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Archive for the tag “Taliban”

26 Mar 2020

Afghanistan Is Drifting Toward Civil War. The Coronavirus Pandemic Makes One More Likely.

The reality is that Afghanistan is a landlocked country thousands of miles away from America and of marginal economic and strategic importance to it. Once the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban, it began to look at Afghan war through the rearview mirror. And with the monumental crisis created by the Coronavirus pandemic, the American foot will remain steady on the accelerator. The troops are coming home.

Read Here – The National Interest

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05 Mar 2020

What Now After The U.S.-Taliban Deal

It took the Trump administration 17 months to clinch a preliminary agreement with the Taliban – a first step toward ending more than 18 years of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. The deal is not so much a peace agreement as it is a way for Washington to manage conflict in the southwest Asian nation in the aftermath of the American withdrawal, which is supposed to be finalized by May 2020 (assuming the Taliban uphold their end of the bargain).

Read Here – Centre For Global Policy

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14 Sep 2019

How India Secretly Armed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance

India must not commit the error of placing Indian troops on Afghan soil, says the diplomat who coordinated New Delhi’s secret military assistance to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander of the Northern Alliance, who fought the Taliban and U.S. forces till his assassination in 2001.

Read Here – The Hindu

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09 Sep 2019

More Americans Will Die After Trump Abruptly Ends Afghan Talks, Taliban Say

President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel Afghan peace talks will cost more American lives, the Taliban said while the United States promised to keep up military pressure on the militants, in a stunning reversal of efforts to forge a deal ending nearly 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

Read Here – Reuters

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04 Sep 2019

Taliban Fragmentation: A Figment Of Your Imagination?

The notion of the Taliban insurgency as a fractured entity, rife with internal strife, has lingered in much of the commentary and analysis on the Afghan conflict. This is in spite of the last five years, which have witnessed the Taliban pull out of its bloodiest internal crisis and achieve its strongest position since 2001. Long after the United States quietly abandoned its stated aim of “shattering” the Taliban, even Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani was said to refer to his long-term plan for ending the conflict as “fight, fracture, talk.”

Read Here – WarOnTheRocks

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31 Aug 2019

In Afghanistan And Kashmir, It’s The 1980s All Over Again

While a superpower negotiates an exit from Afghanistan, India stirs up a hornet’s nest in Kashmir. It is the 1980s, and the world is at an inflection point that led to a major insurgency in Kashmir, the Afghan civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the attacks of 9/11. Again today, the world is facing no less an important transition period as the United States is set to conclude a preliminary peace agreement with the Taliban and India’s Hindu nationalist government continues its communications and media blackout in Kashmir after having revoked the region’s nominal autonomy this month.

Read Here – Foreign Policy

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23 Apr 2019

Washington’s Gamble In Afghanistan

There’s a famous saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that measure, Washington has tested the limits of sanity with its strategy in Afghanistan: For seventeen years, it pursued the same policy while hoping in vain that it would produce the desired outcome. Recent months, however, have brought a much-needed course correction.

Read Here – The National Interest

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27 Jan 2019

Afghanistan’s Impossible Task: Talking And Fighting While Holding Elections

If a negotiated settlement to the war is a priority, and the aim is to facilitate talks between the Taliban and Kabul, then a legitimate, stable Afghan government would be a prerequisite. But Afghanistan’s history to this date indicates that elections are not an effective way of producing legitimate and stable central government there.

Read Here – The National Interest

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22 Oct 2018

There’s No Path To Victory In Afghanistan

This month, for the first time, the U.S. armed forces are recruiting young men and women who weren’t yet born when the invasion of Afghanistan took place. The war has been going on for 17 years now (17-year-olds can enlist with parental consent), making it the longest war in American history. Yet we are no closer than we have ever been to accomplishing our objectives, in part because those objectives have been so sketchily, inconsistently, and unrealistically defined.

Read Here – Slate

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14 Oct 2018

An End To The War In Afghanistan

Finally, and perhaps ultimately what may prove most decisive of these factors, the notorious Great Game—in which outside powers have intervened in and jousted over Afghanistan for a century and a half—is proving surprisingly propitious in terms of a rare coinciding of the interests of these countries.

Read Here – The National Interest

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