Exchanging old 5 and 10 pound notes

The bloodshed is not likely to end anytime soon. Intra-Afghan talks are faltering, and the Taliban are gaining on the battlefield. Some Afghans cling to the hope that the Biden administration will follow a more conditions-based approach to U.S. withdrawal. Biden has promised to end America’s “forever wars” and was against Obama’s surge, but U.N. and Afghan officials say the Taliban actively maintain their alliance with Al Qaeda, in violation of the peace deal. Without an enduring U.S. presence, many predict that talks will collapse and that the country could once again plunge into chaos, as it did when the Soviet army departed. “If we see a total disengagement of the international community, the naturally ensuing result will be a state of civil war,” says Davood Moradian, the director of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies. The Taliban, he says, would be just one of many warring factions. “We have already seen this reality in Libya, … [Read more...] about Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road

The rush of incoming aircraft roused Waheeda and her sleeping family. It was long after dark on a cool spring night in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a Taliban stronghold of fertile valleys and stark mountains that borders Pakistan. The sound of warplanes is a familiar echo across the skies here, but it had never come so close to Waheeda’s mud-brick home. Her father, a village doctor named Nazar Gul, got up to see what was going on when the first bomb struck the family compound, killing five of her cousins. Her father was moving toward the blast site when a second bomb exploded, she says. In an instant, both of her parents and five of her sisters vanished. “It was dark and dusty, and nothing was visible,” the 14-year-old remembers. “I just knew they were all martyred.” … [Read more...] about America’s Longest War Takes a Deadly New Turn