Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in the Bush administration, has been holding discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai about becoming a senior adviser to his government, U.S. officials said. (more…)

An investigation appointed by President Hamid Karzai concluded on Monday that 140 civilians, including children, were killed in the US air strikes in Afghanistan last week, a police chief said. (more…)

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington, DC was overshadowed by a controversy over another US airstrike gone astray in Farah Province south of Herat, which left at least 30 civilians dead, (and some say over 100). Angry villagers from Bala Baluk brought truckloads of bodies, most of them women and children, to Farah’s provincial capital. If confirmed, the mistaken bombardment would be the worst since last summer’s attack on the village of Azizabad, also in western Afghanistan. (more…)

History tells us that Washington is quite willing to look the other way when it comes to corruption as long as the crooks under their control do its bidding. Indeed, the very presence of US forces and money is part of the dynamic which encourages such corruption. Apparently, Mr. Karzai is no longer considered to be playing by those rules and attempts to unseat him are growing. (more…)

The US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, the Guardian has learned. (more…)

“Karzai is not delivering. If we are going to support his government, it has to be run properly to ensure the levels of corruption decrease, not increase. The levels of corruption are frightening.” (more…)

“I met with [Afghan] President Karzai, who is determined to help the young democracy survive,” Bush said. “And so he said, why don’t you hang around for a while? (more…)

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don’t try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush’s Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they — and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings — officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

That’s a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian, and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the U.S. is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and ever less powerful. The last allies from the infamous “coalition of the willing” are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians — I’ll bet you didn’t even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq — are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer. (more…)