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The article discusses Iran's missile strikes on Pakistan and Iraq, triggering denunciations and tensions in the Middle East; Iran claims the strikes were in response to terrorist attacks within its borders, while France and the U.S. criticize the actions, raising concerns about broader conflict.

The article reports on the concerted campaigns of diplomats and political leaders from different countries to move forward the peace deal negotiation between the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Rather than a respite after Afghanistan's frigid winter, the start of the spring thaw has brought deadly avalanches and insurgent attacks. It took a full day for news of a massive avalanche in the snowbound reaches of Badakhshan Province, in the shadow of the Hindu Kush mountains, to reach Faizabad, the provincial capital. The avalanche swept through the tiny village of Sherin Nazim on Monday, burying most of the houses in snow. Reports reaching Faizabad from the area said that so far at least 43 of the village's roughly 200 residents had been found dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Two boys equipped with suicide vests were arrested here over the weekend, less than a year after one of them had been pardoned by President Hamid Karzai for the same crime, and presented to reporters on Sunday. The boys, named Nasibullah and Azizullah, were described by officials from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's intelligence agency, as 12-year-olds who had been trained in Pakistani madrasas. The officials refused to give their names for security reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The political fallout from a NATO airstrike in Pakistan that was operated out of Afghanistan and killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers became clearer on Sunday, as Pakistan seethed over the attack and the United States scrambled to contain the damage to an already frayed relationship. Afghan officials, meanwhile, worried that they would bear the immediate brunt of Pakistan's wrath and that the Pakistanis would follow through on threats to withdraw from an international conference on Afghanistan's security and development that is scheduled for Dec. 5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two new reports addressing human rights issues in Afghanistan have raised questions about how NATO troops are conducting the war. Both reports center on a question that has vexed international forces since the war began: How can the military be sure it has killed, detained or made deals with the right people? A report by the Afghan Analysts Network challenges the accuracy of American intelligence used in what are known as targeted killings, and makes a case study of the killing of an alleged Qaeda-affiliated operative in Takhar Province who was attacked by NATO jets as he traveled in a convoy through a rural area. The report offers evidence that NATO forces got the wrong man and that the insurgent commander they were seeking is alive in Pakistan -- an interview with him is included in the report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 -- The Afghan government escalated its criticism of Pakistan on Wednesday, publicly questioning for the first time how the Pakistanis could ensure the security of their nuclear arms if they did not even know that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, had been hiding in a compound in a Pakistani military town less than an hour from their capital. In comments at a weekly news conference, Gen. Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, echoed points made this week by others in the country, including President Hamid Karzai, but in starker terms. The general specifically criticized Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, which has claimed that it was unaware that Bin Laden had been living for years in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, where American commandos killed him in a raid early Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- With Afghan discussions under way about the future involvement of the United States in the country and the prospect of long-term military bases, the Pakistani government has urged Afghanistan to distance itself from the West and tie its future more tightly to that of China and Pakistan, according to Afghans and Americans who are knowledgeable about a meeting between the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. During a landmark April 16 meeting here in Kabul, for which the most powerful figures in the Pakistani government flew to Afghanistan, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan suggested that Afghanistan needed to look to China, a power in the ascendance, rather than hewing closely to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Much of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership flew here Saturday for a meeting with Afghanistan's president to discuss efforts to forge peace with the Taliban. Although leaders from the two countries have met before to discuss a peace deal, the gathering Saturday was unprecedented because of the number of high-level Pakistani officials in attendance. The delegation was led by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. He was accompanied by the chief of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan's pre-eminent spy agency, as well as the country's interior and defense ministers and top foreign policy officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- More than a dozen oil tankers carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan were torched in Rawalpindi early on Monday, not far from Pakistan's capital and the headquarters of the military, police officials said. The attack was the second on NATO vehicles since Pakistan closed a major border crossing to Afghanistan last week in protest over a series of strikes by NATO helicopters on Pakistani border posts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BATI KOT DISTRICT, Afghanistan -- The main road into Afghanistan from the east traverses a flat, parched countryside, past flimsy roadside bazaars and squalid villages. Then, the terrain abruptly changes: arid land gives way to vast olive groves that spread for miles, as if a giant dropped a Mediterranean island into Central Asia. Gul Abbas, 66, a white-bearded farmer, walked recently among the rows of olive trees, occasionally reaching up to pat a branch as if it were an old friend, and spoke like someone lost in a dream: ''We used to have visitors; people came from India, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, to see our farms.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Pakistani-based militant group identified with attacks on Indian targets has expanded its operations in Afghanistan, inflicting casualties on Afghans and Indians alike, setting up training camps, and adding new volatility to relations between India and Pakistan. The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is believed to have planned or executed three major attacks against Indian government employees and private workers in Afghanistan in recent months, according to Afghan and international intelligence officers and diplomats here. It continues to track Indian development workers and others for possible attack, they said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The former top United Nations official in Afghanistan said that recent arrests of high-ranking Taliban figures by Pakistan had severed important secret communications between the Taliban and the West meant to foster peace negotiations. Kai Eide, the former special representative in Afghanistan for the United Nations secretary general, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday that, for the past year, the United Nations had been quietly involved in early discussions with the Taliban in Dubai. He said those talks were upended by the arrests of senior Taliban leaders, including the group's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in February. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Both Afghan and Pakistani Taliban groups claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing this week that killed eight Americans -- seven of them C.I.A. officers -- suggesting that the attack was viewed as a success and could be used to gain recruits and financial support. The competing claims, made Thursday and Friday, did little to clarify the circumstances of the attack, as each group offered a different account of how the C.I.A. base in Khost Province, in southeastern Afghanistan, had been infiltrated on Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

War, misery and loss are hardly strangers to the vast swath of central Asia from the steppes of Iran to the snow-lashed mountains of the Hindu Kush, yet only when the region's troubles threaten to seep beyond its borders does the world take note. In early 2009, the fighting in Afghanistan spilled into Pakistan, and the violence drove an estimated 1.9 million people from their homes. In both countries, outsiders -- Mongols, Persians, British, Russians -- have long been uneasy visitors, strong enough to dominate the ground but never for long and always at a high price. This year, nearly twice as many Americans died in combat in Afghanistan as in 2008; in Pakistan, anti-Americanism swelled with extremist sermons in some mosques and burgeoning conspiracy theories on the streets.President Obama ordered more troops to Afghanistan and by fall decided to send still more. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan announced plans on Thursday to relocate hundreds of foreign staff members, sending some out of the country, in the wake of a lethal attack on its workers at a guesthouse last week. The relocation of its workers here, while temporary, is one more signal of mounting pressure on United Nations operations as security deteriorates around the region. The move comes four days after the United Nations announced that it was withdrawing its international workers from northwestern Pakistan, where insurgents are fighting Pakistani troops and have carried out a string of attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The killing of Osama bin Laden deep in Pakistan is sure to fuel the debate over the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan, where 100,000 troops are still fighting a war to destroy Al Qaeda. And the raid, conducted without the cooperation or even advance knowledge of Pakistan, raised fresh doubts about the lengthy American effort to turn it into a trustworthy partner in the hunt for terrorists. As President Obama approaches a critical period in deciding how many troops to pull out of Afghanistan -- and how fast -- the deadly raid on Al Qaeda's leader called into question many of the administration's basic assumptions about how to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for Islamic terrorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The latest high-level talks on ending a diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike. The White House, angered by the recent spectacular Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, refuses to apologize. The Obama administration's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, left the Pakistani capital Friday night with no agreement after two days of discussions aimed at patching up the damage caused by the American airstrikes last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghanistan border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- American officials pressed their Pakistani counterparts on Thursday to reopen a vital supply route for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, as relations deteriorated after the fourth strike by coalition helicopters in a week killed three members of Pakistan's border force. Pakistan angrily closed the crossing to protest the strikes on its side of the border, leaving American officials to use meetings and phone calls to try to soothe relations and get the route reopened. Both sides indicated that they might be able to resolve the dispute with a joint investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan in recent weeks, American officials said. The strikes are part of an effort by military and intelligence operatives to try to cripple the Taliban in a stronghold being used to plan attacks against American troops in Afghanistan. As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month. This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration's comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December. American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]