Ashraf Ghani

Tuesday

Jason Burke

Stray shells and suicide bombers in Kabul’s finest hotel

From our UK edition

No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward with white-hot fire’ to avoid missiles. Once safely on the ground, she decides to make her way to Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, drawn by ‘better telephone and telex links, food worth eating and a certain faded splendour’.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

How Afghanistan erred by thinking Biden would never leave

By now, the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is etched into history as a failure — one that punctured the Biden administration’s self-professed persona as a collective of calm and cool national security veterans. The Taliban’s rapid capture of the entire country, coinciding with the meltdown of the US-funded Afghan security forces and the awful optics of desperate Afghans trying to get on a flight out of Kabul, will be examined by historians for decades. The history-writing is already well underway. On February 17, the GOP-held House of Representatives sent letters to several government departments demanding any and all records related to the withdrawal.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

The Taliban’s rough year in power

Next month will mark the first anniversary of the Taliban’s second stint in power in Afghanistan after a twenty-year insurgency against the US-backed government. In August 2021, Taliban fighters, flush with captured American military equipment and the jubilation of victory, were openly walking the streets of Kabul. While the disgraced Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, was preparing for a life of exile in the United Arab Emirates, Taliban officials were converting his offices into their headquarters. The Taliban’s first year in power, however, hasn’t been pretty. The group has quickly come to understand that administering a poor and faction-prone country is a lot more difficult than taking up arms against a deeply unpopular, corrupt, foreign-dependent government.

Monday

Daniel DePetris

The Taliban’s Afghanistan quagmire

Hibatullah Akhundzada is a secretive man who is only occasionally heard and seldom seen. But on May 1, the Taliban’s supreme leader was delivering a sermon in Kandahar’s central mosque, bragging about his organization’s supposed successes. “Congratulations on this victory, freedom and success,” said the reclusive Akhundzada, surrounded by armed bodyguards. Nine months after the Taliban captured Afghanistan and forced the hapless Ashraf Ghani to flee the country in a helicopter, its chief official remains content with relishing the past. But truth be told, the Taliban has nothing to brag about.

Friday

Stephen L. Miller

The Democrats damned Biden by impeaching Trump

Joe Biden is officially a victim of the new rules that every Democratic president is going to face from here on out. That's thanks to his party’s overzealously tying an impeachment around Donald Trump’s neck before the 2020 election. Both Biden and the Democrats are not going to like where those new rules lead when the Republican party, in all likelihood, takes back the House of Representatives in early 2023. Traveling back in time for a moment, remember that Donald Trump’s first impeachment was based on a third-party whistleblower who notified Rep. Adam Schiff of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

biden