Afghanistan Archive

Among countries that exemplify poorly managed economies, Afghanistan figures prominently. Many factors currently weigh down the Afghan economy, including negative current account balances, unrestrained government spending, low productivity, negligible income taxes, years of cheap and fraudulent lending and widespread graft. The prospects for the future are no more optimistic. The impending international troop drawdown combined with inadequate security and looming uncertainty beyond 2014 have made the country a financial no-go zone for foreign investors. Afghanistan is beginning to suffer from the departure of the large sums of foreign capital and investment it has largely depended on for years. Reportedly, every […]

In the month since Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran published “Little America,” his brutal review of the U.S. and allied war effort in Afghanistan, it has been interesting to observe the reactions from the various tribes of the Beltway. No one escapes criticism in Chandrasekaran’s narrative, this columnist included, but the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Marine Corps come under especially heavy fire. The reaction from the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. military as a whole has been to add the book and its criticisms to the list of lessons that need […]

In the traumatic months after the attacks of Sept. 11, the United States struggled to understand the new world it faced and to redirect its security strategy away from “rogue states” relying on conventional military power to the shadowy and ambiguous terrorist threat. Some components of the new strategy, such as augmented homeland security and increased assistance to partner states, were obvious and fell easily into place. How to use U.S. military power in an offensive way against terrorism was not so clear. The initial reaction of the Bush administration reflected the old saw that when all one has is […]

On Sept. 30, 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki was riding in a convoy in northern Yemen’s al-Jawf province with several other suspected members of the terrorist group al-Qaida. Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric, had long been on a so-called kill list of terrorist leaders targeted by the U.S. government for elimination. On that day, two Predator drones operating in the skies above fired seven Hellfire missiles, killing Awlaki and, among others, a colleague named Samir Khan. In itself, the killing was simply another skirmish in the 10-year U.S.-led war on terror, which since Sept. 11, 2001, has stretched from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the […]

This past week, during an unannounced visit to Kabul, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the Obama administration had designated Afghanistan a “major non-NATO ally.” Though the status does not carry with it any sort of legal expectation that the United States will consider an attack against Afghanistan as an attack on the U.S., it is one of the most significant designations in America’s diplomatic arsenal in terms of upgrading a bilateral relationship outside a formal treaty of alliance. Most reports indicate that this status was granted to Afghanistan to reassure the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai […]

Four container trucks carrying supplies for NATO forces enter Afghanistan from Pakistan’s north-western Torkham border. World News Videos by NewsLook

Afghans hope the focus will be on corruption after donors offer 16 billion US dollars in aid at Tokyo conference. World News Videos by NewsLook

A suicide attack outside Kandahar University kills seven a day after an Afghan policemen opened fire, killing three British soldiers. World News Videos by NewsLook