The idea that the world can be shaped by military force, as it was by the Allied victory in World War II, has since been proven impossible time after time. Many Israelis who do not follow events beyond our immediate neighborhood were surprised and even shocked by the American pullout from Afghanistan and its abandonment to the mercies of the […]

As Israel has learned the hard way, how you leave an area is no less important than the timing. When Kabul was toppled by the Taliban this week, it was a double victory for the jihadist organization. It had won the physical war, regaining control of Afghanistan, and it had won a psychological war. Make that present tense: It continues […]

MIDDLE ISRAEL: The war on Islamism, unlike the war for democracy, is both winnable and imperative. They had – to paraphrase Joe Biden – the will to fight. Faced with 200,000 Soviet troops and 5,000 tanks, Hungarian workers and students confronted their Soviet invaders with hunting rifles, pistols and Molotov cocktails as Budapest became a battlefield between David and Goliath. […]

All withdrawals in this part of the world end the same, with the vacuum being filled by hostile and radical terrorist elements. It wasn’t even really a battle. On June 10, 2007, clashes erupted between Hamas and Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip. Israel had withdrawn from the coastal enclave two years earlier, and after Hamas came to power in […]

REGIONAL AFFAIRS: America’s debacle in Afghanistan is a complicated process, and the breakdown has many antecedents. The harrowing scenes at Kabul airport had been predicted days earlier. Cynics knew that a “Saigon” moment was coming. US President Joe Biden had promised in July that Kabul would not fall and that the Afghan army, supposedly some 300,000 strong, could fight. In […]

Like other foreign powers, Turkey was caught off-guard by the speed of the Taliban’s recent blitz across the country, which has greatly complicated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans. While most NATO countries were happy to wash their hands of the conflict after a grueling 20-year counterinsurgency and nation-building effort, Erdogan was proposing that Turkey continue to provide security for […]

The swift return of the Taliban to power has sparked panic in Afghanistan and sent shockwaves around the world. With U.S. military forces taking control of the Kabul airport and the evacuation of foreign nationals and thousands of Afghans proceeding, important questions loom about the future of Afghanistan and the impact of the convulsive events that unfolded over the past […]

The images of humanitarian chaos and the deteriorating situation for women after the swift Taliban takeover of Kabul have left the international community grasping for options. In the face of Afghan women’s desperate pleas for support, women’s rights NGOs in the United States recently called for a United Nations peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan. There is no question that such an […]

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” This is a powerful and blunt truth. The quote is usually attributed to Plato, although the reality seems to be that it was George Santayana who said it in 1922. He’s also the same guy who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” How appropriate. To […]

The images are already splashed all over the media: an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III rolling down the taxiway of Kabul’s airport while Afghan civilians run alongside it. Views cut to civilians clinging on to the wheel well doors, then long-distance shots of bodies falling from the ascending jet. Still shots all over the news and social medial show the […]