Afghanistan is now facing mortal danger. It has to survive, but it is not clear how it can manage. Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, which was attacked by gunmen last Saturday, used to fit like a glove, like a grandmother’s couch. Outside, the war has been raging. Millions of Afghan lives were aimlessly broken, hundreds of…
Recently, a memory of my son as a small boy came back to me. He was, in those days, terrified of clowns. Something about their strange, mask-like, painted faces unnerved him utterly, chilled him to the bone. To the rest of us, they were comic, but to him — or so I came to imagine…
Presenting the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States on Friday at the Johns Hopkins University, Secretary of Defense James Mattis painted a picture of a dangerous world in which U.S. power – and all of the supposed “good” that it does around the world – is on the decline. “Our competitive edge has…
The United States is once again ratcheting up the pressure on Pakistan to fall in line with U.S. policy in Afghanistan by ending the Afghan Taliban’s enjoyment of safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan is once again pushing back. Amid the mistrust, mutual recrimination, and stale narratives that have increasingly characterized the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in recent years,…
Posted on January 1, 2018, the President of the USA Donald Trump’s tweet about the mistake of providing Pakistan with American financial aid (more than 33 billion dollars over the last 15 years), which was rewarded with “nothing but lies & deceit,” was a significant news event in the world politics of the recently arrived…
The Pentagon intends to deploy an estimated 1,000 new combat advisers to Afghanistan as part of the Trump administration’s planned troop surge, according to reports. As early as February, members of an Army security-force assistance brigade from Fort Benning, Georgia, will be sent to work as combat advisers to Afghan National Security Forces. Their deployment…
