South East Asia

How the International Community Turned Its Back

Life under the Taliban is the worst women’s rights crisis on the planet. When the Taliban returned to power last August, they imposed immediate and brutal restrictions, the harshest of which were reserved for women. They quickly imposed a ban on girls’ secondary education, which remains in place despite domestic and international demands to lift it. They also placed restrictions on women’s movement, requiring women to be accompanied by a male family member while traveling, and women’s dress, ordering women to cover their faces in public. Girls and women are also no longer allowed to play sports.

How a Burst Real-Estate Bubble Threatens China’s Economy

The Chinese real estate sector is teetering. The largest private Chinese developer has defaulted on its external bonds. Most developers are struggling to refinance their domestic bonds. Home prices have gone down for the last 11 months. New construction is down 45 percent. The most acute stress can be traced back to developers who raised large sums by preselling yet-to-be built apartments. Some, however, failed to set aside reserves to guarantee the completion of these units, and households that took out mortgages to buy these homes have threatened to stop paying.

One year after the transition of power in Afghanistan, the country faces a cascading humanitarian crisis. Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has expanded its medical programs in Afghanistan to meet the growing needs.

At first light Sunday morning, shivering soldiers at a Northern Alliance checkpoint outside the Taliban- controlled village of Jalreez say it is too dangerous to go any farther.

An armada of warplanes deployed to the Indo-Pacific by the United Kingdom, France and Germany signals the Europeans’ commitment to reinforce the region in a crisis, even during the challenge posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to security experts.

A year has now passed since the tumultuous U.S. withdrawal from decades of war and occupation in Afghanistan.

With the Taliban functionally in charge, the country faces a deteriorating humanitarian crisis and economic collapse. But instead of taking action to promote stability and reinvigorate the economy, the U.S. has made it worse and penalized innocent, ordinary Afghans.

Taiwan has been the perennial flashpoint between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This has been the case for decades. While each side has consistently pointed to the Three Joint Communiques as the basis of the bilateral US-PRC relationship, the reality has always been that each side had nuanced, if not different, interpretations of these documents, particularly as they pertained to Taiwan.[1] Furthermore, the Shanghai Communique is largely comprised of unilateral statements and declarations that highlight that the two sides held differing opinions on key issues. Additionally, the US also had the Taiwan Relations Act and the Six Assurances as relevant framing documents. Despite the incongruous frames of reference (or at least the incongruous interpretations thereof), both sides have historically admonished the other to not change the status quo over Taiwan. On the heels of what many are now referring to as the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, we have to wonder what status quo even means 50 years after the original Shanghai Communique.[2]

Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead – or so we are told. Al-Qaida’s chief and successor to the slain Osama bin Laden, he was deemed the chief ideologue and mastermind behind the audacious September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. On July 31, he was supposedly killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, while standing on his balcony.

The recent assassination of Al-Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri is likely to create a number of ramifications. Al-Zawahiri was assassinated by two Hellfire R9-X missiles from an MQ9 Reaper drone, that had flown over or originated in a third country, in the heart of Kabul, which the US evacuated from in August last year. Al-Zawahiri had a US $25 million bounty upon his head and had been the “invisible” leader of Al-Qaeda since 2011.