In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the CIA-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets. So,…
The worst-case scenario is that Pakistan launches even just a limited ground operation into Afghanistan together with relying on US drone strikes either across the border or within its own. That could immediately set into motion the fast-moving sequence of events that results in the never-ending war that former Prime Minister Imran Khan is so…
Russia is a responsible regional stakeholder and therefore doesn’t want the worst-case scenario of a never-ending Pakistani-Taliban war to transpire, yet it’s powerless to directly shape the dynamics for de-escalating this crisis in order to avert that outcome. Nevertheless, it’ll never give up trying, hence the real reason why Special Presidential Representative for Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov…
Pakistani-Taliban ties are a lot more complicated than most observers assume, especially in light of their latest tensions. They lost control over their security dilemma after their American and TTP partners who they respectively recruited as leverage over the other exploited them in pursuit of their own self-interested ends. It’s still not too late to…
What Afghanistan urgently needs isn’t more lectures about its internal affairs or military threats, but someone credible like China who sincerely believes in its people’s ability to reconstruct their country. Thursday saw tangible progress in rebuilding the Afghan economy after that country signed an oil production deal with China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas…
The Pakistani-Taliban security dilemma is untenable and quickly approaching the breaking point, which is why Islamabad might soon seize the initiative to decisively defend itself from Afghan-emanating terrorist threats, but it’s unknown exactly how far it might go in this respect. In any case, the US is expected to support its recently restored regional proxy…
