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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The prospect of talks with the Taliban inched closer on Thursday when the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran met to explore ways of pushing the nascent peace process forward. The two-day trilateral meeting hosted by the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, comes as his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, claims to have opened direct discussions with the Taliban for the first time in the 11-year-old insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that his representatives had begun talks with the Taliban and the American government, a potentially significant development suggesting that the Taliban were dropping longstanding objections to face-to-face discussions with the Afghan government. A member of the Afghan High Peace Council also described the recent Afghan government contacts to The New York Times this week and said that there had been an agreement with Taliban representatives to go ahead with peace talks in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, but there was no date yet for meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- More Taliban insurgents are being killed or captured than ever before, yet when the captives are interrogated by the American military, they remain convinced that they are winning the war. That is because the Taliban believe that their own hearts-and-minds campaign is winning over Afghans -- or so they tell their interrogators -- and even converting a growing number of Afghan government officials and soldiers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Several Taliban negotiators have begun meeting with American officials in Qatar, where they are discussing preliminary trust-building measures, including a possible prisoner transfer, several former Taliban officials said Saturday. The former officials said that four to eight Taliban representatives had traveled to Qatar from Pakistan to set up a political office for the exiled Afghan insurgent group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The senior American commander in Afghanistan suggested Tuesday that American forces could remain in the country beyond 2014 despite President Obama's pledge to withdraw them by then. The commander's remarks amounted to the most emphatic signal to date that the United States military intended to secure a presence here, possibly for years. In an interview with The New York Times, the commander, Gen. John R. Allen, avoided talking about troop levels as America begins to wind down its operations in the war on the Taliban insurgency, now 10 years old. But he said negotiations with the government of President Hamid Karzai on a strategic partnership agreement would ''almost certainly'' include ''a discussion with Afghanistan of what a post-2014 force will look like.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan -- Punctually, at 8 o'clock every evening, the cellphone signals disappear in this provincial capital. Under pressure from the Taliban, the major carriers turn off their signal towers, effectively severing most of the connections to the rest of the world. This now occurs in some portion of more than half the provinces in Afghanistan, and exemplifies the Taliban's new and more subtle ways of asserting themselves, even as NATO generals portray the insurgents as a diminished force less able to hold ground. The question is whether the Taliban need to hold territory as they once did in order to influence the population. Increasingly, it seems, the answer is no. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In his first public appearance since rushing back to Afghanistan after the assassination of the country's leading peace broker, a solemn President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that the Taliban had gained access to their target by wooing senior leaders with an audio CD suggesting that peace was within reach. Mr. Karzai's statement and an account from a former Taliban member who helped bring the bomber to the peace broker, Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who led the country's High Peace Council, painted a picture of a dark and complex plot that unfolded over four months to enable the assassin to move in on his target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- An assassin with explosives hidden in his turban was ushered into the home of the head of Afghanistan's peace process on Tuesday, embraced him and then exploded the bomb, killing him and dealing a potentially devastating blow to the effort to reconcile with the Taliban and end 10 years of war. The assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan's High Peace Council and a former president, on the heels of a carefully planned attack on the American Embassy a week ago, underscored the fierce opposition of those who want to shatter the country's tenuous stability and thwart its tentative steps toward peace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban have begun to send signals that they are interested in a negotiated settlement, potentially offering an opening for the West and the Afghan government, several Western officials said. While there have been some meetings between the Afghan government, NATO officials and some Taliban figures -- and even with someone who turned out to be a Taliban imposter -- the Taliban have always insisted that NATO troops would have to leave Afghanistan before any meaningful negotiations could take place. Now two recent statements suggest instead that they would be willing to engage in talks even with foreigners in the country. The Taliban are also speaking in less inflammatory terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban launched one of their most audacious surprise attacks on Thursday, sending a squad of at least seven suicide bombers into the capital of a relatively stable southern province with the aim of assassinating the provincial governor and an influential powerbroker. Neither was killed, but security and health officials said at least 21 civilians had died in the collateral mayhem, half of them children. The Taliban attack in the capital of Oruzgan Province, Tirin Kot, appeared to be carefully coordinated. It struck at the heart of Afghanistan's south just as the American-led NATO command is in the process of gradually handing over security responsibility to the Afghan government after nearly 10 years of war, and it raised new alarms about the government's capabilities when the foreign forces eventually leave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- An insurgent suicide bomber hiding explosives in his turban assassinated the mayor of Kandahar on Wednesday, the third killing of a high-profile official in the country this month. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on the mayor, who held dual citizenship in Afghanistan and the United States. The killing came two weeks after a suicide bomber used the same disguise to attack senior mullahs at a memorial for the former provincial chairman of Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was also assassinated, heightening concerns that the tenuous security gains in the violent south are faltering despite months of intensified fighting by NATO and Afghan forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KARZ, Afghanistan -- The marble grave of the Afghan president's half brother, assassinated two weeks ago by one of his own men, lies in this scruffy village that is near Kandahar and bears the family name. The white stone has a quiet to it that stands in stark contrast to the din he left behind. Ahmed Wali Karzai's killing put the region's spoils up for grabs, and the tribal elite of Kandahar are watching, waiting, and above all, calculating their next move. They all want a piece of the future, and among them are strong men with guns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taliban spokesmen denied reports sent through their e-mail and in text messages early Wednesday that their movement's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, was dead, saying that their Web sites and telephones had been hacked. Zabiullah Mujahid, one of the spokesmen, reached by telephone, said: ''The enemy hijacked our telephone numbers and e-mails. They have sent out false texts and statements about death of Mullah Omar. In reality he is alive and in good condition.'' The e-mail message said he had died of a heart attack and named his successor. Mr. Mujahid added that Mullah Omar was in Afghanistan, but military and intelligence sources have said they believe that he is in Pakistan, most likely in Karachi. A second Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, also denied the reports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Taliban fighters attacked and overran several Afghan border police posts on Wednesday, killing nearly two dozen police officers in a remote area of northeastern Afghanistan, according to the provincial governor. ''Twenty-three Afghan border police officers were martyred and seven others were wounded,'' said Jamaluddin Badar, governor of Nuristan Province, where the attack took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Toor Jan, who used to kill Americans and Canadians here, does not want much from the Afghan government. A home. A job. And, yes, eight security guards. He needs them. As one of the few Taliban commanders to switch sides, he is a target. In a rare interview, the 28-year-old, who is tall, thin and has a full black beard, is somber about the step he has taken, although he is one of the success stories of the government's biggest and best-financed peace program, which aims to bring Taliban fighters over to the government side, sapping the insurgency's strength. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. A NATO spokesman apologized for the child's death, which took place early Saturday in western Nangahar Province in the Hesarek District, a remote poppy-growing area close to Kabul Province and Logar Province. There has been almost no NATO presence there throughout the war, and the area is thought to be heavily penetrated by the Taliban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- From the Taliban's hidden mud compounds to NATO's headquarters in Brussels and the Pentagon, combatants in a decade-long war are asking versions of the same question: How does Osama bin Laden's death change the struggle over who will control Afghanistan? For the Taliban, the jury is still out: they say their insurgency was never solely dependent on Bin Laden, and they could survive his demise, but the American raid that killed him has raised the possibility that even the movement's top leaders may not be safe in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- More than 10,000 people gathered Thursday in Kabul to oppose reconciliation with the Taliban and the involvement of Pakistan in any peace deal, warning that it would be a betrayal of the Afghan people's long fight against extremism. The meeting, organized by a former intelligence director, Amrullah Saleh, and attended as well by Abdullah Abdullah, a former presidential candidate, was a frontal attack on the current government's policies, and speakers denounced both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The organizers promised that if they were not listened to, they would ''go to the streets and protest.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was based for many years and where Al Qaeda helped to train and pay insurgents, there was relief and uncertainty about how his death would play out in the fraught regional power politics now shaping the war. While senior political figures welcomed the news of his death, they cautioned that it did not necessarily translate into an immediate military victory over the Taliban, and urged the United States and NATO not to use it as a reason to withdraw. ''The killing of Osama should not be seen as mission accomplished,'' said Hanif Atmar, a former interior minister who has been a strong opponent of the Taliban. ''Al Qaeda is much more than just Osama bin Laden.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL -- The Taliban announced that the insurgent group's spring fighting season would begin officially across Afghanistan on Sunday in an unusual news statement that aimed to project an image of strength and concern for civilians, even as NATO warned the public to expect insurgent efforts to launch a major attack. The United Nations special representative, Staffan de Mistura, meanwhile, said both sides should redouble their efforts to avoid killing civilians as the fighting is expected to ratchet up with the arrival of good weather. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Government officials struggled on Tuesday, but with limited effect, to contain the damage from a spectacular jailbreak that freed 475 inmates, most presumed to be Taliban fighters, from southern Afghanistan's largest prison. Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar Province, where the prison break occurred, announced that security forces had detained steadily mounting numbers of escaped detainees throughout the day. By day's end, however, he conceded that while 71 people had been detained, the descriptions of only 41 men matched those of escapees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Taliban leaders carried out an audacious plot on Monday to free nearly 500 fighters from southern Afghanistan's largest prison, leading them through a tunnel dug over more than five months and equipped with electricity and air pipes, which suggested that the insurgents remained formidable and wily opponents despite recent setbacks. The plan was so closely held that one young Taliban fighter who got out said he knew nothing of it until a fellow inmate tugged his sleeve to wake him in the night and led him to the three-foot-wide tunnel, which ran more than half a mile from a hole in a cell's floor, under security posts, tall concrete walls and a highway, and came up in a nearby house. From there, a waiting car took the fighter a few miles away, where he hailed a taxi to safety. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The Taliban staged an audacious prison break here early Monday, freeing at least 476 political prisoners through a long tunnel, according to the warden, Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Mayar. He said that security authorities had discovered in the morning that the prisoners from the political wing of the building were gone, and that the authorities had just found the tunnel. ''We do not know if the tunnel was dug from outside or inside the prison,'' he said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The release of explicit photographs of American soldiers apparently engaged in atrocities against Afghan civilians threatens to ignite tensions between the Afghan and American governments and provide fodder for the Taliban's efforts to persuade Afghans that the foreign troops fighting here are a malevolent force. NATO officials and Western diplomats here have been steeling themselves for the release, worried that it will further undermine relations with President Hamid Karzai at a sensitive time when there have been several recent episodes of civilian casualties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- As American troops press the Taliban in their desert and mountain redoubts, Western diplomats, Taliban leaders and the Afghan government have begun to take a hard look at what it would take to start a negotiation to end the fighting. Efforts to start peace talks have yielded little in the past. Nonetheless, interest in a political track is growing as pressure mounts to find a palatable way to reduce the military commitment here and as public support for the war ebbs in the United States and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A cousin of Afghanistan's president was killed Wednesday during a night raid by NATO and Afghan forces in which they detained the man's son as a suspected Taliban commander, as well as at least two of the family's bodyguards. The case brought the delicate issue of civilian casualties into the presidential palace and added to the already tense relationship between the Afghans and the Americans. It also raised questions about whether a member of the extended family of President Hamid Karzai might have Taliban ties, or whether bad intelligence led to a deadly raid on the home of an innocent family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Last year was the deadliest of more than nine years of war for Afghan civilians, the United Nations reported Wednesday, attributing 75 percent of the deaths to attacks by Taliban and other insurgents rather than coalition forces. The United Nations said 2,777 civilians were killed in 2010 -- a 15 percent increase over the previous year -- in its annual civilian casualty report, authored jointly with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Boys almost always look up to their elder brothers and their friends, but what if your brother is a suicide bomber or one in training -- do you want to train, too? A new and disturbing video posted on YouTube that has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times shows a group of Afghan or Pakistani Pashtun boys role-playing the last moments in the life of a suicide bomber. Whether it is meant as a rehearsal or as a form of propaganda for the Taliban is impossible to say, but the message is clear: This is something to aspire to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- This year the spring offensive by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has a new and terrifying face: the insurgents are using suicide bombers who create high casualties to sow terror and are planning an assassination campaign as well, Afghan and American military analysts say. The insurgents' deadly bet is that fear will trump anger and that Afghans will lose any faith they had in their government's security forces and eventually turn to the Taliban. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CORRECTION APPENDED KABUL, Afghanistan -- After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- NATO airstrikes killed at least 35 people in a remote mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan last week in an attack that NATO officers say was a successful mission against Taliban insurgents, but that Afghan officials have condemned as causing mass civilian casualties. A joint NATO and Afghan assessment team will go to the area Monday to investigate the casualty allegations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack on Friday at a supermarket in the capital frequented by foreigners. They said the strike was aimed at killing the head of the private security company Blackwater. Employees of Blackwater, now called Xe Services, were in the area at the time, but neither they nor anyone they were protecting were killed or wounded, said Harry W. Clark, an adviser to the company. Instead the attack killed at least nine other people, including five foreign women, four of them Filipinos, said Afghan and Western officials, and at least one child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan -- This city, once a crossroads in the country's northeast, is increasingly besieged. The airport closed months ago to commercial flights. The roads heading south to Kabul and east to Tajikistan as well as north and west are no longer safe for Afghans, let alone Westerners. Although the numbers of American and German troops in the north have more than doubled since last year, insecurity has spread, the Taliban are expanding their reach, and armed groups that purportedly support the government are terrorizing local people and hampering aid organizations, according to international aid workers, Afghan government officials, local residents and diplomats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The International Committee of the Red Cross, which usually seeks to avoid the public eye, held a rare news conference here on Wednesday to express deep concern that Afghanistan security had deteriorated to its worst point since the overthrow of the Taliban nine years ago and was preventing aid groups from reaching victims of conflict. ''The sheer fact the I.C.R.C. has organized a press conference is an expression of us being extremely concerned of yet another year of fighting with dramatic consequences for an ever growing number of people in by now almost the entire country,'' said Reto Stocker, the head of the Afghanistan office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Fellow villagers claimed he was just a poor kid who had taken a police job to help his family get by. Superiors saw him as a reliable foot soldier in the Afghan Border Police who had inexplicably snapped. The Taliban claimed he was a sleeper agent they had planted to kill NATO soldiers. What is known for sure about the police officer, who shot and killed six American soldiers on Monday in one of the worst attacks by an Afghan service member on NATO forces in nine years of war, is that his name was Ezzatullah and that he had been in the border police since 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Under intense pressure, the government of President Hamid Karzai announced Wednesday that it would extend, if briefly, a contentious deadline for banning most private security companies in Afghanistan. The announcement came after heavy lobbying from the countries spending billions of dollars to develop Afghanistan's infrastructure and sending thousands of troops to fight the Taliban insurgency. Diplomats here, including those from the United States, argued that Mr. Karzai's original schedule to phase out private contractors did not leave enough time for an orderly transition and that it was endangering important aid projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- An American soldier shot and killed an Afghan detainee in a district jail in Kandahar Province on Sunday, according to a statement from President Hamid Karzai that appeared to portray the shooting as unprovoked. Afghan police officers confirmed the killing, saying that the detainee was a Taliban commander who might have been trying to escape and that the soldier was an American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CORRECTION APPENDED KABUL, Afghanistan -- As an American military patrol walked through a rural, Taliban-dominated district of Kandahar Province recently, a man wearing local clothes came toward them shouting, ''Don't shoot, I am an American!'' He asked for their protection, saying that he had been abducted by the Taliban and held for months but had finally managed to escape, according to Western officials in Kabul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LONDON -- Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that a British aid worker killed in an American rescue raid in Afghanistan last week may have been killed by a grenade detonated by a United States special forces unit -- not by a suicide bomber's vest from her Taliban captors, as the American command in Afghanistan suggested when it confirmed her death on Saturday. A grim-faced Mr. Cameron appeared at a news conference at 10 Downing Street to say he had learned of ''this deeply distressing development'' on Monday from the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who told him that an American-led review of the raid to rescue the aid worker, Linda Norgrove, ''has revealed evidence to indicate that Linda may not have died at the hands of her captors as originally believed.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Taliban court had already scheduled the sentencing of a young Afghan aid worker named Attiqullah, when NATO forces raided the Taliban prison where he was being held in mid-August. ''Friday your trial will start, and it will be up to the judge what happens to you,'' Attiqullah, 22, recalled being told by his jailers, who were registering his name on a list of detainees to be tried. ''It is up to him if they sentence you to death or cut part of your body.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Taliban leader in northern Afghanistan believed to have been involved in the kidnapping of a New York Times reporter as well as the intimidation of the local population was captured on Tuesday in Takhar Province. The Taliban commander, whom Maj. Sunset R. Belinsky, a NATO spokeswoman, declined to name, was known as a district leader in Chahar Darah, in Kunduz Province, which borders Takhar. The area has become increasingly unstable in the last several months with frequent reports of Taliban activities there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- It was difficult enough for the people of western Kandahar Province. They are beleaguered both by the Taliban, who control the roads, demand taxes and execute anyone suspected of disloyalty, and by the American military, who often show little regard for people and whose demands that locals stand up to the insurgents seem unreasonable. Still, there was no reason to anticipate something far worse: American soldiers suspected of being a sadistic rogue band led by Sgt. Calvin Gibbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PARWAN, Afghanistan -- The top American commander in Afghanistan said Monday that high-level Taliban leaders had reached out to senior Afghan government officials in the context of starting reconciliation discussions that could pave the way to end the fighting in Afghanistan. For months, efforts at reconciliation have been stalled at every level, and this is the first explicit public suggestion that there is extensive behind-the-scenes contact between insurgents and the Afghan government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Taliban fighters in a rural area near the Helmand River staged an audacious nighttime raid early Thursday, swooping down on several hundred sleeping Afghan private security guards who were securing a road construction project, and killing at least 21, according to guards who escaped. The attack was striking not only for its scale and viciousness but because it took place in the Helmand River Valley, where thousands of British troops have been stationed for the past three years and where now American troops have entered to try to rout the Taliban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PUL-I-KUMRI, Afghanistan -- Almost unnoticed, this strategic northern province is slipping away from government control. Baghlan Province contains two of the crucial north-south routes in Afghanistan. As night falls on this provincial capital, the city turns dark and silent. The Taliban have decreed that the cellphone signals go down at night so the main cellphone companies switch off the signals from dusk to dawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- As a huge manhunt for two missing American servicemen widened throughout a dangerous region of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, a Taliban spokesman said that one had been killed in an ambush and the other captured. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Kabul on Sunday that the military would ''do all we can'' to return the servicemen, who were in the Navy. The United States military in Afghanistan was offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to their return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- After intensive negotiations with NATO military commanders, the Afghan government on Wednesday approved a program to establish local defense forces that American military officials hope will help remote areas of the country thwart attacks by Taliban insurgents. Details of the plan are sketchy, but Americans had been promoting the force as a crucial stopgap to combat rising violence here and frustration with the slow pace of training permanent professional security forces -- the bottom-line condition for the American military to begin pulling back from an increasingly unpopular war. Many parts of Afghanistan have no soldiers or police officers on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In a successful effort to win back a remote district from the Taliban, NATO helicopters dropped more than 200 Afghan commandos and a smaller number of American Special Operations troops into northeastern Afghanistan, NATO officers and Afghan officials close to the operation said Tuesday. A recent influx of insurgents, primarily Pakistani Taliban fighters, into the Barg-e-Matal District of Nuristan Province led to battles with Afghan forces during the past week and had raised fears that the insurgents were trying to establish a haven there after being forced out of Pakistan by Pakistani military operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- In many of the hamlets of eastern Afghanistan, the elders have become used to late-night knocks at the door and masked Taliban gunmen demanding money, but this year was different. When the men came, the elders refused to pay. The Taliban response in the impoverished Dwa Manda district of Khost Province was swift and brutal. They kidnapped 15 elders from villages that refused to turn over money they had received from the government for small development projects. A day later, the bodies of six elders were found, shot to death, said the Khost provincial police chief, Gen. Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai, on Tuesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- Nearly a year into a new war strategy for Afghanistan, the hardest fighting is still ahead, but already it is clear that the biggest challenge lies not on the battlefield but in the governing of Afghanistan itself. That has been the early lesson of the American-led offensive in February in Marja, in Helmand Province, where most Taliban insurgents either were beaten back or drifted away. Since then, Americans and Afghans have struggled to establish a local government that can win the loyalty of the Afghan people, something that is essential to keeping the Taliban at bay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]