KANDAHAR, Afghanistan An explosive device planted by Taliban militants killed 11 civilians on Sunday in Afghanistan’s most violent province, a government official said.The blast happened on a road in the Nawzad district of Helmand Province. The province is the focus of one of the largest NATO offensives in the eight-year-old war against the Islamist Taliban.”A [...]

WASHINGTON   U.S. led forces in Afghanistan will launch a new military operation later this year to get full control of Kandahar, the former “capital city” of the Taliban, a senior U.S. official said on Friday. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, had already flagged his intention to target Kandahar following an [...]

KABUL A NATO airstrike in southern Afganistan killed at least 21 civilians, the Afghan Interior Ministry said Monday, in an incident that could inflame already heightened sensitivities over noncombatant casualties.NATO forces confirmed in a statement that its planes fired Sunday on what it believed was a group of insurgents in southern Uruzgan province on their [...]

ISLAMABAD, Guerrillas detonated two sons of school buildings in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday (21.2.2010) in the last wave of attacks carried out hard-line groups that are targeted at educational institutions, it was said officials in that country.No one injured in a predawn attack on two school buildings located in the Mohmand tribal region, near the [...]

ISLAMABAD  A son of the leader of a major Taliban faction attacking Western forces in Afghanistan was killed in a recent missile strike by a U.S. drone in Pakistan, security officials said on Friday. A pilotless U.S. drone fired two missiles into a compound owned by the Haqqani militant network on Thursday in Pakistan’s North [...]

PESHAWAR, Pakistan A bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants Thursday, underscoring the relentless security threat here even as Pakistani-U.S. cooperation against extremism appears on the upswing.The attack in Khyber tribal region came as U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke met with Pakistan’s prime minister in Islamabad, [...]

ISLAMABAD The Pakistani military confirmed on Wednesday that the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, had been captured.U.S. and Pakistani officials who declined to be identified said on Tuesday Baradar had been captured in the Pakistani city of Karachi in a raid by Pakistani and U.S. agents.”At the conclusion of detailed identification [...]

SARGODHA,Pakistani lawyers for five young Americans accused of contacting militants over the Internet and plotting terrorist attacks sought their release on bail on Tuesday, saying the prosecution lacked evidence.The students, in their 20s and from the U.S. state of Virginia, were detained in December in the central Pakistani town of Sargodha, 190 km (120 miles) [...]

NEAR MARJAH, Afghanistan  U.S. and Afghan forces ringed the Taliban stronghold of Marjah on Thursday, sealing off escape routes and setting the stage for what is being described as the biggest offensive of the nine-year war. Taliban defenders repeatedly fired rockets and mortars at units poised in foxholes along the edge of the town, apparently [...]

WASHINGTON In the early months of his presidency, President Barack Obama’s national security team singled out one man from its list of most-wanted terrorists, Baitullah Mehsud, the ruthless leader of the Pakistani Taliban. He was to be eliminated.Mehsud was Pakistan’s public enemy No. 1 and its most feared militant, responsible for a string of bombings and [...]