It was inevitable that Barack Obama's decision to draw down 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer would be controversial. Most Democrats — as well as a growing cohort of Republicans and, according to the polls, a majority of Americans — were looking for a bigger, faster pullout. The Pentagon was hoping for something slower. General David Petraeus, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, must be particularly disappointed that the counterinsurgency strategy that ...

President Barack Obama is about to announce his new strategy for Afghanistan, but the success of whatever option he chooses will depend heavily on Pakistan acting to stop its territory being used to attack Western forces next door. And that's bad news, because the demands of its own domestic counterinsurgency campaign, doubts about the duration of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan and looming political instability in Islamabad have left Pakistan in no hurry to help out. Obama's National ...

Oct. 7 marks the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan — a war that has slouched from campaign to crusade to near quagmire as the U.S. has rethought and redefined its strategy in the war on terrorism. According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 53% of Americans now say things are going badly for the U.S. in Afghanistan. And few are saying that as vehemently as those who have picked the anniversary as ...

Pretty, resourceful Mme Andre Viollis was last week the first journalist to enter Afghanistan's freshly captured capital Kabul . Her paper Le Petit Parisien had staked her to an airplane. With quick, appraising, bright French eyes she took the measure of the Conqueror, potent Nadir Khan, told how he rode through the streets on a prancing charger preceded by musicians, how his swart warriors danced and sang, how the people hailed him with shouts of "Liberator! Liberator!" Nadir had liberated ...

Indignantly denying that during his exile at Rome he has become a Roman Catholic, ex-King Amanullah of Afghanistan landed last week at Jidda on the Red Sea, the port for Mecca. After a purifying pilgrimage to the Holy City, Amanullah will try to stage a comeback. He lost his throne in the first place , chiefly because Afghanistan's fanatical mullahs raised the rabble against his "impious innovations"—such as store clothes, champagne, beard-shaving. With a Meccan pilgrimage to his credit, ...

Lean, wiry Bacha Sakao, "The Water Carrier," bandit King of Afghanistan sat, unconcerned, in the capital city of Kabul last fortnight while the King he drove from the throne, plump, oily Amanullah, prestidigitated in far off Kandahar to show his fitness to rule. To suspicious Kandahar Afghans plump Amanullah promised last fortnight to show the famed Khirkai Shereef , a religious relic of great potency kept in a locked box which only "a man fit to be King" can open. ...

False, almost jubilant reports last fortnight had it that King Amanullah of Afghanistan and Queen Thuraya had been driven out of Kabul, their capital, by insurgents who objected to the King's dictum that all male Afghans wear pants.Last week came more authoritative despatches. Amanullah had not fled. Kabul, stoutly defended by loyal pants-clad troops, had not been captured.To a British airplane from India, zooming above Kabul, the British Minister Sir Francis Henry Humphrys signaled: "All is well. Do not land on any account. Situation is improving." ...

Osama bin Laden may have been found and killed in Pakistan, but that country's leaders believe it wasn't the only place where the al-Qaeda leader had traveled after fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in an exclusive interview with TIME on Wednesday — one of the first he has given since the raid on Abbottabad — thinks bin Laden may have visited his ancestral homeland, Yemen, in search of a new bride. Just ...

Osama bin Laden once crowed to an interviewer, "Believe me, when your children and your wife become part of your struggle, life becomes very enjoyable." The late Al-Qaeda chief uttered those words before 9/11, when he was able to keep his four wives and many children living comfortably in separate houses across Afghanistan. Every few weeks or so, Bin Laden would drop in on a wife to fulfill his husbandly duties. But at the end, his rosy portrayal ...

Osama bin Laden's final night began with a group of four helicopters slicing through the night skies over Pakistan, making their way toward Islamabad from a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan. The mission, approved by President Obama on Friday morning, had been set for early Sunday local time, but was delayed by poor weather. Pakistani officials did not know they were coming. The small, elite force flew low and fast, using terrain-following radar to hug the folds and valleys to avoid radar detection. ...