War In Afghanistan, Middle East | featured news

After more than a year of sporadic contacts, U.S.-Taliban talks have been stalled for months, deflating Obama administration hopes that progress toward a political solution to the Afghan war would be well underway this spring.

The Taliban is stronger now than before President Barack Obama ordered a surge of troops to Afghanistan, two senior U.S. lawmakers said on Sunday, contradicting the administration's assessment of the insurgency.

Most Americans want US troops out of Afghanistan and oppose a significant long-term commitment to support that nation's economy and security, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday.

The latest high-level talks on ending a diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike.

Blake Hounshell says Romney may criticize Obama's Afghanistan approach, but his is much the same for a conflict that is intractable and a pull-out that is inevitable

Afghan and U.S. officials said Sunday they had agreed to the broad outlines of an accord governing the long-term American presence in Afghanistan after the Western combat role ends in 2014. The heads of the two countries' negotiating teams, Afghanistan's national security advisor Rangin Spanta and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, initialed a draft of the "strategic partnership agreement" that the two sides have said they plan to finalize prior to a landmark NATO summit in Chicago next month. That gathering is expected to provide a blueprint for the final phase of the decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Afghan security forces on Saturday arrested five insurgents suspected of planning massive attacks on crowded areas of the capital Kabul, an intelligence spokesman said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned photographs of U.S. soldiers posing with the mangled bodies of Afghan insurgent bombers as "inhuman" on Thursday, calling for a rapid transition from NATO to Afghan security to prevent more such incidents.

American support for a U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan continues to erode rapidly and has now hit a new low, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Already tense U.S. and NATO ties with Afghanistan were dealt another blow on Wednesday with photographs appearing in an American newspaper of U.S. soldiers posing with the maimed bodies of dead Afghan insurgents.