All Blog Posts from World Watch

This story was filed by CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk at the United Nations.

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The leak of information about Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother and his alleged connection to the CIA and tribal drug lords is curious. Leaks always are. But in this case, the release of this sensitive information is troublesome and potentially game-changing in a dangerous war.

Ahmed Wali Karzai admitted to giving the agency information, but has denied receiving any money from the CIA, or being part of the lucrative Afghanistan opium trade – making him, at least in Washington-talk, that much more guilty.

The report itself will change the political and military landscape in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The insurgents will use it as proof of the U.S. meddling at the highest level of the Afghan government. In Pakistan, where the use of drones is already being questioned by the U.N. envoy for extrajudicial killings — and the Pakistani Parliament questions the strings on the $7.5 billion U.S. aid package — the equation of the U.S. government to the CIA is devastating.

So, the obvious, unanswered question is: who leaked the information?

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The White House has dismissed a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation that President Obama might announce an additional surge of troops — likely between 40,000 and 45,000 as early as next week.

The BBC's "Newsnight" program reported Wednesday night that Mr. Obama has already made his decision, informed the British government that a significant troop increase was coming, and that he may seek to make the announcement publically ahead of a NATO defense ministers' meeting in Slovakia next week.

Newsnight, a well-regarded hard-news magazine show, did not name sources for its report.

The White House was quick to tell the BBC that the claim was incorrect, and that the Mr. Obama was still in the highly publicized decision-making process about how to alter the American war strategy in Afghanistan.

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This story was filed by CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk at the United Nations.

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Eight years ago this month, the war in Afghanistan began, and in the coming weeks, President Obama will decide, after intense deliberation with his war council, what to do next.

The most puzzling, and troubling aspect of the deliberations, is how many genuinely basic questions remain unanswered. What are the goals? Who is in charge of the country where 100,000 troops are serving under U.S. and NATO command (and Mr. Obama is considering a dramatic increase)? And, of course, why?

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On Friday, a German ground commander called in a U.S. airstrike on two stolen fuel tankers in northern Afghanistan. Dozens of civilians had gathered around the tankers and Afghan officials say 70 or more were killed by the American bombs.

Official investigations have ramped-up to determine which of the two NATO allies — German or the U.S. — made the tragic error that led to the misguided strike, but the real consequences won't wait for those findings. Nor can the real work to try and make amends to the Afghan people.

CBS News consultant Jere Van Dyk says it really doesn't make any difference whom, exactly, is to blame for the airstrike. In the minds of most Afghans, "they are all infidels, they're all outsiders and they're all suspect."

"What the United States has to do, regardless of who fired the weapons, is to show that they're sorry, that they care," said Van Dyk, "because every time you kill anybody on the ground - every cousin, every brother, every uncle, every father is now fodder for the Taliban."

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As President Obama heads to Camp David for the Labor Day weekend, his vacation reading is the sobering Afghanistan war report by U.S. and NATO General Stanley A. McChrystal, but he would be well-advised to add to his bedside literature the United Nation's new report on the increase of drug cartels in Afghanistan.

"Afghan Opium Survey 2009," was released Wednesday in Kabul by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The report reads like a John Le Carré spy novel. The headline is that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is down, but UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa also concludes the war-torn country now has its very own drug cartels.

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Pakistan’s army may require months to prepare for a new military offensive against the Taliban in a restive region along the country’s unsettled border with Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani general on Tuesday told President Obama’s envoy for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region according to senior Pakistani officials.

Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmed, a widely respected army commander, met with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama's envoy, to brief him on Pakistan’s northwest frontier province, specifically the areas at the center of Taliban activity.

It is this region which is of the most interest to the U.S. as Afghanistan heads in to Thursday’s presidential elections. In the past, U.S. officials have complained about Taliban militants crossing the border with relative ease to attack Afghan and western troops in Afghanistan before returning to Pakistan’s soil to reorganize.

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This analysis was written by CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, currently embedded with U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.

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There are a few things that really annoy me about the current Afghan debate. As I head back to Afghanistan to cover the Aug. 20 presidential election, I feel compelled to write about them, in the hope that someone will be paying attention.

First is the idea that most — the popularly quoted figure is some 80 percent — of insurgents are "economic," and as such, are driven purely by money. The argument is made that poor villagers are easily recruited by Taliban and al Qaeda leaders who pay them anything from $10 to lay a single bomb, to $400 as a monthly "salary" — more cash than Afghans could earn in neglected, poverty-stricken areas.

Let us not forget that the unemployment rate is 40 percent in Afghanistan and literacy rates barely above 30 percent for men – less than half that number for women. So the argument would seem to make sense — superficially.

I disagree. It's time to blow this argument to pieces.

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We were crouched down in a field, the earth steaming with the heat of the sun and the air thick with humidity. Two Marines were kneeling down beside me.

"All we've done since we got here is get blown up," one of them said. And then they started to talk.

On a patrol exactly like this one a few days ago in southern Helmand province, they had been walking along the canal. One of their Marines stepped on a relatively small explosive device hidden in the ground, most likely a landmine.

The problem was, that mine was linked to a bigger explosive device in a deadly daisy chain that did not miss its mark. The Marine who was walking behind was hit by the bigger, secondary explosion.

"We ran as soon as we heard it go off but when we got to the canal the only thing that was there was his body armor. He was nowhere," they told me, "just gone."

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CBS News correspondent Mandy Clark is embedded with U.S. soldiers trying to secure eastern Afghanistan ahead of next month's presidential elections.

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Filed at 4:50 a.m. Eastern.

Operation Champion Sword is a pre-election surge of U.S. and Afghan forces in the country's volatile eastern border region. The goal is to disrupt insurgents planning attacks during the elections scheduled for August 20.

It's all happening around Khowst, one of Afghanistan's biggest cities along the border with Pakistan and a key target for suicide attacks by Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants.

The daily operations consist of precisely targeted, in-and-out missions by small groups of soldiers. The targets are pinpointed by intelligence agencies and can include militant safe-havens, weapons caches or bomb-making facilities.

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A majority of the British public believes the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan cannot be won and British troops should be withdrawn immediately, according to a poll commissioned by The Independent.

According to the poll, carried out by ComRes for the newspaper, 58 percent of Britons say the war is "unwinnable," with 31 percent believing victory can be achieved.

Fifty-two percent of those asked said all British forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan immediately.

The results reflect a public wearied by near-daily headlines of troop deaths, scandals over how well those troops have been equipped for battle, and a prime minister whose credibility has shrunken dramatically during the past several months.

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