The Biden administration is trying to work around longstanding terrorism-related sanctions to facilitate the delivery of aid to the struggling Afghan population. Despite the issuance of sanctions exceptions, Taliban rule in Afghanistan will cause many global banks to refuse to finance commercial transactions with the Afghan private sector. Whether U.S. …

The Moscow meeting of ten regional states and the Taliban officials on Wednesday has produced an outcome that by far exceeds expectations. The salience of the consensus opinion is four-fold, as reflected in the joint statement issued after the event: regional recognition that Taliban government is a compelling “reality”; it …

The foreign ministers of Iran and Turkey talked about collective efforts to ensure stability and fight against terrorism in Afghanistan, as Tehran is going to host a ministerial meeting of the Afghan neighbors next week. In a telephone conversation on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and his Turkish counterpart …

Iraq’s election on October 10 saw the lowest voter turnout of any of its six polls since the 2003 US-led invasion of the country. All the same the results met one of the major demands of the young activists who had pressed for early elections, and then urged a voter …

Ethiopian forces carried out an airstrike Friday on the city of Mekelle, their fifth on the Tigray regional capital since Monday. There were no immediate reports of casualties following Friday’s airstrike, which witnesses say hit a farmer’s field near a fenced off area on the eastern side of Mekelle University. …

A loose analogy considers the wait and see approach concerning cancer. In a number of instances, the old school method is to do surgery before or after chemoradiation. Why do surgery, if the chemoradiation (by all accounts) has eliminated the cancer? Cancer related surgery can often lead to some quality …

Not long ago, an archaeologist friend of mine and I came to a striking conclusion: We did our intellectual work entirely backwards from one another. He, with almost nothing to go on beyond shards of pottery, had to extrapolate a world from mere fragments. I, blessed or burdened (take your …

Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia cleric whose Mahdi Army followers battled U.S. forces during the years of the occupation, made big gains in Iraq’s parliamentary election on October 10. His victory could pose problems for the United States and Iran. But despite the Sadrist List’s electoral success, it is not a …

The NATO defense ministers who met yesterday and today in Brussels had a long list of issues to discuss, from the alliance’s role in confronting a rising China to its plans for countering a resurgent Russia. But NATO is also confronting more fundamental questions about its identity that have taken …

Moscow has butted the grand old transatlantic alliance in the chest on Monday with the foreign ministry announcing that it will suspend the NATO military liaison mission with effect from November 1 and recall the accreditation of its staff in response to the NATO decision to withdraw the accreditation of …