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The United States will halt its military withdrawal from Afghanistan and instead keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of President Obama’s term in 2017, Mr. Obama will announce on Thursday, prolonging the American role in a war that has now stretched on for 14 years. The current American force in Afghanistan of 9,800 troops will remain in place through most of 2016 under the Obama administration’s revised plans, before dropping to about 5,500 at the end of next year or in early 2017, senior administration officials said. Some of the troops will continue to train and...

SORKHROAD, Afghanistan — At least three times a week, Malaika hikes up the mountain, past mulberry and pine trees, to a clearing where she can get cellphone reception. She calls her family to reassure them that the Islamic State fighters have not come for her yet. Below, her village — Bagh, in the Maamand Valley in eastern Afghanistan — has been gutted by the Islamic State militants who overran it three months ago. Most of the houses have been looted, burned or simply taken over by the fighters, and the 80 or so families that lived there have been forced...

New data from the United Nations on the military advances by a resurgent Taliban is alarming for what it says about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan — and what it suggests about the American military’s honesty about what is happening there.The fall of Kunduz two weeks ago was a startling sign of how the Taliban has reasserted itself, wresting a northern city from the control of the NATO-trained Afghan Security Forces, who are not doing a great job of showing they are up to defending their country. The United Nations data, reported by The Times on Monday and backed...

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban insurgency has spread through more of Afghanistan than at any point since 2001, according to data compiled by the United Nations as well as interviews with numerous local officials in areas under threat. In addition, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan over the past two weeks has evacuated four of its 13 provincial offices around the country — the most it has ever done for security reasons — according to local officials in the affected areas. The data, compiled in early September — even before the latest surge in violence in northern Afghanistan —...

Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl could have had a desk waiting for him in the Pentagon in the summer of 2014 when the Army asked him to figure out why Bowe Bergdahl deserted his combat outpost in Afghanistan. Dahl passed on the offer. He thought he had a better chance of finding the truth by taking his work back to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, where he was the deputy commanding general of its I Corps headquarters. That decision was the first step in a two-month investigation at JBLM during which he interviewed 57 people and pulled together a team of 22 soldiers...

<p>Casualties were reported in the explosion, which rocked central Kabul at around 9:15 a.m. local time, the source said.</p> <p>"A few civilians were injured, but we do not have any reports of any death," Afghan ministry of interior spokesperson Najib Danish said.</p>

<p>The attorney defending Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl says that the officer who presided over his Article 32 hearing last month is going to recommend that he face a lower-level court martial, thus sparing him a long prison sentence.</p> <p>An Army officer is recommending that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a lower-level court martial and be spared the possibility of jail time for leaving his post in Afghanistan, his lawyer said Saturday.</p>

A retired military colonel, now a Fox News analyst, has dropped a bombshell in the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army sergeant held for five years by the Taliban who is charged with desertion and misbehaving before the enemy. Retired Col. David Hunt says Bergdahl actually joined the Taliban, and recordings prove it. Further, he notes the U.S. government has failed to make use of that evidence in the case against Bergdahl, who was returned to the U.S. in a stunning trade for five top terrorists held at Guantanamo. Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show, Hunt said the...

He has also benefited from a powerful alliance with the Pakistani military spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, the original sponsor of the Afghan Taliban insurgency. ...snip... Mullah Mansour, a stout man believed to be just under 50, does not, unlike his famously reclusive predecessor, live in hiding. His circumstances are not those of a jihadist leader living a fugitive existence, fearing drone strikes and avoiding cellphones in case they are tracked — in fact, one person who knows him says the Taliban leader owns a cellphone company. Some of the time, he lives in a southern neighborhood of Quetta, Pakistan, known...

The death toll has climbed to 22 following an airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that struck a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders Saturday. Ten of those killed were patients, including three children, according to Doctors Without Borders/Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF). The other 12 were staff members, said MSF. In a statement, the coalition in Afghanistan acknowledged that U.S. forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz early Saturday at 2:15 a.m. local time "against insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces in the city of Kunduz. The strike was conducted in the vicinity of...

KABUL — The acting governor of Afghanistan’s northern Kunduz province said Sunday that Taliban fighters had been routinely firing “small and heavy” weapons from the grounds of a local hospital before it was apparently hit by a U.S. airstrike over the weekend. In an interview, Hamdullah Danishi said the Doctors Without Borders compound was “a Taliban base” that was being used to plot and carry out attacks across the provincial capital, Kunduz city. “The hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban,” Danishi said. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there. We tolerated their firing...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Confusion reigned in the wake of the deadly bombing Saturday of a hospital compound in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz that killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens more. It remains unclear exactly who bombed the hospital run by Doctors Without Borders and the international medical charity has demanded an investigation into the incident.Doctors Without Borders said that "all indications" pointed to the international military coalition as responsible for the bombing and called for an independent investigation. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said an inquiry was underway into whether the carnage at the clinic...

The Taliban Friday claimed to have shot down a C-130 military transport plane in eastern Afghanistan, with NATO confirming that 11 people including six US soldiers were killed in the crash. NATO did not confirm the cause of the crash but it comes as Afghan forces -- backed by NATO special forces and US air support -- pushed into the centre of the northern city of Kunduz which was captured by the Taliban on Monday. "Our mujahideen have shot down a four-engine US aircraft in Jalalabad," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Twitter. "Based on credible information 15 invading forces...

The Taliban have seized the Bala Hisar fortress in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. The fighters achieved the victory, despite NATO airstrikes and government efforts. More than 40 people died and 330 were injured in the fighting, including civilians. Many others have fled from the provincial capital. This is the biggest coup for the Taliban since 2001, led by the group’s new leader Mullah Mansour. They have emptied safe deposit boxes at banks, seized weapons and vehicles, and released prisoners. It was also a public relations victory. Kunduz is one of Afghanistan’s richest cities. It is also a key...

The Taliban have captured Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, taking government buildings and the city’s central prison in one of the biggest military victories for the movement since 2001. It is the most serious invasion of a provincial capital in 14 years.

Obama Admin Had Tapes of Bergdahl Deserting to Taliban - Ignored Them at Trial Retired General David Hunt told Bill O'Reilly tonight the Obama administration has tapes that prove Bowe Bergdahl deserted to the Taliban. The Obama administration did not use the tapes in the trial of Bergdahl.

The odd case of Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl got even weirder during his Article 32 hearing conducted by Army officials Thursday and Friday last week. The Article 32 procedure is the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury, except that the accused has quite a few more rights. Unlike a typical grand jury, the Article 32 is presented before a single hearing officer, not held in secret, allows defense counsel to be present and to cross-examine witnesses, and to call their own. All of this occurred at Bergdahl’s hearing. Army prosecutors called Bergdahl’s immediate chain of command to testify. They...

Six months ago, authorities seized a cargo plane in Bangkok that contained 35 tons of North Korean military weapons. These included versions of the Chinese HN-5 “man-portable air defense system,” or MANPADS. The MANPADS were being shipped to Iran. The HN-5 — a copy of the Soviet SA-7— is less capable than the MANPADS Iran produces on its own. Why, you ask, would Iran be importing more primitive missiles than the ones it already makes? The only conceivable answer is that Iran was planning to provide North Korean missiles to Iran’s proxy terrorist groups, to gain plausible deniability in case...

Last night President Obama hosted a dinner of "foreign policy experts" to get advice about his ISIS plans. Among the guests were Sandy Berger, a man who got caught stealing federal documents; Strobe Talbott a man whose employer receives major funding from the terrorist-funding government of Qatar, and Zbigniew Brzezinski a man who was involved in creating both the Islamist state of Iran and the Taliban....Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Mr. Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Mr. Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage...

Sep 11, 2015 | by Amir Shah KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban fired a series of missiles into a U.S. base in Afghanistan late Thursday but caused no injuries among the soldiers or personnel at the base, an Afghan official said. There was no immediate confirmation of the attack from Washington. According to Massum Farzahee, the police chief of Bagram district in Parwan province, attackers fired four missiles around 9 p.m., targeting the Bagram Air Base, located about 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Three rockets hit inside the base, the police chief said, but no...