Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested.

A joint team from the Pentagon, US Geological Service and USAID has calculated Afghanistan's mineral deposits are worth at least $900bn.

Geological surveys discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium.

But questions are being asked about the timing of the release of information.

Read more @ BBC News

Nice going morons.

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said "This was to sabotage the operation and to show we can strike anywhere, any time we want."

I think he just forgot that Islam forbids such things like indiscriminate mass murder. Oops.

Kandahar blasts were warning to US and Nato - Taliban

Saturday's bomb attacks in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar were a warning to US and Nato forces, the Taliban say.

A Taliban spokesman said the attacks were in response to a planned major offensive by international forces against militants in the region.

At least 35 people were killed and some 57 injured in the blasts in Kandahar, Afghanistan's third largest city.

The main target appeared to be Kandahar's prison, officials said, though no prisoners escaped.

'Sabotage'

Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said the blasts were retaliation for comments made by the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, that the Kandahar region would be targeted to wipe out the Taliban.

"This was an answer to Gen McChrystal," Mr Ahmadi told the AFP news agency.

"This was to sabotage the operation and to show we can strike anywhere, any time we want," the spokesman said.

Read more @ BBC News

Well, that is what a top general says:

McChrystal's blunt warning to the West

This leaked report offers a blunt and bleak assessment of the challenges facing Afghanistan - and a timetable for possible failure.

Put simply, General Stanley McChrystal acknowledges that the US could lose this war in the next 12 months.

The US commander wants more boots on the ground.

He calls for a speeding up in the training of the Afghan security forces.

And, in the coming weeks, Gen McChrystal is expected to ask for as many as 30,000 extra US forces.

But after a deeply flawed election in Afghanistan which has yet to be resolved, there is growing opposition in President Barack Obama's own Democratic Party to the war.

Read more @ BBC News

In the villages of Afghanistan, many young men are working for the government during the week, but fighting for the Taliban at weekends.

"We don't get paid," says Gul Mohammad.

"It's voluntary - all for the sake of God. We even buy fuel for the operations ourselves. And our own ammunition and bullets."

Gul Mohammad (his name changed to protect his identity) is not what you might think of as a typical Taliban fighter.

He is educated, in his 20s, married with children and, during the week, he works in a government office.

"I'm a civil servant - that's how I support my family, with my salary and by growing wheat, here in the village.

"At the same time, I work for the Islamic Emirate (the name the Taliban use for their regime in Afghanistan). I've been fighting for the Taliban for about two years."

Read more @ BBC News

Nato's failing mission is increasingly coming to resemble the Soviets' disastrous campaign

It is deja vu on a huge and bloody scale. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, is about to advise his president that "the Afghan people are undergoing a crisis of confidence because the war against the Taliban has not made their lives better", according to leaked reports. Change the word "Taliban" to "mujahideen", and you have an exact repetition of what the Russians found a quarter of a century ago.

Like Nato today, the Kremlin realised its forces had little control outside the main cities. The parallels don't end there. The Russians called their Afghan enemies dukhy (ghosts), ever-present but invisible, as hidden in death as they were when alive – which echoes Sean Smith's recent photographic account of the fighting in Helmand and the failure of the British units he was with to find a single Talib body.

...

The big difference, so far, is that after years of remorseless losses the Soviet leadership realised the war was unwinnable. Mikhail Gorbachev tried talking to the enemy to form a coalition Afghan government (shades of the current "Do we talk to the Taliban?" debate), but when they and their western backers refused, he pulled out anyway. Does Obama have the sense to do the same? In January 1989, six weeks before the Russians completed their withdrawal, I wrote in this newspaper: "The Soviet invasion was an outrage which the majority of the world's nations rightly condemned … But the manner of their departure has been nothing but honourable … What led to the U-turn was a combination of factors: the political mistakes of their Afghan allies [in 2009 read "the corrupt Karzai government"], awareness that the entry of Soviet troops had turned a civil war into a holy crusade, and recognition that the mujahideen could not be defeated. It required a new leadership in Moscow to accept what Russians had privately known for months."

Yuri put it graphically: "It wasn't a Soviet-Afghan war. It's a civil war. A powerful country like ours can't be defeated. If we had sent in more men, it would have been outright occupation or genocide. We thought it was better to leave."

Read more @ The Guardian