Tag Archives: Abdullah-Abdullah

Can an apologetic policy towards the Afghan Taliban really help Pakistan end its global isolation and put it on the path to development?

The attack on the Afghan parliament was a grim reminder the militants are hard to vanquish on the battlefield. The spike in violence has put Afghanistan’s rag-tag security forces under more pressure than at any time in the past six months.

Economically dependent on the foreign presence, Afghanistan will need to work hard to succeed on its own.

Only bilateral and multilateral trust and sincerity will help promote the national reconciliation in Afghanistan. But the ground situation hardly portends well because Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan People’s Dialogue on Peace, India and Russia on the one hand, and Dr Ashraf Ghani, Pakistan, USA, and China, on the other, find themselves at variance.

International community’s response to Afghanistan’s unity government deal seems to be over-optimistic. It’s a curt reminder of political wheeling and dealing in a nascent democracy that remains mired in primitive tribalism and warlordism.

Afghanistan’s new unity government undermines its democratic institutions and many on the Afghan street mince no words to say it.

The current confusion in Afghanistan’s political crisis highlights the paradoxical nature of Afghan politics: both highly fluid at times of uncertainty, as well as inherently rigid. Amid all this, Karzai still remains the most important player in the current crisis. All depends on how he plays it. He has emerged as the strongest player in mediation.

Pakistan successfully foiled a terrorist attack on the country's largest airport. But the ten attackers, all of whom were killed, did succeed in highlighting the country's failure in winning the intelligence war, which holds the key to rooting out terrorism from its soil.

Voters in Afghanistan turned out in record numbers on April 5th to elect a new president and provincial councils. Estimates put the voter turnout at nearly 60 percent. The high turnout was significant for many reasons — the top being people coming out of their homes despite Taliban threat and the exclusion of Afghan refuges in Pakistan from the voting process. …

Is it possible to predict the upcoming Afghan elections on the basis of polling data? There are severe methodological challenges in collecting accurate survey data in a country like Afghanistan, and, given how young the country’s democracy is, not much past data on how well those predictions turned out. But surveys during the 2009 presidential election did prove to be …