opinions

Biden’s Afghanistan plan puts al Qaeda in heart of Washington

2021-03-09

By Michael Rubin

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has sent a letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani outlining ways forward for the Afghan peace process. Meanwhile, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, has provided the Afghan government and the Taliban with a  Read more

Afghanistan: Status of Doha Agreement and the Way Forward

2021-03-04

By Ambassador Amar Sinha

To mark one year of the Doha Agreement between the US and the Taliban, signed on 29 February 2020 in Doha, the Vivekananda International Foundation in collaboration with a prominent Kabul based think tank, Afghans Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS) organized a dialogue involving a set of well informed and knowledgeable Afghan and Indian interlocutors o

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Tragedy of Losing Persian in the Sub-continent

2021-02-28

By Rafia Zakaria

IN or around the year 1210 a poet was born in the Persian city of Shiraz. Not unlike now, those years were a moment of transformation in the Muslim world. Mongol expansion had led to the fall of many cities and dynasties. It was in this atmosphere of fear and change that the young poet grew up. Before long, he left to travel the Western Islamic world and took the

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Afghanistan's Quest for Sustainable Peace and Its Growing Ties with Sri Lanka

2021-02-21

An AISS Senior Research Fellow, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Sri Lanka M. Ashraf Haidari discusses how the Taliban and their regional sponsor both spoil Afghanistan’s peace and undermine the country’s peace process with implications for regional stability. The ambassador also discusses questions on the key aspects of the growing re

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Biden kills pipelines at home but promotes them for the Taliban

2021-02-09

By Michael Rubin

On his first day in office, President Biden canceled permits for the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmentalists and anti-fossil fuel activists should not have applauded his move.

After all, Canada will not stop extracting oil from the tar sands of northern

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