The Washington Post: Women in Afghanistan are changing their lives and their nation. Fifteen years ago, barely 5,000 girls were enrolled in primary school. Soon that number will exceed 3 million. Thirty-six percent of teachers are women. Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani, has launched a project to establish a female-only university, run by women. In government,
The New Yorker: America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent
Michael Hughes: Just as the spirit of rapprochement between Kabul and Islamabad is in the air on the eve of talks with the insurgency, it appears Pakistan’s military chieftains have sunk to a new nadir amid reports they are supporting Daesh, otherwise known as the Islamic State, the sworn enemy of the Taliban and Al
The Guardian (UK): The policy of indefinite detention in Gitmo makes a mockery of the US constitution. That’s why, as Barack Obama makes his latest impassioned and forceful plea to close it once and for all, it is shameful that he is leaving in place the practices that enabled it to flourish in the first
The Independent: I have long nursed the suspicion that Taliban units, ISIS and government militias are not fighting about religion or government at all, more about mafia power. Click here to read more (external link).
Michael Hughes: Kabul attempting to negotiate with the Taliban is a worthwhile endeavor for symbolic purposes alone, not to mention the brute fact the war will never end if parties to the conflict never communicate. With that being said, however, expectations should be set that striking a peace deal is highly unlikely in the current environment,
New York Times Sunday Review: Pakistan is intervening in a number of foreign conflicts. Its intelligence service has long acted as the manager of international mujahedeen forces, many of them Sunni extremists, and there is even speculation that it may have been involved in the rise of the Islamic State. Click here to read more (external link).
Counter Punch: The Assange case is rooted across the Atlantic in Pentagon-dominated Washington, obsessed with pursuing and prosecuting whistleblowers, especially Assange for having exposed, in WikiLeaks, US capital crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of civilians and a contempt for sovereignty and international law. None of this truth-telling is illegal under the US Constitution.
Michael Hughes: The United States has spent some $2.3 billion on projects specifically designed to stabilize Afghanistan that have shown scant evidence of doing so or have actually undermined stability, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said in a report on Friday. What makes this report even more pathetic is that it comes as
Foreign Policy: In 2014, Afghanistan’s presidential election was marred by accusations of fraud. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry intervened and brought together the two candidates, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, to form what is now the National Unity Government (NUG), with Ghani serving as president and Abdullah as chief executive officer. Though the agreement