South East Asia

Lt Gen Faiz Hameed, the director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, arrived in Kabul on Saturday for talks with the Taliban regarding matters related to the safe evacuation of foreign nationals, border management and security in the region, sources said.

Geo News reported that Hameed will also meet with Pakistan’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Mansoor Ahmed Khan and his team on issues of repatriation and transit through Pakistan and the situation on the border.

Kosovo has agreed to take in Afghanistan evacuees who fail to clear initial rounds of screening and host them for up to a year, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity Saturday.

The U.S. Embassy in Kosovo said later in a statement that the arrangement did not mean Kosovo was taking evacuees who had been deemed ineligible for admission to the United States.

Indian External Affairs (Foreign) Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar presided over a UN Security Council meeting last week focused on threats posed by ISIL.

Davood Moradian, Director General of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, briefed the UNSC and accused the Islamic world of being passive observers.

Iran is engaging Taliban leaders following their takeover in Afghanistan, hoping for stability and an end to the flow of Afghan refugees into Iran.

Tehran is heralding a U.S. humiliation and the U.S. military withdrawal, which has led to the removal of American forces from near its eastern border.

In March, I travelled to Afghanistan and the Middle East with General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., the Alabama-born marine who heads Central Command. He has been overseeing the frantic evacuation out of Kabul. During one of several interviews aboard his plane, I asked him, “Do you really think, given the intermarriage, the interweaving of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, that the Taliban is really ever going to be able or willing to restrain Al Qaeda from doing anything against us?” By then, the Taliban held roughly half of Afghanistan, a country about the size of Texas. McKenzie was chillingly candid. “I think it will be very hard for the Taliban to act against Al Qaeda, to actually limit their ability to attack outside the country,” he replied. “It’s possible, but I think it would be difficult.”

U.S. officials had warned of an ISIS attack over the past week in wake of the sweeping Taliban takeover. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie of the U.S. Central Command said Thursday that the attackers were two ISIS suicide bombers.

Experts said the group, dubbed the “mortal adversary” of the Taliban, pose the biggest threat to America’s presence in the country.

The organization believed to be responsible for Thursday’s deadly bombing outside the airport in Kabul is a longtime sworn enemy of both the United States and the Taliban.

Known as ISIS-K or IS-K, it is the local affiliate of Islamic State, the jihadist group that once ruled large swaths of northern Syria and Iraq.

Qatar has played an outsized role in facilitating the safe passage and evacuation of U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans from Afghanistan.

The Biden administration has been criticized heavily for its handling of the evacuation, with charges that it was unprepared for such a complex operation despite setting the timeline.

The Taliban has seized an unprecedented amount of U.S. and Western weaponry, representing a significant expansion in the organization’s military capacity and combat capabilities.

For over two decades, the United States has provided the Afghanistan National Defense and Security Forces with over $20 billion in weaponry, hardware, and equipment. However, the U.S. failed to produce a sustainable and effective Afghan military.

Recent political developments in Jammu and Kashmir have opened a debate that some kind of democratic recovery has started in this conflict-ridden part of India and perhaps even the whole country. Yet a closer look shows that it is too early for such optimism.