Afghanistan

The BBC is reporting that Afghan guerrillas deployed a suicide car bomb against a NATO military convoy in west Kabul near the parliament building Tuesday morning, killing at least 19 persons and wounding 52. Five US troops are said among the dead. MSNBC has a good video report: The enormous fireball destroyed twenty vehicles. Spokesman […]

The guerrilla forces in Afghanistan had launched new attacks on NATO and Afghanistan National Army targets in the past few days, after weeks in which they were busy making sure to get their cut of the profits from the poppy-based heroin trade. The return to the battlefield is an annual late spring and summer ritual […]

NATO forces raided the home in Nangarhar of Afghan parliamentarian Safia Siddiqi Wednesday night, in the course of which they killed her brother-in-law. In response, crowds in Nangarhar blocked a major thoroughfare in protest. The Dari Persian press says that crowds came out to demonstrate all over Nangarhar Province, chanting anti-American slogans and demanding that […]

At the Global Affairs blog, Farideh Farhi weighs in on Iranian human rights activist Emadeddin Baghi. She suggests that “it also suggests a shift of approach by Ahmadinejad’s paranoid government from the harassment of well-known human rights activists to their arrest.” Barnett Rubin weighs in on reports of the Afghanistan government negotiating with the Taliban. […]

Barnett Rubin has just posted another entry in his brilliant series on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan.

At our Global Affairs group blog, Barnett Rubin comments on an important new NYT article on how Afghanistan is going bad under W.’s tender ministrations. Rubin is perhaps our foremost Afghanistan expert and his trenchant and informed commentary is a must see.