US News and World Report: Afghan women have seen their rights disappear since the Taliban regained control of their country in August 2021. In August 2021, after 20 years of war, the United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. Following America’s exit, the Taliban – a predominantly Pashtun, Islamic fundamentalist group – quickly regained power
Michael Hughes: General Mirza Aslam Beg as a chief instructor at the National Defense College during the early 1980s allegedly first articulated Pakistan’s version of the military doctrine known as “strategic depth,” which posits Islamabad’s hegemony in Afghanistan as critical in case of war with India. Many in Rawalpindi felt the Taliban seizing Kabul (again) was crucial
FT: Ghafari is scathing about the 20 years of US intervention. “It was not a ‘war on terror’. It was war to produce more terrorism,” she says. “They [US forces] destroyed entire villages. And if you asked, they would say, ‘There was one or two Taliban.’” In Afghanistan’s perennial woes she sees the traces of
The Guardian (UK): The review finds the sheer scale of the aid resources funnelled through central state institutions was distorting. The Afghan state spent approximately $11bn each year, but raised only $2.5bn of its own resources, the report finds. Echoing previous studies it suggests it would have taken 35 years for the state to become
Tolo News: The US Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in a recent report identified six factors it said led to the collapse of the former republic government of Afghanistan. The Afghan government failed to realize that the US would “actually” exit from Afghanistan, SIGAR said. For the fifth reason, SIGAR blames former President Ashraf
AFP: The Taliban on Sunday revealed the final resting place of the movement’s founder, Mullah Omar, whose death and burial they kept secret for years. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Agence France-Presse Sunday that senior leaders of the movement attended a ceremony at his gravesite earlier in the day near Omarzo, in Suri district of
By Sadiq Amini via The Diplomat: Nothing illustrates the divisions inside the Taliban leadership so much as the cruel ban on girls’ education, which is widely believed by nationalist circles within the Taliban to be the work of the ISI and extremist elements of the Taliban who are closely aligned with Rawalpindi, as they are
Atalayar: The Hazara community, one of the ethnic groups in Afghanistan that have suffered the most persecution throughout its history, stands out in this regard. Life for the Hazaras has never been easy due to their differences with the rest of the Afghan communities, in particular with the Pashtuns, one of the main ethnic groups in the
AFP: A mass grave containing the remains of 12 people has been uncovered in Afghanistan, Taliban officials said on Monday. The grave was found by villagers over the past few days in the town of Spin Boldak, bordering Pakistan, a site of fierce fighting between former Afghan government forces and Taliban fighters before the Taliban
popMATTERS: Matthew Heineman’s remarkable Retrograde—a National Geographic film showing at some festivals now and hitting theaters and streaming later this year—is one of the most unsettlingly intimate examples of this kind of filmmaking. Ostensibly, it’s a document of the last nine months of the Western-backed Afghanistan government in 2021. The film’s scope ranges from furious