Ron Moreau

Why Taliban fighters are the real peacemakers in Afghanistan.

Is Afghanistan destined to be run by a drug mafia?

Many in the Taliban are sick of their longtime allies. But how do you dump a terrorist group?

Ghazala Javed soared from poverty to stardom in a world that loves its songs but holds singers in contempt. It ended with her being shot dead.

Villagers in Afghanistan's Ghazni province rise up against the militants.

The guerrillas use teams of young techies to attack Afghan cities.

An updated list of Afghan and Pakistani insurgent leaders to watch.

Too bad the Taliban and their ISI backers have other ideas.

A Taliban letter sounds a newly moderate note while the Haqqani faction puts out a how-to book for jihad.

A new book explains why the 1979 Soviet invasion happened and describes what the war did to the invaders.

He's the unsung general who drafted the plan for the surge. It's gone fine so far. Now, the real test.

The plan is to undo the Americans' recent gains with the fiercest spring offensive ever—and that seems to be just fine with Pakistan's ISI.

Recruiters in this Afghan refugee camp don't wait for graduation before sending kids to the front lines.

Nearly a year ago, Pakistani security forces acting on U.S. intelligence arrested the Taliban's senior leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, brother-in-law and No. 2 to the reclusive, one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar. Now the Taliban have finally anointed his successor.

Within hours of the slaying of Punjab Gov. Salmaan Taseer by Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, people who supported it had built a social-media shrine to the assassin, lavishing praise on him on Facebook.

If Gen. David Petraeus gets his wish, this will be the year of the snake. America's top officer in Afghanistan recently explained his war plan as the "anaconda strategy," designed to "squeeze the life" out of the Taliban insurgency.

When Richard Holbrooke took up his assignment as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan early last year, trying to lay the foundations for long-term stability at the epicenter of the Obama administration's tremulous policy, he knew as well as anyone that his mission was close to impossible.

U.S. troops aren't the only ones in Afghanistan who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. It also afflicts Afghan civilians—and the Taliban, too.

Taliban forces are definitely feeling the impact of stepped-up U.S. action in southern Afghanistan.

Most Afghans are profoundly skeptical about elections, especially given how much fraud accompanied President Karzai's return to power. But local candidates are taking it seriously.

Three years after NEWSWEEK published its controversial cover naming Pakistan the world's most dangerous nation, it seems to be even worse off.

In recent weeks, Pakistanis could be forgiven for thinking that the military, which has ruled for half of the country's 63 years of independence, had come back into power. Television news has been filled with footage of Army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani visiting some of the country's 6 million flood victims as Army helicopters dropped food and water and made rescues in isolated mountain villages.

The Pakistani Army's response to the flood has been swift and competent. But in terms of aid and infrastructure, Islamabad has utterly failed, which means the Taliban can claim to care more about people than the government.

After WikiLeaks published a trove of U.S. intelligence documents—some of which listed the names and villages of Afghans who had been secretly cooperating with the American military—it didn't take long for the Taliban to react.

Pakistan's ongoing support of the Afghan Taliban is anything but news to insurgents. Many of them readily admit their utter dependence on the country's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, not only for sanctuary and safe passage but also, some say, for much of their financial support. One officer offered an unverifiable estimate that Pakistan provides roughly 80 percent of the insurgents' funding.

The Afghan Taliban's three operational chiefs have gone deep underground, senior insurgent officials tell NEWSWEEK, and meetings of the leadership have been canceled until further notice.

The latest international meeting on Afghanistan optimistically set a date for a security handover and devised a plan to rebuild the country. But is any of this actually achievable?

Taliban fighters have been elated by the firestorm over Gen. Stanley McChrystal's comments to an embedded magazine reporter. To them, bickering in Washington and dissent within the military means that the U.S. invasion is falling apart.

Under intense U.S. pressure to drive deeper into the jihadist havens of North and South Waziristan, Pakistan is trying to clear the area its own way. The country's military chiefs dread the losses their troops would suffer against entrenched militants in the tribal badlands, but something has to be done, if only to stop the erosion of public support for the government.

In an eerie echo of those brief, heady days in Saigon, U.S. officials are crowing over the discovery of nearly $1 trillion worth of mineral wealth in Afghanistan. According to The New York Times, Pentagon officials have mapped "huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium."