South Asia

The Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting in Vienna on India’s membership will be a contestation between US and China to determine the future of the nuclear and world order

At a press conference in Hanoi on May 23, President Obama announced that he would lift the decades-old arms embargo on Vietnam, which he called “a lingering vestige of the Cold War.” He also confirmed that, two days earlier, a missile launched from a U.S. Special Operations Forces drone had killed the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur in a taxi about a hundred miles southwest of Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan. (The strike also killed the driver, Muhammad Azam, whose family the U.S.

Experts say reports of an Iran-backed Taliban buffer zone in Afghanistan against the Islamic State are overstated but that Iran has had links with Taliban commanders for over a decade. 

Iran is working with the Taliban to set up a buffer zone along its border with Afghanistan to keep out the Islamic State, the latest sign of how the rise of the Syrian-based terror group is turning longtime rivals into uneasy allies.

CIC Senior Fellow and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin spoke recently with Voice of America Pashto, please view the interview below.

The VoA commentator poses questions in Pashto and Dr. Rubin responds in English.  Below are the English translationss of the questions.

-President Obama stated that the death of Mansoor is an important milestone.  Is it?  Will the loss of this leader really effect the Taliban’s progress?

On Saturday May 22, a U.S. drone strike killed Mullah Mansour, the leader of the Taliban and architect of the group’s bloody reconquest of Afghanistan this past year. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports on the killing, and Hari Sreenivasan talks to former Pakistani diplomat Riaz Mohammad Khan and former State Department official Barnett Rubin about what lies ahead for the Taliban.

As the Taliban collected the body of its slain leader on Monday, the insurgent group also began discussing his replacement, insiders say — a choice that could spark furious infighting and signal whether there's any chance of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan.

Two senior members of the Afghan Taliban told NBC News that they'd received the burned remains of Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, who was killed Saturday in a U.S. airstrike in southwest Pakistan — the first time since the beginning of the Afghan war that the United States had directly targeted a Taliban leader.

Early on Saturday, a middle-aged Pashtun man used forged documents to cross from Iran into Pakistan. A few hours later, on a lonely stretch of highway, he was incinerated by an American drone.

India might be better off building an international consortium with the likes of Japan and South Korea to invest in the project