6 July 2021 Five times in the past two weeks, government soldiers in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces in northern Afghanistan have fled across the border into Tajikistan after clashes with Taliban militants. They didn’t lose the firefights, and they’re not cowards; 1,600 trained soldiers – over 100 a day – just fled abroad to avoid […]
10 March 2021 In an letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last weekend, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken insisted that Ghani agree to share power with the Taliban insurgents in a transitional government, to be followed at some point by some sort of election. Understandably, the Afghan leader views this as a shotgun marriage
There is movement towards peace in Afghanistan – or at least towards an end to the American military ordeal there, which has lasted for almost eighteen years. US officials and representatives of the Taliban insurgents have held seven rounds of direct talks in the tiny Gulf state of Qatar since last October, and they are
During the past 65 years of military rule in Burma, the army has killed thousands of people from almost every one of the country’s numerous minorities: Shans, Karens, Kachins, Karennis, Mon, Chin and many smaller groups. But the only ones who have faced a genocide are the Rohingya, and it is happening right now. Only
In 2010, Barack Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden, vowed that the United States would be “totally out” of Afghanistan “come hell or high water, by 2014.” In 2014 Obama said that he would leave about 8,000 US troops there after all, and made an agreement with the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, that extended their stay
It happens after every major terrorist attack by Islamist terrorists in a Western country: the familiar debate about who is really to blame for this phenomenon. One side trots out the weary old trope that the terrorists simply “hate our values”, and other side claims that it’s really the fault of Western governments for sending
If the Taliban were not so busy fighting the rival Islamic State jihadis who began operating in Afghanistan early this year, they might now be within reach of overthrowing the Afghan government that the Western powers left behind when they pulled out most of their troops last year. Even with that distraction, the Taliban are
Islamist fanatics, as you would expect, are very earnest about their beliefs. They accept that secrecy and deceit are necessary to mislead the enemy, but they do not expect their leaders to be lying to them. When they find out that they have been lied to, consistently and over a long period of time, they
“We will not be cowed by these sick terrorists,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron after ISIS produced a grisly video of the mass beheading of Syrian captives by foreign jihadis who allegedly included British fighters. “We will not be intimidated,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper after the recent attacks in Montreal and Ottawa.
“We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it’s not America’s responsibility to make it one,” said President Barack Obama last May. No, it isn’t, and Afghanistan is a strikingly imperfect society in almost every respect: politics, economy, security and human rights. But it isn’t entirely a lost cause, either.