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On Monday, June 21, Turkish President Recep Erdogan said that his recent meeting with US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels opens a "new era" in diplomatic relations between the two countries. According to Erdogan, there are no problems in relations between Turkey and the United States that cannot be solved, and there are much more areas for cooperation. Biden expressed the hope that countries can make real progress. At the same time, the parties did not agree on problematic issues, such as the acquisition by Turkey of Russian S-400 anti-missile systems, violation of...

EXCLUSIVE: One of the classified email chains discovered on Hillary Clinton's personal unsecured server discussed an Afghan national's ties to the CIA and a report that he was on the agency's payroll, a U.S. government official with knowledge of the document told Fox News. The discussion of a foreign national working with the U.S. government raises security implications – an executive order signed by President Obama said such unauthorized disclosures are 'presumed to cause damage to the national security." The U.S. government official said the Clinton email exchange, which referred to a New York Times report, was among 29 classified...

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the embattled Afghan president and a suspected drug trafficker, has been on the CIA payroll for most of the past eight years, The New York Times says. The US spy agency pays Karzai for a variety of services, the newspaper said on Tuesday, such as fielding recruits for an Afghan paramilitary force operating at the CIA's direction in and around his home city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He also helps the CIA contact and sometimes meet Taliban followers. Karzai, who is said to have ties to Afghanistan's lucrative illegal opium trade, has a...

Kabul (Reuters) - The Afghan president is angry at being kept in the dark over a deal to free five Taliban leaders in exchange for a captured U.S. soldier, and accuses Washington of failing to back a peace plan for the war-torn country, a senior source said on Monday. The five prisoners were flown to Qatar on Sunday as part of a secret agreement to release Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who left Afghanistan for Germany on the same day. :snip: "The president is now even more distrustful of U.S. intentions in the country," said the source close to President Hamid...

1.) If they believe that the Taliban aren't terrorists, then is this behind their reasoning that no negotiations took place with terrorists in the release of Bowe Bergdahl for 5 GITMO detainees? 2.) If they state that there was a third party involved (Qatar) and thus neither side (the WH or the Taliban) spoke directly with each other, then does that constitute their position that no negotiations took place with terrorists? The problem with #1 is that when the WH slammed Karzai over some of his statements concerning joining the Taliban, what could/can the WH say to Karzai now? Breitbart.com...

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said the U.S. did not negotiate with terrorists in the process of exchanging the transfer of five terrorism suspects for the release of the only American prisoner of war in Afghanistan. “We didn’t negotiate with terrorists,” Mr. Hagel said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And I said and explained before, Sergeant Bergdahl is a prisoner of war. That’s a normal process in getting your prisoners back.” Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was handed over to U.S. special forces by the Taliban Saturday, with the government of Qatar serving as a go-between. Qatar is taking custody of five...

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Greta Van Susteren on Monday, “A trained ape can get a status of forces agreement. It does not take a genius.” Rumsfeld was talking about Barack Obama’s failed diplomacy in Iraq and Afghanistan. CNS News reported: Donald Rumsfeld, who served as U.S. Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush, blames poor diplomacy by the Obama administration for the current strained relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “Our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first-rate in the Bush administration,” Rumsfeld told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Monday. “It has gone down...

Donald Rumsfeld: 'It does not take a genius' By: Tal Kopan March 25, 2014 06:13 AM EDT Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is blasting the Obama administration’s handling of Afghanistan, saying a “trained ape” could have done a better job in diplomatic relations with the country. “We have status of forces agreements probably with 100, 125 countries in the world,” Rumsfeld said Monday night on “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” on Fox News. “This administration, the White House and the State Department, have failed to get a status of forces agreement. A trained ape could get a status...

(CNSNews.com) - Donald Rumsfeld, who served as U.S. Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush, blames poor diplomacy by the Obama administration for the current strained relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai."Our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first-rate in the Bush administration," Rumsfeld told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren on Monday. "It has gone down hill like a toboggan ever since the Obama administration came in."

Last week, Taliban militants stormed into the Serena Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing nine including children. The Serena was one of most heavily secured buildings in Kabul. The attack there follows many Taliban attacks on Afghan civilians and US forces, as well as Afghan forces attacks on American troops there. But today, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai insists that “foreign intelligence agencies” are responsible for the Serena attack. The Afghan government held foreign agencies of intelligence responsible for an attack against a luxury hotel in this city that left nine fatalities and various injured. President Hamid Karzai’s management denied that groups...

KABUL, Afghanistan — Advocates say that women’s rights and security in Afghanistan are under mounting assault from all sides — the Taliban insurgency and the government alike — putting at risk 12 years of hard-won gains for women here. The country’s Parliament is about to approve legislation that would strip away crucial legal protections. The insurgents have mounted a string of violent attacks on female officials. And advocates for women are deeply worried by the news that President Hamid Karzai has been negotiating secretly with the Taliban, who enforced hard-line, fundamentalist restrictions on women during their years in power. And...

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been engaged in secret contacts with the Taliban about reaching a peace agreement without the involvement of his American and Western allies, further corroding already strained relations with the United States. The secret contacts appear to help explain a string of actions by Mr. Karzai that seem intended to antagonize his American backers, Western and Afghan officials said. In recent weeks, Mr. Karzai has continued to refuse to sign a long-term security agreement with Washington that he negotiated, insisted on releasing hardened Taliban militants from prison and distributed distorted evidence of what he called...

Susan Boyle revealed she has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. The Scottish singer who shot to worldwide fame in 2009 with her jaw-dropping performance on "Britain's Got Talent" was diagnosed last year, but has now decided to reveal her news publicly for the first time. Speaking to the Observer newspaper, Boyle said, "It was the wrong diagnosis when I was a kid. "I was told I had brain damage. I always knew it was an unfair label. Now I have a clearer understanding of what's wrong and I feel relieved and a bit more relaxed about myself." Asperger's has...

President Hamid Karzai’s government is considering bringing back stoning for adultery—and imposing 100 lashes (which is a death sentence) for unmarried people who have had sexual relations. Thus, Afghan men can marry female children, keep male children as sex-toys, maintain four wives, and visit prostitutes from dawn to dawn. But it is a capital crime if an Afghan man dishonors another Afghan man by having relations with his female “property;” and, if he has raped the poor wife, she is also to be stoned. Worse yet, if two young Afghans meet and fall in love on their own and have...

The Obama administration has more trouble with its diplomacy than just regarding Iran. Last week, the White House let it be known that they had all but concluded a pact with Afghanistan to keep as many as 15,000 troops, mostly American, in place until 2024, a decade longer than Barack Obama promised when he launched his own surge strategy in late 2009. Almost immediately after going out on that political limb, Hamid Karzai began to saw it off, insisting that the issue had to be brought before tribal elders and that Karzai himself wouldn’t sign it either way, a direct...

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has refused to sign a security deal with the United States, the White House said, and Washington may have to resort to the "zero option" of withdrawing all American troops from the strife-torn country next year, as it did in Iraq. Karzai told U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice in Kabul on Monday that the United States must put an immediate end to military raids on Afghan homes and demonstrate its commitment to peace talks before he would sign a bilateral security pact, Karzai's spokesman said. The White House said Karzai had outlined new conditions in...

KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai told tribal leaders Thursday that he did not trust the United States, hours after Secretary of State John Kerry said a final draft deal on troop levels had been reached. "My trust with America is not good," Karzai said at a meeting of tribal elders and political leaders in Kabul. "I don't trust them and they don't trust me. During the past 10 years I have fought with them and they have made propaganda against me." Civilian war casualties in Afghanistan rose 45 percent over the last year, with hospitals treating children who have...

One of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's main religious advisers will not overturn a decree issued by clerics in the north reimposing Taliban-style curbs on women, in another sign of returning conservatism as NATO forces leave the country. The eight article decree, issued late in June, bars women from leaving home without a male relative, while shutting cosmetic shops on the pretext they were being used for prostitution - an accusation residents and police reject. "There is no way these shops could have stayed open. Shops are for business, not adultery," Enayatullah Baligh, a member of the top religious panel, the...

Afghan President Hamid Karzai now says his recent comments suggesting collusion between the U.S. and Taliban were misinterpreted by “the media,” and that explanation appeared to satisfy Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday, even though the contentious remarks were made during a nationally televised speech. Moreover, Karzai made similar insinuations during a meeting in Helmand province two days after the original March 10 speech, according to Afghan and U.S. media reports. After Karzai told reporters in Kabul Monday that his words had been misinterpreted, Kerry said he was “very, very comfortable with the president’s explanation.” … If Karzai’s words...

In remarks with Afghan president Hamid Karzai at the White House this afternoon, President Barack Obama said the U.S. has fallen "short of the ideal" in Afghanistan: