A car bomb explosion blasted through the crowded Meena Bazaar market area of Peshawar, the most populous city in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, on October 28, killing at least 90 people and wounding 100 others. The blast occurred a short time after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, for three days of talks with senior government officials. The two cities are about 88 miles apart.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister of North West Frontier Province, said in a telephone interview with Reuters news that the blast was set off by a suicide bomber in a car packed with as much as 330 pounds of explosives.

Reuters reported that the explosion occurred in the busy Peepal Mandi market street “in a city that for years served as the headquarters of the Pakistan- and U.S.- backed mujahideen war against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan.” (In an article entitled “Bleeding Afghanistan” published in The New American magazine for December 8, 1986, this writer interviewed an American journalist who told of meeting up with a mujahideen group in Peshawar in June 1985 and was issued a Soviet-made AK-47 automatic rifle before accompanying the resistance fighters into Afghanistan.)

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, speaking during a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Bratislava, Slovakia, on October 22, called for the defense alliance’s members to redouble their efforts to train and equip Afghan forces, warning that inaction would have serious consequences.

During his talk, entitled ''New Challenges — Better Capabilities,''  Rasmussen countered the increasing anti-war sentiment in NATO countries with a warning against inactivity, stating:

Afghanis, Americans, and the rest of the world waited in anticipation on October 19 for the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) that is investigating reports of fraud in the nation’s August 20 presidential election to release its results — results that will determine if incumbent President Harmid Karzai has been unequivocally reelected.

The commission released figures back on September 16 showing Karzai with 54.6 percent of the vote. According to Afghan law, if a single candidates fails to receive over 50 percent of the vote, a runoff vote must be held.

One late-breaking AP report announced that ECC investigators had thrown out nearly a third of Karzai's votes.

The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva voted 25 to six on October 16 in favor of a resolution to endorse a report that accuses both Israel and the Palestinians of committing "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity" during the December 2008-January 2009 war.

Voting in favor of the resolution were Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia.

Voting against the resolution were were the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Ukraine. Eleven countries abstained from the vote. The report, which was written by a group of investigators led by South African judge Richard Goldstone (hence, “The Goldstone Report”), calls on both sides to conduct investigations into the war crimes accusations within six months. If Israel and the Palestinians refuse to comply, the matter would be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.