The review announced by Gen. David Petraeus, chief of the US Central Command, into the use of airstrikes by US forces in Afghanistan needs to produce fundamental changes to reduce civilian casualties.

NATO forces in Afghanistan should immediately release the results of their investigation into a March 14, 2009, incident in which an 8-year-old girl in Kapisa province was burned by white phosphorus munitions.

The government of Afghanistan should listen to the Afghan women who are planning to hold a protest on April 15, 2009, at great personal risk, and repeal or reform the Shia Personal Status law.

A US federal court ruling that three detainees in US custody at the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan who were arrested abroad be given the same legal protections as Guantanamo detainees expands the role of federal courts in protecting detainee rights outside the US. Today's ruling, which held that the three petitioners have the right to challenge their detention in US federal court, applied the framework set out in last year's US Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo, Boumediene v. Bush.

The United States should make protecting human rights a priority in its revised policy toward Afghanistan.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai should issue a pardon for Parwez Kambakhsh, a student and part-time journalist, whose 20-year prison sentence for blasphemy has been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Yesterday it emerged that a senior British army officer, Colonel Owen McNally, had been arrested under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly passing classified information to a human rights worker in Afghanistan. Unnamed sources suggested he had become "close" to the campaigner Rachel Reid. Here, for the first time, she responds to what she says is a "vicious slur"

The US military's investigation into deadly and controversial airstrikes in Azizabad in Afghanistan in August 2008 was deeply flawed, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.