Afghanistan President, Ashraf Ghani’s proposed month-long ceasefire with the country’s Taliban insurgents to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha is looking like an act of desperation. Regardless of whether it is taken up, or not, the proposed ceasefire is a sign of a government in trouble and grasping at straws. The proposed ceasefire follows […]
Tag Archives: Afghanistan
If one was to believe the US UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s latest statement on the war in Afghanistan, it is going well for the US-backed government and the Taliban is moving towards peace. The reality is somewhat different. The weekend’s bomb blast in Kabul which killed more than a hundred people and injured well over […]
Perhaps its because we like to reinforce our own prejudices with positive reaffirmations or perhaps its because the media does not know how to tell a complex story simply, but the weekends presidential election in Afghanistan was not the democratic triumph we have been led to believe. Yes, they were elections, but this was somewhat […]
When a war does not have a defined objective that can be equated with victory, it is easy to fudge its definition of defeat. This is the case in Afghanistan. The US’ “peace with honor” in Vietnam was, by any measure, a defeat. The Vietnamese won their unified state and the US won nothing. In […]
If you had to guess the number one spot for terrorism worldwide, what would you guess? Afghanistan? According to a new document from the defence and security intelligence and analysis group IHS Janes, first prize for terrorist attacks belongs to Syria. Putting aside the pedantic untidiness of who the terrorists actually were, Syria certainly suffered […]
It is reasonably widely accepted that Osama bin Laden was able to stay in the Pakistan town of Abbottabad because he had the protection of Pakistan’s military, in particular its powerful Inter Services Intelligence organisation. It would have been all but impossible for bin Laden to have stayed in one place in Pakistan without the […]
For every Australian tired of bad news – disasters, political disputes and public people behaving badly – here is some good news. While nobody was noticing, late last year Australia pipped Norway to achieve the highest standard of living in the world. Standards of living used to be equated with national wealth divided by the […]
The leaking of more than 91,000 US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan via the whistleblower website Wikileaks has, in all, told us some of what was known, much of what was suspected and all of which was feared by citizens of the states that are contributing to the war. What might have […]
You wouldn’t expect a surgeon to recommend Chinese medicine to his patients. His advice usually involves a scalpel and some nasty cutting. Similarly, it would be surprising for military men to advocate political solutions to global conflicts. It’s not their area of professional expertise. By default they lead with their strongest suit – organised violence […]