Afghan Police

Kabul - American and Afghan military forces rescued an American doctor early Sunday who had been kidnapped by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, military authorities announced. The doctor, identified as Dilip Joseph, an American citizen working for a nonprofit based in Colorado, was rescued along with two Afghan doctors and an Afghan driver, according to international forces and local Afghan officials. The doctors and driver were abducted by gunmen Wednesday afternoon after they had visited a rural clinic in the village of Jad Dalak in the Sorobi district of Kabul province, east of the capital, said Hazrat Mohammed Haqbin, the district governor.

NAQI KHAIL, Afghanistan - The minivan taxi crossed a river, then jostled and bumped on an unpaved road. The border policeman sat with the ordinary passengers; his buddy lay in a coffin fastened to the roof, "Praised be God for Zabiulla" written on the wood. The others got off at a bus station, and the taxi, the policeman and the coffin continued along the main road in northeastern Afghanistan's Kapisa province. In each village they stopped at, nobody knew the dead man. It was 4 p.m. when the taxi pulled up next to the Naqi Khail primary school and a store with a rusty metal machine that churned out vanilla soft-serve ice cream.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - Testimony in the preliminary hearing for U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales wound up Sunday night with a senior Afghan police investigator saying he did not believe Bales could have killed 16 people in two separate villages by himself. Maj. Khudai Dad, chief of criminal techniques for the Afghan police in the province of Kandahar, said he walked the area between three housing compounds hit by a gunman on the night of March 11 and doubted that any single person could have killed so many people in such a wide area in the space of three hours.

KABUL, Afghanistan - After years of comings and goings, almost everything about leaving Kabul is familiar: the ride through dusty dawn streets, skirting past old men on bicycles and boys in horse-drawn carts, the long airport trudge through four luggage screenings and pat-downs, the way the plane's wingtips seem to almost scrape the jagged peaks surrounding the city. Everything is the same - but the knowledge that this is the last time. Kabul has been home for more than three years, but on this trip my assignment as a foreign correspondent here is ending, and I will join the American exodus from its long war in Afghanistan.

As a senior in high school, Scott E. Dickinson liked to daydream about owning a shiny red Ferrari and real estate with sweeping views of the Southern California coastline. But his dreams did not include a college education. "He was just floating through life," recalled his mother, Pauline Dickinson. "He didn't even want to get up in the morning, let alone get dirty or sweat or suffer under any circumstances. " Dickinson got lots of tough love at home. But his parents were so concerned that they prayed he would find a direction in life.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Across Afghanistan, at combat outposts in the wind-scoured desert and the jagged mountains, it was daily routine: A small group of Afghan police or soldiers and Western ground troops would gather their gear and set out together on a foot patrol or a village visit. Until now. In its most sweeping response yet to "insider" shootings that have seen 51 Western troops killed this year by Afghans in uniform, the NATO force is halting, at least temporarily, joint patrols and other small-unit ground operations by Afghan and foreign troops unless specifically approved by a high-ranking regional commander, military officials said Tuesday.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In a disastrous day for the NATO force in Afghanistan, four American troops were gunned down Sunday by Afghan police, a U.S. airstrike killed eight Afghan women foraging for fuel on a rural hillside, and military officials disclosed that a Taliban strike on a southern base had destroyed more than $150 million worth of planes and equipment - in money terms, by far the costliest single insurgent attack in 11 years of warfare....

KABUL, Afghanistan - American special operations forces have suspended the training of new recruits to an Afghan village militia until the entire 16,000-member force can be rescreened for possible links to the insurgency, U.S. officials said Sunday. The move is the latest repercussion from a series of "insider" shootings carried out by members of the Afghan police and army against Western troops. Forty-five NATO service members have been killed in such attacks this year, and the U.S. toll in August alone was 12 dead.

KABUL, Afghanistan - With the tempo of "insider" shootings accelerating, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Afghanistan for talks on the phenomenon of Western troops dying at the hands of Afghan allies, U.S. and Afghan officials said Monday. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey flew into the sprawling Bagram air base north of Kabul and was holding consultations with senior U.S. and Afghan commanders and government officials. Hours before his arrival, another American service member was killed in an insider shooting, the 10th such U.S. death this month.

KABUL, Afghanistan - They've been cut down while working out in makeshift gyms, as they bedded down for the night in remote combat outposts, after shrugging off heavy packs and sweat-soaked body armor when they returned from patrol. At the height of this dusty summer, American troops are dying at unprecedented rates at the hands of their Afghan allies. And both sides are struggling to explain why, even as they search for ways to stem what are known in military parlance as "insider" attacks.