Twenty-four men at an Afghan refugee camp on the outskirts of the Pakistani port of Karachi are among those arrested on suspicion of involvement in the ethnic clashes still shaking city. At least 44 have been killed in the clashes which began Nov. 30, pitting local Urdu-speakers against Pashtuns from northwest Pakistan. The incidents were mainly blamed on activists from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP). Leaders from both the parties denied their members were involved in the violence. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif raised the specious possibility that India instigated of the Karachi violence as a response to the Mumbai attacks. (AFP, AlJazeera, Dec. 2)

President Hamid Karzai openly called for a timeline for NATO to withdraw from Afghanistan. At a Nov. 26 news conference with NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Karzai rhetorically asked: "How long will this war go? Afghanistan can’t continue to suffer a war without end." (NYT, Nov. 27)

From Radio Australia, Nov. 26:

10 arrested over acid attack in Afghanistan
Afghan police have arrested 10 men accused of spraying acid in the faces of several schoolgirls and teachers. The attack happened outside a girls' high school in the southern city of Kandhar.

Rashid Rauf of Birmingham, UK, alleged mastermind of a 2006 plot to blow up transatlantic jets using liquid bombs, was one of five people reported killed Nov. 22 by a presumed US missile attack in the North Waziristan region in Pakistan's Tribal Areas. Unnamed Pakistani intelligence sources said that a wanted Egyptian militant, Abu Zubair al-Masri, was among the others killed.

Missiles from an apparent US drone struck a house near the town of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan region early Nov. 22, killing at least four. Mir Ali has been hit repeatedly in the more than 20 US air-strikes on Pakistan since August. (NYT, Nov. 22) The previous day, a bomb killed eight mourners at the funeral of a Shi'ite cleric, Syed Zahid Iqbal Shahid, who had been shot that morning by gunmen on a motorbike in Dera Ismail Khan, near Bannu (NWFP). The bombing was followed by a riot in which a mob set fire to shops and vehicles and pelted police with rocks. (Dawn, Nov. 21; NYT, Nov. 22)

A missile from a US drone struck a purported militant hideout in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province Nov. 19—the 20th such attack since August, but the first outside of the country's Tribal Areas. The strike in Bannu district left five dead. It came despite growing protests from the Pakistani government against the air-strikes. (AP, Nov. 19)

US President-elect Barack Obama in his Nov. 16 appearance on 60 Minutes was asked by interviewer Steve Kroft: "Can you give us some sense of when you might start redeployments out of Iraq?" His answer stated fairly explicitly that his planned Iraq draw-down would be concomitant with an escalation in Afghanistan:

Jill McGivering in a Nov. 12 report for the BBC, "Rough justice for Afghan women inmates," visits Afghanistan's dismal Lashkar Gah prison in Helmand, revealing that women and teenage girls continue to be incarcerated for lengthy terms in harsh conditions for such crimes as pre-marital sex or defending themselves against abusive spouses in the post-Taliban era. Of the prison's seven female prisoners she interviewed, this case is perhaps the most poignant: