Summary here and here.

Tracing the South Korean hostage situation:

Taliban insurgents freed seven remaining South Korean hostages in Afghanistan on Thursday after a six-week kidnap ordeal, following a deal that Afghan officials said included a ransom payment by Seoul.

The four women and three men were handed over in two batches to officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Ghazni province in southeast Afghanistan, from where the Taliban seized 23 Christian volunteers on July 19.

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Some Afghan officials say South Korea agreed to pay a ransom during negotiations with the Taliban, which one foreign diplomat said started out as a demand for $20 million.

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South Korea’s presidential Blue House said that under the deal it struck with the Taliban it must withdraw its small contingent of non-combat troops in the country within the year and stop its nationals from doing missionary work in Afghanistan.

However, South Korea had already decided before the crisis to pull its 200 engineers and medical staff out of Afghanistan by the end of 2007. Since the hostages were taken, it has banned its nationals from travelling there.

A spokesman for South Korea’s president, Chon Ho-seon, was evasive in responding to questions at a news briefing in Seoul on Wednesday on whether a ransom was part of the deal, saying only South Korea had done what was needed. Article

Just shy of 71 months on:

A suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives near an entrance to the Afghan capital’s airport early on Friday, killing at least one Afghan and wounding several other people, police and witnesses said.

The blast occurred at the NATO controlled side of the combined civil and military airport, they said. An Afghan airport official said civilian flights to and from the airport continued as normal. Article

“Diminishing humanitarian space” = chaos.

Less than a month after three deminers were shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan, the Mine Detection Dog Centre (MDC) has announced it will not resume demining activities in the volatile Kandahar and Helmand provinces unless security is guaranteed.

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According to Hakimi, 80 percent of MDC’s demining activities have been suspended in Kandahar and Helmand provinces as a result of security concerns.

MDC says it now has a limited presence in the provincial city of Kandahar, where it raises public awareness of landmine issues.

Mine clearance agencies operating in Afghanistan say there are no particular security measures in place to protect their staff from hazards.

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Since the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army in 1979 hundreds of thousands of mines have been planted throughout the country. The UN demining programme says people in over 2,020 communities across Afghanistan still face the threat of landmines and UXOs.

Haji Agha Lalai, an elder in Panjwai District, said people in his village were finding it increasingly risky to travel within their locality. “Some people are even not cultivating their land because of landmine risks,” Lalai told IRIN.

In the last 18 years over 150,000 Afghans have been killed or disabled by anti-personnel landmines, according to demining organisations. Mine action agencies say every month landmines kill or injure over 50 Afghans. Article

What’s up in Waziristan:

The Pakistani military and tribal leaders were Friday trying to secure the release of some 150 paramilitary troops captured by pro-Taliban insurgents in the border area by Afghanistan, an official said.

The Frontier Corps unit was travelling between the regional capital of Wana and Shakai in 16 vehicles when ‘hundreds’ of heavily armed militants blocked and surrounded the convoy, a senior security officer said on condition of anonymity.

The group was being held in mountains in the Ladha area, he added.

However, the central army command in Islamabad’s twin city of Rawalpindi denied reports of the captures, saying contact was lost with the group while it was sheltering in a valley from a storm and that the convoy would shortly return to base.

A spokesman for a local rebel leader Baitullah Mehsud told the BBC that the soldiers were surrounded, disarmed and taken prisoner because the government was not honouring a peace deal. Article

Tracking the incredible shrinking Musharraf.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is about to choose one of three options available to him to relinquish his office of the chief of the army and appoint a new commander in his place to lead the world’s fifth largest standing army.

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Whatever Musharraf’s decision, his legal advisers have made it clear during several rounds of in-house discussions that he can’t hold the office of profit after November 15 if he wants to remain president following this cut-off date.

He has been told that Article 43, which in one sense has been held in abeyance by Article 41 (7)(b), inserted in the Constitution by the 17th Amendment, would become operative on November 15.

It says: “The president shall not hold any office of profit in the service of Pakistan or occupy any other position carrying the right to remuneration for the rendering of service.”

Informed circles said it would be fine with the presidential camp if Bhutto’ s MPs, as per the deal, abstained during voting for Musharraf’s re-election.

“Our main concern is that they should not resign in any case as some other opposition parties would do,” one of them said.

These quarters frankly concede that Musharraf has very limited options in this difficult time and he is trying to get the best out of them. It is now inevitable that he can’t remain in uniform, they said.

They admitted that Musharraf’s aides have negotiated with Bhutto from a position of weakness.

“Had there been no March 9 blunder of filing the presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohamed Chaudhry, Bhutto would have even agreed to re-elect Musharraf in uniform,” they added. Article

Noted FYI:

A Christian priest and his American wife were shot dead at their home in the Pakistani capital Islamabad in what police said yesterday was a revenge attack for an alleged rape.

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The detained couple were also Christians and had confessed to the crime, he added.

The wife, a nurse at an Islamabad hospital, accused the priest in her confession of having raped her some months before, when he invited her to prayers at his residence.

The priest filmed the assault and was trying to blackmail her, she claimed. Article