David Rohde, “Held By the Taliban,” New York Times, Oct. 17–21, 2009. Last November, Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter David Rohde set out to get the other side of the story on the war. He ended up becoming involuntarily embedded with the Haqqani network.

Karen De Young, “U.S. Official Resigns over Afghan War,” Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2009. Former Marine and newly former Foreign Service Officer Matthew Hoh becomes the first publicized conscientious resignor over the war. Read his resignation letter, too.

Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2009. Mayer explores the tactics—and ethics—of the CIA’s drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mayer’s discussion of the piece on NPR’s Fresh Air is also worth a listen.

Julius Cavendish, “Taliban Attack UN Kabul Guesthouse in Attempt to Upend Afghan Runoff,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 28, 2009. While the headline gives the main details, the article also points out that the attack may have also been intended to frighten the international aid community. Attacks like these, starting with the murder of Ricardo Munguia, have resonated strongly within the aid community. The Times later linked the guesthouse attack to the Haqqani Network and Al Qaeda.

Arthur Bright, “Clinton: Hard to Believe Pakistan Can’t Find Al Qaeda,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 30, 2009. Signalling a break with the Bush Administration, the Secretary of State publicly calls out Pakistan’s failure to crack down on militants on the run from Afghanistan.

Carlotta Gall and Jeff Zeleny, “Out of Race, Karzai Rival Is Harsh Critic of Election,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2009. I’m omitting the election here because it has been front page news everywhere, but here Gall and Zeleny take a hard look at the effect Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal will have on Hamid Karzai’s already thin legitimacy.

This week, the main characters.

Hamid Karzai — Elizabeth Rubin, “Karzai in His Labyrinth,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 2009. Published just prior to the flawed recent elections, Rubin explains why the Afghan president turned to warlords for support.

Mullah Muhammed Omar — Scott Shane, “A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing U.S.,” New York Times, October 10, 2009. Shane updates us on the status of that other antagonist the U.S. failed to capture in 2001.

Richard Holbrooke — George Packer, “The Last Mission,” New Yorker, September 28, 2009. A detailed biography of the civilian in charge of Pres. Obama’s Afghanistan policy.

And some more general material.

The McChrystal Report. The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan leaked to Bob Woodward last month. It’s frank and surprisingly accessible to non-experts.

Ahmed Rashid, “The Afghanistan Impasse,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009. Reviews of Gretchen Peters’s Seeds of Terror, the most extensive examination of the heroin trade to date, and Nicholas Schmidle’s To Live or Perish Forever.

And if that’s not enough for you, George Packer has assembled a thorough list of essential, recent books on Afghanistan and Pakistan over.