Afghanistan, U.s. Troops | featured news

Marines and Afghan troops cleared the last major pocket of resistance in the former Taliban-ruled town of Marjah on Saturday ...

U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers advanced through poppy fields of Marjah on Saturday under withering gunfire from Taliban fighters shooting from mudbrick homes and compounds where families huddled in terror.

The Taliban’s familiar display of haphazard and ineffective shooting has been punctuated by the work of what would seem to be several well-trained marksmen.

U.S.-led NATO troops launched a major offensive on Saturday against the Taliban's last big stronghold in Afghanistan's most violent province, a test of President Barack Obama's troop surge strategy.

U.S. Army soldiers launched a major operation Tuesday in support of a planned U.S.-Afghan attack on the largest Taliban-controlled town in southern Afghanistan.

Explosive ordnance disposal troop commander Lt. Caroline Pollock squats by a culvert on a dusty training ground and looks at what appears to be a pile of harmless junk. A plastic jug. Some metal casing. Wiring. All the makings of deadly roadside bombs.

The year's tally was 319, compared with 155 in 2008, due mostly to the crude but ever larger and deadlier roadside bombs built by the Taliban.

On the heels of a U.S. announcement of a massive troop surge for Afghanistan, an al Qaeda spokesman Saturday appeared to be trying to improve the group's image in the region with a new audio message in English.

The first wave of President Obama's new Afghanistan surge will add about 16,000 U.S. troops who got their orders over the past ...

Perhaps only a “handful” of U.S. troops will leave Afghanistan in 2011, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said.