Taliban advances in Afghanistan shift the Central Asian playing field on which China, India and the United States compete with rival infrastructure-driven approaches. At first glance, a Taliban takeover of Kabul would give China a 2:0 advantage against the US and India, but that could prove to be a shaky head start. The potential fall…
Things have been moving very rapidly as Taliban forces immediately closed in on Kabul after the end of the occupation. The US is frantically evacuating people, former Afghan officials are fleeing the country, and a transition to Taliban control is a done deal. It’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Taliban would regain…
According to Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan Dmitry Zhirnov, Western journalists are misportraying the situation since Russia’s view is that there’s no reason to panic. ISIS isn’t rising, Kabul is mostly calm, and civilians are safe. Russia has surprisingly come to have more pragmatic ties with the Taliban than any other country apart from Pakistan as…
The United States lost the Afghanistan War a long time ago, as is quickly becoming apparent as the Taliban take city after city. After 2002, it was never clear what the US war aim was. You can’t win a war if you don’t have a clear objective. The war is lost before it begins. The…
Biden administration officials on Thursday said they expected the Taliban to arrive in the Afghan capital in 30 days and were sending in troops to evacuate the U.S. embassy and U.S. civilians. Just three days later the Taliban surprised Washington by arriving in Kabul on Sunday. The Afghan president has fled the country. How could…
It’s almost poetic that it was the Taliban of all forces – who are condescendingly seen by average Americans as so-called “barbarians” – that exposed two decades’ worth of lies spread by the most powerful propaganda machine in human history, the US media. American officials, media, and experts were all completely wrong about Afghanistan. They…
