Fears over the future of ailing Kabul Bank grew violent Wednesday as state police beat back crowds of frustrated Afghan government workers attempting to withdraw their salaries on the final day before a four-day national holiday. More than 500 government employees, including local police officers, Afghan National Army soldiers and teachers, mobbed the sole Kabul Bank branch that remained open, only to be kept at bay by armed police from the country’s National Directorate of Security. The crowds pressed in so closely that the NDS police started punching and shoving people to keep them back. The guards also threatened to destroy the cameras of journalists attempting to take pictures of the scene. A cameraman was punched before jumping into a car and speeding off.

As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, President Hamid Karzai told Afghans on Thursday not to panic shortly after his brother, a major shareholder in the beleaguered Kabul Bank, called for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown. “Kabul Bank is safe,” Karzai said at a joint news conference at the presidential palace in Kabul with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “People need not panic, need not be worried.”

One of Afghanistan’s most senior prosecutors says the President, Hamid Karzai, fired him after he repeatedly refused to block corruption investigations at the highest levels of the government. Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, the former deputy attorney-general, said investigations of more than two dozen senior officials – including cabinet ministers, ambassadors and provincial governors – were being held up or blocked outright by Mr Karzai, the Attorney-General, Mohammed Ishaq Aloko, and others. ”We propose investigations, detentions and prosecutions of high government officials, but we cannot resist him,” Mr Faqiryar said of Mr Karzai. ”He won’t sign anything. We have great, honest, and professional prosecutors here, but we need support.” This month Mr Karzai intervened to stop the prosecution of one of his closest aides, Mohammed Zia Salehi, who investigators say had been wiretapped demanding a bribe from another Afghan seeking his help in scuttling a corruption investigation.

The Washington Post has changed significant portions of an article published earlier today regarding the CIA’s payment of large numbers of people within Hamid Karzai’s administration in Afghanistan. These changes occur mostly in the beginning of the article and substantially manipulate its content. Most notable among the changes is the complete elimination of a quote describing how “half of Karzai’s palace” is on the CIA payroll. This quote, from an anonymous U.S. government official, was replaced with a paraphrased statement that “a significant number” of officials in Karzai’s administration are paid by the CIA. This alteration is followed by a quote from a CIA spokesman, which does not appear in the original article, who says that the “anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both.” Another significant quote from this anonymous source, detailing how Kazai is “blind to about 80 percent of what’s going on below him”, was also completely eliminated from the article. There are also a number of smaller changes all of which are designed to eliminate the perception of ignorance, malfeasance, and public perception that the Afghan government is almost wholly owned by the CIA.

Mohammad Zia Salehi was arrested by a British and American-backed anti-corruption task force last month after being allegedly recorded soliciting a bribe to hamper a money laundering inquiry. Mr Salehi, chief of administration for the national security council, is said to have been a trusted intermediary for the government, arranging meetings with insurgents in its attempts to start negotiations with the Taliban. Hamid Karzai, the Afghanistan president, personally intervened to release his aide, angering Western embassies who have asked him to clamp down on the corruption which riddles his administration.

President Hamid Karzai lashed out at his Western backers for the second time in three days on Saturday, accusing the U.S. of interfering in Afghan affairs and saying the Taliban insurgency would become a legitimate resistance movement if the meddling doesn’t stop. Mr. Karzai, whose government is propped up by billions of dollars in Western aid and nearly 100,000 American troops fighting the Taliban, made the comments during a private meeting with about 60 or 70 Afghan lawmakers. At one point, Mr. Karzai suggested that he himself would be compelled to join the Taliban if the Parliament didn’t back his controversial attempt to take control of the country’s electoral watchdog from the United Nations, according to two of those who attended the meeting. The people included a close ally of the president.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has drawn up a new cabinet that retains key ministers backed by the West, diminishing fears of a government dominated by former warlords, according to Western diplomats who saw the list. Mr. Karzai’s spokesman said the new cabinet will be submitted to Parliament on Saturday morning and announced on Afghan television later in the day.

Gordon Brown downplayed the issue of corruption in Afghanistan today as he demanded that other Nato countries come forward with thousands more troops. The Prime Minister professed his confidence in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s desire to end corruption and insisted that allied forces operating in Afghanistan could muster an additional 5,000 troops in addition to the US troop surge being debated in Washington.

A report in Wednesday’s New York Times alleging that the CIA is secretly paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, a man reputed to be one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug barons, throws into sharp relief the most crucial question the administration now faces in Afghanistan: Should America continue its policy of working with warlords and disreputable power-brokers in an attempt to use their influence to advance US interests? Or should it instead focus on protecting the Afghan people – in many cases from the very warlords the US has supported in the past?

School principal Karima Monib has become an unwilling celebrity in her hometown as a symbol of the fraud allegations plaguing Afghanistan’s recent presidential election. TV stations in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif have repeatedly aired footage of Monib defending herself against accusations that she tried to stuff ballot boxes as head of the polling station at her school.

Just a week before this country’s presidential election, the leaders of a southern Afghan tribe called Bariz gathered to make a bold decision: they would abandon the incumbent and local favorite, Hamid Karzai, and endorse his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. Mr. Abdullah flew to the southern city of Kandahar to receive the tribe’s endorsement. The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.

President Hamid Karzai and his main rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, were running virtually even Tuesday in the first fragmented returns from last week’s Afghan election, raising the possibility of a runoff that could drag the process out for months.

The main challenger to Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that he has received “alarming” reports of “widespread rigging” in Thursday’s presidential election by pro-government groups and officials, but he called on supporters to be patient and said he hopes the problem will be resolved through the official election review.

A top U.S. military official said Afghanistan’s security situation is getting worse, as Senator John McCain warned that there aren’t enough troops deployed in the country. “It is serious and it is deteriorating,” Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program yesterday. “The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated. Their tactics, just in my recent visits out there and talking with our troops, certainly indicate that.”

Whether and how to negotiate peace with the Taliban has become the one issue that no candidate in the Afghan presidential election can avoid taking a stand on. There is broad agreement that the war must end, but debate swirls around whether the government of President Hamid Karzai is moving effectively toward persuading the Taliban to end their insurgency.

Thousands of U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops moved into Taliban-infested villages with armor and helicopters early Thursday in the first major operation under President Barack Obama’s revamped strategy to stabilize Afghanistan. The offensive in the once-forgotten war was launched shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday local time in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold in the southern part of the country and the world’s largest opium poppy producing area.