Newsitem List

For many Canadian partisans of The Mission in Afghanistan, Canada is just fighting the good fight. Their attitudes are curiously anachronistic, as if our boys have gone off to stick it to Jerry. There are yellow-ribbon support-our-troops stickers on many cars; there's home town pride. Embedded correspondents produce little more than a stream of human interest pieces, as if Afghanistan was some enormous Katrina aftermath. You'd probably find something similar in Norway, Finland, and other Nice...

KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a weak leader in a lose-lose situation, whose political survival counts on the presence of foreign troops in the country, a senior security advisor to Karzai said Sunday, June 3....

American and NATO coalition forces in Afghanistan are killing and maiming dozens of civilians as they attempt to suppress a growing anti-occupation insurgency by loyalists of the former Taliban fundamentalist regime. In case after case, the deaths are the result of indiscriminate bombing by US/NATO aircraft in retaliation for attacks on coalition troops....

Estimates say that the Taliban control perhaps half a dozen provinces in the south – with popular support. It also proves that there is no popular support for the US occupation – only the opportunist Karzai and the former warlords support this war....

Al Jazeera has obtained a videotape showing Mustafa Abu al-Yazid presenting himself as the leader of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan....

The most outspoken female MP in Afghanistan has been expelled from parliament after saying proceedings had descended to a level "worse than a zoo". The views of Malalai Joya, in a television interview, outraged fellow parliamentarians, who immediately voted to suspend her from the house for the rest of her five-year term. Some even demanded that she should be brought before a court for defamation and stripped of the right to stand again as a candidate....

ISLAMBAD — The standoff of four Pakistani policemen taken hostage by madrassah students at the Red Mosque in Islamabad reached a dead-end Saturday, May 19, after the government insisted on the unconditional release of all hostages despite initial agreement to some of the students' demands....

Pakistan’s attempts to tighten security along its border have led to a series of clashes with US-occupied Afghanistan. On Thursday, for the second time this week, Pakistani forces in the Kurram tribal agency fired mortars and rockets at positions in the adjacent Afghan province of Paktia. Four Afghan troops were killed, while US aircraft reportedly buzzed the skies overhead....

From roadside bombs to suicide attacks, northern regions are seeing the same tactics the Taleban employ in the south....

The Taliban-led opposition to the occupation continues to grow, though little has changed in the Taliban's vision of the future, which is as bleak as its past for Graham Usher, who interviews a more fortunate comrade of Dadullah in Hawed, Pakistan...