Yup, we're beating them back:

President Hamid Karzai's half brother, the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan and a lightning rod for criticism of corruption in the government, was assassinated Tuesday by a close associate. His death leaves a dangerous power vacuum in the south just as the government has begun peace talks with insurgents ahead of a U.S. withdrawal.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar provincial council, was shot to death while receiving guests at his home in Kandahar, the capital of the province that was the birthplace of the Taliban movement and was the site of a recent U.S.-led offensive.

Wali Karzai was shot by "a good friend" while receiving guests at his home in Kandahar, NBC News reported.

Tooryalai Wesa, the provincial governor of Kandahar, identified the assassin as Sardar Mohammad and said he was a close, "trustworthy" person who had gone to Wali Karzai's house to get him to sign some papers.

As Karzai was signing the papers, the assassin "took out a pistol and shot him with two bullets — one in the forehead and one in the chest," Wesa said. "Another patriot to the Afghan nation was martyred by the enemies of Afghanistan."

"My younger brother was martyred in his house today. This is the life of all Afghan people, I hope these miseries which every Afghan family faces will one day end," President Karzai said at the start of a news conference with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy in Kabul.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a text message sent to NBC News' Kabul office.

Wali Karzai was the focus of corruption and drug trafficking charges which put the integrity of the entire Karzai administration in question, not to mention rumors that he was a CIA asset. It's also a disconcerting example of the Taliban's continued ability to shape the narrative in Afghanistan and follows on the heels of the breakout of Taliban prisoners from the Kandahar prison and the military offensive in Kandahar.

Just last month, Harper's published an article on the tenuous relationship between the Karzai brothers:

Of course, the apparent push to make Ahmed Wali governor could just be part of some inscrutable game between the president, his brother, and the internationals. We may have to wait until the resolution of the country’s parliamentary crisis to find out, particularly since Wesa is said to have hopes of being part of Hamid Karzai’s next cabinet. But the prospect of Ahmed Wali becoming governor and the mild reaction the notion has provoked say something about vanishing pretensions on both sides, as the United States tries to forge a stable political order that can outlast its withdrawal.

You and what army? Surely President Karzai understands the rules of the game by now. Anything we do while "saving" his country from the scourge of terrorism is a mere "oops" and he really should be too polite to mention these things. Via Raw Story:

KABUL (AFP) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the US military on Sunday to avoid operations that kill civilians, saying it was his "last warning" to Washington after 14 people allegedly died in an air strike.

Reacting to the alleged deaths of 10 children, two women and two men in an air strike on Saturday in the southern province of Helmand, Karzai said such incidents were "murdering of Afghanistan's children and women."

"The president called this incident a great mistake and the murdering of Afghanistan's children and women, and on behalf of the Afghan people gives his last warning to the US troops and US officials in this regard," his office said, adding that he "strongly condemned" the killings.

Citing initial "reports and heartrending pictures published on media" Karzai's office said 10 children, two women and two men were killed in the raid.

Adopting an unusually angry tone, Karzai said the US-led operations were "arbitrary" and unnecessary".

"The president said that US and NATO troops have been repeatedly told that their arbitrary and unnecessary operations cause the deaths of innocent Afghans and such operations violate human and moral values but it appears that (we) are not listened to," the statement said..

Remember when even liberals thought Afghanistan was the "good war?" It's been apparent almost from the beginning what a huge headache it was going to be. All you had to do was look at the experience of the Soviet Union to know the only smart thing was to not start a war there in the first place:

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai’s denunciation last week of abuses at the main American prison in Afghanistan — and his abrupt demand that Americans cede control of the site within a month — surprised many here. The prison, at Bagram Air Base, is one of the few in the country where Afghan and Western rights advocates say that conditions are relatively humane.

American officials, caught off guard by the president’s order, scrambled to figure out the source of the allegations. Now they have at least part of an answer: the Afghan commission that documented the abuses appears to have focused mainly on the side of the prison run by Afghan authorities, not the American-run part, according to interviews with American and Afghan officials.

Mr. Karzai was, in essence, demanding that the Americans cede control of a prison to Afghan authorities to stop abuses being committed by Afghan authorities.

But the American snickering subsided quickly as it became apparent that the Afghans were not backing off their demand, the officials said, and instead appeared intent on turning it into a test of their national sovereignty.

“We have the right to rule on our own soil,” said Gul Rahman Qazi, the chief of the Afghan commission that investigated the prison, at a weekend news conference in which his panel listed accusations of abuses.

The matter is exposing the deep vein of mutual mistrust and suspicion that runs beneath the American and Afghan talk of partnership, and officials characterize the prison dispute as a critical complication for the United States’ intent to withdraw from the Afghan war on its own terms.