Afghanistan

As tens of thousands of NATO troops battle it out with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan for the seventh year, a handful of soldiers are waging their war armed with little more than slogans, leaflets and loud music. They are the members of the psychological operations, or psyops, teams deployed by Western armies to help sap the will of the enemy and win over the local population without firing a shot.

The Afghan government under President Hamid Karzai controls just 30 per cent of the country, the top U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) today released a study that adopts a critical view of the proposal for a licensing system that would legalize opium cultivation in Afghanistan as a step towards ending the narcotics trade in that country.

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military. Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The United States has urged European leaders as well as the public to be more supportive of NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, a cornerstone of the US war on terror, or the alliance will be "effectively destroyed" by a failure in the central Asian country.

The U.S. Army has ordered another 3,000 Packbot combat robots. This is the second generation Packbot 510, which is lighter, faster, stronger, more rugged and reliable than the thousands of existing PackBots. The army already has about 4,000 of these small robots in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has become the world's top producer of opium. According to the United Nations, the Southern Asian nation supplies more than 90 percent of the world market in opiates. And while the drug trade is not new to Afghanistan, it's beginning to leave its mark on society.

Six years ago coalition forces headed into Afghanistan to eradicate the Taliban. Now an international think tank says more than half of the country is under the Taliban's thumb. Meanwhile, an Oxfam report sharply criticized US-led development efforts in the region.

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company, according to a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR—which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton—was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the Center's list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.

Pakistan's Frontier Corps is responsible for protecting the country's western regions along its more than 1,500-kilometer porous border with Afghanistan. With a reported 60,000 paramilitary troops, the force is comprised of 14 units based in the Northwest Frontier Province and 13 units in Baluchistan. The troops operate under the orders of Pakistan's Army Headquarters as well as the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions. The Pentagon's proposal for more funds calls for a training center to be built in northwestern Pakistan.