Polish soldiers in Ghazni province are winning over locals with their shoot-last policy, but US troops who went around kicking in doors have left suspicion in their wake Most days, weather permitting, a couple of US Black Hawk helicopters take off from Bagram air base and do the rounds of Nato bases...

The top US diplomat in Kabul warned ­yesterday that Pakistan posed a bigger security challenge to America and the world than Afghanistan, as Islamabad grappled with the latest terrorist attack on its soil and the escalating Taliban ­insurgency on its north-western border. Christopher Dell, who cur...

Roadbuilding in a far-flung valley under the guard of French forces augurs well. But this is winter, and the real fighting has yet to start From the air, the Morales-Frazier firebase looks like it has been etched on to the bare rock. It sits at the bottom of a long, deep valley full of insurgents an...

Alternatives to opium are being shown to farmers in Kabul, while Bagram sees the arrival of more US troops Kabul When Alexander the Great arrived in Afghanistan, he found 120 different varieties of grape growing here. Much later, about a century ago, California's giant raisin industry was started us...

The Afghan president's call to bring elections forward to April has not gone down well with hard-working electoral officials Aghanistan's elections are being planned behind thick walls and high security on the outskirts of Kabul. Inside an array of single-storey buildings, the country's Independent ...

The UN's nuclear watchdog has said traces of uranium taken from the site of an alleged nuclear reactor in Syria were manmade and rejected the Syrian government's claim that it came from an Israeli air strike that destroyed the site in 2007. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...

The US president-elect, Barack Obama, said yesterday that he would act swiftly once in power to confront Iran, vowing to take a new approach focused on dialogue but warning Tehran that there were limits beyond which it should not go. Speaking on network television nine days before taking office, Oba...

The controversy over Barack Obama's vacant Senate place took a twist yesterday when the man controversially appointed to replace him tried and failed to take his seat amid chaotic scenes on Capitol Hill. Roland Burris, appointed last week by the scandal-hit Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, manage...

Barack Obama's selection yesterday of a Clinton administration veteran, Leon Panetta, as the CIA's new director, has sharply split the Democratic party between those who say he lacks intelligence experience and those who have welcomed him as a sharp break with the past. The rift in Democratic ranks ...

The death of Mark Felt, better known as Deep Throat, added a postscript yesterday to an era of political skulduggery and journalistic endeavour that brought down a presidency. Felt, who was 95 when he died at home in California, had been second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation durin...