Three significant things about Ashraf Ghani’s swearing-in ceremony in Kabul on Monday augur well for the implementation of the US-Taliban pact signed in Doha on February 29. One, the US officials, civilian and military, made a full court appearance at the ceremony in Kabul, affirming their reconciliation with Ghani. The US special representative for Afghan…
India and Iran are the only two governments in the world which didn’t welcome the US-Taliban peace deal because they both realize the enormity of what they stand to lose by America’s pragmatic rapprochement with the same organization that it blames for facilitating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but neither of them can really do much…
A mini mutiny in Kabul against the US-Taliban deal has been nipped in the bud and it should sound warning bells in Washington that the real threat to peacemaking in Afghanistan comes from one principal source — the interest groups that monopolise state agencies and are loathe to transfer power. Isolating the Kabul cliques amidst…
The US and the Taliban signed an historic peace deal on Saturday in the Qatari capital of Doha which sets the timeline and conditions for the full withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, with this landmark agreement giving credible reasons for observers to be cautiously optimistic about its prospects of success but also containing within…
President Trump will likely sell the U.S.–Taliban deal as a peace agreement and a U.S. military withdrawal. It is neither. The deal only reduces troop strength to 8,600 from 13,000, and Trump has said even minor complications will serve as justification to halt or reverse this reduction. The U.S. military has little left to offer…
The Trump administration, anxious to be able to claim that it fulfilled its campaign pledge to end war in Afghanistan, pressed for a signed peace deal, leaving it to the Afghan government and the Taliban to hammer out the details. The ink was barely dry on the historic US-Taliban Peace Agreement, however, when the Taliban…
