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Editorial comment: Afghan harvest
The US-led Nato mission is not winning against the Taliban. It needs a re-focused strategy, built around security and jobs, and it needs to break the cycle of lawlessness and corruption that is rotting the nation-building effort that has hardly begun
Helmand governor cracks down on crime
Gulab Mangal has won the respect of foreign forces by taking direct action against drugs and graft – sweeping out corrupt and ineffectual officials since his recent appointment in Afghanistan’s most troublesome province
UN confirms air raids killed 90 Afghans
The United Nations supported Afghan government claims, saying it had found convincing evidence that about 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, during US-led coalition air raids in the west of the country
UN call to abandon Afghan poppy eradication
The use of ground forces to destroy poppy crops in Afghanistan should be abandoned as too costly and ineffective, the UN’s top anti-drugs officer said
Taliban threat ‘underestimated’
A senior French general in Afghanistan has admitted that the international security force has underestimated the threat posed by the resurgent Taliban
Kabul accuses allies of civilian deaths
The Afghan government accused its Nato military allies of killing 76 civilians, most of them children, during operations against insurgents in the west of the country
Taliban creep closer to Kabul
Rebel commanders have boasted of their plan to surround the Afghan capital. And recent events seem strikingly similar to the successful mujahideen campaign to cut off the city in the early 1990s
Sarkozy defends French Afghan role
The president addressed French troops in Kabul mourning the death of 10 comrades, and told them that France’s continued involvement in Afghanistan was ‘essential to the freedom of the world’
Taliban ambush kills 10 French soldiers
Nicolas Sarkozy was on his way to Afghanistan after Taliban fighters killed 10 French soldiers in fighting near Kabul, part of the heaviest death toll Nato forces have suffered in battle since the 2001 US-led invasion
‘Taliban threat’ to Afghan drug trade
Opium traffickers are dumping their stocks on rumours that the Islamist insurgents are preparing to crack down on the smuggling, according to United Nations drug control officials
Related content and features
Comment and Analysis
The west’s goals in Afghanistan
The country is not about to become a shiny new democracy. Any political system must pay its respects to history, geography and culture, writes Philip Stephens
Forgotten fields in the battle to revive Afghanistan
Seven years after the fall of the Taliban government, many development experts concur that too little is being done to revive the country’s agricultural base
