David Loyn is a visiting senior fellow in the War Studies Department at King’s College, London and author of ‘The Long War – the Inside Story of America in Afghanistan’.
From our UK edition
Taliban rule of Afghanistan becomes madder by the day. The only thing they reliably do is find new ways of making life impossible for women. They recently jailed the senior government advisor, Dr Farouq Azam, for more than a month after he made the subversive suggestion that women medical professionals should be sent to assist
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Britain and other western nations have abandoned the women of Afghanistan in pursuit of a UN programme of engagement with the Taliban that has demonstrably failed. For the fourth time since the Taliban takeover in August 2021 representatives of the few countries that still have an Afghan policy met the Taliban again in Doha last
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Once again Pakistan’s strategy of asymmetric warfare against its larger South Asian neighbour has plunged the region to the brink of a wider war. Long-term Pakistani support of anti-India militant groups – in particular Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) – continually destabilises the region. The attack on tourists in the honeymoon location of Pahalgam meadow in Kashmir
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The Taliban have always had a strange misogynist world view, weirdly preoccupied by sex. The first time they were in power in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the governor of the western province Herat banned women from walking or talking in the street outside his office, in case he was distracted by footsteps ‘or hearing
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Since America’s disastrous scuttle from Kabul in August 2021, there had been rising concern that Afghanistan would once again become a crucible of international terrorism. The claim by the Islamic State group to have carried out the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow appears to have justified that fear. An Islamic prophecy says that when
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The SAS blocked UK visas for Afghan special forces soldiers, perhaps fearing that they would be able to produce evidence incriminating the SAS in the shooting of unarmed civilians. That was the striking implication of a BBC Panorama investigation this week – with the Ministry of Defence confirming that it is undertaking a review of 2,000 cases where Afghan
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It has now been almost two years since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. In recent weeks, a number of international assessments have been published looking at the state of the country under their leadership. One UN report looked at the potential for terrorism in a country where ‘terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom… than at
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President Joe Biden is either not being briefed on what is going on in Afghanistan, or more likely choosing not to believe what he is being told. In an unscripted aside at the end of a press conference on Friday he said, ‘Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaeda would not be there.
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Remarkable as it may sound, it looks as if a border skirmish this week between Iranian and Afghan border guards, which involved at least three deaths, was about water. This is not the first border clash as tensions grow over scarce water resources between Iran and the 20-month old Taliban regime, although it is the
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While the Taliban continues to double down against women in Afghanistan, the UN appears to be wanting to normalise relations with them. Women in the country are already blocked from almost all jobs and all education. Yet a week after the extremist group barred females from working for the UN, the organisation’s deputy secretary general
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It is an iron law that if governments put out important documents just ahead of a long holiday weekend there is something fishy about them. So it was with President Biden’s decision to release a report on America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Thursday, before the Easter weekend. The White House press corps had about
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Fighting has continued against the Taliban in Afghanistan while the world has not been watching. The commander of the main opposition force, Ahmad Massoud, began with 643 fighters after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and now claims to have a force of 5,000 across six provinces in a belt in the northeast of
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Afghan women’s meetings on Zoom with their supporters outside the country often now end in tears as the stories of Taliban rule are too hard to bear. One prominent regional woman’s leader was beaten by her own younger brother. He said she could not go out on her own without a male relative and needed
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Sherpur District, to the north of central Kabul, where al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed, lies at the western end of a huge former military base where British forces were besieged in the winter of 1879, during the second Anglo-Afghan war. The parade ground, still a wide open area until 2001, was quickly built over by
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The social media accounts of the new so-called ‘National Resistance Front’ (NRF) in Afghanistan give the impression of a raging insurgency already taking place against the Taliban. The talk is of ‘intense clashes’, with the Taliban suffering ‘heavy casualties.’ There are exaggerated accounts of running battles and successful ambushes against the Taliban across the north
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The scale of the human tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan is hard to comprehend. The economy has collapsed, some 20 million people face death by starvation and international agencies like the World Food Programme have already doubled their estimate of what they will need just to keep people alive. They are appealing now for a staggering
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I first met Haji Mir, a tribal elder from Helmand, in Herat in western Afghanistan in 2002, not long after the fall of the Taliban. He had come to Herat to ensure the safety of Helmand under the new American-backed administration. At the end of the trip he protected us when we were stoned by
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The office of the Afghan president, the Arg, sits in more than 80 acres of parkland, quadruple the size of the White House estate, and more than twice the size of Buckingham Palace grounds. Since it was built in the late eighteenth century, most of its occupants have died violently in one of the elegant
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Some western governments and media have been involved in a collective act of wishful thinking in recent months over the Taliban—believing them somehow to be ‘moderate’ and on the way to forming an inclusive government. The idea began with their elevation of status as a partner in negotiations with the US in Doha. They were
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There have been some curious juxtapositions in Afghanistan this week. On the one hand, the under-19 Afghan cricket team was allowed to leave for a planned tournament in Bangladesh, as if things were normal, while on the other there was a sinister military parade taking place in Kandahar this week. After the lines of horsemen
