Months of peace negotiations in Afghanistan bring good and bad news. Despite consolidation of a power sharing agreement between political rivals and the formation of a council for peace, the coronavirus and a contest for Taliban leadership will defer the commencement of peace talks.
The COVID-19 pandemic is transforming international relations not just by straining relations among powerful states, but also by disrupting violent nonstate actors. Perhaps no major militant outfit has felt the impact as much as the Taliban. The group’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, is either seriously ill with the virus or possibly dead. Sirajuddin ...
Both the US and the Taliban declared the 29 February peace agreement a victory. Here Emrah Ozdemir (Karatekin University, Turkey) explains the implications for the deal, its impact on Afghan citizens and some possible roadblocks ahead for maintaining peace throughout the country.
These are the bare facts. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, it did not take long to establish that responsibility for the onslaught lay with the al-Qaeda movement. The US was convinced that its master-mind, Osama bin Laden, was being sheltered by the extremist Islamist group controlling ...
As the COVID-19 pandemic death toll grows and the number of those infected creeps past one million confirmed cases, worldwide, the Palestinian health workers of Gaza and the West Bank try desperately to prevent the spread of the virus in the occupied territories. Unfortunately, however, this effort has been severely compromised by the Israeli occupation ...
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scrambled to Afghanistan last week in a bid to rescue the peace deal with the Afghan Taliban. A little over one month since the “historic deal” was signed in Doha, Washington is already feeling the need for a salvaging act.
It has been more than nine years since I resigned in protest over the escalation of the Afghan War from my position as a Political Officer with the US State Department in Afghanistan. It had been my third time to war, along with several years of working in positions effecting war policy in Washington, DC with the Department of Defense (DOD) and the ...
The United States should have also delineated some stringent ‘red-lines’ that the Afghan Taliban would have to adhere to, unconditionally for sustaining a peace dialogue with the United States.
The anomalies in the 2018 election calls for making structural as well as organizational changes in both the commissions. While collections of the anomalies from the 2018 elections being still fresh, marching to presidential election without goal oriented and futuristic reforms, will result in disaster in the presidential election.
Taliban officials and Western diplomats said Thursday that an agreement was imminent. They said that the two sides were finalizing a deal in which the Taliban would renounce ties to international terrorist groups and pledge that Afghanistan would not be used as a launching ground for attacks on the United States, as Al Qaeda did in 2001. In return,...
US president Donald Trump should not see Afghanistan through the prism of Iraq, Libya and Syria, because in the Middle East, the US was either weak or had no political and moral grounds for intervention unlike Afghanistan. The reaction to haphazard withdrawal and not fulfilling its commitment might be different than Iraq and Syria.
In an ideal situation, a cooperative relationship between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan could have tremendously benefitted the entire landmass of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Unfortunately, mutual suspicions and mistrust have negatively impacted not only the overall security paradigm in the region but also deprived the people and ...
The Taliban, a violent extremist Islamist organisation bolstered by arms and money from the Pakistani establishment, has all of a sudden acquired a certain legitimacy.
The proximate cause is Washington’s desire to finally pull out from Afghanistan where it has fought — and largely lost — an 18-year-old war. US President Donald Trump ...
Salvation Party is a political organization founded on Islamic and democracy principles and rules, supporting independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity, social justice, and presidency system in the structure of the government.