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Discourteous remarks about Afghanistan made by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan at the recent Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting were an insult to the Afghan nation reeling from the Taliban takeover. In his remarks, Khan described the non-monolithic Taliban group as a predominately ethnic Pashtun movement, implicitly casting millions of Pashtuns as the Taliban’s adherents.... But perceptions matter.... ...To be sure, it is difficult to determine whether the Taliban will ever be able to run a non-ideological Afghan state. But by casting it as a Pashtun movement, Pakistan risks sparking Pashtun nationalism in more than 40 million Pashtuns who...

A charity named after Winston Churchill has provoked fury by rebranding itself amid concerns over his views on race. The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has removed pictures of the wartime leader from its website and is changing its name to the Churchill Fellowship. Volunteers at the trust said it was 'rewriting history'. One told The Sun: 'He was voted, by the people, as the Greatest Briton in a BBC poll in 2002 but is now erased from his own charity by the woke brigade. ... ...Controversies surrounding his rule include whether he could have acted more decisively to prevent the...

Afghanistan’s professional class of men and women, part of a generation that came of age under the shield of the U.S. military, are weighing the danger of rapidly advancing Taliban forces. Many are packing their bags... Long before President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal in April, hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled to Europe, Australia and the U.S. Now, many of the well-educated people who prospered in the new Afghanistan and hadn’t dreamed of leaving have also concluded that staying put is no longer an option.

It was reported recently that the USA and the Taliban have reached a peace agreement on Afghanistan that will allow US forces to leave that country 17 years after they invaded it on October, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. Al Qaeda..... A large number of the terrorists that filled the country were killed, some were captured and some escaped to other countries. The impression left by the swift operation was that the Taliban would never gain back its strength and that Afghanistan would never again be a terror state. And then last week it was reported that America...

Recently, I was speaking with a friend of mine, a committed liberal and an equally committed member of the anti-Trump camp. Despising President Donald Trump is almost a default position in my Chicago-area community; however, my liberal friend has always impressed me as reasonable and well informed. Hence my particular consternation when he, in a most matter-of-fact way, said President Trump is costing us friends and influence around the world, as if it were an accepted truth. This was more annoying than surprising, because ever since Donald Trump took office, the mainstream media and their political allies have been working...

He found himself a refugee at 12 years old, crammed onto a boat with no toilets, shoulder-to-shoulder with men who had soiled themselves. There was no room to sleep, no food and very little water. This boy had never seen the ocean before. Yet here he was, three days at sea now, and this ramshackle boat, tossed in heavy winds and high waves, began sinking. Grown men began screaming for help. Passengers locked below deck pounded against the door. ... For a brief, strange moment, I was calm, "So, this is how you will die." In his new memoir "The...

Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative sect of Sunni Islam named for an eighteenth-century preacher and scholar. Jamel Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist in Afghanistan during that period, is now head of al-Arab News Channel and a columnist for al-Hayat. At a meeting in Bahrain recently, Khashoggi told me that there has been a major, and unexplored change in Muslim culture, one that is not discussed in the West. It is "raw Wahhabism," to use his words; this change, this nihilism, this desperation, this destruction of Afghan-Pakistani Pashtun culture. And equally, the terrible tactics of ISIS, which are no different from the Wahhabis...

A small body of Sikhs defended a vital North-West Frontier post against 10,000 Afridi and Orakzai attackers. Yesterday was the 117th anniversary of their heroic effort Britain’s Parliament interrupted proceedings and rose to give a standing ovation on September 12, 1897 to 21 valorous soldiers — all of them Indians, all of them Sikhs — for what was undoubtedly a tremendous act of collective bravery, and one of the greatest ‘last-stands’ in military history, the Battle of Saragarhi. The North-West Frontier of undivided India, now a part of Pakistan known as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, is a harsh place. Embroiled even today in...

Preliminary results from Afghanistan's presidential election, have been delayed, an election official said, amid accusations of fraud. The contest pitted former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah against former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani. A senior U.N. official said the delay was intended to take account of allegations by Abdullah that his rival engaged in mass vote rigging. The election was intended to mark the first democratic transfer of power in Afghan history, a crucial step towards stability as NATO prepares to withdraw the bulk of its troops by the end of the year. ETHNIC TENSIONS Now the U.N. fears the standoff...

NEW DELHI (AFP) - India was to decide its response Wednesday after accusing Pakistan of killing two of its soldiers and mutilating one of the bodies ...

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

A video believed to feature Pashtun school children in south-east Afghanistan recreating a terrorist attack has been posted on social networking sites. The 84-second clip appears to show a veiled boy bid farewell to his friends before approaching a group of children nearby and blowing himself up. Sand is tossed in the air to simulate the detonation as children fall to the ground. As the dust settles, their playmates gather round and pretend to identify the dead.

A document released by WikiLeaks described efforts by high-ranking Afghan officials to quash reports of police officers and other Afghans arrested for "purchasing a service from a child." The leaked diplomatic cable quoted former Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar's concern that publicity about the arrests, which involved the hiring of "dancing boys," would "endanger lives." The author of the diplomatic cable fretted that the case would be "blown out of proportion, an outcome that would not be good for either the U.S. or Afghanistan." The vast gulf between U.S. and Afghan attitudes about homosexuality and pedophilia has generated concern...

It is an open secret that thousands of Taliban insurgents travel to Pakistan when they need a break from the fighting in Afghanistan. The reason is simple: The Pakistani soldiers are friendly and the border is hardly controlled at all. SPIEGEL ONLINE joins one fighter as he returns to the front. In Afghanistan cars are cheaper. Rafiullah knows this all too well. He grew up in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, a place where you can pick up almost any new model cheaply. The cars are stolen from around the world and then smuggled into the country. Rafiullah needs a car,...

A pilotless U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles into Pakistan's North Waziristan, an al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary on the Afghan border, killing at least 12 militants on Saturday, intelligence officials said. The United States has intensified missile strikes by drone aircraft in Pakistan's lawless Pashtun tribal lands in an effort to curb violence in Afghanistan, much of which U.S. officials say comes from militant sanctuaries on the Pakistani side. Most of the missile attacks this year were carried out on militant targets in North Waziristan region. In the latest strike, the missiles hit a house used by militants as a...

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, July 1 (UPI) -- It may be an Apollo 13 moment in Afghanistan. After the explosive of the fuel cells, which crippled the command module, the NASA flight director, approached the problem from the standpoint of status asking the Mission Control team "what do we have on the spacecraft that's good?" Maybe the same status check should also be done for Afghanistan. No doubt encouraged by the announced timetable for the withdrawal of American forces, the United States appears to have lost a long-term commitment both of the Karzai government and Pakistan and hasn't gained the...

Dec. 19 (UPI) -- A CBS news report filed by Kimberly Dozier states that U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in Kandahar with five Afghan tribal elders. Pulling out his notebook, the admiral asked the Afghans what they need. Apparently the new fashionable counterinsurgency introductory question is "What do you need?" rather than "Are you fighting on our side?" or "Are we winning?" In addition to new dams for irrigation purposes, Afghan elders made two requests, which were surprising only from the standpoint that, after eight years in Afghanistan, either request could...

Outside View: Afghanistan’s center of gravity WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Numbering more than 25 million, Pashtuns are the largest tribal group in the world. They are also by far the dominant ethnic group in the Taliban. The center of gravity of the war in Afghanistan is the confluence of the Taliban's Islamic radicalism and traditional Pashtun culture. In their brilliantly written article, "No Sign until the Burst of Fire -- Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier," Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason emphasize that the key to addressing the current instability and radicalization on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border...

There are few places in the world Robert D. Kaplan has not visited and written about in his books and magazine articles. He travels to countries hardly anyone else even considers – to Turkmenistan, for instance, during the time of the lunatic "Turkmenbashi" who transformed his post-Soviet republic into the North Korea of Central Asia. He has an uncanny ability to see conflicts looming on the horizon well in advance and – reversing the standard relationship between journalists and officials – U.S. defense policy professionals often ask him for briefings about what he has seen.His regular dispatches in the...

NEW YORK, Feb 13 (Reuters) - The Taliban has established itself across a large part of Pakistan, forcing the country to fight a war against the hardline Islamist group that is about Pakistan's own survival, President Asif Zardari told CBS News. "(The Taliban) do have a presence in huge amounts of land in our side. Yes, that is the fact," Zardari told "60 Minutes" in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday, excerpts of which were released on Friday. U.S. President Barack Obama said this week there was no doubt terrorists were operating in safe havens in the tribal regions...