At least 20 women and children have been killed in an airstrike conducted by US warplanes in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar, local officials say.

The deadly aerial aggression occurred late on Friday and claimed the lives of eight women and 12 children, Abdul Latif Fazly, a member of the provincial council, said on Saturday, adding that the airstrike also wounded more than 15 other civilians.

Kunar governor Abdul Satar Mirzakwal said an operation by Afghan forces in Sheltan district killed 38 members of the Taliban militant group and a number of terrorists belonging to the Takfiri al-Qaeda terror group, including four foreign nationals, and wounded 12 more.

Pulling US and NATO forces out of Afghanistan would give terrorist groups the opportunity and ability to rebuild in that country and develop the capability of carrying out more mega-attacks like the ones against the United States on September 11, 2001, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford said.

"Leaving Afghanistan in my judgment would give the terrorist groups the space with which to conduct operations against the American homeland and its allies," Dunford told a meeting at the Washington Post newspaper on Thursday.

Four US Army soldiers were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in the western part of Afghanistan.

The extremist Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the attack which took place on November 26 in Bala Buluk district of Farak province. .

As the US urgently seeks an exit from its ongoing 17-year war in Afghanistan - the longest war the nation has prosecuted in its 242-year history - for-profit, privately-held mercenary corporations are increasingly taking over, leading officials in Kabul to question their expensive and often deadly presence.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, quickly contributing to a boom in the so-called ‘private security' business, a euphemism to describe the use of mercenary soldiers, according to reports.

How much more blood must be spilled in Afghanistan before Washington acknowledges reality and ends the war?

Three more American troops were killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb on Tuesday and three others wounded; their names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin. These deaths, along with Sgt. Leandro Jasso who was killed in a firefight last Saturday, bring the number of troops killed in Afghanistan this year to thirteen. Unless major changes are made in U.S. strategic policy, they will not be the last to die.

There’s a prevailing maxim, both inside the armed forces and around the Beltway, that goes something like this: “The U.S. can never be militarily defeated in any war,” certainly not by some third world country. Heck, I used to believe that myself. That’s why, in regard to Afghanistan, we’ve been told that while America could lose the war due to political factors (such as the lack of grit among “soft” liberals or defeatists), the military could never and will never lose on the battlefield.

That entire maxim is about to be turned on its head. Get ready, because we’re about to lose this war militarily.

The US is dropping more bombs on Afghanistan in 2018 than it has in any other year on record, new Air Force data shows.

United States Air Forces Central Command has been publishing munitions data regularly since 2006, but comprehensive records are only available on their website dating back to 2009. Second to 2018, 2011 saw the most bombs dropped, according to the available data.

Sputnik News first reported in June that the US military was outpacing every other year on record in terms of bombs dropped on the country in 2018. With data from October now available, that distinction remains.

With three US troops killed in Afghanistan earlier this week, President Trump was pressed on the matter of why, 17+ years in, the US military remains in the country. He told interviewers that “every expert that I have and speak to says if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.”

When Trump announced his escalation of the war last year, he said his first impulse was to pull out, but that the experts had assured him the war was still winnable. In recent months, officials have been very public about trying to convince Trump to stay in the war despite how poorly its going.

Trump’s claims that all the experts he’s hearing are telling him the same thing suggests his administration is limiting his access to dissenters. The war is plainly going disastrously, and it wouldn’t be hard to find people who would tell the president as much.

Airstrikes conducted by the US military has killed at least 30 civilians, including children and women, in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand amid a spike in civilian deaths from aerial attacks.

The US-led NATO force in Afghanistan said on Wednesday that American advisers and Afghan government forces called in an airstrike as they came under fire from Taliban militants in a compound in Garmsir district.

"At the time of the strike, the ground force was unaware of any civilians in or around the compound; they only knew that the Taliban was using the building as a fighting position," a force spokeswoman said in a statement.

The blast from a roadside bomb killed three U.S. Servicemen in Afghanistan Tuesday morning, and wounded three others.

“Lt. Ubon Mendie, a spokesman for the U.S. forces, said in a statement that three other service members and one American civilian contractor were injured in the blast. The wounded were evacuated and were being provided medical care, Mendie said,” according to USA Today.

The Taliban – the same one that we have been fighting since 2001 – claimed responsibility for the attack, which happened in the Ghazni province. The identities of the soldiers remain unknown.

n rare comments on peace talks in Afghanistan, President Trump reported that “very strong” negotiations are ongoing in the country. He said the people of Afghanistan “are tired of fighting,” and the goal is to end the war.

That said, Trump appeared to try to downplay the effort, saying that the negotiations “probably” are not going to be successful, but “who knows?” He did not elaborate further. Special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has expressed hopes for a peace deal by April of next year, though the Taliban said no agreements are yet in place.

Less important than what President Trump said was that he addressed the matter at all. The Afghan War has tended not to be a popular topic for him to address. This may suggest a growing interest within the administration to tackle the protracted war.

“I’m tired of spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan building roads and bridges over there where I would rather build roads and bridges here,” Paul told Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House during a wide-ranging interview that included President Donald Trump’s push to advance an America First foreign policy,

A study from Brown University released on Wednesday found that American taxpayers spent $5.9 trillion in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 2001, which is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the 2017-18 fiscal year.

The U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan has said he hopes to strike a final peace deal with the Taliban by April of 2019, according to Reuters citing local media reports.

U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad led three days of talks between the United States, the Taliban and the Afghan government in Qatar where the Taliban has a political office, the culmination of months of attempted unprecedented face-to-face sit down dialogue between American officials and the Islamist insurgent group's representatives.

Khalilzad told reporters over the weekend that he hopes “a peace deal is reached before April 20 next year”, when Afghanistan is planning to hold a presidential election. While six months is ambitious and a tad optimistic, it appears more about creating the conditions for a final politically face-saving American exit from the now approaching two decade long quagmire.

They’ve been profoundly corrupt and often meant little, but Afghanistan’s elections have long been enough to provide the illusion of a functioning democracy. The Trump Administration is in ongoing discussions on maybe backing away from that.

The Wall Street Journal reported ongoing discussions are being held at the behest of US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been pushing the idea of telling the Afghan government to simply indefinitely suspend the presidential election, which is supposed to happen in April.

The US interest in this plan is apparently centered on the attempts to negotiate with the Taliban on settling the ongoing war, with officials, including Khalilzad, believing that such negotiations would be too hard in the middle of a nationwide election.

Afghanistan’s Taliban will negotiate with the central government in Kabul only after the United States agrees to leave the country, according to a senior Russian diplomat.

Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special envoy for Afghanistan, announced the Taliban’s demands on Monday after hosting an international summit on the country’s crisis that was attended by other members of a security bloc led by Russia and China. The Taliban want the United States to undertake a number of “confidence-building measures,” starting with a deadline for a full withdrawal from the country.

The most elite US-trained forces in Afghanistan suffered a devastating defeat to the Taliban in what's often referred to as the country's "safest district" over the weekend, in yet another sign the war is a lost cause.

Early on Sunday, a company of roughly 50 Afghan special-forces commandos was almost entirely destroyed in the rural district of Jaghori, according to a report from The New York Times.

Over 30 of the US-trained commandos were killed, The Times said, in a district that is "famous" for how peaceful it is.

Seventeen years after the US invasion of Afghanistan, many residents of the country have changed their minds for the worse on the Americans.

The war, by many measures, keeps getting worse. As Sputnik News recently reported, Afghan authorities control or influence a mere 55.5 percent of the country, according to the US Military's Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the lowest figure since the government oversight authority began keeping tabs on it in November 2015.

Despite the grim landscape, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told an audience of students at an influential Washington university on Monday that "the Taliban are not in a winning position." That same day, a suicide bomber in Kabul targeted demonstrators protesting the lack of security against the Taliban provided by the government, and the militants made further gains in the east.

On November 9 Moscow hosted a conference on Afghanistan that involved delegates from Kabul and Taliban and that was attended by an observer from the United States.

Russia is baffled at the United States’ attempts to accuse it of hindering dialogue between the Afghan authorities and the radical Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia), especially on the background of the recent consultations in Moscow that involved both parties, the Russian foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

"We took notice of the statement US Under Secretary of State David Hale made at a conference organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on November 8, where he said in particular that Russia is allegedly hindering peace talks with the Taliban movement," the ministry said. "Such statement cannot but be baffling on the background of Russia’s persistent efforts in cooperation with the regional partners to facilitate the launch of the process of intra-Afghan reconciliation."

With the Taliban carrying out offensives against several provinces around the country at any given time, the Afghan government has been forced to prioritize who gets reinforcements. This weekend, that meant sending special forces to the Jaghori District of Ghazni. The Shi’ite dominated district was long seen as “safe.”

That’s not panning out, however, as the Taliban are not only routing Shi’ite militias, but defeating the reinforcements as well, killing at least 25 commandos and continuing to advance deeper into the district.

On the surface, the district is only important in that it gives the Taliban a route to attack the important provincial capital, which it has long contested. It may be more significant, however, in that the reinforcement strategy is failing.

On Friday talks opened between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Moscow, in an unprecedented moment where both sides have come together for formal face-to-face talks hosted by the Russian government.

Following a press conference wherein Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged "I am counting on you holding a serious and constructive conversation that will justify the hopes of the Afghan people," the talks commenced behind closed doors.

This is Moscow's first successful attempt to get all sides at the same table as a prior summit was deemed a failure when Afghan government authorities refused to attend. And while Kabul high officials are nowhere present for this week's talks, members of the government-appointed Peace Council are attending the event. Notably, among the dozen nations to send envoys to the event is the United States; however, the US has merely sent a diplomat from the American Embassy in Moscow as an observer.

Brown University has released a new study on the cost in lives of America’s Post-9/11 Wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts.

This includes combatant deaths and civilian deaths in fighting and war violence. Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well.

This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011.

Brown University has released a new study on the cost in lives of America’s Post-9/11 Wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The study estimates between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed in the course of the three conflicts.

This includes combatant deaths and civilian deaths in fighting and war violence. Civilians make up over half of the roughly 500,000 killed, with both opposition fighters and US-backed foreign military forces each sustaining in excess of 100,000 deaths as well.

This is admittedly a dramatic under-report of people killed in the wars, as it only attempts to calculate those killed directly in war violence, and not the massive number of others civilians who died from infrastructure damage or other indirect results of the wars. The list also excludes the US war in Syria, which itself stakes claims to another 500,000 killed since 2011.

The US serviceman killed in an insider attack in Kabul is identified as Brent Taylor, a mayor from Utah. While shocking to some back at home, this is only the latest such incident in a war that even top brass now call unwinnable.
North Ogden city mayor Major Brent Taylor was deployed to Afghanistan with the Utah National Guard at the beginning of this year. Taylor’s trip to Afghanistan was the fourth such deployment for the father of seven and was due to last one year.

Instead, Taylor was gunned down in an “apparent insider attack” in Kabul on Saturday. The gunman was reportedly a member of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces – whom Taylor was deployed to train and advise. The gunman managed to wound another US service member, before other Afghan forces killed him.

Taylor’s death was mourned by Utah Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, who wrote that the Afghan war “has once again cost us the best blood of a generation.”

In his first interview as commander, Gen. Scott Miller says the more aggressive posture was needed because of heavy casualties among Afghani forces.

When Gen. Scott Miller took over the war in Afghanistan on Sept. 2, Afghan soldiers were being killed and wounded at near record numbers.

He instituted a more aggressive policy of helping the Afghan military track and defeat the Taliban — what he calls "regaining the tactical initiative" — but in an exclusive interview with NBC News on Tuesday, his first since taking command of U.S. and coalition forces here, he also says he recognizes that the solution in Afghanistan will be political, not military.

"This is not going to be won militarily," Miller said. "This is going to a political solution."

Raziq was a classic product of America’s failed policy in Afghanistan, wherein personalities have been propped up over — and sometimes at the expense of — institutions. Of the $557 billion America spent in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2011, just 5.4 percent went toward governance. Most of the money was spent on security, which enriched men like Raziq.

The United States is not engaged in a war of national survival in Afghanistan and, therefore, does not need to keep its military forces in the country.

And of course it is a good thing that nobody has been hurt by these devices. Obviously targeting anyone with packages containing explosive materials is terrible, even if those devices were not rigged with the intention of detonating and harming anyone, and it is a good thing that not a single one of them has done so. It is a good thing that none of America’s political elites were targeted by the sort of explosive device that America drops on people in other countries every single day.

You know, the kind that actually explode.

Apparently some Acme comedy bombs mailed to a number of extremely rich people, which thankfully did not hurt anybody at all, are infinitely more newsworthy than the real bombs which maim and destroy children in Yemen on an industrial scale.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 24, 2018

During the height of the Obama-era surge in Afghanistan, a massive number of insider attacks started cropping up. The Pentagon resolved this ultimately by virtually eliminating direct contact with Afghan forces.

But the Trump-era surge is starting to have the same problem, as they started bringing troops in more direct contact for “training” purposes, and insider attacks are again on the rise. The Pentagon, again, has announced they are halting nearly all face-to-face contact with the Afghan military.

US officials are downplaying the matter, saying it is standard practice now, and that all regular contact will continue with the Afghans, they’ll just be contacting them by telephone or email instead.

Afghan officials also downplayed it, saying they can still go to the US side of the bases if they have to, and it’s just the US troops that are being told to stay away from the Afghans.

The US Army’s second Security Force Assistance Brigade is slated to deploy to Afghanistan in an “advise and assist” mission as the fight against the Taliban shows no signs of ending from either side.

"The 2nd SFAB is a conventional unit with a special mission ready to answer the nation's call," US Army Brig. Gen. Donn Hill, who commands the unit, said Thursday in a prepared statement. In total, there are about 800 officers and noncommissioned officers in each security force assistance brigade, the Army Times reported last December. The deployment will start next spring, according to the Army.

The three top officials in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province were killed when their own guards opened fire on them at a security conference Thursday, the deputy provincial governor said, and a Taliban spokesman said the target was Washington’s top general in Afghanistan, Scott Miller, who escaped without injury, according to NATO.

Agha Lala Dastageri, Kandahar’s deputy provincial governor, said powerful provincial police chief Abdul Raziq was among the dead, along with Kandahar governor Zalmay Wesa, who died of his wounds at a nearby hospital.

Mr. Dastageri said provincial intelligence chief Abdul Mohmin also died inside the governor’s sprawling residence where the attack occurred.

Two US citizens were wounded and a local police chief killed when Afghan guards opened fire at Austin S. Miller, the NATO and US forces commander in Afghanistan, after his meeting with Kandahar officials in the city.

The attack took place on Thursday afternoon after Miller’s meeting with Kandahar’s governor and the provincial police chief, General Abdul Raziq.

Raziq was killed in the attack at the governor's office, while two US citizens and several top Afghan officials, including the governor, were wounded, Pajhwok Afghan News reported. General Miller was safely evacuated from the area after the incident, NATO said.

Taliban officials issued statements over the weekend confirming for the first time a new round of talks on the peace process with US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. The talks took place in Qatar, where the Taliban’s diplomatic offices are located.

The Taliban rarely admits to talks ongoing at all, but even more significantly, officials revealed that the discussions are centering on the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan after 17 years, and that the US has agreed to that as a topic of discussion.

Reports coming after a Friday meeting in Doha, Qatar, between US diplomats and top Afghan Taliban officials suggest that Washington has agreed to discuss bringing its troops home and end America’s 17-year war in Afghanistan.

During Friday's preliminary talks, US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad discussed with the Taliban conditions to bring about the end of the US's 17-year war in Afghanistan, according to two ranking Taliban officials speaking on condition of anonymity, as reported by Al Jazeera.

US Special Envoy on Afghanistan Meets With Taliban Officials in Doha – Report
"Six US delegates arrived in Doha to have a meeting with our [Taliban] leaders [and] agreed to discuss all issues, including the pullout of foreign troops," an unnamed Afghan Taliban official stated.

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

Adding to a growing list of UN reports released recently all showing a surge in Afghan civilian casualties in different manners, a Wednesday report was released showing that civilian deaths are surging from US and Afghan government airstrikes.

This has been ongoing through the year, with a decrease in US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria leading to more warplanes committed to bombings in Afghanistan. More US strikes means more civilians getting hit, meaning the casualty figures are at multi-year highs.

The UN figures show 649 civilian casualties in the US and Afghan airstrikes in 2018’s first nine months. This is 39% more than the same period in 2017, as well as more than the whole of last year. 60% of the casualties are women and children.

All these reports on all these different sorts of civilian casualties caused by the war show a general increase in violence against civilians on all fronts, with no signs of the violence slowing down any time soon.

An American C-130 transport plane has crashed in Afghanistan, killing at least 11 people, a US defense official has said. Among the dead are several US troop members and contracted civilians whose nationalities have not been disclosed.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for shooting down the C-130, according to AFP. However, this information has not yet been confirmed, and US authorities previously denied any hostile engagement.

“Our mujahideen have shot down a four-engine US aircraft in Jalalabad,” AFP cited Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid as saying. “Based on credible information, 15 invading forces and a number of puppet troops were killed.”

Don't look for the Trump administration to pull out of Afghanistan any time soon.

In fact, expect just the opposite, as ill-advised as it is to continue pursuing a military solution to protect a US-installed corrupt government that is teetering on the brink of its own destruction.

The US has entered its 17th year in the Afghan war trying to prop up a government that is fundamentally flawed, corrupt to the core with a security force that still cannot defeat the Taliban on its own. In fact, corruption within the government has actually empowered the Taliban not only to stay the course but has increased its influence after it was all but defeated in 2001.

The UN said deliberately targeting and murdering civilians are serious violations of international humanitarian law that amount to war crimes. UNAMA has called for a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

Heavy fighting erupted in dozens of provinces across Afghanistan over the weekend, with reports over the weekend suggesting that these fights were heavily Taliban attacks timed to the 17-year anniversary of the US invasion.

Over 200 combatants were reported slain, with the Afghan Defense Ministry reporting 156 Taliban slain. Reports have 35 Afghan soldiers killed as of Saturday night, and 15 more killed overnight Sunday in Jawzjan.

The Defense Ministry has sought to rebrand all of that fighting after the fact, now saying that it was a series of “military crackdowns” as opposed to Taliban attacks. That the Afghan government lost territory, and the main highway is closed certainly raise questions about why they would’ve chosen these sites for “crackdowns.”

After 17 years of war in Afghanistan, a comfortable majority of American veterans say they would support a decision by President Donald Trump to pull all U.S. troops out of the country, according to a survey released Monday by a Washington think tank.

The joint poll from RealClearPolitics and the Charles Koch Institute, a libertarian-oriented research organization, found that more than half of Americans are skeptical of continued U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, an assessment that is even more common among veterans.

According to the survey, 53 percent of Americans do not believe Washington has a clear strategic objective in the Afghanistan War. About 60 percent of veterans feel the same way.

17 years ago, the United States began its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, officially launched to pursue al-Qaeda in general and Osama bin Laden in particular. Bin Laden is long since dead, but the US still has a massive war raging in Afghanistan, one which is going extremely poorly and shows no signs of ending.

On the war’s anniversary, fighting raged particularly hard, with 14 different provinces across Afghanistan reporting Taliban attacks, and many of them leading to substantial battles. All told, over 110 people were reported killed in 24 hours, roughly half of them Taliban, and the rest included 19 civilians and 35 Afghan soldiers.

Taliban attacks looked to secure territory gains in several districts, including strategically important districts along the Kabul-Kandahar highway.The main highway in Afghanistan, and one of the few major paved roads in the nation, officials say it is closed to traffic until fighting is resolved.

In his latest comments to reporters, US Central Commander Gen. Joseph Votel confirmed that the Afghan military and police and facing increasingly high numbers of battlefield casualties, following what he termed a “difficult and bloody summer.”

This has been well-documented in recent months, with the Afghan military losing ground significantly to the Taliban. The casualties are further exacerbating Afghan military shortfalls, caused by poor recruiting, and large numbers of “ghost troops” who exist only on paper.

Gen. Votel sought to downplay this to the reporters, however, saying Afghan officials have acknowledged the casualties but have said they “will not deter them.” Votel is also keen to see the Afghan military abandon attempts to defend territory and hold military checkpoints.

On September 3rd, a U.S Army sergeant major was killed by two Afghan police officers - the very people his unit, the new Security Force Assistance Brigade, was there to train. It was the second fatal “insider attack,” as such incidents are regularly called, this year and the 102nd since the start of the Afghan War 17 long years ago. Such attacks are sometimes termed “green-on-blue” incidents (in Army lingo, “green” forces are U.S. allies and “blue” forces Americans). For obvious reasons, they are highly destructive to the military mission of training and advising local military and security forces in Afghanistan. Such attacks, not surprisingly, sow distrust and fear, creating distance between Western troops and their supposed Afghan partners.

President Ghani says Afghan forces have enough potential and have managed to save the country from “collapse”.

In reaction to the possibility of privatizing the Afghan war, President Ashraf Ghani said he will not allow “foreign mercenaries” to operate in Afghanistan.

Addressing the 3rd Mayors National Conference, the president said the Afghan government forces have enough potential and have managed to save the country from “collapse”.

“You should know that the work which is done by Afghans cannot be done by any foreign mercenary and foreign mercenaries will never be allowed in this soil,” Ghani said.

Ghani’s remarks come days after Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater security company, in an interview with TOLOnews, insisted the Afghan war will end “a few months” using his plan to send in few thousand contracted mentors to Afghanistan.

The former founder and CEO of Blackwater says he needs just six months and roughly 3,600 men to make the Afghan War look far different from the shitshow it is now.

In an interview with Afghanistan’s TOLO News, Erik Prince once again pitched his idea to privatize the nearly-17-year-old conflict, offering up a force of “contracted veteran mentors” from the United States and NATO countries to serve alongside Afghan security forces.

“Well, I would say six months after the program is fully ramped up, you have a very different situation on the ground, I will commit to that,” Prince said, outlining a plan to provide 36 contractors for each unit of Afghan security forces, who would serve for two to four years at a time.

Yes, you read that right: Erik Prince says he can turn the war around in six months while suggesting his contractors could be there for at least four years.

Moscow is outraged at NATO’s "errant" attacks in Afghanistan, which have become almost a daily reality, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

"We are outraged at the fact that NATO’s ‘errant’ attacks in the country have become almost a daily reality, while no one has been held responsible," the statement reads.

"We believe that the current situation is a result of gross miscalculations the US made in Afghanistan and the White House’s reliance on the use of military force to resolve the situation in the country. We call on Washington to reconsider its short-sighted policy and opt for diplomatic measures aimed at launching an inter-Afghan dialogue," the Russian Foreign Ministry said, adding that Moscow called "for bringing those responsible for crimes against civilians to justice."

With the defeat of ISIS in most cities in Iraq and Syria reducing the number of potential targets for US airstrikes in those countries, planes have been relocated in large numbers to Afghanistan. It has been well-documented that this has led to a soaring number of US airstrikes in Afghanistan, with nearly 3,000 strikes in the first six months of this year, double that of the previous year.

With these strikes largely confined to areas where the US has little ground presence of intelligence on the area, the large increase in strikes led to an equally large increase in the number of civilians getting killed in airstrikes, with nine killed in Kapisa last week in the most recent example.

The UN issued a statement on Tuesday voicing concern about the increasing civilian deaths from airstrikes, reiterating that all parties have an obligation to protect civilians from harm. The US and Afghan governments both say they are “aware” of the statement.

The last official figures on Afghan military deaths came out in 2016. 22 soldiers were killed on an average day, and this was so bad that Afghan and US officials decided that death tolls would subsequently be kept secret

Things have just gotten worse, and 22 deaths would be a comparatively mild day compared to media reports on the death tolls in recent days. In the past week, the average day has seen roughly 57 deaths among Afghan security forces.

The Pentagon’s recent decision to more heavily publicize Taliban body counts, to try to sell the war to the administration, likely comes from the same place as the decision to keep Afghan military deaths secret, as this will just reveal the extent of the conflict’s failure.

The Pentagon’s leadership has long opposed using body counts as war propaganda, particularly in Afghanistan, fearing that it would echo the failed strategy of Vietnam, and alienating people around the world.

But in recent months, efforts to sell President Trump on the Afghan War have changed that, with officials now eager to get gaudy death tolls out to the public to prove that the US and its allies will “remove all who oppose them at every turn,” and are making progress in killing people.

Yet these same officials have long admitted this isn’t an effective way to communicate how the war is going, and that fixation on body counts comes off as terribly morbid. Whether it is something to sell President Trump on the war is another matter.

Countries with nothing to fear do not fear the ICC.

Countries with nothing to fear do not fear the ICC. The United States and Israel are very afraid of the ICC. The murder of unarmed civilians is a war crime. So is torture. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of densely-populated civilian areas, its half-century occupation of Palestinian territory and its construction and expansion of Jews-only settler colonies on Palestinian land are all also illegal under international law. Neither Israel nor the United States has joined the ICC. Other leading human rights violators, including North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and Ethiopia, have either never joined or have withdrawn from the court.

The advisory also warns military activities linked to the bloody conflict in Syria have been ramped across Iran's airspace.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington are running high following Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal re-introduce economic sanctions last month.

Flight Service Bureau, which provides safety information on airspace to airlines, said "without seeming alarmist", the deteriorating relationship between the US and Iran must be taken into account when planning flights in Iran's airspace.

Most parliamentarians in the Afghani parliament voted to revise the country’s security agreement with the United States, including allowing permanent US military bases to remain on Afghan soil. This major development comes in light of Kabul, Beijing, Moscow, and the Taliban having attempting to organize a grand meeting to establish a solution to the US occupation in Afghanistan.

“The idea [of a revision] was put forward by some Parliamentarians in the Chamber of Deputies on Monday and was approved by the majority of the parliamentarians by means of a vote on Wednesday,” 1TV channel reported.

This agreement allowed US military forces and bases to remain in Afghanistan after the US combat mission ended in 2014, the report said. However, security conditions continue to worsen as the number of civilians and security forces killed by terrorist attacks increases.

Many Tesla owners have lost all autopilot functionality as a result of the company’s latest "over the air" software update, according to Jalopnik . Tesla knows about the issue and has promised to fix it by Friday of this week, according to the article, saying it was "a known issue".

Tesla has been sending out its latest "over the air" software update over the course of this week. The purpose of the software update was to increase the capabilities of Autopilot and help it further incorporate traffic lights, stop signs, lane changes and off-ramps.

As a reminder, numerous Tesla Autopilot incidents have occurred when a vehicle moves out from in front of a Tesla vehicle, and/or when there's an option to take an off-ramp nearby. Videos like this one, on YouTube, have confirmed the issue:

As Americans mark the anniversary of 9/11, the war that was launched in response to those attacks shows no sign of ending.

Seventeen years later, American troops are still fighting and dying, civilian casualties are at record highs, and the Taliban now controls more territory than at any point since 2001.

Earlier this month, a new American general took control of the effort — the ninth change of command in what is now the longest war the United States has ever fought.

Outgoing U.S. commander General John Nicholson had a simple message as he handed over reigns to his successor after being in command for the last two years: “It’s time for the war in Afghanistan to end.”