Afghan President Hamid Karzai's main rival drew a huge crowd to a rally on August 13 but violence still loomed as a threat, with a former leader escaping an assassination attempt a week before the vote.
Peace, reconciliation, and economic development are the key themes of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's reelection manifesto. Unlike his challengers, he has the arduous task of defending his past performance and selling his future vision to an increasingly skeptical Afghan electorate.
Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, says an important part of Washington's strategy to defeated the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is recognizing that Afghanistan doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The United States believes that Iran has supplied arms to insurgents in neighboring Afghanistan but top advisers to President Barack Obama have said that the information was conflicting and any threat appeared unsubstantial.
Taliban insurgents have abducted five people campaigning for a leading candidate in Afghanistan's presidential election, officials said.
Sixty years ago -- on August 12, 1949 -- the four Geneva Conventions of the post-World War II era were published. But since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, critics have charged that the Geneva Conventions are outdated and ill suited to an era where one side in a war is a militant group rather than the armed forces of a state. RFE/RL spoke with Knut Dormann, deputy head of the legal department of the International Committee of the Red Cross, about why the Geneva Conventions remain vital.
Four hundred U.S. Marines have staged a helicopter assault in the mountains of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, part of efforts to secure Taliban-held areas, eight days before a presidential election.
Taliban fighters stormed a district police headquarters in once-quiet northern Afghanistan overnight, killing the police chief and two of his men, an official said, as violence spreads into once safe areas.
The attack, the latest in a series of assaults before the August 20 presidential poll, came after U.S. commanders said the war in Afghanistan had not reached a crisis point even though the Taliban had gained momentum.
On a bright summer day, amid the towering mountains surrounding the Panjshir valley north of Kabul, locals recently voiced their support for Abdullah Abdullah.
The Taliban are advancing out of traditional strongholds in Afghanistan's south and east into the north and west, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in the country said in an interview published on August 10.
The United States has placed 50 suspected Afghan drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, "The New York Times" reported on August 10, citing a Congressional report to be released this week.
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