When we talk about Afghanistan, the first picture we get is Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But Afghanistan has a different face too. It is one of the richest nations as far as minerals are concerned.
Afghanistan rowed back on Saturday from a total ban on media broadcasts of disturbing images from insurgent attacks or live pictures of security operations.
Pakistan's unprecedented crackdown on its homegrown Taliban may have weakened the militants but the insurgency is still a threat to the unpopular U.S.-backed government.
Pakistan said a senior Pakistani Taliban commander with al Qaeda links may have been killed when helicopter gunships attacked a building he was in, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday.
Iraqi politicians made their last pitches to voters on Friday before a parliamentary poll that al Qaeda-linked militants have sworn to derail with violence.
The United States will deliver 1,000 laser-guided bomb kits to Pakistan this month and is considering additional arms sales to help the Pakistani air force crack down on insurgents in the Afghan border region.
Four Afghan civilians and one foreign soldier were killed on Monday when a suicide car bomber hit a convoy of NATO-led troops near the southern city of Kandahar, officials and witnesses said.
A senior member of al Qaeda's Yemen wing who the Yemeni government said it killed has emerged on an internet forum, threatening to carry out attacks in the United States.
The number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan has reached 1,000, an independent website said on Tuesday, a grim reminder that eight years of fighting has failed to defeat Taliban insurgents.
Al Qaeda aims to infiltrate Central Asia to train militants and turn the ex-Soviet region into a zone of unrest, a U.S. envoy said on Saturday.
A son of the leader of a major Taliban faction attacking Western forces in Afghanistan has been killed in a missile strike by a U.S. drone in Pakistan, security officials said on Friday.
Many Iraqis released by U.S. forces after being detained for suspected links to Sunni insurgents have been killed by tribes seeking revenge or are being driven back into the arms of al Qaeda.
U.S. Marines are making steady progress in one of the biggest NATO offensives in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001, but areas infested with roadside bombs are bogging them down, a spokesman said on Monday.
Chances of success for a NATO offensive in the last big Taliban bastion in Afghanistan's Helmand province may depend on ensuring the operation doesn't repeat the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004.
