President Hamid Karzai

CHICAGO - When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden was devising a strategy for overthrowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and controlling Afghanistan once the U.S. left the country, said a former U.S. official familiar with the cache of notes and letters that were seized last year in the raid on the terrorist leader's compound. Bin Laden had discussed his plans with the Taliban leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, and the Haqqani network, which controls the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while discussing the intelligence.

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.

Weary as Americans are of the war in Afghanistan, it has been obvious for some time that the United States would continue to play a role in that country after Afghan forces assume full control of security in 2014. So it isn't surprising that Washington and Kabul have reached a draft "strategic partnership" agreement under which the U.S. will continue providing military, economic and other aid to Afghanistan for another decade. In principle, a continuing relationship is perfectly defensible, but it needs to be circumscribed to prevent a re-escalation ofU.S.

Senior American officials on Sunday sought to smooth over a sharply quarrelsome interlude in U.S.-Afghan relations, with the special U.S. envoy to the region describing President Hamid Karzai's administration as "a government we can work with." Speaking to reporters in Kabul, Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, pointed to Karzai's participation in a major planning conference with Afghan, American and coalition officials. "We have a good relationship with this government," said Holbrooke, who has verbally clashed with Karzai in the past.

The young lovers didn't stand a chance. In a desolate field on the edge of their village in northern Afghanistan, hundreds of men, stones in hand, closed in to carry out the mullah's death sentence, handed down after the pair eloped against the wishes of their families. "It was an act of great cruelty," said Mutasem Khan, an uncle of Abdul Qayuum, the 28-year-old man who was stoned to death this month in Kunduz province along with the village woman he had wooed, identified only as 19-year-old Siddiqa.

The Obama administration's official position on the impact Gen. David H. Petraeus will have on the war in Afghanistan is minimalist. His appointment doesn't mean a change in strategy, officials say — just more "unity of effort" in the struggle to make counterinsurgency work. After all, Petraeus was a coauthor of the strategy his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, was pursuing. But that doesn't mean there won't be real change. In a war that hasn't been going notably well, there ought to be. And Petraeus is a different general from McChrystal — not merely more practiced at politics and diplomacy but also more likely to focus on those aspects of the war. For an unofficial forecast, I turned to David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who has been an advisor to Petraeus since 2005.

The Obama administration moved with some unease Monday to recalibrate its relationship with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who not long ago likened the U.S.-led coalition in his country to an invading force. Karzai is visiting Washington this week with two dozen or more senior members of his government in tow, and the two sides are struggling to forgive, if not forget, mutual hard feelings. He was invited to take part in a working dinner Monday night with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Blair House, the official state guest house.

The sunbaked, shell-pocked ruins of west Kabul stand as silent testament to what happened the last time Afghanistan splintered along ethnic lines. The country's disastrous civil war in the early 1990s — a conflict that killed at least 100,000 people and helped set the stage for the Taliban's rise to power — reduced whole swaths of the capital to rubble, leaving scars on the landscape that reconstruction efforts have yet to erase....

Afghanistan's top law enforcement official and its intelligence chief stepped down Sunday, taking the blame for last week's attack by Taliban insurgents on a national peace assembly as President Hamid Karzai addressed the gathering. The resignations of Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and National Directorate of Security Chief Amrullah Saleh came at a time when Afghanistan, faced with an insurgency that continues to intensify, can ill afford instability in its police and intelligence ranks.

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai suggested Thursday that a speeded-up departure of Western troops is the only way to prevent a recurrence of "painful experiences" such as the sight of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead insurgents. In a statement issued by the Afghan presidential palace 24 hours after the Los Angeles Times published photos showing U.S. troops with the remains of suicide bombers and mugging for the camera, Karzai called the behavior depicted "inhumane and provocative.

On a day when President Obama personally apologized for the burning of Korans at an American-run military base, violence over the incident escalated ominously with the killing of two American troops by an Afghan army soldier during a demonstration in eastern Afghanistan. At least 13 people have been reported killed in unrest that broke out after Afghan laborers at the Bagram air base discovered late Monday that discarded Korans were being disposed of in the incinerator used to burn trash.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday sought to secure help from Pakistani leaders in facilitating peace talks with Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban leaders, while the militant group denied any interest in negotiating with an "impotent" administration. Karzai's visit to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, came amid reports that he had said in an interview that the U.S. and Afghan governments had begun secret talks with the Afghan Taliban. In recent months, U.S. officials have been meeting with Taliban envoys to discuss the establishment of a Taliban office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

Six months ago, in a moving ceremony during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, President Hamid Karzai went on Afghan television to pardon about two dozen young boys, the youngest only 8 years old, who had been caught trying to carry out suicide attacks. On Monday, authorities in Kandahar province reported that two of the children, 10-year-olds, had been rearrested last week, apparently intending again to carry out bombings. Provincial spokesman Zalmay Ayubi said the boys each had a vest full of explosives when they were detained along with three adults suspected of being militants, and that they told intelligence officers they had been recruited for suicide missions.

  On the face of it, President Hamid Karzai has every motive to do all he can to bring about talks with the Taliban. Instead, the Afghan leader is emerging as a prime impediment to urgent U.S. efforts to jump-start negotiations with the insurgents. Since the start of his second term in office, Karzai has repeatedly declared that his top priority is finding a political settlement to the bloody Afghan conflict and bringing the "disaffected brothers" back into the social and political fold.

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.

The Obama administration on Tuesday delivered what might be its toughest warning yet to President Hamid Karzai over corruption in his government through a messenger who in the past has managed to forge a rapport with the mercurial Afghan leader in times of tension. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, flew in for a one-day visit to the Afghan capital that included two sessions with Karzai, whose relations with the United States have plunged to a low not seen since last summer's fraud-riddled presidential election.

Several hundred women, many holding aloft pictures of relatives killed by drug lords or Taliban militants, held a loud but nonviolent street protest today, demanding that President Hamid Karzai purge from his government anyone connected to corruption, war crimes or the Taliban. "These women are being very brave," said the protest leader, her face hidden by a burka. "To be a woman in Afghanistan and an activist can mean death. We want justice for our loved ones!" Afghan police, in riot gear, monitored the rally as it worked its way slowly through muddy streets to the United Nations building here, but they did nothing to disrupt the event.

President Hamid Karzai demanded Wednesday that the U.S.-led NATO force refrain from nighttime raids on Afghan residential compounds, actions that are described by the Western military as a key tactic in the fight against the Taliban and other insurgent groups. The president's call came at the opening of a three-day loya jirga , or grand council, attended by about 2,000 tribal elders, community leaders and dignitaries. The Afghan capital was under virtual lockdown for the start of the gathering, after a flurry of Taliban threats against participants.

A U.S. general responsible for training Afghanistan's security forces has been relieved of his duties for criticizing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and saying the country's leaders were "isolated from reality. " Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, made the comments in an interview posted Thursday on the website Politico. A day later, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, released a statement saying Fuller had been relieved of his assignment.