Some 200 Taliban militants destroyed more than 160 Humvees and trucks bound for NATO forces in Afghanistan Dec. 7 in a pre-dawn raid on the terminal where they were parked in Peshawar, Pakistan. The war material was offloaded for transit to Afghanistan at the Pakistani port of Karachi. Meanwhile, the Pentagon reveals that most of the additional US troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul—in what the New York Times calls "a measure of how precarious the war effort has become."

Another missile strike by a suspected US drone on Mir Ali village (North Waziristan) killed at least three presumed militants Dec. 5. (AFP, Dec. 5) That same day in Peshawar, a car-bomb attack on a crowded market near a Shi'ite mosque killed at least 27, including a 12-year-old boy, and wounded 100. The mosque and adjacent buildings were wrecked. The bazaar was crowded with shoppers in the run-up to the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. (AlJazeera, Dec. 6)

Twenty-four men at an Afghan refugee camp on the outskirts of the Pakistani port of Karachi are among those arrested on suspicion of involvement in the ethnic clashes still shaking city. At least 44 have been killed in the clashes which began Nov. 30, pitting local Urdu-speakers against Pashtuns from northwest Pakistan. The incidents were mainly blamed on activists from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP). Leaders from both the parties denied their members were involved in the violence. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif raised the specious possibility that India instigated of the Karachi violence as a response to the Mumbai attacks. (AFP, AlJazeera, Dec. 2)

President Hamid Karzai openly called for a timeline for NATO to withdraw from Afghanistan. At a Nov. 26 news conference with NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Karzai rhetorically asked: "How long will this war go? Afghanistan can’t continue to suffer a war without end." (NYT, Nov. 27)

From Radio Australia, Nov. 26:

10 arrested over acid attack in Afghanistan
Afghan police have arrested 10 men accused of spraying acid in the faces of several schoolgirls and teachers. The attack happened outside a girls' high school in the southern city of Kandhar.

Rashid Rauf of Birmingham, UK, alleged mastermind of a 2006 plot to blow up transatlantic jets using liquid bombs, was one of five people reported killed Nov. 22 by a presumed US missile attack in the North Waziristan region in Pakistan's Tribal Areas. Unnamed Pakistani intelligence sources said that a wanted Egyptian militant, Abu Zubair al-Masri, was among the others killed.

Missiles from an apparent US drone struck a house near the town of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan region early Nov. 22, killing at least four. Mir Ali has been hit repeatedly in the more than 20 US air-strikes on Pakistan since August. (NYT, Nov. 22) The previous day, a bomb killed eight mourners at the funeral of a Shi'ite cleric, Syed Zahid Iqbal Shahid, who had been shot that morning by gunmen on a motorbike in Dera Ismail Khan, near Bannu (NWFP). The bombing was followed by a riot in which a mob set fire to shops and vehicles and pelted police with rocks. (Dawn, Nov. 21; NYT, Nov. 22)

A missile from a US drone struck a purported militant hideout in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province Nov. 19—the 20th such attack since August, but the first outside of the country's Tribal Areas. The strike in Bannu district left five dead. It came despite growing protests from the Pakistani government against the air-strikes. (AP, Nov. 19)