Under no circumstances will Moscow be scared away from playing a leading role in Afghanistan’s sustainable socio-economic reconstruction, which it regards as integral to improving its de facto Taliban partners’ anti-terrorist capabilities and thus ensuring the wider region’s lasting stability. A suicide bomber blew themselves up outside the Russian Embassy in Kabul on Monday, killing…
The real reason why America went there was actually a pipe dream which had nothing to do with fighting the Taliban, Martin Jay writes. Western media pundits scramble to arrange the clichés about how the West lost a military defeat in the graveyard of empires. The real reason though why America went there in the…
It’s objectively the case that Pakistan’s prior alliance with America against the Afghan Taliban ended up fueling the TTP and other terrorist groups’ war against the state after they exploited genuine grievances to advance their evil cause. Pakistan didn’t gain anything from that previous policy, which ultimately ended up being completely counterproductive to its objective…
While the Pakistani-Taliban security dilemma owes its origins to “innocent” misperceptions of the other that were previously manageable since neither suspected that any adversarial third party was meddling in these mutually sensitive issues, this dynamic has now evolved to the point where both suspect their counterparts of colluding with their hated enemy (if not outright…
It won’t openly say as much, but the Taliban is arguably working to preemptively avert its potentially disproportionate dependence on China and Pakistan out of concern that such a relationship could erode its sovereignty. Afghan Minister of Industry and Trade Nooruddin Azizi shared some insight into his country’s geo-economic balancing act in an exclusive interview…
The Taliban (an organization banned in Russia), which seized power in Afghanistan a year ago, have pledged a tough fight against drugs, saying the cultivation, transportation and distribution of opium poppies are punishable by death. However, many experts had already raised doubts as to whether the Islamists would succeed in tackling the international drug business,…
