Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader, dead - Barack Obama:Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has been killed by US forces in Pakistan, President Barack Obama has said.

Bin Laden was shot dead at a compound near Islamabad, in a ground operation based on US intelligence, the first lead for which emerged last August.

Mr Obama said US forces took possession of the body after "a firefight".

Bin Laden is believed to have ordered the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and a number of others.

He was top of the US' "most wanted" list.

DNA tests later confirmed that Bin Laden was dead, US officials said.

Bin Laden was buried at sea after a Muslim funeral on board an aircraft carrier, Pentagon officials said.

Announcing the success of the operation, Mr Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al-Qaeda".

Osama bin Laden is dead:After 10 years of hunting, a team of CIA officers and Navy SEALs kill bin Laden in a firefight near the Pakistani capital

WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden, the face of global terrorism and architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was killed in a firefight with elite American forces Monday, then quickly buried at sea in a stunning finale to a furtive decade on the run.

Long believed to be hiding in caves, bin Laden was tracked down in a costly, custom-built hideout not far from a Pakistani military academy.

"Justice has been done," President Barack Obama said in a dramatic announcement at the White House while a crowd cheered outside and hundreds more gathered at ground zero in Manhattan to celebrate the news.

Photos: America Reacts to death of Osama bin Laden
Bin Laden hid in plain site in Pakistan
Intel hunt led to shootout at bin Laden fortress
Special report: The death of Osama bin Laden

The military operation took mere minutes.

LANDI KOTAL: Five security officials were killed in a militant attack on a check post in Khyber tribal region’s Landi Kotal area

on Thursday, DawnNews reported.
Militants attacked the check post with heavy weapons as a result of which two security officials were also wounded, security sources told DawnNews.
The wounded officials were shifted to a hospital for treatment.
Security forces subsequently started a search operation in areas surrounding the check post.
Separately, in Khyber’s Bara area, three people were killed in clashes between armed militants from two banned organisations.

A serviceman with the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) force has lost his life in a non-combat related incident in the troubled eastern part of Afghanistan.

"A NATO service member died as a result of a non-combat injury in eastern Afghanistan," a Press TV correspondent cited a brief press release by the security mission on Wednesday as saying. 

The alliance did not announce the name or nationality of the victim.

The latest death brings to 47 the number of fatalities among foreign troops in war-ravaged Afghanistan so far this year.

Last year, nonetheless, with a death toll of 711, remains the deadliest year for foreign military casualties. The number eclipsed the previous record of 521 in 2009. 

Afghanistan's Minister of Energy and Water Mohammad Ismail Khan has strongly rejected a plan to erect permanent US military bases in his country.

Speaking on Tuesday in a ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of Soviet troops' withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ismail Khan slammed Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak for his support of the plan. 
Ismail Khan pointed out that the defense minister should change his stance as he had ignored the dignity of Afghan people. 

The minister of energy and water further reiterated that the Afghans would be capable of providing security in the war-hit country if foreigners stop interfering. 

“Millions of Afghans were killed and injured because they wanted to live freely, and they did not accept to be in foreigners' subjection,” Ismail Khan noted. 

The Afghan Interior Ministry says police forces have detained five Taliban attackers who intended to target government installations in the southern province of Kandahar.

The ministry said police arrested the militants, equipped with explosives-ridden jackets and homemade bombs, on Monday, before they managed to carry out the attacks. 

Kandahar province is one of the main strongholds of Taliban militants in southern Afghanistan. The militants also seem to be gaining ground in eastern and northern provinces.
Militant attacks have left hundreds of Afghan and US-led foreign troops dead over the past months.
US-led NATO has admitted to the rising power of the militants in Afghanistan despite the presence of 150,000 US-led forces in the country.

The Pentagon has admitted in several reports that the US has failed to establish security in the war-torn country. source

A Finnish soldier serving with US-led foreign troops has been killed and several others wounded in the volatile northern Afghanistan.

The soldier died in an explosion in the Northern Province of Samangan. 

Finland has around 180 soldiers in Afghanistan.

At least 44 foreign soldiers have been killed in the war-torn country so far in 2011.

Last year was the deadliest for foreign forces in Afghanistan -- with over 711 foreign troops killed.

NATO has admitted to the rising power of the militants in Afghanistan despite the presence of 150,000 US-led forces in the country.

The invasion of Afghanistan took place with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country. Nine years on, however, Afghanistan remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the price.

The rising death toll among the US-led foreign forces has prompted growing opposition to the Afghan war in countries that have contributed troops to the mission. source

A report says that Washington spends $300 million of American taxpayers' money on Afghan war per day, and this comes as the US has failed so far to establish security in the war-torn country.

This is while the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will allow for a reduced US defense budget in 2012. 

Under the Pentagon's proposed budget, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will drop to $117.8 billion for fiscal year 2012, a reduction of $41.5 billion from the previous year, AFP reported. 

As the US war effort winds down in Iraq, the budget sets aside $10.6 billion for “Operation New Dawn,” with the remaining 50,000 US troops there due to withdraw by the end of 2011. 

Spending for the Afghan mission calls for $107.3 billion, down slightly from the last budget, which requested $113.5 billion. 

The budget released Monday offered no insight into the scale of the planned drawdown, with the Pentagon's budget document assuming an average of 98,250 troops on the ground by the end of 2012. 

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the Pentagon had "decided to budget conservatively" as it was too soon to predict how many troops would be withdrawn after July. 

"But that's not to say that we will have 98,000 troops at the end of Feb. 2012. In fact it's a lead pipe cinch we won't," he added. 

The budget for Afghanistan and Iraq includes $79.2 billion for operations, $10.1 billion to counter the threat posed by homemade bombs -- the main killer of NATO-led troops in the war. 

Some $11.9 billion is devoted to repairing and replacing equipment lost or damaged and $12.8 billion for training and arming Afghan security forces, who are supposed to gradually take over security duties between now and 2015. 

By October, the United States and NATO plans to expand the Afghan army to 172,000 soldiers and the police to 134,000 police.

The UK government is spearheading talks with the notorious terrorist group Taliban in Afghanistan, now, into the tenth year after the US-led invasion of the country.

As the US-led occupation of Afghanistan enters its tenth year, casualties have risen among Afghan civilians and NATO troops alike, making the last 12 months the bloodiest of the conflict to date. 

US and British troops are engaged in a dirty war in Afghanistan, using aerial bombing, drone attacks, torture prisons and corporate mercenaries against the Afghan people, all of which are fuelling further insecurity and fostering human rights abuse. 

Britain joined the countries that invaded Afghanistan under the US command after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on US soil on the pretext that the masterminds behind the attacks - al-Qaeda and the Taliban - must be uprooted. 

But, the multinational force led by the US military have neither been able to defeat terrorism nor they succeeded in their attempts to uproot the terrorists the US and British intelligence agencies claimed have taken refuge in the mountains of Afghanistan. 

US Army General David Petraeus is said to leave his post as the commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan before the end of the year, a report says.

Petraeus, who was appointed less than eight months ago, will leave his post as the head of the US and NATO forces by the end of 2011 as part of a reshuffle plan that would see the departure of top five US diplomats in Kabul, including its Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and Lieutenant-General David Rodriguez, deputy to Petraeus, the London-based Times reported Tuesday.

"General Petraeus is doing a brilliant job but he's been going virtually non-stop since 9/11 [and] he can't do it forever," Pentagon Secretary Geoff Morrell said. 

"This is a heck of a demanding job, he will have to be rotated out at some point," he further explained. 

With the administration of US President Barak Obama struggling to curb the nine-year old militancy in Afghanistan, the speculation has raised serious concerns over the fate of the prolonged war and the future war strategies in the war-wracked country. 

Two security guards and an insurgent were killed in an attack in the Afghan capital Kabul, officials say.

Reports said the blast occurred just inside a shopping complex in the city centre after an attacker carrying explosives was challenged by guards.

A gun battle which broke out following the explosion has now ended.

It is the second attack in less than three weeks in the heavily fortified Afghan capital, after nine died in an attack on a supermarket on 28 January.

The Taliban told the BBC they had carried out that attack.

Monday's attack is thought to have begun when an attacker was challenged by security guards as he attempted to gain access to the shopping precinct, says the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul.

When Washington's red-walled Opera House drew in friends and fellow travellers from the world over to pay tribute last week to veteran American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama set them a challenge.

"He made a difference. Let us now carry that work forward in our time," Mr Obama declared as he ended his eulogy for the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, following his sudden death of a heart attack last month.

But who would fill this larger-than-life figure's big dusty boots?

Names mentioned by several people close to this process are obvious choices on Washington's rollcall of the best and brightest.

But many tried-and-tested troubleshooters are said to be demurring, citing other commitments, advancing age, or the daunting scale of the task.

How will the approaches championed by Mr Holbrooke move forward, including a strong civilian role alongside the growing military juggernaut and its powerful four-star, all-star General David Petraeus?

"The essence of the challenge is getting the balance right between the military and the political, civilian and diplomatic aspects," reflected former deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a close friend of Mr Holbrooke, who now heads the Brookings Institution.

"That's a 21st Century ass-whooping right there," says a US marine as an airstrike turns a mud compound into dust. That was the offensive against the Taliban in Marjah, in southern Afghanistan, in the spring. The video, filled with a constant chatter of automatic fire, was taken by marines and passed to us.

After a year-long campaign of "ass-whooping", Nato hopes it has "shaped the battlefield" to help achieve its objectives for the next phase of the campaign. The plan is to leave the Taliban weakened enough for the Afghan police and army to start taking over from the international forces. Another aim may be to force the insurgents into talks with the government, though this is not publicly stated by Nato officers.

"Finally, we've aligned our resources with the demands of the campaign," said Nato's top civilian official in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, speaking about the surge of forces ordered by President Obama. "It's still fragile. There's a long campaign ahead but we've regained the initiative having, candidly, lost it in the past."

Recent years have seen the re-emergence of the hardline Islamic Taliban movement as a fighting force in Afghanistan and a major threat to its government.

They are also threatening to destabilise Pakistan, where they control areas in the north-west and are blamed for a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks.

The Taliban emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

A predominantly Pashtun movement, the Taliban came to prominence in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1994.

It is commonly believed that they first appeared in religious seminaries - mostly paid for by money from Saudi Arabia - which preached a hard line form of Sunni Islam.

The Taliban's promise - in Pashtun areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan - was to restore peace and security and enforce their own austere version of Sharia, or Islamic law, once in power.

A major international conference on Afghanistan has backed President Hamid Karzai's timetable for control of security to be transferred from foreign to Afghan forces by 2014. The BBC's Ian Pannell in Kabul looks at the chances of meeting that goal.

By most estimates the security situation across the country looks increasingly bad.

Violence continues to rise and June was the deadliest month in nearly nine years of war.

According to the UN, the number of roadside bombings rose by nearly 100% in the first quarter of this year compared with 2009.

Assassinations rose by half and suicide attacks doubled. More than 1,000 people died in the first six months of the year, with June being the worst so far for foreign troops.

But military commanders and the politicians who gathered in Kabul on Tuesday think they are on the right track.

Their argument is that the rise in violence is an expected but temporary result of a surge in troops that has deliberately and sometimes aggressively targeted the Taliban in their havens.

Missile attacks by US drones in Pakistan's tribal areas have more than doubled under the Obama administration, research by the BBC Urdu service shows.

Since January 2009 nearly 2,500 people have been killed in Pakistan as a result of US drones and Islamic militant attacks. The graphics below show how Islamic militant strongholds in the border area close to Afghanistan have been targeted by US drone aircraft, while, at the same time, Islamic militants have carried out attacks across Pakistan.

Missile attacks by US drones in Pakistan's tribal areas have more than doubled under the Obama administration, research by the BBC Urdu service shows.

Compared with 25 drone strikes between January 2008 and January 2009, there were at least 87 such attacks between President Obama taking office on 20 January 2009 and the end of June 2010.

More than 700 people have been killed in such attacks under Mr Obama, compared with slightly fewer than 200 from under his predecessor, George W Bush.

The militant backlash over the same period has been even more violent. Extremists have struck more than 140 times in various Pakistani locations, killing more than 1,700 people and injuring hundreds more, the BBC research shows.

Afghan troop map: US and Nato deployments

The US is the largest contributing nation to the international forces in Afghanistan whose numbers now total, more than 140,000.

The US has around 90,000 troops deployed with the Nato-ledInternational Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan with an additional 10,000 deployed as part of the US Operation Enduring Freedom, mainly in the East regional command.

The Afghan-Pakistan border region is widely believed to be the front line in the war against Islamic militants. see how militants operate on either side of the border.

Helmand, Chaghai

Kabul's writ has never run strong in the remote southern plains of Helmand province. For this reason, it has emerged as the most significant Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. Further south, across the border in Pakistan, lies the equally remote Noshki-Chaghai region of Balochistan province.

Since 9/11 this region has been in turmoil. In the Baramcha area on the Afghan side of the border, the Taliban have a major base. From there they control militant activities as far afield as Nimroz and Farah provinces in the west, Oruzgan in the north and parts of Kandahar province in the east. They also link up with groups based in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.

Two security guards and an insurgent were killed in an attack in the Afghan capital Kabul, officials say.

Reports said the blast occurred just inside a shopping complex in the city centre after an attacker carrying explosives was challenged by guards.

A gun battle which broke out following the explosion has now ended.

It is the second attack in less than three weeks in the heavily fortified Afghan capital, after nine died in an attack on a supermarket on 28 January.

The Taliban told the BBC they had carried out that attack.

Monday's attack is thought to have begun when an attacker was challenged by security guards as he attempted to gain access to the shopping precinct, says the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul.

Afghan blast kills Ex-US Customs man

A roadside bomb blast in southern Afghanistan has claimed the life of a retired US Customs officer and left three other customs workers wounded.

The attack at the Inland Customs Warehouse in the province of Kandahar killed David Hillman, a retired US Customs and Border Protection officer, on Monday.

According to a statement released by US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in Washington, Hillman had worked for the US government for 30 years, AP reported.