The Iranian foreign ministry voiced pleasure in the Afghan government and Taliban's commitment to the temporary ceasefire in the country, and welcomed its extension.
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi welcomed the extension of the ceasefire in Afghanistan on Sunday, calling for continued commitment and respect for it by both sides.

He also expressed the hope that continued ceasefire can pave the ground for the start of a new and constructive process for peace talks and establishment of stability and tranquility in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan extended its unilateral ceasefire with the Taliban following an initial truce observed by both sides over the Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

President Ashraf Ghani appealed to the militants to follow the government's lead and enter peace talks.

At least 17 people were killed as an explosion rocked a meeting of Taliban and Afghan security forces, gathering during an unprecedented ceasefire for the Eid holiday, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, a local official said.
Casualties include Taliban, Afghan security forces, and civilians, Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor of Nangarhar, said.

The timing of the bombing appears to be significant. On Saturday, Taliban members entered the Afghan capital, Kabul urging people to come forward and take selfies with them. The unusual move reportedly occurred elsewhere in the country, as photos and videos on social media showed Taliban fighters giving hugs to locals and Afghan forces across several provinces.

A report from a top U.S. military watchdog has finally acknowledged that the UH-60A+ Black Hawks that the United States is supplying to the Afghan Air Force are less capable and harder to maintain than the Russian-made Mi-17 Hip helicopters they have now. The review raises concerns that this could limit Afghanistan’s ability to conduct operations across the country unless steps are taking to mitigate the loss of capability, something we at The War Zone have long warned could easily be the case.

The Pentagon’s own Office of the Inspector General included these frank admissions in a routine, periodic update on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, nicknamed Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), which it released in May 2018. The Department of Defense leads this oversight effort, which also includes representatives from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Moscow will continue efforts to involve the radical Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia) in direct talks with Kabul, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following the meeting of CSTO foreign ministers on Monday, adding though that those efforts have failed so far.

According to Russia’s top diplomat, "together with normalizing the military situation in Afghanistan" heads of ministries supported Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s call for a direct dialogue with the Taliban members.

"Russia has long advocated for this kind of dialogue, the Taliban members are part of the Afghanistan’s society. Provided that they abandon a military approach to defending their interests, they should be made direct participants of the political process," he said. "So far the Taliban members have not demonstrated readiness to this kind of dialogue, but we will continue our efforts, particularly on the back of today’s agreements between the CSTO foreign ministers," the minister added.

US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan more than 17 years ago in October 2001. It’s has been a continuous war marked by US military occupation.

The justification is “counterterrorism”. Afghanistan is defined as a state sponsor of terrorism, allegedly responsible for attacking America on September 11, 2001.

The war on Afghanistan continues to be heralded as a war of retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. US troops are still present and deployed in Afghanistan.

The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade and occupy Afghanistan under “the doctrine of collective security” was that the September 11 2001 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, namely Afghanistan.

Yet there were no Afghan fighter planes in the skies of New York on the morning of September 11, 2001.

An Afghan leader has issued a plea for Britain to deploy more troops to the country in a bid to quell the resurgent Taliban, Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.
Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan government’s chief executive, who met with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Thursday, called for a renewed long-term military commitment by the UK and its NATO allies.

His plea comes as UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is reportedly considering increasing the number of troops in the country by 400 following an appeal by US President Donald Trump.

When NATO issued a similar appeal last year, the ministry of defence responded saying the “UK keeps its contribution in Afghanistan under regular review to ensure it remains suited for the needs of the mission.”

U.S. warplanes over the last few years have pulverized an estimated 40 American taxpayer-funded Humvees worth about $70,000 each that fell into the hands of the Taliban after the United States provided them to the Afghan security forces, USA Today reported this week.

President Donald Trump has nominated Lt. General Austin Miller to replace General John Nicholson to command US Forces-Afghanistan, the Defense Department said in a press release.

"Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis has announced that the president has made the following nomination… Army Lt. Gen. Austin S. Miller for appointment to the grade of general, and assignment as commander, Resolute Support Mission, North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and commander, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan," the release said on Tuesday.

Earlier, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said that the United States has failed to stabilize Afghanistan despite 16 years of occupation and billions invested in stability programs.

The Taliban say they “categorically reject” a statement made by the US commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan about secret talks taking place between the Kabul government and the insurgents. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement, distributed to the media on Friday, that Gen. John Nicholson’s remarks, made to reporters at the Pentagon from his Kabul office, were a “baseless claim,” AP reports.

It was common during the opening of the Iraq war to see slogans proclaiming “No blood for oil!” The cover story for the war – Saddam’s links with Al Qaida and his weapons of mass destruction – were obvious mass deceptions, hiding a far less palatable imperial agenda. The truth was that Iraq was a major producer of oil and, in our age, the Age of Oil, oil is the most strategic resource of all. For many it was obvious that the real agenda of the war was an imperialistic grab for Iraqi oil. This was confirmed when Iraq’s state-owned oil company was privatised to western interests in the aftermath of the invasion.

Senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire, according to the Pentagon. “A lot of the diplomatic activity and dialogue is occurring off the stage, and it’s occurring at multiple levels,” General John Nicholson said Wednesday in a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon. He would not identify the figures involved in the negotiations, except to say that they included mid- and senior-level Taliban officials, AFP said. “I should point out they met in secret. This is how they were able to advance the talks,” he said, citing the need for the “confidentiality of the process.” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in late February proposed peace talks with the Taliban, saying they could be recognized as a political party if they accepted a ceasefire and recognized the country’s 2004 constitution.

There is no other way than to consider a new Afghan security agreement that will bring together both regional players and global powers to ensure the security in the country, Afghan politicians have told Sputnik, stressing that the Obama-era Bilateral Security Agreement with Kabul has proven completely ineffective.

Kabul needs to reconsider the 2014 Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) signed by the Obama administration and the government of Ashraf Ghani as the people of Afghanistan are increasingly losing trust in their international partners, politicians told Sputnik Afghanistan.

According to Russian and Chinese law enforcement agencies, militants fleeing by sea from Syria and Iraq follow a route from the Qasim port in the Pakistani city of Karachi to Peshawar, and are then distributed along the Nangarhar province in the east of the country.

After the scrapping of the Iran nuclear deal by the Trump administration, the re-imposition of sanctions against the Persian nation, and the threat to impose the “toughest sanctions in history,” the US gear-up to destabilize or perhaps even go to war with Iran is becoming more and more visible by the day. A war of words between Iran and the United States is now ensuing with actual military aggression against Iran by Israel in Syria promising to provide an even greater likelihood that the U.S. military and America’s busy intelligence community will soon be working even harder to ensure that Iran is no longer able to resist Atlanticist hegemony.

However, the plan to destroy Iran is nothing new as anyone who has been following the US war machine can easily attest to.

Despite committing additional resources to Afghanistan, US troops and local security forces have made little inroads against the Taliban. Some Afghan lawmakers are questioning whether the country needs US assistance at all.

A report to Congress prepared by the Pentagon’s inspector general challenges an earlier assessment of the US military that the latest increase of support to the Afghan national security forces helped turn the corner and gain momentum against the militant movement. Over the first quarter of 2018 the Taliban’s threat has not greatly diminished.

“The Taliban continued to hold territory and launched devastating terrorist attacks in Kabul and across the country,” Glenn Fine, the deputy Pentagon inspector general, wrote in an introductory note to the report, which was released on Monday.

US Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller shocked observers Wednesday at a US Navy Department briefing when he made the tone-deaf claim that American forces and their Afghan partners are the mujahedeen in Afghanistan now.

The number of British troops in Afghanistan could top 1,000 for the first time in years following calls from Donald Trump for US allies to do more to combat the Taliban.

Defence secretary Gavin Williamson is understood to have written to the prime minister recommending that numbers be boosted, although a decision is yet to be made.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the UK’s contribution to the mission was kept “under constant review”.

According to official reports, after almost two decades of continuous deployment of several thousand US and NATO servicemen in Afghanistan, the level of production and drug trafficking has increased by 1,000% compared to levels in 2001, the year Washington announced its intentions to invade Afghanistan. There’s no logical explanation American political figures can provide us for this fact, since among the stated goals of the persistent military presence of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan includes both fighting against terrorism and combating drug trafficking.

Seventeen years of wasted taxpayer money and government mismanagement: millions of U.S. dollars spent on projects to rebuild Afghanistan that have not helped the Afghan people.

In some cases, these projects actually put Afghans in danger.
This is a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

In order to attempt to curtail the flow of terrorist between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the former country is building a wall on the border it shares with the latter. “For the better security of our country and nation, we had to do this work,” a Pakistani army official, Brig. Nisar.

Nisar, who only uses one name, told journalists during a government-organized visit to the border that this is in Pakistan’s security interest. The barrier has angered the Afghan government, which disputes the location of the boundary and says the fence will” tear communities apart.”

According to NBC News, construction began last year on two fences that parallel each other as they snake through the remote, mountainous landscape. Standing 13 feet high on the Afghan side and 11 feet on the Pakistani side, sharp spirals of silver barbed wire are cradled at the top of each.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has offered an updated report on the shrinking Afghan military, revealing that their previous report was in error. The previous report, released earlier this month, said the Afghan military had lost around 30,000 fighters, or 10%.

SIGAR now says that the actual number was only about half that. The Pentagon, which provided SIGAR with the data, accidentally forgot about a 17,000-man border patrol that had been transferred from the police to the army, and which didn’t end up in the previous report under either category.

Lt. Col. Martin O’Donnell, from the US-led Afghan mission, confirmed his office was behind the problem and “it was our bad.” SIGAR noted this was just the latest in a series of problems they’ve had getting reliable data out of the Pentagon.

The United States Army recently awarded BAE Systems $97 Million in orders for new night vision goggles and thermal weapon sights for the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle III and Family of Weapon Sight-Individual (ENVG III/FWS-I) program. The all-in-one weapon sight system allows soldiers to acquire and eliminate enemy targets through a wireless connection that transmits the weapon’s crosshairs and surrounding imagery directly into the soldier’s goggles.

On April 27 the NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg issued an ultimatum to the Taliban fighting the US and NATO allied forces that have invaded and occupied Afghanistan; negotiate–meaning surrender-or be destroyed. Taking his cue from the Nazi diktats in the countries they invaded and occupied across Europe in the Second World War, he acted like a Reinhardt Heydrich, the Nazi SS Security General, making threats against the resistance on behalf of the warlords in Washington and the other NATO capitals and like the German Nazis before him, repeated the same lies the Germans used; that NATO’s presence “creates the conditions for peace and reconciliation.” But a more severe war lurks under their guise of peace.

“Full spectrum dominance” was the watchword in a 2000 document, “Joint Vision 2020” (updated from a 1996 version), which the authors described as a “conceptual template” for the U.S. military’s evolution over the two decades to come. Its language was even more hubristic than that slogan suggests: “a force that is dominant across the full spectrum of military operations – persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of conflict… prepared to win across the full range of military operations in any part of the world… [with the ability] to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations.”

Defeat any adversary? Control any situation?

The number of U.S.-funded Afghan security force personnel has sharply declined over the past year, even as fighting and terror attacks escalated in many parts of the country, a U.S. government watchdog said on Monday.

The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces as of Jan. 31 numbered 296,409 people, with the Afghan National Army at 85.4 percent of its authorized strength and the Afghan National Police at 93.4 percent of its authorized strength.

The figures, compiled by U.S. Forces-Afghanistan from the Afghan military, were in a report issued late Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Construction, or SIGAR.

The information had been classified or restricted from the public for the past six months, SIGAR said.

Two Islamic State suicide bombers struck in Afghanistan's capital on Monday, killing 25 people, including nine journalists who had rushed to the scene of the first attack, in the deadliest assault on reporters since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

An Agence France-Presse photographer, a cameraman for the local Tolo TV station and several reporters for the Afghan branch of Radio Free Europe were among the fatalities, police said. At least 45 people were wounded in the attacks, according to Kabul police spokesman Hashmat Stanekzai, who said four police were among those killed.

The attack was the latest in a relentless string of large-scale bombings and assaults in the capital and elsewhere in Afghanistan this year.

For Iraq, my final estimate of about 2.4 million people killed was based on accepting the estimates of the 2006 Lancet study and the 2007 Opinion Research Business (ORB) survey, which were consistent with each other, and then applying the same ratio of actual deaths to passively reported deaths (11.5:1) as between the Lancet study and Iraq Body Count (IBC) in 2006 to IBC’s count for the years since 2007.

Mohammad Alam Ezadyar, the first deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s Upper House of Parliament told Sputnik about Kabul’s desire to hold a permanent seat in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the US military presence in the country, and shared his opinion on why terrorists are being repositioned from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan.

Speaking about the presence of Daesh jihadists in Afghanistan, Ezadyar opined that this terrorist group is a large project of the world powers aimed at posing threats to neighboring countries.

"Currently, Daesh fighters are being repositioned from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan in order to pose threats to Central Asia countries, the Caucasus and China. Our people and politicians believe it's a strategic plan advocated by the world's major powers. It's said not only in Afghanistan but also abroad."

Bombings at voter registration centres in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and in Baghlan province have killed at least 63 people and wounded more than a hundred others, health officials said.

At least 57 people were killed in Kabul when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the doorway of an ID distribution centre in the city on Sunday, officials said.

Six more people were killed later in the day in Baghlan's Pul-e-Khumri city, when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb near another voting centre. All six were from the same family.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group said it carried out the Kabul attack, but no group has claimed responsibility for the Baghlan blast yet.

The Kabul bombing occured in the Dasht-e-Barchi area, where many of the country's Shia Hazara minority reside.

Among the victims were many women and children, witnesses said.

The War on Terror is a sham. We are just here to guard Drugs for the CIA and Bankers. The American People need to be told.

Two days later Pat Tillman was dead. Executed by 3 shots to the forehead at close range, from a NATO Rifle.

If you are guarding (Opium) Poppy Fields, and you complain, you are “Suicided”

The Taliban Destroyed all the Poppy fields. It was corrupting their country and their youth.

This caused the US Bankers and New York Bankers, to lose $300 million a month in Drug Money.

Two brigades and a regiment are headed abroad in the upcoming months, according to three Wednesday releases from the Army.

The 3rd Cavalry Regiment will head to Iraq this spring, and in the summer, the 101st Airborne Division Sustainment Brigade will head to Afghanistan while the 4th Combat Aviation Brigade heads to Europe, according to the releases.

“This brigade is no stranger to Afghanistan, as this will be our fifth rotation there since 2001,” Col. Stanley Sliwinksi, commander of the Fort Campbell, Kentucky-based 101st Sustainment Brigade, said in a release.

The United States has spent more than $800 billion on the never ending war in Afghanistan, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The bulk of that money was spent fighting the Taliban, but billions have also gone toward rebuilding the country and investing in its infrastructure. A lot of those projects haven't gone well, and a $60 million power system in northeast Afghanistan that doesn't provide any power is just the latest example.

According to a new report from John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) mismanaged the project so badly that its powerstation isn’t connected to a power source, hasn’t been tested, and “may be structurally unsound and pose a risk to Afghans who live near transmission towers and lines,” or who work at the station.

“Okay buddy, how ya doing today?” a Marine asks as he stands over the body of a dead Afghan man. “You look like you just got fucked.”

A cameraman with 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment stands nearby, rolling tape. He zooms in to show the man’s mangled right hand, where a round impacted before entering his torso.

It’s sometime in 2011 in Kajaki, Afghanistan. A scout sniper team has been cleared to take the shot, suspecting the target of being a spotter for Taliban fighters in the area. When the patrol arrives to inspect the body, they find that the now-dead man was a local shopkeeper, and he was unarmed. It’s unclear whether the man, whose killing was cleared under the rules of engagement, was an observer for the Taliban, or an innocent bystander.

U.S. military members often say “we own the night” due to their use of night vision devices, but the maxim no longer holds true.

That’s because the Taliban has picked up much of that same tech, either by seizing it from slain Afghan troops or by acquiring it up on the black market. And while the Pentagon is well aware of the problem, officials don’t have a good way to counter it.

Taliban fighters, many now outfitted with night vision goggles and infrared lasers, have more than doubled nighttime attacks on Afghan and U.S. troops between 2014 and 2017, according to a new report from The New York Times.

The U.S. military plans to loot Afghan mineral deposits for some time. A 2007 Pentagon memo that the New York Times quoted in a 2010 article says that Afghanistan could be the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

The Companies of United States are planning to extract Afghanistan’s enormous reserves of valuable rare earth minerals, Reuters reported after U.S. President Donald Trump met with his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani on Thursday.

Afghanistan has some of the world’s largest un-extracted reserves of rare earth minerals valuable in electronic production, such as lithium, as well as gold and various gemstones. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the total value at least US$1 trillion.

According to a White House statement, the presidents agreed that the development of Afghan minerals by U.S. companies would “develop materials critical to national security,” as well as “defray some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more self-reliant.”

A new report from the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD IG) exposes even more fraud, waste and/or corruption in America’s ongoing war in Afghanistan. This latest report reveals that more than $3.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds provided to the Afghan Armed Forces from 2014 through 2017 was grossly mismanaged.

The Afghanistan War is the longest in United States history, and despite initial claims that the goal of the invasion was to keep Americans safe by destroying the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the result has been a massive increase in opium production that has fueled an on-going opioid crisis in the United States and ensnared more than 2.5 million Americans in heroin addiction.

As whistleblower and former FBI contractor Sibel Edmonds noted, before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, there were around 189,000 heroin users in the United States. By 2016, that figure increased to 4.5 million—an estimated 2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users.

The number of heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. also skyrocketed with a 533 percent increase from around 2,000 deaths in 2002 to more than 13,200 deaths in 2016. The is part of more than 64,000 deaths attributed to drug overdoses in 2016, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Russia has rejected comments by NATO's top commander in Afghanistan that it has been supporting and even supplying weapons to the Taliban, in a clash of words that underlines growing tension over Moscow's involvement in the conflict.

In an interview with the BBC last week, General John Nicholson said that Russia had been acting to undermine US efforts in Afghanistan despite shared interests in fighting terrorism and narcotics, with indications that Moscow was providing financial support and even arms.

"We've had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and said this was given by the Russians to the Taliban," he said.

A statement from the Russian embassy in Kabul dismissed the comments as "idle gossip", repeating previous denials by Russian officials.

wounded in a car bomb explosion near a sports facility in southern Afghanistan, a health official has said.

Omar Zwak, spokesperson for the governor of Helmand province, said Friday's blast in the city of Lashkar Gah took place close to the Ghazi Muhammad Ayoub Khan stadium, where a wrestling match was taking place.

Aminuallah Abed, chief of the provincial public health department, said that 40 people who were wounded were receiving treatment at a local hospital.

The death toll is expected to rise, with hospital sources telling Al Jazeera that a number of wounded people were in serious condition.

The top US military officer visited Afghanistan on Monday to evaluate the military campaign and ensure new American advisory teams and an upgraded Afghan Air Force are on target, AP reported. As the next fighting season with the Taliban looms, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he wants to understand the goals for the coming months so the US-led coalition can develop ways “to measure progress in the fight.” Dunford told reporters that he seeks “a discussion about measures of effectiveness.” Measuring success will be a key part of White House discussions this summer when President Donald Trump looks for a one-year assessment of his new regional strategy.

Defense Secretary James Mattis made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday, arriving at the Kabul Airport with little fanfare before offering rare public comments on the Afghan War. Mattis focused on what ‘victory’ would look like, and offered a glimpse into US strategy for achieving it.

Mattis confirmed in his comments that any victory in Afghanistan would be “not a military victory.” Rather, he sees victory coming in the form of political reconciliation. That’s not going to involve major peace talks, however, as Mattis called that “a bridge too far,” reflecting Trump’s opposition to such talks with the Taliban.

Instead, Mattis suggested that the strategy would mirror something that’s been tried repeatedly in Afghanistan, “peeling away” some Taliban factions by drawing them into talks. Mattis said the US has seen “interest” in such talks.

In Afghanistan, the world’s most powerful military is threatened by a small, pink flower.

Despite an escalation of the Afghan conflict under the Trump administration, a record opium crop, coupled with steady Taliban gains, foretell bitter fighting in the coming months for American forces and the Afghans stationed alongside them.

“Record-high opium production is but one indication of how badly U.S. efforts have failed and are continuing to fail,” said Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East. “It is both a major source of Taliban funding and an indication of how little control the Afghan government is able to exert.”

The longest war in American history, the US occupation in Afghanistan, now well over 16 years long, has often been called a ‘forgotten war.’ It may be fair to do so again, as the ongoing escalations are barely noticed, and not debated.

Senate hearings on America’s various wars over the past week covered a wide variety of topics. Afghanistan was mentioned four times, and then mostly in passing. Two hours of briefing by intelligence officials saw Afghanistan mentioned not even once.

All the while, more US troops continue to arrive. Exactly how many isn’t clear, as President Trump has made that a secret. Furthermore, US data that is coming out of Afghanistan is increasingly inaccurate, making it even harder to accurately cover the situation on the ground.

The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) has fielded a squadron of new Pakistan Aeronautical Complex JF-17 “Thunder” combat aircraft, according to a recent report by the Associated Press of Pakistan. The multi-role fighter jets are stationed at Pakistan’s Samungli Base near Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan.

The Lithuanian government has increased its support of NATO’s Operation Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan following requests from NATO and other allies, the country’s Ministry of National Defense announced February 22.

An unspecified number of Lithuanian troops from Special Operations Forces will join the 21 Lithuanian soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan with NATO in April, the ministry noted.

National Security Adviser and three-star general H.R. McMaster has been falling out of favor with President Trump for quite some time now, with Trump said never to have been fond of him, and the Pentagon looking for something else for him to do.

Keen to avoid a public scene of another top official’s ouster, the plan may include giving McMaster a fourth star and sticking him in another military post, which might well be in Afghanistan.

Officially, the U.S. military objective in Afghanistan is to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, but just last month President Trump said that talks with the Taliban are off the table, indicating an incoherent policy, as Jonathan Marshall notes.

The ministers said yes to the creation of military Schengen to ease forces movements across the Old Continent. NATO is to do away with the cumbersome and lingering bureaucratic procedures hindering transportation of troops and hardware through territories of member states. One of the solutions is a standardized form used by European allies and partner states for granting permission for movements. Germany has offered to host the command center to implement the concept of free transit zone in view of its vast experience in providing logistical support.

The decision is taken amid burgeoning preparations to boost military infrastructure near Russia’s borders.

To augment the forces in East Europe, the Black Sea, the Baltics and the Scandinavian Peninsula the bloc needs new logistic hubs. Unobstructed large-scale transport movements become top priority for implementation of the war plans, such as concentrating combat-ready stocks for a full US brigade in Poland.

Although they are the most notorious, the Taliban and Daesh are not the only terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan. In an interview with Sputnik, deputy spokesman of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense Mohammad Radmanesh explained that there are some 20 similar terrorist groups in the country and described how they appeared in Afghanistan.

The deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan is evident from the reports of the US military. In 2015, Kabul and its Western allies controlled 72% of the administrative districts, and militants - about 7%. According to the latest data, in August 2017 the ratio of the territories under control was 57% compared to 13%, respectively.

Many rural areas are under the control of Taliban and ISIL militants, in various parts of the country. The zones of their influence are adjacent to the Afghan border, including the neighborhoods with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

The ever-escalating US air war in Afghanistan is having little real effect on the war against the Taliban, but has managed to ensnare an entirely distinct faction in Northern Afghanistan into it, one which the US hadn’t been targeting for years.

Chinese Uighurs, operating under the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) banner, were regularly swept up in the initial US invasion a decade and a half ago, and recent US airstrikes in the area along the Chinese-Afghan border have increasingly targeted their forces as well as Taliban in the area.

Why the US is suddenly interested in targeting them is unclear, though NATO issued a statement suggesting it was to prove to them that cross border attacks weren’t safe. Either way, the Chinese are expected to be quite happy about this.

(ANTIWAR.COM) Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Assistant Secretary of Defense Randall Schriver on Tuesday revealed that the Pentagon expects the cost of the Afghan War in 2018 to come to $45 billion.
This obviously is subject to change, in the face of more probable escalations. The cost includes $13 billion in direct cost for US troops already committed, $5 billion to prop up Afghanistan’s own struggling military, and other funding for logistics, aid projects, and other assorted expenses.

That’s a lot of money to throw at the war in its 16th year, and there is a lot of questioning of the merits among senators of both parties, concerned that yet another doubling down on a war long since lost may not be the most prudent of courses.

Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Assistant Secretary of Defense Randall Schriver on Tuesday revealed that the Pentagon expects the cost of the Afghan War in 2018 to come to $45 billion.

Afghan officials told reporters this week that Beijing is reportedly holding discussions with Kabul over establishing a military base near China’s border with Afghanistan.
Chinese officials reportedly cited concerns about the threat posed by Uighur jihadists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, considered by the Pentagon to be home to the “highest concentration” of terrorists in the world.

Afghanistan shares a border with the autonomous Xinjiang region—China’s largest province. Xinjiang is home to China’s oppressed Muslim Uighur (or Uyghur) minority, whose separatist groups reportedly train and operate in the Af-Pak region.

Kabul and Beijing have been in talks over China’s military establishment since December, but details remain elusive, indicated Mohammad Radmanesh, a spokesman for the Kabul-based defense ministry.

Cascading disaster is an apt term for the US military’s strategy in Afghanistan, which involves the indiscriminate killing of terrorist leaders, whether Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS or whatever else.

In addition to heavily underreported civilian casualties, US military strikes increase the ferocity of those terrorist outfits. Not just because those outfits want to show the world how strong they are. There is another element which arguably is even worse, as it is virtually impossible to reverse. Each “neutralized” leader leaves a power void within his organization and a number of usually younger and more ruthless members start fighting among each other to take over – with cruelty and spectacular attacks obviously being stronger “election” arguments than a “softy” willingness and capacity for peaceful dialogue.

The US Defense Department has refused to disclose information about the war in Afghanistan that has routinely been released since the war began in 2001, according to the internal government watchdog that administers those information releases.

For 16 years, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has released quarterly population figures that elaborate on what parts of the country are under insurgent control and which are under the control of government and coalition forces.

Until Monday — when SIGAR reported that they would not be releasing that data with their quarterly report because they had been instructed not to by the Pentagon. According to a report by SIGAR chief John Sopko, the DoD wouldn't even tell them why they were not allowed to release that information.