Zabihullah Mujahid’s BBC Interview: The Taliban’s Own Indictment
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid’s recent BBC interview offers one of the clearer public statements yet of how Kabul’s leadership understands its own governance model five years into power, and by extension, how far that model diverges from the benchmarks international observers have used to assess it. Mujahid’s central claim, that Afghanistan’s “conflict and political crisis […]
The Contradiction at the Core of Muttaqi’s Pakistan Narrative
Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s recent remarks on Pakistan-Afghanistan relations follow a pattern now familiar in several of his public statements over the past year, namely a categorical denial of TTP presence on Afghan soil, paired with rhetorical redirection toward Pakistan’s governance failures and its relations with other neighbors. When compared with Muttaqi’s prior […]
Afghanistan’s Terror Economy Enters Its Fifth Year
The United Nations Security Council’s 38th Monitoring Team report, released on 10 August 2026, offers the most detailed accounting to date of what five years of Taliban rule have produced along Pakistan’s western border: not stability, but an increasingly diversified terrorism marketplace operating with the regime’s tacit and, in several cases, active support. The report’s […]
The Emirate’s Five Years Between Control and Collapse
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban marched into Kabul and declared the restoration of their self-styled Islamic Emirate. Five years later, the movement often described as “Taliban 2.0” has changed remarkably little beneath the surface. What has shifted is administrative machinery, not ideological substance. The core worldview that shaped the group during its first stint […]
Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel
India’s expanding defence-industrial relationship with Israel has acquired a new dimension amid the war in Gaza. A July 2026 investigation by Amnesty International, based on commercially available shipment-level trade data, identifies 2,596 shipments of small arms, ammunition, military vehicles and related components from India to Israel between 7 October 2023 and 30 November 2025. Importantly, […]
Born Into the Emirate: A Generation That Has Never Known Anything Else
As the Taliban returned to power, one of the most consequential changes in Afghanistan is also one of the least visible: time is producing a generation for whom Taliban rule is not a political rupture but a childhood reality. Consider the distance between August 2021 and August 2026. An Afghan child who was ten when […]
Five Years of Taliban Rule: Governance Without Legitimacy and Resistance Expanding
Five years after the Taliban returned to Kabul, the Islamic Emirate has achieved what it sought militarily but not politically: control without broad-based consent. The regime has consolidated its authority across most of Afghanistan and reduced the scale of the nationwide war that preceded its takeover. Yet territorial control has not translated into legitimacy. Instead, […]
Accountability Without Transparency in Afghanistan: UNAMA’s Assessment of the Taliban Security Sector
A new UNAMA report, published in August 2026, examines whether Afghanistan’s Taliban administration has established meaningful accountability mechanisms for its security forces nearly five years after taking power. The report’s central finding is not that oversight structures are absent, several genuinely exist, but that their near-total lack of public transparency makes it impossible to assess […]
Pakistan’s Religious Right
Pakistan has a legacy of religious, political and societal influences from the greater Middle East, Central and South Asia and the British raj. These are reinforced by the challenges of state and nation-building in 21st Century; further accentuated by the onslaught of social media and an ever-agitating street. It was the religion and nationalism ‘combine’ […]