South East Asia

In late April 2021, US President Joe Biden announced a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In other words, the US has been trounced in Afghanistan by its very own jihadist Frankenstein, the Taliban. The defeat of USA is covered with the ugly debris of history. The dirty war on Afghanistan was part of a disastrous process of occupying and controlling large swathes of the world. On September 16, 2001, President George W. Bush vowed to “rid the world of evil-doers,” then cautioned: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” The word “crusade” comes from the Latin for the cross, crux, and implies the warlike march of Christianity against the infidel, recalling one of the most shameful blots on the medieval maps of Western imperialism. The new Crusade by the American empire was waged in defense of a different professed faith, not Christianity but rather liberal democracy. But this belief also concealed less noble designs.

The United States, which has prosecuted a war against Afghanistan since October 2001, has promised to withdraw its combat troops by September 11, 2021. This war has failed to attain any of the gains that were promised after 20 years of fighting: neither has it resulted in the actual fragmentation of terrorist groups nor has it led to the destruction of the Taliban. The great suffering and great waste of social wealth caused due to the war will finally end with the Taliban’s return to power, and with terrorist groups, which are entrenched in parts of Central Asia, seizing this prospect to make a full return to Afghanistan.

If the military officials who talk to the press get their way, the U.S. war in Afghanistan will never end. This became execrably clear on June 9, when the New York Times published an article quoting anonymous Pentagon dignitaries informing us that after the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, it may continue to bomb the country, if it doesn’t like how things go. You read that right. President Biden says the war will end. The geniuses in the Pentagon say no it won’t, we’ll keep bombing.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has much to lose, both domestically and internationally, if the truth comes out. A muddled debate about the origins of the virus serves China just fine. Evading accountability — and suffering no little negative fallout — for unleashing a pandemic on the world that killed millions of people is not a bad outcome. And the economic results may even be better for China than for the rest of the world, thereby strengthening the CCP further.

China stands ready to work with all parties to build a closer Belt and Road partnership, President Xi Jinping said Wednesday in a written message to the Asia and Pacific High-level Conference on Belt and Road Cooperation.

Xi said the joint building of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that he proposed is aimed at carrying forward the spirit of the Silk Road, working together to build an open platform of cooperation, and providing new impetus for cooperation and development among countries.

Bangladesh and nations in Southeast Asia are welcoming the Group of Seven’s new answer to China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, saying it will be another source for financing their burgeoning infrastructure needs.

But because the U.S.-led Build Back Better World Partnership (B3W) initiative is scant in details, officials of some governments in the region and analysts say they also are waiting for more information to see how it can help their countries. China has an eight-year head start and has pumped huge amounts of money into its global infrastructure-building program (OBOR).

Taliban fighters overran a key district in Afghanistan’s northern province of Kunduz on June 21 and surrounded the provincial capital, police said.

Fighting around Imam Sahib district began late on June 20 and by noon on June 21 the militants had overrun the district headquarters and were in control of police headquarters, said provincial police spokesman Inamuddin Rahmani.

The setbacks come at a harrowing moment for Afghanistan, just as American and international troops are set to leave the country in coming weeks.

The Taliban entered two provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan Sunday, local officials said, the culmination of an insurgent offensive that has overrun dozens of rural districts and forced the surrender and capture of hundreds of government forces and their military equipment in recent weeks.

The Afghanistan government’s top peace negotiator has voiced concern that the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan could cause a “security vacuum, an increased level of fighting and perhaps a slower pace of negotiations,” saying the solution “has to be through negotiations, not through battle.”

Every few hours this weekend, the Taliban released videos of triumphant insurgents inspecting yet another Afghan district headquarters that had been lost in battle by government forces or surrendered without a fight.