South East Asia

U.S. and other donors must engage Taliban on their finances so that aid doesn’t pay for costs already covered by Afghanistan’s government budget.

Although economic and humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the Taliban have taken some positive steps toward financial stability by publishing a fiscally responsible three-month budget and raising considerable amounts of domestic revenue — especially through customs duties, which have risen with a crackdown on corruption.

Abstract: Although the Islamic State’s official affiliate in Afghanistan, Islamic State Khorasan (ISK), first emerged as a threat in 2015, its global notoriety was heightened when it struck the Kabul airport during the Taliban takeover of the city in August 2021, leading to questions about the future stability of the country and the Taliban’s ability to contain the revived terrorist threat. The Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, combined with an unconditional U.S. withdrawal and a collapsed Afghan government, generated new opportunities for ISK to reinvigorate its violent campaign following years of significant manpower and territorial losses. Given the absence of multilateral counterterrorism pressure, the Taliban’s limited capacity to govern, and a worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, ISK now finds itself perhaps in the most permissive environment yet to rebuild, rally, and expand. As the Taliban continue to struggle with their transition to a state actor, ISK enjoys unprecedented opportunities to forge opportunistic ties with local militant groups in need of jihadi alliances and to recruit from communities dissatisfied with the Taliban’s rule. If regional powers do not engage in a coordinated security strategy with the Taliban, they may bear the consequences of the growing ISK-Taliban conflict.

Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like us are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.

The PLA has carefully studied the use of network-centric militaries such as the US Army and observed the reliance of those organisations upon information as a key element of their technological superiority. A theoretical representation of the centrality of information to western methods of warfare is provided by the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop as described by John Boyd.

Given the lack of joined up thinking by China’s geopolitical adversaries, the biggest threat to China’s growing economic and geopolitical dominance may actually be itself.

For a country considered by many to have been the source of a global health pandemic resulting in over 5.3 million deaths globally, it is noteworthy that COVID-19 appears to have done little to check China’s geostrategic standing. If anything, it can be argued that China’s geostrategic reach may actually have increased. This is particularly the case as Western governments have presided over a series of geostrategic errors allowing Beijing to extend its sphere of influence almost unchallenged.