Desperate to secure supply routes to Afghanistan, the United States has been spending at least six times more on military aid for the mostly authoritarian states of Central Asia than on efforts to promote political liberalisation and human rights in the region, according to a new report released here by the Open Society Foundations (OSF).
While Americans die in Afghanistan, the democracy we’re attempting to instill there is but an abstraction to most Afghans.
Politicians seeking credit for a sensational rescue may have helped condemn Linda Norgrave.
In the high-vaulted main hall of Union Station in Washington, DC, the sound of a drone attack interrupts the morning rush hour. A dozen people suddenly freeze in place. Some point up into the air. Others crouch with hands over their heads in a vain attempt at self-protection. The commuters on their way to and from the trains pause to look at the stationary figures. After a minute or so, the leaf-blower sound of the drone attack cuts off, and the figures crumple to the ground, crying out in pain. As the cries of the victims fade, two attendants cover the bodies with blood-stained sheets.
Too bad that the Torkham border was re-opened: the United States could have used an indefinite halt to the convoys as a pretext to leave Afghanistan.
On Monday, The Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.
Waging war is more often a sign of weakness, not strength, on the part of our leaders.
Much as the United States needs to withdraw from Afghanistan, it needs to keep in mind the effects that our military standdown would have on India.
Why is the U.S. launching an offensive in Kandahar just as the process of bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table is gaining momentum?
Afghanistan is a crossroads of civilizations and an almost bewilderingly complicated place.
Over the past few centuries, however, it has more often than not been treated as a pawn in the “great game”. The country has also developed a reputation as the “graveyard of empires”, not least because outsiders’ forces have never succeeded in pacifying the place. Internal stability, such as it has ever existed, has been predicated typically upon de-centralized, and frequently shifting political arrangements between a weak centre and roiling periphery.