South China Morning Post: As global geopolitics continues to be driven by great power competition, China will feature more prominently in the transnational jihadist rhetoric. Jihadist groups like Isis-K require a bigger adversary to justify their extremist violence and attract funding and recruitment. For the past two decades, the raison d’être of transnational jihadism was
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
Middle East Eye: As the Taliban reel from the repercussions of the two-decade conflict in Afghanistan, there is fresh debate over the right way to carry out a war – Few individuals would unite Bernard-Henri Levy, Michael Waltz, Qassem Soleimani and Abdullah Azzam like Ahmad Shah Massoud, the subject of their boundless admiration. So what
Michael Hughes: The U.S. House, expected to be controlled by the Republicans as a result of this week’s midterm elections, will launch a probe into President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan after the new Congress convenes in January, Representative Michael McCaul, who is likely to lead the investigation, said on Friday. On
HSToday: When U.S. troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Taliban took over the government, world leaders and others braced themselves for what the future might hold for Afghanistan and its citizens. Many feared the worst, and the Taliban did not disappoint. It claimed to have reformed its ways but, with a long history of
8am: This type of political system exists in developed countries of the world such as the United States of America, the federal government of Germany, Pakistan, India, Canada, Switzerland, and 16 other countries. Racial, religious, and linguistic diversity in some countries compelled them to move toward federalism to create a system responsive to the needs
Lawfare: Authoritarian regimes have their own dynamics and incentives, and efforts to influence them from outside must be informed by what makes sense in terms of their own overriding priority of regime as well as individual leadership survival and longevity. Asking an authoritarian regime to take actions that risk undermining—let alone toppling—it is, beyond a
Jamestown Foundation: The most significant question that arose in the wake of his death concerned the origin of the drone that killed him. It certainly was not from inside Afghanistan. But was it from neighboring Pakistan or some other country? And would Pakistan allow the U.S to use its airspace for a strike on al-Zawahiri
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