Afghanistan’s Peaceful Transition Foundation (APTF) head Dr. FarooqAzam has said the previous government was not honest in its reconciliation process and that led to its collapse, adding that building a new system would take time. He added with the departure of former President Ashraf Ghani, fighting has ended and now qualified people should be appointed on key posts. He lambasted […]

The former US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation has blamed then president Ashraf Ghani for refusing to share power with the Taliban. In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Khalilzad said: “They (the Ghani government) preferred the status quo to a political settlement.” He claimed when the Ghani administration realised that the US was leaving, it miscalculated the effects of […]

Chinese Foreign Minister and State Councillor Wang Yi will meet a delegation of the interim Afghan Taliban government during his visit to Qatar on Oct. 25-26, Chinese foreign ministry said on Monday. The two sides will exchange views on the situation in Afghanistan and topics of “common concern”, said foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, speaking at a regular news briefing […]

The terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, provided one of the last searing images of the United States’ 20-year counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan when two of its suicide bombers killed thirteen U.S. troops at Kabul’s international airport, the deadliest day for U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan since 2011. But with that attack, ISIS also […]

The Biden administration is trying to work around longstanding terrorism-related sanctions to facilitate the delivery of aid to the struggling Afghan population. Despite the issuance of sanctions exceptions, Taliban rule in Afghanistan will cause many global banks to refuse to finance commercial transactions with the Afghan private sector. Whether U.S. sanctions on the Taliban are lifted outright will depend on […]

The Moscow meeting of ten regional states and the Taliban officials on Wednesday has produced an outcome that by far exceeds expectations. The salience of the consensus opinion is four-fold, as reflected in the joint statement issued after the event: Then, there is the ubiquitous geopolitical angle. Simply put, the Biden Administration has lost the plot. The Fox News flashed […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday Afghanistan should receive economic support and get its financial assets unfrozen as its stability was in the interest of all its neighbours, Reuters reported. Washington meanwhile said earlier this week it has no plans to release billions in Afghan gold, investments and foreign currency reserves parked in the United States that it froze […]

Russia is moving towards excluding the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) from its list of extremist organisations, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, a day after high-level talks between Moscow and Afghanistan’s new rulers. Russia labelled the IEA a “terrorist organisation” in 2003 but welcomed the IEA for talks in Moscow several times before it seized power in Afghanistan in […]

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 […]