Ahmed Wali Karzai—half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, and the province's de facto ruling warlord—was assassinated July 12 at one of his five mansions by a senior commander of his own security detail, Sardar Mohammad. The assassin—a member of Karzai’s extended clan, the Popalzai, and a trusted family associate for decades—was immediately gunned down by the other bodyguards. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The Interior Ministry says an investigation is underway and several people who were guarding the home have been taken into custody. Cables released by WikiLeaks last year revealed suspicions by US diplomats that Karzai was involved in Afghan's opium trade. After one meeting with US envoy Frank Ruggiero in September 2009, the diplomat said of Karzai, known by the acronym "AWK": "While we must deal with AWK as the head of the provincial council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker." (AFP, ABC, MSNBC World Blog, July 12)

President Barack Obama said June 28 that his newly announced drawdown of US military forces in Afghanistan will be done "in a responsible way." Under the plan, 10,000 troops will be pulled out of the country by year's end, and a total of 33,000 troops will be out by next summer, fully returning the "surge" troops the president announced in late 2009. (Xinhua, May 30) Simultaneously, coalition and Afghan officials will be tripling the size of a US-funded program to establish local self-defense militias to fight against insurgents. The militia forces—said to be modeled after the Sons of Iraq, led by Sunni ex-insurgents who turned against al-Qaeda—are to grow from a current 6,500 recruits to 30,000. "Where we have them trained and fully employed the Taliban is not re-emerging," boasted Army Brig. Gen. Jefforey Smith, an assistant commanding general at the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan. (USA Today, June 29)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on June 19 that the US had opened preliminary talks with members of the Taliban as part of an effort to end the war in Afghanistan. In an appearance on CNN’s "State of the Union," Gates cautioned that the talks were in preliminary stages and officials remain uncertain the Taliban participants are authentic representatives of leader Mullah Omar. He said the effort was being carried out by diplomats but did not directly involve the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And he said several other countries are participating, though he did not name which ones. "We have said all along that a political outcome is the way most of the wars end," Gates said. "The question is when and if they are ready to talk seriously." (NYT, June 19)

At least 20 people, eight of them army troops, were killed when Taliban militants attacked a security post at Wakeen in Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal region on June 9. The attack came five days after Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, commander of Harkat-ul Jihad al Islami (HUJI), was killed in an apparent US drone strike near Wana, South Waziristan. He was believed to be the mastermind of an audacious May 23 militant attack on Pakistan's Mehran naval base in Karachi, which was repulsed after an indeterminate loss of life. (RTT, June 9; Dawn, June 4; Dawn, May 23)

Two NATO air-strikes in Afghanistan May 29 again killed civilian villagers, outraged residents ad local officials said. One strike on Nawzad in Helmand province, apparently launched in response to an attack by the Taliban on US Marine forces, killed 14. Officials said that all of the dead were women and children, and that of the six injured, only two were men, both unarmed civilians. President Hamid Karzai’s office issued a formal statement condemning the attack. The other strike took place in the Doab district of remote northeastern province of Nuristan, and killed 38 civilians, 20 of whom were part of the local police force, local officials said. The police officers were apparently engaged in ground fighting with the Taliban insurgents. Afghan TV showed images of the Nawzad casualties being taken into hospitals and bereaved relatives cradling the bodies of several young children wrapped in bloody sheets. A NATO spokesman said that an investigation was under way. (The Guardian, Gamut, May 29)

At least 11 people were killed and more than 80 injured May18 as a protest demonstration sparked by a deadly US raid erupted into clashes with security forces in Taliqan, capital of Afghanistan's northeast Takhar province. Protesters armed with Kalashnikov rifles, axes, grenades and petrol bombs battled police, and assaulted a small NATO base on the city's outskirts, local officials and witnesses said. The protest was launched in reaction to the apparent killing of four civilians—including two women—in a night raid conducted by US troops on a nearby village. "American forces entered a house in a village near Taloqan city, the capital of Takhar province, around 12:30 AM. As a result, four people were killed," Abdul Jabar Taqwa, the provincial governor, told McClatchy news service in a telephone interview. An ISAF statement said: "A combined Afghan and coalition security force killed four insurgents, including two armed females during a security operation targeting an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan facilitator in Taloqan district, Takhar province yesterday."

Two suicide explosions targeted a paramilitary Frontier Constabulary training center in Charsadda district of Pakistan's Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province (the former North West Frontier Province) May 13, killing up to 90 recruits as they lined up to be bussed home on leave. Over 140 others sustained critical injuries. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility, calling it response to the killing of Osama bin Laden. "This was the first revenge for Osama's martyrdom," Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location. "Wait for bigger attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan." (Pakistan Observer, Pakistan Times, May 13)

Afghan police and army troops are to replace foreign forces in at least five locations in the country in July and a transition process, agreed by the Afghan government and NATO, is slated to be complete in December 2014. But aid groups fear a power vacuum that will make their work in the country untenable. "If the national security forces that are left behind in 2014 are unable to provide for the security of the population, and the indications at the moment are that this will indeed be the case, then we can expect that they'll also be unable to provide the security conditions for the provision of humanitarian assistance," said Rebecca Barber, a humanitarian policy and advocacy adviser with Oxfam. "This will have serious implications for the Afghan people—millions of whom are reliant upon humanitarian aid." (IRIN, May 10)