Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi gave Afghanistan’s new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) rulers advice Thursday on how to gain international recognition, during a visit to Kabul. After returning to Islamabad, Qureshi said he advised Islamic Emirate leaders on how to improve their reputation. “As a neighbour and as a well-wisher and friend, I conveyed to them what sort […]

Pakistani counter-terrorism forces say they have killed three Afghan militants who belonged to the ISIS group during a raid on a hideout near the country’s border with Afghanistan. The gun battle was the latest episode of violence in Pakistan involving extremist groups that appear to have been emboldened by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, The Associated […]

Security forces attacked in different parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan Islamabad: Six Pakistani security personnel were killed in three attacks in different parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan in two days. Four personnel including two FC soldiers Lance Naik Mudassir and Sepoy Jamshed and two police constables Abdul Samad and Noor Rehman lost their lives in an improvised […]

The Taliban imposed further restrictions on female city government employees in Afghanistan’s capital on Thursday, barring many from returning to work next week in a sign that the group will continue to restrict women’s rights despite two decades of freedoms under the previous government. Neamatullah Barakzai, the Taliban’s head of public awareness for the Kabul municipality, said many female city […]

A roadside bomb struck a vehicle carrying security forces in a former stronghold of local militants in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, killing four, police said. The attack happened in Bajur, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The area served as a base for the Pakistani Taliban until a few years ago, when the army said […]

Four militants and a soldier were killed in two separate gun battles in Indian Kashmir on Wednesday, a police officer said, as violence in the disputed region continued following a spate of attacks on civilians. More than 30 people have been killed after a rise in violence in Kashmir in recent weeks, including targeted killings of minority Hindus, Sikhs and […]

The United States regretted its inability to take part in the talks on Afghanistan in Moscow this week. The Russian side was pinning hopes on a meeting of the exclusive Troika Plus (US, China, Russia and Pakistan) followed by a gathering in an expanded format known as the ‘Moscow format’ on Wednesday. The US State Department spokesman Ned Price said […]

Abstract: Six themes emerge from a close examination of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in 2021: the ANDSF collapse was months—if not years—in the making; the United States did not give the ANDSF everything they needed to be independently successful; the ANDSF did put up a fierce fight in many areas; the ANDSF were poorly served […]

In Kamdesh, Nuristan, where U.S. forces withdrew more than a decade ago, the American presence is a distant – and negative – memory for many locals. In the dead of night on August 30, 2021, the last U.S. forces stepped off the tarmac of Kabul Airport onto a plane and left Afghanistan. It was almost 20 years after the first […]

Since the return of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the calculus for Moscow has been tricky: how to reassert its regional influence after the U.S. military exit while also keeping some distance from internal Afghan struggles. “Afghanistan itself is not of interest to Russia,” said Andrei Serenko, the head of the Moscow-based Center of Contemporary Afghan Studies. “Russia wants to use […]