By Kevin Sieff and Sayed Salahuddin KABUL — A former Taliban leader turned peace negotiator was assassinated Sunday by three unidentified gunmen in a brazen attack in the Afghan capital, hours before leaders here announced the next phase in the country’s security transition. Arsala Rahmani, 70, was fatally shot while traveling through central Kabul. He was a key member of the High Peace Council, a group res ...

By David Ignatius Let’s assume the signals from the White House and Tehran are reliable, and that Iran is serious about an agreement to remove its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium from the country and stop producing more. What happens then? This question of “next steps” in the Iran nuclear talks is important, because neither side is likely to commit to the first set of “confidence-building measures” ...

By Rama Lakshmi An Indian police team will visit Tehran this month as part of an investigation into the role of three Iranians suspected of carrying out a bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat’s car in New Delhi in February, a police official said Thursday. The three-man team will seek information on the suspects’ movements, “when they left the country, when they returned, where they went, their phone records ...

By Joby Warrick and Steven Mufson Increasingly hard-pressed to find buyers for its petroleum, Iran has been routinely switching off satellite tracking systems on its sea-bound oil tankers for more than a month, in what U.S. officials and industry analysts describe as a cat-and-mouse game with Western governments seeking to enforce sanctions on Iranian exports. The unusual tactic was begun in early April and ...

By Kevin Sieff KABUL —Afghan commanders have refused more than a dozen times within the past two months to act on U.S. intelligence regarding high-level insurgents, arguing that night-time operations to target the men would result in civilian casualties, Afghan officials say. The defiance highlights the shift underway in Afghanistan as Afghan commanders make use of their newfound power to veto operations pr ...

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Thursday that U.S. officials were doing everything possible to win the release of a U.S. soldier held captive by Afghan insurgents, a day after his parents went public with complaints about government inaction. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was captured in eastern Afghanistan in 2009 and is believed to be held by the militant Haqqani network somewhere in the tribal areas of ...

By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung The United States launched airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday that killed as many as seven militants, the second American missile attack in the country since the CIA and other spy agencies disrupted an al-Qaeda airline bomb plot, U.S. officials said. The strike came as new details surfaced about the foiling of the plot, including the disclosure that the operative who posed as a ...

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and MATTHEW ROSENBERG HAILEY, Idaho — The parents of the only American soldier held captive by Afghan insurgents have broken a yearlong silence about the status of their son, abruptly making public that he is a focus of secret negotiations between the Obama administration and the Taliban over a proposed prisoner exchange. The negotiations, currently stalled, involved a trade of five Ta ...