Obama visits US troops in Afghanistan

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has slipped into Afghanistan to see US troops serving in America's longest war.

Air Force One arrived on Sunday at the main US base in Afghanistan after an overnight flight from Washington.

Obama was expected to spend just a few hours at Bagram Air Field. It is understood he had no plans to meet with outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has had a rocky relationship with the White House.

Obama is considering keeping a small number of US troops in Afghanistan for training and counterterrorism missions beyond year's end. The US and NATO are withdrawing most of their forces by then.

Karzai has refused to sign a security agreement that the US needs to keep troops in Afghanistan. The candidates running to succeed Karzai say they will sign.

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Gunmen kill 6 police officers in Pakistan

GUNMEN have stormed a tribal police post in southwestern Pakistan, killing six police officers and wounding three, authorities say.

The attack took place in Wadh area of Baluchistan province's Khuzdar district, where insurgents have launched previous attacks, said Baroz Khan, a senior government official.

Officers manning the post returned fire and pushed the gunmen back toward nearby mountains, Khan said. Reinforcements from the paramilitary Frontier Corps later reached the post, some 300 kilometres south of Quetta, the provincial capital, he said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but suspicion immediately fell on Baluch nationalist groups who have claimed responsibility for such attacks in the past.

For over a decade, Baluchistan has been the scene of a low-intensity insurgency by some nationalist groups demanding autonomy or a greater share from mineral and gas resources being extracted from the impoverished province. It is also believed to be home to many Afghan Taliban members.

Residents say a crackdown has sparked disappearances in Baluchistan blamed on security forces. They say the disappearances swelled in the mid-2000s, when Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government cracked down on insurgents there.

Two years ago, the Voice for Baluch Missing Persons organisation handed the United Nations a list of 12,000 names they said belonged to people missing in the conflict.

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Poland's Jaruzelski dies at 90

POLAND'S last communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, has died at a military hospital where was being treated after a stroke. He was 90.

Jaruzelski died on Sunday just days before Poland marked 25 years since a crucial parliamentary election in which Poles voted against the country's communist rulers and in support of the Solidarity freedom movement that soon formed Poland's first democratic government in over four decades.

Hospital spokesman Grzegorz Kade confirmed Jaruzelski's death. He suffered a stroke earlier this month and was previously treated for cancer at the hospital.

On December 13, 1981, Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland against the wishes of pro-democratic Solidarity union that grew into a nationwide movement. Solidarity eventually prevailed, ousting the communists from power in the 1989 election.

Jaruzelski is survived by his wife Barbara and a daughter Monika.

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