The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan threatens to destabilize the North Caucasus for three interrelated reasons. First, the Taliban victory is certain to inspire Islamist rebel groups in that region of southern Russia to act, just as earlier Islamist victories in the Middle East motivated them in the past. Second, following the fall of Kabul, a large number of North Caucasians […]

Iranian officials are carefully weighing their options after the surprisingly swift Taliban takeover of Afghanistan amid fears of instability, a refugee influx, and extremist groups such as Islamic State (IS) gaining a permanent foothold in its eastern neighbor. Tehran, which has cultivated loose ties with the Taliban in recent years and hosted the group’s representatives, has not publicly reached out […]

The events that the governments of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have been increasingly dreading in recent weeks have begun to happen. The Afghan government has fallen to the Taliban and despite the Central Asian governments having had years to contemplate and plan for such an occurrence, the initial shock waves from south of the border seem to have particularly caught […]

Speculation abounds. The end of US-managed rule in the nation called Afghanistan has fueled a flood of warnings, blame, and just plain guessing about what comes next there. Liberal and neocon warmongers in the media wring their hands looking for someone/anyone to blame beside their failed imperial strategy. The far right in the US have yet to speak their piece […]

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. […]

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 […]