Prime Minister Imran Khan announced on September 18 that he has initiated a dialogue with the Taliban for the formation of an inclusive government in Afghanistan. The announcement was made a day after his meeting with the leaders of Afghanistan’s neighbours, including China, Russia, Iran and Tajikistan on the side-lines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization…
“In war, the moral is to the physical as ten is to one”. This quote from Napoleon Bonaparte could be an apt description of what happened to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in front of the ever-advancing Taliban! While the speed of ANDSF’s capitulation was a shock, the end results perhaps not…
Context The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held its 20th anniversary conference in Dushanbe, Tajikistan on September 17. The conference took place in the backdrop of the collapse of Ashraf Ghani government in Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. This was accompanied by the complete withdrawal of US and coalition troops that has raised alarm bells…
The Afghan National Army (ANA) had disintegrated in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent civil war. The new ANA post-American occupation is a more recent phenomenon and has an interesting history. In the first few years after the U.S. arrival in late 2001, security was provided by militias of local warlords. The U.S. had no…
The year then was 1965 In the month of September Without warning the enemy advanced to capture our country Pakistan With their three times size They came during the night Little did they all know They would get a big surprise As the war progressed along They found something was wrong Everywhere they tried to go…
Only days after the Taliban take-over of Kabul a fresh resistance has raised its head, in the Panjshir valley. The self-proclaimed leader of this resistance movement is Amrullah Saleh, vice-president in Ghani’s toppled government. After Ghani’s cowardly flight from Afghanistan Saleh declared himself President while referring to the Afghan Constitution. However he played it safe…
The international debate on South Asian nuclear politics usually adopts an inadequate approach when examining the strategic capabilities of both India and Pakistan. The leading global academic communities try to communicate their arguments on the South Asian nuclear arms race by adopting different angles for New Delhi and Islamabad. The decades-long rivalry between India and…
Context As a direct result of the industrial revolution and emerging capitalist system, a number of powerful businesses and entrepreneurs come to the scene in the 18th,19th, and the early part of the 20thcentury. These names included giants like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan and Marcus Goldman. They…
The least that Ebrahim Raisi should do is to curtail the powers of the unelected strata, reform the financial sector, and open up the great Persian civilisation to the outside world. Iran’s new President Ebrahim Raisi has a much tougher task than his predecessors as he has assumed office at a crisscrossed time of regional…
Briefings by the military high command to parliamentarians have become a regular feature in Pakistan. So the recently concluded national security meeting on 1st of July 2021 shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. If media reports are to be believed, the topics under discussion were Kashmir, Afghanistan and internal security. Going by recent chain…
