Afghan Security Forces

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai, perhaps best known in the West for periodic well-aimed jabs at his NATO allies, is embarking on a determined charm offensive as he faces the prospect of seeing troops and, perhaps even more crucially, dollars slip away from his country. The Afghan government has long regarded the NATO alliance and its partners as a seemingly bottomless source of funding. But aides to Karzai say the president is heading to a landmark NATO summit in Chicago this weekend with a keen awareness of the financial pinch being felt from London to Tokyo.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai, perhaps best known in the West for periodic well-aimed jabs at his NATO allies, is embarking on a determined charm offensive as he faces the prospect of seeing troops and, perhaps even more crucially, dollars slip away from his country. The Afghan government has long regarded the NATO alliance and its partners as a seemingly bottomless source of funding. But aides to Karzai say the president is heading to a landmark NATO summit in Chicago this weekend with a keen awareness of the financial pinch being felt from London to Tokyo.

Insurgents took aim Sunday at Afghanistan's security forces, ambushing an army bus in the capital, Kabul, and storming an army recruitment center in the north of the country. At least eight Afghan soldiers and police were killed in the two attacks. The Afghan police and army are considered key to the West's exit strategy, which calls for the nation's forces to take over security responsibilities across the country in the next three years. That plan was endorsed at a NATO conference last month and again last week in a White House assessment of the Afghan conflict.

KABUL, Afghanistan - A brazen daytime assassination on Sunday offered a grim reminder of stymied progress in a key part of NATO's effort to wind down the Afghan war: peace talks with the Taliban. Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan government body set up to conduct negotiations with the militant group, was shot and killed while traveling by car through the Afghan capital, police said. Coming less than nine months after the assassination of the head of the High Peace Council, the killing cast yet more gloom over Western-backed efforts to bring the insurgents to the bargaining table.

Stepping into an intensifying debate in Washington, the new head of NATO said Monday that more allied troops are needed in Afghanistan to help train the country's security forces. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who took over Aug. 1 as NATO's secretary-general, said he agreed with an assessment last month by Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, who emphasized the need to secure Afghan cities. "We have to do more now, if we want to do less later," Rasmussen said during a speech in Washington.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and San Diego -- Security for Afghan villagers remains precarious in the Marja district of Helmand province, where U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers mounted a massive assault in February to oust the Taliban from control, according to the Marine general who led the assault. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson said late Sunday that while there are hopeful signs in Marja, with Afghan police patrolling and farmers signing up to grow crops other than opium poppy, the mission's success or failure may not be known for months.

War's violence claimed the lives of more than 2,400 Afghan civilians in 2009, the United Nations said Wednesday, the largest annual death toll for noncombatants since the U.S.-led invasion eight years ago. But the proportion of civilian deaths attributed to Western and Afghan security forces dropped sharply in the wake of strict new rules of engagement issued in the summer by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces...

The message could hardly have been clearer, or more brutally delivered: the beheaded corpse of a respected provincial politician, dumped by the roadside. Jawad Zehak, whose decapitated remains were recovered Tuesday, was the leader of the provincial council in Bamian, perhaps the most peaceful of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. It is one of seven areas across the country where the Afghan police and army are supposed to begin taking over security responsibility next month. Afghanistan's main intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, swiftly blamed insurgents for Zehak's abduction and killing, and declared it part of a deliberate pattern of intimidation in the areas slated for security transition.

One by one, each smartly uniformed member of the class stood at full attention, brandished a graduation certificate and uttered the ritual call-out: "I will serve Afghanistan!" But for the first time, the proud group of newly commissioned army officers was made up entirely of women. The 29 second lieutenants were the first female recruits to complete a 20-week officer-candidate program mentored by U.S. troops. Their graduation ceremony this week at a sprawling training facility on Kabul's eastern outskirts marked a milestone for Afghan security forces and spoke volumes about the complex interplay here of gender roles and security demands.

Afghan security forces seized 262 pounds of heroin in a vehicle in the Paghman district near Kabul, the official Bakhtar news agency said Monday. The agency, monitored in Islamabad, said the drug had been brought from Pakistan.

There are days here, in these war-haunted times, when it seems that death might come in any guise, and from any direction. From a bomb buried in the earth. From the sky. From a rusted motorbike haphazardly parked in a busy marketplace, with no one paying it and its deadly package any notice. Or from a soldier who breaks down doors in the dead of night, with murder in mind. Despite a shared sorrow and bewilderment, a jarring disparity has emerged in the way Americans and Afghans view the killings of 16 villagers in rural Kandahar province, allegedly at the hands of a lone U.S. Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales.

Suspected insurgents fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades Tuesday at a government delegation offering condolences to villagers in a district of Kandahar province where a U.S. soldier is accused of going on a shooting rampage. No one in the delegation, which included two brothers of President Hamid Karzai and a number of high-level officials, was injured, but a member of the Afghan security forces was killed and another was wounded, witnesses and officials said. Members of the delegation, which also included the Afghan army chief of staff, a Cabinet minister and the Kandahar governor, had just emerged from a mosque in Panjwayi district when gunfire erupted, officials said.

  Britain, the United States' staunchest ally in Afghanistan, has suffered its worst single battlefield loss in six years, testing a strained coalition's commitment to ensure that Afghan security forces can take over the task of fighting the Taliban. Six British troops were presumed dead after a massive blast destroyed their heavily armored vehicle in Helmand province, Western military officials said Wednesday. The fatalities mark a grim milestone, pushing British deaths in the course of the 10-year war above 400, a toll second only to American losses of more than 1,900 troops.

What is the logic behind the Obama administration's policy toward Afghanistan? On its face, it makes no sense. In 2009, President Obama ordered a major buildup of forces to counter alarming gains by the Taliban and the Haqqani network. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan increased from 34,000 when he took office to nearly 100,000 in 2010. To oversee the buildup he sent two top Army generals, Stanley A. McChrystal and then David H. Petraeus, to design and implement a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan that the president signed off on. In June of last year, however, Obama announced that 32,000 "surge" troops would come home by September 2012 - earlier than Petraeus and his superiors judged prudent.

The former Taliban commander was furious, chain-smoking, scowling and scattering ashes on a plastic mat spread on the dusty ground. He deeply regretted, he said, that he had defected to the Afghan government side this year with nearly two dozen of his men, one of whom has already been hunted down and killed in revenge. And he did not believe that his former comrades in arms in the insurgency were ready to give up the fight for their traditional heartland. With this year's fighting season drawing to a close as the harsh Afghan winter sets in, U.S. commanders have declared that the "surge" ordered by President Obama two years ago achieved its aims.

The wartime alliance between Afghanistan and the United States in the last decade has been fraught with suspicions over sharply differing goals and tactics. It is becoming clear that any postwar partnership to prevent a Taliban comeback is likely to be just as problematic. Despite compelling common interests, stark differences already have emerged between Washington and the Afghan government about the military landscape after 2014, when most U.S. combat troops are gone and Afghan security forces are in charge of keeping the country safe.

Fighting in Afghanistan left at least 24 insurgents and five Afghan security forces dead, officials said. In eastern Paktika province, along the Pakistan border, five soldiers and 18 militants were killed when insurgents attacked an Afghan army post, the U.S.-led coalition said. Clashes also continued in Helmand province, where police on Saturday killed six Taliban militants.

Insurgents with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launched a sustained attack Thursday against a U.S. base in Kandahar. No coalition casualties were reported, but the hours-long confrontation demonstrated the Taliban's continuing ability to strike in the heart of Afghanistan's main southern city. The attack, which began in midafternoon and stretched into the evening, targeted a joint civilian-military installation housing what is known as a provincial reconstruction team, or PRT, mainly devoted to development projects.

  Imperial soldiers once patrolled its battlements. Treasure lay heaped in vaulted storerooms. Prisoners languished in its depths; princes plotted the course of empires. But by late in the last century, the mighty fortress overlooking this western Afghan city had fallen into ruin. Built on a plateau thought to have been a redoubt of Alexander the Great, the Citadel of Herat has been brought back to life. Reopened last month as a museum and cultural center after a painstaking refurbishment, the 15th century structure serves as a poignant reminder of past glories in a country beaten down by decades of war and deprivation.

The young U.S. Army sergeant had lost nearly all the blood in his body by the time he was rushed into a military field clinic at this dusty base in eastern Afghanistan. As his distraught unit mates converged on the surgical suite, some of them weeping, the entire camp pitched in for an emergency blood drive. But military doctors' frantic efforts were futile, and Sgt. John A. Lyons, a 26-year-old from New Jersey who had studied Latin in college, died of the wounds he had suffered in a Taliban ambush.