In what appears to be the most brazen attack in the Afghan capital in months, several gunmen and suicide bombers have attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul.
A harrowing new report from Refugees International shows that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are on the rise and the number of displaced Afghan's has skyrocketed over the past year.
Former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, wrote an article on Bloomberg.com tacitly agreeing to the idea of negotiations with the Taliban and, rather curiously, calling for a truth commission as a way of reconciliation.
While the Taliban build “shadow governments” in virtually every province of Afghanistan, the United States and local telecoms will build a shadow mobile phone network to circumvent Taliban attempts to cut off communication. This initiative won't be sustainable, but it will save lives.
The murder of a provincial politician traveling to Kabul shows how far security has deteriorated on Afghanistan's roads and underscores the dwindling and increasing isolation of the embattled country's few zones of peace.
The violence perpetrated by the Taliban has not only caused serious deterioration of security but also dangerously skewed the focus of US aid projects in Afghanistan.
A former National Security Council member under both George W. Bush and President Obama, Douglas A. Ollivant, writes an op-ed in the Washington Post that is symptomatic of why the US is still not getting its longest war right and how Afghanistan is still misunderstood, even by high-level policymakers.
