Afghanistan News

By Andrew Gray

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NATO and its partners need to get better at coordinating efforts to defeat a "ruthless and resilient" insurgency in Afghanistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday.

Gates said America's security depended on being able to combine military, political, and economic endeavors to stabilize failing states and he cast Afghanistan as the ultimate test of that approach.

"To be successful, the entirety of the NATO alliance, the European Union, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and other groups -- the full panoply of military and civilian elements -- must better integrate and coordinate with one another and also with the Afghan government," he said.

Five visiting scholars from Afghanistan who disappeared from the University of Washington were found Wednesday morning in Canada after crossing the border separately over the past several days, a U.S. ...

Job to do...Mr Rudd says Australian soldiers in Afghanistan have an 'important mission'. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says Australian forces will suffer more casualties in Afghanistan but troops will remain in the ...

Struggling with orders to prosecute a young detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld went online and consulted a priest for help with his concerns about the fairness of the military tribunals.

Vandeveld described a crisis of conscience over the prisoners' treatment and the ethical handling of cases that led him to quit last month.

'I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country,' he wrote in the e-mail on Aug 5. 'I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with four children, and not only will they suffer, I'll lose a lot of friends.'

Taliban militants attacked police checkpoints ringing a key provincial capital in southern Afghanistan for the second time in a week, sparking a battle in which 18 insurgents were killed, an official said Wednesday.

The late Tuesday attack came only two days after hundreds of militants gathered on the horizons of Lashkar Gah for an apparent large-scale assault on the capital of Helmand province. NATO called in fighter aircraft and 60 militants were reported killed.

The second attempt on the capital of the world's largest opium producing region would appear to signal the Taliban's interest in disrupting a major government center.

A National Guard soldier from Franklin has been killed in Afghanistan. Cpl. Scott Dimond, 39, died as a result of injuries sustained from an improvised explosive device.

A June 29, 2008 file photo shows two Afghan widows sitting on the ground after they received their monthly food ration distributed by an international aid group, in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Whenever Gary Cundiff thought about retiring from the Cherry Hill Police Department, he imagined himself "sitting on a beach, drinking a cold beer." He never saw himself in the dusty central highlands of ...

A 20-year-old U.S. Marine from Fairbanks has died in Afghanistan. Cpl. Jason Karella was part of a battalion helping train Afghan national security forces.

Let's work for peace: National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan with his Pakistan counterpart Mahmud Ali Durrani before a meeting in New Delhi on Monday.

The main purpose of British generals, it sometimes seems, is to say aloud the things that American generals think privately but dare not say in public.

Congresswoman Shelley Berkley says she'd be reluctant to send more U.S. forces to Afghanistan until the U.S. has an overall strategy for Central Asia.

Eight civilians were killed in separate insurgent attacks in Afghanistan , as the US-led coalition said it killed five Taliban rebels elsewhere in the country on Monday.

Karachi, Oct 13 : More than 400,000 Afghan nationals have arrived in Karachi, fully equipped with latest automatic weapons, MQM chief Altaf Hussain has claimed.

A British Army interpreter charged with spying for Iran is a Walter Mitty-style fantasist with grandiose visions of his own importance, a court heard today.

The U.S. coalition says its troops have killed five Taliban militants in a raid in central Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials say the death toll from a suicide attack during a gathering of tribal elders in the northwest part of the country a day earlier has risen to more than 60.

Published: Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 7:38 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 7:39 a.m. What do Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ahmad Shah Abdali, the British Raj and the Soviet ...

Tajikistan News.Net Sunday 12th October, 2008 Kabul, Oct 12 Five civilians were killed Sunday in a roadside bomb explosion in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul, an official said.

British officials covered up evidence that a Taliban commander killed by special forces in Helmand last year was in fact a Pakistani military officer, according to highly placed Afghan officials.