The Telegraph reports that a High Peace Council convened by Hamid Karzai may request that some Gitmo detainees be freed so they can participate in peace talks. (h/t Carol Rosenberg) Taliban prisoners would be freed from Guantánamo Bay to potentially join peace negotiations under a proposal from the Afghan council appointed to find a settlement [...]

Think Progress does the math on Panetta’s admission that there are just 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and discovers we’ve got 1,000 American troops in Afghanistan for each al Qaeda member. The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta [...]

Aafia Siddiqui has been at the center of one of the many mysteries flowing from the Bush and Obama administrations’ conduct of  intelligence operations. A Pakistani native and former MIT scientist, background on Siddiqui can be found several places, including a Seminal diary by ondelette here. The stories of Siddiqui’s disappearance and  her recent trial [...]

The Bush Administration isn’t going to tell us what they know about the grim status of Afghanistan. And why should they? After all, if we knew how bad Afghanistan was, we would be able to show the costs of the Iraq surge and other failed Bush policies.

Did Bush piss off our allies … again?

Barnett Rubin explains why the Taliban has been blowing up cell phone towers in Afghanistan. It’s a good old-fashioned protection racket.