August, 2021

• 30 August

  Taliban’s Attitude To ISIS Will Be Critical For US Decisions On Afghanistan – Analysis

  

  The airport blasts could re-open the military option if the Taliban do not crackdown on the ISIS The ISIS-engineered blasts near the Kabul airport on Thursday, in which 13 US soldiers were killed along with dozens of Afghan civilians, have put the US at the crossroads. The blasts have put …

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• 30 August

  Hardline Haqqani Network Put in Charge of Kabul Security

  

  The Taliban has placed security for the Afghan capital, Kabul, in the hands of senior members of the Haqqani Network, which has close ties with foreign jihadist groups including a long-standing association with al-Qaida. Western intelligence officials say the assignment is alarming and undercuts Taliban promises to tread a more …

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• 30 August

  Afghanistan’s Coming Economic Collapse — and What It Could Mean

  

  Not even heroin, opium, and methamphetamine will be able to solve the problem. No government — particularly one with only a shaky claim to legitimacy, none of it democratic — will ever enjoy a sudden drop in its country’s standard of living. That is something the Taliban may shortly discover …

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• 30 August

  The Long, Quiet Death of American Foreign Policy

  

  With the protection of the nation’s interests abroad entirely subordinate to domestic politics, it’s now almost impossible to maintain a prudent strategy. A sked for his opinion of Western civilization, Mohandas K. Gandhi wryly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” We could say the same about U.S. …

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• 30 August

  The Day Afghanistan Died

  

  If you’ve read the plethora of post-mortem reports on Afghanistan, there are plenty of enemies to go around, from corruption, to incompetent leadership, to 20 years of rosy assessments from our own defense establishment. For me, there is a single day that Afghanistan died, and it was June 16, 2021. …

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• 30 August

  Why Exactly Did We Abandon Bagram Air Base?

  

  The Economist’s Shashank Joshi tweeted an important observation that deserves to be highlighted. President Biden was either confused or — worse — actively misleading the American people when he said at Thursday’s press conference that senior military officers advised him to abandon the Bagram air base because there “was not …

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• 30 August

  Afghanistan Nightmare Gets Worse

  

  Our nightmarish exit from Afghanistan got worse on Thursday when a suicide attack at the Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. troops, as well as dozens of Afghan civilians. It was the heaviest combat loss for the U.S. since the downing of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan a decade ago. Prior …

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• 30 August

  Afghanistan and the Propaganda of Infinite War

  

  The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s re-ascendance are producing some incredible lamentations about the decline of American power. This apprehensiveness about withdrawal is premised on the belief that the U.S. acts as a force for good and is vital to the effort to defeat the scourge of global …

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• 30 August

  US-Taliban ties on razor’s edge. China is the winner

  

  A panoramic view of Mes Ayna on the gentle hills and craggy mountains in Logar province 40 kilometres south-east of Kabul, Afghanistan, where Chinese firms signed contracts to mine one of the world’s largest untouched copper deposits estimated to contain 450 million metric tonnes of ore worth at least US$50 …

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• 30 August

  Wandering 40 Years in the Afghan Desert

  

  The Taliban have taken military control, but Afghanistan’s future is cloudy. Assumption that the Taliban can, by itself, effectively govern a nation divided by conflicting tribal loyalties and a partially reconstituted population, with a sharply contrary mindset, needs more validation. Rather than facts, agendas have delegated responsibility for the debacle …

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