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According to local media reports, the Taliban have murdered more than 40 civilians in Malistan in the past one week. Most of these civilians were Hazaras.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan on January 10 claimed that India is backing the Islamic State (IS) and facilitating attacks in the country. Khan’s statement came a week after 11 Shia Hazara coal miners were brutally massacred by IS affiliated militants. In the interim, the Pakistani premier labeled the mourning families as “blackmailers” for refusing to bury their dead until Khan visits them to hear their demands for justice and security. Protesting with unburied coffins has become a means of expressing outrage against the state for the Shia Hazaras, thousands of whom have been targeted and killed since the turn...

Yesterday I wondered if Democrat Rep. Jacki Speier of California had gone off the deep end by musing that the Taliban aren't really terrorists, but rather "part of the fabric of Afghanistan." It turns out she was basically mangling the new talking points from the Obama Administration, which is going all-in for the reinvention of the Taliban butchers as legitimate battlefield opponents. CNN reports on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's testimony before Congress today: Bergdahl was held by the Haqqani network, a Taliban wing designated a terrorist group in 2012. However, Hagel noted Bergdahl was a war captive, not a...

Taliban insurgents halted minibuses in western Afghanistan, identified 14 Shiite passengers and shot them dead by the side of the road .. marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ... The Taliban, like other Sunni extremist groups, view the country's minority Shiite community as apostates, and have targeted Hazaras

Turkey is emerging as the new player in the unfolding Afghanistan peace process. As Afghanistan and Pakistan work on a peace roadmap, with the active assistance and blessings of London and Washington, Turkey has stepped in, even offering to host senior Taliban leaders released by Pakistan for reconciliation talks with the Afghan government. Although India is not part of the deal, India will be deeply affected by the outcome of whatever political process is implemented in Afghanistan. And with a strong presence on the ground in Afghanistan, India will be keen to ensure its own red lines about the accommodation...

April 14, 1999, Wednesday COMMITTEE HEARING SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS: SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS) HOLDS HEARING ON THE CRISIS IN AFGANISTAN  WASHINGTON, D.C. SPEAKERS: U.S. SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R-KS), CHAIRMAN U.S. SENATOR JOHN ASHCROFT (R-MO) U.S. SENATOR GORDON H. SMITH (R-OR) U.S. SENATOR ROD GRAMS (R-MN) U.S. SENATOR CRAIG THOMAS (R-WY) U.S. SENATOR PAUL DAVID WELLSTONE (D-MN), RANKING MEMBER U.S. SENATOR ROBERT G. TORRICELLI (D-NJ) U.S. SENATOR PAUL S. SARBANES (D-MD) U.S. SENATOR CHRISTOPHER J. DODD (D-CT) U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DANA ROHRABACHER (R-CA) THE HONORABLE KARL F. INDERFURTH ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SOUTH ...

The Department of Defense requests $7.5 billion to support Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) for FY 2010. This represents an increase of 34 percent above the FY 2009 level of $5.6 billion. The Department also requests Congress continue to provide needed flexibility by appropriating these funds for two-year execution through September 30, 2011. The FY 2010 budget provides essential resources to maintain the accelerated growth of the Afghan National Army (ANA) force structure to a goal of 134,000 (122,000 trained and 12,000 soldiers in training) by December 2011 and to continue training and supporting the 86,800 Afghan National Police (ANP)...

The Hazaras cherish education and hard work, but their Shiite Muslim faith and Asian features have long made them a target. Will they find a better life in the post-Taliban era? At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them. The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed...

Al Qaeda had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world against the West, but now it is in the middle of a dirty sectarian war within Islam. For those in the West asking when Islam will have its Reformation, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the process appears to have begun. The bad news is it's been marked by calumny, hatred and bloody violence. In this way it mirrors the Reformation itself, which we now remember in a highly sanitized way. During that era, Christians of differing sects massacred each other as they fought...

Soldier fulfilling promise to deliver Afghani rug to president BY BECKY MALKOVICH, THE SOUTHERN U.S. Army Lt. Col. Grayson Gile of Marion holds up a rug that he received while serving in Afghanistan as a member of the Combined Joint Special Operation Task Force. The men that gave it to him asked if he could get the rug to President Bush, who is depicted in the center of the rug.(STEVE JAHNKE/THE SOUTHERN) MARION - Grayson Gile may have completed his broader mission in Afghanistan as a member of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, but he returned stateside with...

OPERATION: ENDURING FREEDOM Taliban hunting an American? Opposition leader executed reportedly accompanied by U.S. agent By Toby Westerman © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com At the same time some 1,500 opponents of the Taliban – warriors and holy men – gathered in Peshawar, Pakistan, to lay plans for the next Afghan government, Taliban fighters located and killed one of their most influential opponents – and may be hunting for an American reported to have accompanied him. Abdul Haq, a well-known hero of the anti-Soviet guerrilla war and long-standing opponent of the Taliban, was found south of the Afghan capital, Kabul, captured and then killed, ...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

WASHINGTON, Nov 01, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Already divided between north and south, war-ravaged Afghanistan appears to be moving toward a more permanent partition.The process of partition began long before the extremist Taliban militia was formed in 1994. According to some analysts it started with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.Created as a buffer zone between British India and the former Russian empire, Afghanistan survived the departure of the British from the subcontinent in 1947 because the fear of Soviet communism kept its various factions together.The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and its disgraceful ...

More than 10 million Afghans will... cast ballots to choose their president on Saturday, in the first direct election for head of state in the nation's 5,000-year history.... After the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan faced enormous challenges, the lack of a legitimate political system, the existence of warlords with private militias, the absence of effective national institutions -- and desperate poverty. Though none of these problems has been fully overcome, significant progress is now being made against all. Step by step, the Afghans are rebuilding an effective state and political system. At last year's Constitutional Loya Jirga (or political...

AMIAN, Afghanistan — Hussein Jan, a 51-year-old farmer, tossed a stone into a shallow pit dug on a slope above this town. "They shot us here, 76 people, they killed everyone, and only I survived," he said. "With me there were 11 people from my village, most of them relatives, and I alone survived," he said. He laughed, tipping his head back, but his face suddenly twisted into a grimace of terrible pain. In tales like this, the people of the Bamian region have been counting their dead since they returned to this fabled valley seven months ago, after the...