Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki, on a visit to Kabul today, was warmly received by his Afghan hosts.

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai today criticized Pakistan's decision to erect a fence and put land mines along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Pakistan has announced plans to fence and mine sections of its frontier with Afghanistan to help prevent cross-border raids by pro-Taleban militants. The controversial proposal follows repeated criticism from both U.S. and Afghan officials who have accused Pakistan of failing to secure the lawless border area. VOA's Benjamin Sand has more from Islamabad.

U.S.-led coalition forces say they have killed Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, a Taleban leader in southern Afghanistan who was a close associate of Osama bin Laden.

A bomber blew himself up outside the home of an Afghan lawmaker in Kabul today, killing one civilian and wounding at least seven people, including three bodyguards.

A former supreme commander of NATO said today that pacifying Afghanistan can best be done by shifting the focus away from a military solution and toward a political one.

Police in Afghanistan say at least eight people have been wounded in a suicide bomb attack that targeted a member of the Afghan parliament.

A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force says NATO and Afghan forces have killed about 50 Taleban insurgents in an operation in southern Afghanistan.

Afghan officials have detained two men, accusing them of spying for Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. Afghanistan has repeatedly accused the spy network of supporting Taleban insurgents, and relations between the two countries have been increasingly confrontational.

The French defense minister said France is willing to send its remaining troops in Afghanistan anywhere in the country to help in emergencies.

France has announced it will withdraw about 200 members of its military special forces from Afghanistan in the next few weeks.

Viktor Cherkesov, head of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, and a delegation arrived in Tehran on December 4, IRNA reported. Amir-Hussein Motahar, deputy chief of Iran's Drug Control Headquarters, expressed the hope that their meeting might result in closer cooperation between the two countries, while Cherkesov noted that Russia and Iran have a common interest in controlling the flow of drugs.