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A British soldier awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross died in vain because of an order to prevent damage to Taliban mud huts, an inquest will be told this summer. Colleagues of Lance Corporal James Ashworth – who won the UK’s highest gallantry medal – are expected to tell a coroner they were denied powerful weapons to take on the Taliban due to fears mortars and rockets could damage buildings. Soldiers from the Grenadier Guards will claim James died because he was forced to crawl to within a few feet of an enemy sniper in a mud hut while clutching a...

“The Afghan War is coming to an end,” said Barack Obama on May 23, but it is not ending well. NBC News reported Tuesday that “U.S. and Taliban representatives will meet soon for the first time to begin what are expected to be long and complex negotiations for a peaceful settlement to the war in Afghanistan.” The U.S. entered Afghanistan to topple the Taliban from power and end their influence in the country. In light of that, these talks in themselves constitute an admission of failure. But these talks are far from the first of those.

WASHINGTON: The United States will begin formal talks with the Taliban, including the Haqqani network, in Doha, Qatar, in a couple of days, Obama administration officials said in a major announcement on Tuesday. The engagement, the first of its kind since the post 9/11 conflict, follows key concessions made by Washington, including dropping the pre-condition that Taliban immediately break ties with al-Qaida, in return for much broader, generic, self-serving commitments by the unyielding terrorist group. In a conference call from Northern Ireland where President Obama is attending the G8 summit, US officials said they expected Taliban to issue a statement...

The Taliban said they were opening an office in Qatar to start peace talks with the Afghan government and revive talks with the U.S., taking an important step toward ending a conflict that has dragged on for over a decade.

US to open direct Taliban talks The US is to open direct peace talks with the Taliban, senior White House officials have announced. The first meeting is due to take place in the coming days in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban have just opened their first official overseas office. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his government is also sending a delegation to Qatar to talk to the Taliban. The announcement came on the day Nato handed over security for the whole of Afghanistan to government forces. US officials said prisoner exchanges would be one topic for discussion with the Taliban,...

A Billion Bucks in Bullets U.S. government has given Afghan National Army more than $1 billion in ammo The U.S. government has given the embattled Afghan National Army (ANA) more than $1 billion in taxpayer-funded ammunition, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) latest oversight report. This is in addition to $288 million that has been spent on ammunition for the troubled Afghan National Police (ANP), which has been cited by SIGAR for its widespread corruption.

The Daily Mail is reporting that Obama’s peace partners in Afghanistan, the Taliban, have beheaded a 10 year old boy and a 16 year old boy for the crime of scavenging for food. The Taliban was accused of beheading two boys for spying in southern Afghanistan yesterday. (M) Afghan officials said the boys, aged 10 and 16, were kidnapped by Taliban fighters while scavenging for food in rubbish bins near the police headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city and a key base for Western forces.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban fighters beheaded two boys aged 10 and 16 as a warning to villagers not to cooperate with the Afghan government, local officials said. The boys, named Khan and Hameedullah, had travelled to Afghan army and police checkpoints near their home in the southern province of Kandahar, scrounging for leftover food to bring to their families, the officials said. "The boys were on their way back ... when they were stopped by Taliban insurgents who beheaded them," the chief of Zhari district, Jamal Agha, told Reuters. "Both of them were innocent children and had nothing to...

The Taliban have beheaded two boys for spying in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, officials say. The boys, 10 and 16, had been scavenging for food in bins near police headquarters when they were abducted. They are thought to have regularly accepted food handouts from police. Analysts say the Taliban are known to target those suspected of colluding with police. But the Taliban have denied responsibility in this incident. Spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi insisted to the BBC the group had not beheaded any children in the area. Food for family Kandahar's governor, however, condemned the acts as inhumane and...

Photo: Bruce Reidel said, "The army has provided safe haven, arms, expertise and other help to Taliban. It briefly pretended to abandon Taliban to avoid American anger in 2001 misleading George W Bush." (Reuters) Washington - As the US prepares to leave Afghanistan, Pakistani spy agency ISI is engaged in helping Taliban, a terrorist outfit which the intelligence agency has been helping for more than two decades now, a top American expert on South Asian affairs has said. "For twenty years Pakistan's army, the real power broker in the country, has backed the Afghan Taliban. It helped create the Taliban's...

Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan will lose a key daily meal starting Saturday, causing some to forgo a hot breakfast and others to work six-plus hours without refueling on cooked food, according to Marines at the base and Marine Corps officials.

US SOLDIER Robert Bales, who killed 16 Afghan civilians during a rampage in Kandahar last year, will escape the death penalty by pleading guilty to murder. ... Sixteen people, mainly women and children, were killed in two villages near the base during the rampage. Some of the bodies were piled up and set on fire. ... Last month, AP spoke to locals in the villages that Bales terrorised. "Relatives of the victims became outraged at the notion Bales might escape the death penalty," it said. One man, Mohammed Wazir, who lost 11 family members including his mother and two-year-old daughter...

Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan will lose a key daily meal starting Saturday, causing some to forgo a hot breakfast and others to work six-plus hours without refueling on cooked food, according to Marines at the base and Marine Corps officials. The midnight ration service — known there as “midrats" — supplies breakfast to Marines on midnight-to-noon shifts and dinner to Marines who are ending noon-to-midnight work periods. It's described as one of the few times the Marines at Leatherneck can be together in one place.

A suicide car bomb targeted a foreign military convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing 15 people including five Americans in the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital for nearly a year. The powerful explosion, which struck at 8:00am (local time) in the Shah Shaheed south-eastern residential district, also injured about 40 passers-by including many children going to school, officials said. Nine Afghans including two children died, along with two US soldiers and four NATO-contracted civilians who were travelling through the city's busy rush-hour traffic. A Western military source in Kabul said the two soldiers and three of the contractors were...

KABUL, Afghanistan – A suicide bomber rammed his car into a U.S. convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing at least 15 people including two American soldiers and four civilian contractors, officials said. The brazen attack made May the deadliest month this year for coalition forces. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Secretary, confirmed that the two soldiers from the NATO military coalition who were killed in the bombing were Americans. He would not comment on the nationalities of the civilian contractors. It was the bloodiest attack in the Afghan capital since March 9, when suicide bombers struck...

I’ve said before that the Rules of Engagement are a much bigger scandal than Benghazi. I don’t have much else to say, except watch this video. Find an Obama supporter who still has some sense of right and wrong and show them this video. “The hearts and minds of the enemy are more valuable to this government than my son’s blood. This is submission and the cost of that submission on August 6 was my only son.”

NAVY SEAL TEAM VI FAMILIES TO REVEAL GOVERNMENT’S CULPABILITY IN DEATH OF THEIR SONS IN FATAL HELICOPTER CRASH IN AFGHANISTAN FOLLOWING SUCCESSFUL RAID ON BIN LADEN’S COMPOUND DATE: MAY 9, 2013 PLACE: NATIONAL PRESS CLUB (HOLEMAN LOUNGE) TIME: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM (Washington, D.C.). Three families of Navy SEAL Team 6 special forces servicemen, along with one family of an Army National Guardsman, will appear at a press conference on May 9, 2013, to disclose never before revealed information about how and why their sons along with 26 others died in a fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan on August 6, 2011,...

Do you remember what happened last year on 9/14? Where are the White House phone calls for the families who continue to grieve? What is being done to prevent another fatal attack like the one on 9/14? And why is the full truth being withheld from the American public? Benghazi isn't the only bloody disaster being covered up by the Obama administration. As I reported in a series of columns and blog posts last fall, three days after the deadly siege on our consulate in Libya, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. Two...

A cargo plane crashed during takeoff at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan on Monday, a U.S. military spokesman said. The Associated Press didn’t know about casualties. Other media reported that the crew was killed. Taliban members tried to claim responsibility, but military coalition officials denied the group’s involvement, AP said. “Taliban’s claims are false,” the coalition said in a statement to AP. “There was no enemy activity or involvement during this incident.”

Tens of millions of U.S. dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, according to the New York Times, citing current and former advisers to the Afghan leader. The so-called "ghost money" was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying. "The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States."