PAKISTAN: Mullahs Fight Math in Madrassas

The government has launched a programme to modernize religious schools so that students get a basic education in such subjects as math, English and even computers.

Residents of Razed Afghan Village Dispute U.S. Case for Destruction

The commander of U.S.-NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. James Terry, asserted last month that the homes systematically destroyed by U.S. forces across three districts of Kandahar province as part of Operation Dragon Strike in October and November "were abandoned, empty and wired with ingenious arrays of bombs".

Deferring to Petraeus, NIE Failed to Register Taliban Growth

Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.

Evidence of 2002 Taliban Offer Damages Myth of al Qaeda Ties

The central justification of the U.S.-NATO war against the Afghan Taliban - that the Taliban would allow al Qaeda to return to Afghanistan - has been challenged by new historical evidence of offers by the Taliban leadership to reconcile with the Hamid Karzai government after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001.

AFPAK: Polio Rises With Border Flows

Pakistan became the world’s top polio-endemic country in 2010 and is now the biggest source of the polio virus to countries declared polio-free many years ago. Due to the unrestricted movement of children along the long and porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, both countries have begun to put in place a joint strategy to stem the tide of the ailment.

PAKISTAN: Militancy Takes On a Female Face

On December 25, a female suicide bomber, not more than 18 years of age, blew herself up killing at least 47 people and injuring 105 others.

AFPAK: People Turning Against Taliban

The Taliban once regarded as true jihadists here are rapidly losing popularity in response to their ongoing targeting of mosques, schools and innocent people.

Afghanistan Solutions Heighten Central Asian Crisis

International efforts to replace poppy fields with food crops and improve living standards in impoverished northern Afghanistan seem undeniable progress in the conflict-ridden country. But some experts worry that these efforts will have unintended negative consequences for the nation’s neighbours, where water and energy resources are sparse and tensions run high.

Oil Leak, Haiti, Afghanistan Dominated 2010 U.S. TV News

The disastrous BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, and the continuing war in Afghanistan comprised the major news stories in 2010, according to the latest annual review of network news coverage by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO

The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.

AFPAK: Give Us This Day Our Weekly Drone

Hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders have fallen to drones since the first attack that killed Taliban leader Nek Muhammad in South Waziristan. Now many local people welcome drones.

AFPAK: Bombed Schools Feed Illiteracy, And Militancy

"I have now hired a house in the adjacent Dera Ismail Khan district where my three daughters are studying in a school," says Jamil Shah Wazir of the militancy-riddled South Waziristan. Getting girls to school is a real struggle here.

Peace Must Be “Afghan-led and Afghan-owned”, Diplomats Say

The U.S. move to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan may be seen in Washington as the only effective and viable strategy to stabilise the country, but not everyone in the diplomatic community here at U.N. headquarters agrees.

US Stepping Up Pressure on Pakistan

This week's leak to the New York Times of a proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids against Afghan insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against those sanctuaries.

Gains in Kandahar Came with More Brutal U.S. Tactics

The Barack Obama administration's claim of "progress" in its war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October.

An Overeager Petraeus Ignored Danger Signs on Taliban Imposter

The revelation that the man presumed to be a high-ranking Taliban leader who had met with top Afghan officials was an imposter sheds new light on Gen. David Petraeus's aggressive propaganda about the supposed Taliban approach to the Hamid Karzai regime.

U.S.: Blue-Ribbon Panel Finds AfPak Strategy at “Critical Point”

The administration of President Barack Obama should begin shifting to a counterterrorism (CT) strategy requiring many fewer troops in Afghanistan if its pending review finds that the current counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy is not working, according to a new report by a bipartisan task force of 25 prominent analysts and former top foreign policy officials.

Q&A: “There Is No War on Terrorism”

"The U.S. intentionally confuses al Qaeda with other groups around the world fighting for their independence or liberation, but it's [just] a convenient way to whip up support and get people very afraid," says author and journalist and Reese Erlich.

U.S. Slides on Corruption Index

Iraq and Afghanistan rank near rock-bottom in an index of corruption in 178 countries that found that nearly three- quarters of the countries surveyed showed serious corruption problems.

Afghan Women Demand Liberation, Not Lip Service

Afghanistan will not know peace until women are equal participants in negotiations, stresses a report released Thursday by the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

AFGHANISTAN: Do Peace Talks Have Traction?

Reports over the past 10 days of high-level talks between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and senior representatives of the Taliban have spurred growing speculation here about whether Washington is looking for a speedy exit to the longest foreign war in its history.