War Glance
A coterie of well-connected Afghan businessmen and politicians may have plundered as much as $900m from the country's biggest commercial bank, three times the amount of earlier estimates, and the equivalent of about 7 per cent of Afghanistan's total gross domestic product.
Kabul Bank's funds were treated like personal accounts, it is claimed by several well-known members of Afghan society. Mahmoud Karzai, a brother of the Afghan President and prominent shareholder in Kabul Bank, told The New York Times that the bank's former chairman lent himself about $98m (£62m) to buy one of Afghanistan's airlines, and then used deposits to subsidise the carrier in an attempt to drive rivals out of business.
Afghan elite 'plundered $900m' from leading bank
Afghans Plan to Stop Recruiting Children as Police
Afghanistan is expected to sign a formal agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders, according to Afghan and United Nations officials.
The effort by Afghanistan’s international backers to rapidly expand the country’s police and military forces has had the unintended consequence of drawing many under-age boys into service, the officials conceded.
Bomb strikes funeral as blasts kill 40 in Baghdad
A car bomb ripped through a funeral tent in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday, the deadliest in a series of attacks that killed at least 40 people.
The blasts were the latest in more than a week of bombings that have killed more than 200 people, raising concerns about an uptick in violence as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw from the country.
Number of U.S. casualties from roadside bombs in Afghanistan skyrocketed from 2009 to 2010
The number of U.S. troops killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan soared by 60 percent last year, while the number of those wounded almost tripled, new U.S. military statistics show.
All told, 268 U.S. troops were killed by the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in 2010, about as many as in the three previous years combined, according to the figures, obtained by The Washington Post. More than 3,360 troops were injured, an increase of 178 percent over the year before.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL SLIP OVER WAR CRIMES ‘GUILT’
ALASTAIR Campbell heaped further pressure on Tony Blair by admitting he and the former Prime Minister should face prosecution for war crimes if the invasion of Iraq is found to be illegal.
In a rare slip-up, the spin doctor confessed that if it was found to be unlawful, those who took the country into war “should be punished”. He then tried to squirm out of his comments, made during a debate on BBC1’s Question Time, insisting the war in 2003 was lawful.
Tony Blair's promise to George Bush: count on us on Iraq war
Tony Blair today admitted to brushing aside warnings that invading Iraq would be unlawful and made clear his overriding priority, even at the expense of opposition and secrecy at home, was to maintain a close relationship with the US president.
In four hours of testimony to the Chilcot inquiry, ending with expressions of regret for lives lost that provoked jeers from relatives of the dead, Blair disclosed that he privately told George Bush he could "count on us" in helping get rid of Saddam Hussein, an aim, he said, for which his government should be "gung-ho".
Iraq war inquiry Tony Blair 'regrets' Iraq deaths but says Britain must stop apologising for invasion
Toany Blair insisted today that Britain had to give up the "wretched policy of apology" for the allies' action in Iraq. But he offered the Chilcot inquiry his regrets for the loss of life in Iraq. At his appearance before the inquiry last year he was heavily criticised for not answering a question about whether he regretted the invasion.
At the end of his evidence this afternoon he said it had never been his meaning. "Of course I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life," he said. As he extended his regrets to British and allied troops and Iraqis, there were murmurs of "too late" from the public seating behind him.
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