they are now unable to defeat their armed opposition militarily. This is why they are appealing to the insurgents for a negotiated end to the armed resistance. Some circles in the West--and also within Afghanistan--have shown interest and hope in current rumors of ongoing negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government. These negotiations however, lead nowhere. The Taliban have already rejected the possibility of negotiations and accommodations with the government unless there is a withdrawal of occupation forces. Furthermore, even if Karzai were to utilize his relations with certain elements within the Taliban and bring them under the umbrella of the puppet government, this would not end the conflict.

AFGHANISTAN: Kabul facing "unregulated" urbanisation

Gul Ahmad and his eight-member family live in a two-room shack in slums up on a hill in the north of Kabul city. Ahmad does not own a house. His monthly government salary is about US$60, half of which goes on rent. There is no electricity, drainage, tap water, school, clinic or other facility in the area. Kabul is the victim of a "rapid, unregulated and unequal" urbanisation, according to Yusuf Pashtun, the minister of urban development, and Pietro Calogero, a PhD researcher on urban development at the University of California. From an estimated 500,000 people in early 2001 Kabul's population has soared to over three million in 2007, according to the Afghan Central Statistics Office. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says over one million Afghan returnees from Pakistan and Iran have settled in Kabul. Tens of thousands of people have also flocked to the capital from across the country for various reasons, the Ministry of Urban Development said. However, the rapid population growth has not kept pace with service delivery. Only two percent of Kabul residents have regular access to electricity, while over half of them lack access to sanitation, said Mohammad Yasin Hellal, an official at the Kabul Municipality offices.