The Pentagon recently posed Colombia as a "good model" for the war on opium in Afghanistan. But Hamid Karzai, to his credit, is displaying greater concern for the health of his own land and people than top US Latin American ally Alvaro Uribe. From Reuters, Jan. 26:

KABUL, Afghanistan - Rebuffing months of U.S. pressure, Afghan President Hamid Karzai decided against a Colombia-style program to spray this country's heroin-producing poppies after the Cabinet worried herbicide would hurt legitimate crops, animals and humans, officials said Thursday.

The Western Hemisphere's worst human rights abuser by a mile (and, not coincidentally, closest US ally) is a "good model" for what Washington hopes to build in Afghanistan. The Afghans must be very comforted. From Reuters, Jan. 19 (emphasis added):

BOGOTA - Colombia's U.S.-backed fight against drug traffickers and armed groups could be a good model for Afghanistan to follow in its effort to battle illegal narcotics, a top U.S. general said on Friday.

From The Scotsman, Jan. 18, links and emphasis added:

Mullah Omar, leader of the Taleban, is living in Pakistan under the protection of the country's intelligence service, a captured Taleban spokesman has told Afghan interrogators.

Still think freedom's on the march in Afghanistan? Or, for those of you on the other side of the coin, that the Taliban insurgents are heroic anti-imperialists? From The Independent, Nov. 29:

Disembowelled, then torn apart: The price of daring to teach girls
The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

Afghanistan's "official" security forces rape with impunity and engage in sale and trafficking of women, while the Taliban reap the backlash, imposing harsh vigilante "justice" over growing swaths of the country. Freedom's on the march, eh? First this, from the BBC's Persian service Nov. 7, translated somewhat awkwardly by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA):

Pakistan's army admitted Oct. 31 it had killed up to 80 in an early-morning strike on a supposedly al-Qaeda-linked madrassa in a tribal area near the Afghan border. The military action sparked protests in the area, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, where a local minister belonging to the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami resigned. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the religious coalition that rules the province, announced it would organize nation-wide protests beginning Oct. 31. Qazi Hussein Ahmed, leader of JI and the MMA, rejected the military claim that the madrasa was harboring militants and said a number of children were among the dead. He asserted that the army had acted under pressure from the US.

From CTV, Oct. 28:

NATO's top commander apologized Saturday for civilians killed during battles between NATO-led forces and the Taliban militia in Afghanistan this week.

Still cheering on the heroic Afghan resistance? From Index on Censorship, Sept. 26:

A senior Afghan official working for women’s rights has been shot dead by suspected Taliban gunmen. She was the highest placed female official to be assassinated in Afghanistan in the five years since the Taliban were ousted from power.