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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

Philip Stephens

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

Afghanistan reconstruction

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

Editorial comment

Opium trafficking in Afghanistan

While the small poppy farmer escapes the attentions of the authorities, the big drug barons do not. Karzai must end their impunity