Pakistan

On December 16, 2016, President Obama, speaking at his last White House press conference, suggested to Donald Trump that, “Since there's only one president at a time,” the president-elect should wait “before he starts having a lot of interactions with foreign governments other than the usual courtesy calls.”

Fifteen years have passed since the international community’s intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. Since the drawdown of international forces, Afghanistan has not been able to secure peace and stability. What are the principal domestic and regional factors that deter and enable achieving these objectives? How can the country move forward?

The 71st UN general assembly (UNGA) session, unlike the somnolent affairs of the past, literally began with a bang. A couple of explosions and the discovery of crude bombs in New York and New Jersey, barely a week after the 15th anniversary of 9/11, revived the spectre of terrorism. The swift arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami just two days later and his reported trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan focused attention on the region as a base of transnational terrorism.

PRAGUE, For more than two decades, Pakistan has been accused of creating and sustaining the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan as one of the biggest and most ruthless surrogate forces in modern times.

A leading Western expert of the region, however, says the reality of this opaque relationship is much more complex.