Kabul, Nov. 27 : One person was killed and six others were reportedly injured after a suspected suicide bomber detonated explosives outside or near the US Embassy in kabul on Thursday.

Reports said the bomber detonated explosives about 200m from the heavily guarded entrance to the US compound.

Kabul''s police chief, Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, was quoted by the BBC as saying that one person had been killed and six injured.

Kabul, Nov 27: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly criticised the US and other foreign countries for creating a “parallel government” in the countryside during an overview of Afghanistan’s problems before a UN Security Council delegation.

He said every effort to defeat the Taliban had failed because of the “parallel government”.

Tokyo  - Japan's National Police Agency plans to invite Afghan officers for training in December, it said Thursday.

About 10 Afghan police officers are to visit Japan for about two weeks starting Monday to learn about such things as Japan's crime laboratory techniques and its koban police box system, which places mini-police stations in communities for closer contact with the public.

The Afghan police are to receive lectures on policing, recruiting and fighting narcotics.

Kabul  - Seven years after the fall of the Taliban in the US- led invasion in Afghanistan, the NATO war on terrorism remains "unclear", President Hamid Karzai said on Wednesday - and demanded a timeline for its success.

"This fight against terrorism and civilian casualties has been continuing for the past seven years. Our villages are bombarded, our people are getting killed," Karzai told a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer in his presidential palace.

Karzai said Afghanistan was burning because of "a war which is unclear what it is for, and what we are doing."

London, Nov. 26 : The British Ministry of Defence has revealed that the cost of the offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan has crossed 13 billion pounds in six years so far, and there is a need for more than 2.3 billion pounds to pay for the campaign in southern Helmand province this year.

According to The Times, most of the funds have come from Treasury contingency reserves, although the ministry has had to bear some of the financial burden from its own budget to share the costs of new armoured vehicles sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

London, Nov 26 : In a bid to encourage the tribesmen in Helmand province to take on the Taliban, the UK is learnt to be planning to pay tribal elders “monthly cash bribes”.

The move is in the line with the “Awakening Councils” in Iraq which helped unite Sunni tribesmen against Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq. Similarly, tribal militias in Pakistan had also begun to mobilise against the Taliban and its Qaeda backers.

A spokesman for the British embassy in Kabul, said: “It would establish community councils in Helmand and build trust between communities and government”.