Afghan Leader

For a beleaguered and increasingly isolated Afghan President Hamid Karzai, revelations of an alleged assassination plot hatched in Pakistan and involving one of his own bodyguards are another blow to the prospects for a deal to end the Afghan war. The Afghan government's accusation of a Pakistani link in the alleged assassination plot against the Afghan leader adds new tensions to a cross-border relationship already on edge. Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for Afghanistan's main intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said the ringleaders of the assassination plot, an Egyptian and a Bangladeshi, were based in Pakistan's tribal areas.

President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledged Tuesday that the assassination of the head of the Afghanistan High Peace Council would not stop them from working toward a peaceful resolution to conflict in that country. But the death of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani cast a dark shadow over the talks in New York, where Obama and Karzai were meeting for the first time since the U.S. announced its schedule for withdrawing military troops from Afghanistan. The meeting took place in the aftermath of what is believed to be a suicide attack on Rabbani, who had been working to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with the Taliban.

A new U.S. commander, Gen. John Allen, formally took control of the war in Afghanistan on Monday, inheriting a nearly decade-long conflict that has cost the lives of at least 1,667 American troops. Allen succeeds Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is leaving to head the CIA. Petraeus had been in command for only a year, hastily taking the helm after President Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal after Rolling Stone magazine reported intemperate comments by his staff about the administration's civilian leadership.

As U.S. commanders prepare to bring home 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by year's end, the drawdown is calling fresh attention to the tangle of woes confronting the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. For much of his second term, which got off to an acrimonious start in 2009 with a fraud-tainted election, the Afghan leader has seemingly lurched from one crisis to the next. But recent weeks have seen an unusual convergence of complex and, in some cases, long-festering problems.

A new dispute over civilian deaths erupted Sunday when Afghan officials claimed an errant NATO airstrike had killed 14 people, women and children among them. Western military officials said the incident in Helmand province, which took place late Saturday, was under investigation. Provincial spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said the airstrike was in apparent retaliation for an insurgent attack against a U.S. Marine base in the district of Now Zad. But he said the compound that was hit contained residential structures.

President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday denounced American soldiers who posed for gruesome pictures with Afghan victims of alleged "trophy" killings, calling the deaths cruel and tragic. Addressing the issue publicly for the first time since the graphic images first surfaced this month in the German news magazine Der Spiegel , and more subsequently were revealed by Rolling Stone magazine , the Afghan leader said the photos should stir international indignation — "if there is conscience left in the West.

NATO troops shot and killed a relative of President Hamid Karzai in a nighttime raid in the Afghan leader's home province of Kandahar, family members said Thursday. The incident is expected to exacerbate strained relations between Karzai and the Western military over civilian casualties. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this week offered a personal apology for the deaths l of nine boys in a helicopter strike by U.S. forces ast week. Karzai had earlier rejected an apology from U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top Western commander in Afghanistan, as insufficient.

In the latest salvo aimed at his Western backers, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared Tuesday that reconstruction and development units supported by the NATO force should be phased out. The president's assertion appeared to catch NATO's International Security Assistance Force by surprise. A military spokesman said no timetable had been set for the shutdown of provincial reconstruction teams, known in military parlance as PRTs. The teams, based at Western military installations, operate in 27 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, providing services such as community healthcare and educational support.

A showdown between President Hamid Karzai and his country's newly elected parliament was averted late Saturday when the Afghan leader agreed to convene the inaugural legislative session this week rather than push for a one-month postponement. Lawmakers were intent on defying Karzai's order to delay the first session, initially scheduled for Sunday, and had said they would meet at a mosque or in the street if security forces blocked them from the parliament building. The standoff pushed the Afghan leader and his government to the brink of a full-blown political crisis.

Normally, the White House cleans up the occasional gaffe by Vice President Joe Biden. But in an appearance Tuesday with Afghanistan's president, Biden himself backed away from his recent statement that the U.S. would pull out of the country "come hell or high water" by 2014. Biden, reading from notes in a soft monotone as Afghan President Hamid Karzai stood a few feet away, aligned himself with the Obama administration's more flexible plan for an Afghanistan troop drawdown, acknowledging that the U.S. might retain a presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014.