The Hollywood actress visits Kabul in her role as the UN's Goodwill Ambassador.

The 1,500-mile-long Grand Trunk Road, which runs from Kabul to Calcutta and links the eastern and western regions of South Asia, is one of the area's oldest, longest and certainly most significant highways.

Banks were meant to be the symbol of the new Afghanistan. For the bright-eyed nation-builders, they represented the arrival of capitalism in the Hindu Kush. The emergence of a nascent banking system was seen as one of the finest achievements in the international community's attempts to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of war. The country had a private sector; and it was working.

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a supermarket two hundred metres from the British ambassador’s residence in Kabul yesterday, killing nine people including a child and four Filipinos, officials and witnesses said.

A suicide bomber killed eight people, including five foreigners, inside a high-end grocery store on Friday in the heart of a heavily guarded district of the Afghan capital that's home to many diplomats and Westerners.

David Cameron and Hamid Karzai today played down the significance of the WikiLeaks revelations of criticisms of British military operations in Afghanistan, as the Afghan President voiced his "gratitude for the sacrifices and the resources that Britain has brought" to his country.

Nato's top civilian representative in Afghanistan today moved to clarify comments he made suggesting Kabul was safer than parts of London or Glasgow.

The Afghan government said yesterday it has started dissolving private security firms in the country, taking steps to end the operations of eight companies, including the US firm formerly known as Blackwater and three other international contractors.

Afghanistan's central bank has stepped in to take control of the troubled Kabul Bank, its governor said, after suspected irregularities raised concerns over the country's top private financial institution.

A senior officer in General David Petraeus's support staff, who was fired for publicly criticising the US military's "PowerPoint culture", has issued a fresh broadside against what he says is a bloated, ineffective bureaucracy at America's headquarters in Afghanistan.