South East Asia

The swift fall of the Afghan government and Taliban takeover over the past few weeks poses challenges for the countries to the north. Central Asian governments desire a stable and secure government in Afghanistan that can prevent the spillover of a destabilizing conflict across their borders. In addition, while Afghanistan is less of a lucrative market for trade with Central Asia, with less than $2 billion in trade per year, it is crucial to connecting the region with the 1.5 billion-person combined markets of Pakistan and India.

As the Taliban transforms its military chain of command into a governing structure for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are now being tested.

“Conquering a country is always the easy part. Ruling it, in Afghanistan’s case, is the difficult bit,” says historian William Dalrymple, an expert on Pashtun tribal rivalries. “That’s when the tensions and the fault lines become apparent.”

Refugees from Afghanistan are arriving in their thousands at a US air base in Germany.

The base has become a makeshift refugee camp and an international airport to evacuees – many children have arrived on their own.

Fawad Khan anxiously scrolled down the news on his cellphone, watching the chaos at Kabul airport as thousands of his fellow Afghans try to flee the Taliban-controlled country in the waning days of a massive airlift.

The cooperation and alliance-making have always been the core principle of state’s strategies. The states converge and diverge according to their benefits and rivalry. The cooperation between Pakistan and Turkey goes back to history, and both have stood by each other out of the spirit of brotherhood. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mustafa Kamal Ataturk also shared joint views on the intersection of Islam and promotion of Muslim brotherhood. Today, both the countries have always been at each other’s forefront in times of conflict and crisis, and have supported each other at international level. The relationship between Pakistan and Turkey has increased immensely under the leadership of PM Imran Khan.

US President Joe Biden has made a strategic decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, after twenty years of military presence under the pretext of eliminating terrorism and spreading democracy. Twenty years later, the Taliban has become more powerful and influential and has seized all the joints of the state and major cities easily and in a record period, which leaves many questions about the role that the United States was playing in Afghanistan and its relationship with the Taliban. Paradoxically, the superpower, accompanied by an alliance of powerful armies, could not eliminate an armed group not too numerous.

Since the takeover of Afghanistan, there is a growing concern most importantly about the fragile Afghan economy. It’s a fact that the United States of America has been providing huge economic assistance for Afghanistan for the past 20 years and all this is possibly coming to an end with the Taliban in power. For the past 20 years, the Afghan economy has depended on foreign aid, it is on record that 75% of Afghan’s public expenditure was financed by international aid, and the withdrawal of foreign troops will lead to a drastic drop in funding for their administration. For now, the Taliban has failed to gain international recognition except China. China has so far openly expressed its willingness to trust and cooperate with the Taliban. Will China replace the United States’ financial support in Afghanistan?

The U.S. and its allies waged war for 20 years to try to defeat terrorists in Afghanistan. A double-suicide bombing demonstrated that they remain a threat.

The nightmare that kept counterterrorism experts awake even before the Taliban returned to power is that Afghanistan would become fertile ground for terrorist groups, most notably Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

For months, terrorism analysts warned that Islamic State-linked militants in Afghanistan would try to turn the Biden administration’s exit into a bloody spectacle.

On Thursday in Kabul, those predictions were realized.

ISIS-Khorasan, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan and Pakistan arm, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the suicide bombing attack that killed 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans in an attack outside the airport. The series of blasts ripped through crowds of civilians who were clamoring for a chance to flee before the U.S. withdrawal deadline on Tuesday.

U.S. forces helping evacuate Afghans desperate to flee Taliban rule were on alert for more attacks on Friday after an Islamic State suicide bombing outside Kabul airport killed at least 92 people, including 13 U.S. service members.

The White House said the next few days of an ongoing U.S. evacuation operation that the Pentagon said has taken about 111,000 people out of Afghanistan in the past two weeks are likely to be the most dangerous.