FEW outside Kabul are as powerful as the governor of Balkh, a province in northern Afghanistan. Win an audience with Atta Mohammad Noor and you are left in little doubt of his status. He receives guests from a golden throne at the end of a long hall hung with chandeliers. His word exerts iron control […]
The narcotics trade is ruining Afghanistan and spreading death and addiction around the world. Kabul needs a new approach to the problem — and neighboring Iran happens to offer a great model. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
Last month Afghanistan’s Minister of Mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, told the Wall Street Journal that he expects the country to start exporting oil as early as this year. Mr. Shahrani explained that oil wells in the Amu-Darya Basin in northern Afghanistan, while currently producing no oil, will have an output level of 25,000 barrels of oil a day by […]
As the U.S. and coalition forces prepare to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with all combat forces out by the end of 2014, the governments of Central Asia are bracing for a possible spillover of instability from their south. Ostensibly to help Central Asian countries protect themselves against the Islamist radicals that may gain strength in […]
In the eyes of the rest of the world, war-torn Afghanistan is a place with a beaten-down infrastructure, the minimum of modern amenities and certainly none of the services made possible by the latest technological advances powering the Internet, financial services and telecommunications. Surprisingly, however, Afghanistan is on the leading edge of the mobile-money and banking revolution sweeping […]
China, long a bystander to the conflict in Afghanistan, is stepping up its involvement as U.S.-led forces prepare to withdraw, attracted by the country’s vast mineral resources but concerned that any post-2014 chaos could embolden Islamist insurgents in its own territory. Cheered on by the U.S. and other Western governments, which see Asia’s giant as […]
More than half of Afghanistan’s population is under twenty-five, which shouldn’t be surprising since the average life span there is forty-nine. But the United States Agency for International Development looked at this group and decided it needed help because, it said, these young people are “disenfranchised, unskilled, uneducated, neglected—and most susceptible to joining the insurgency.” […]
“We wanted a clear message from Obama that the U.S. will continue to support democracy in Afghanistan,” Fawzia Koofi, a lawmaker and human-rights activist, said this month. “It’s the only alternative to Talibanization.” Her honesty revealed the plain truth, without official pieties and doublespeak: The U.S. is quitting Afghanistan, and the morning after it does, the Taliban […]
A shy boy with filthy hands and a shabby tunic approached the great man, bowed and tried to kiss his hand. Gen. Matiullah Khan was seated like a sultan on a cushion in his hojra, his airy receiving room. He barely looked at the boy. He nodded to an aide, who withdrew a thick wad of Pakistani […]
As the 2014 date for the withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan approaches, the country faces two starkly different futures. One is a return to the civil war conditions of the 1990s that brought disaster and disunity. In this scenario Afghanistan is abandoned by the international community before falling prey to the machinations of […]
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