The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Imperial Anthropology? America in Afghanistan Counter-insurgency, scholar-soldiers and the failure of the Human Terrain System (2005-2014) STONE AGE HERBALIST The kinetic phase of the war ended. Soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe. Today, the enemy's motives often remain a mystery, and the constant casualties due to the inability to understand the enemy and to predict his actions have been tragically too great… In the late 19th century, the British army developed a habit of sending bright young officers to different regions of the world to study the cultures and live with the local leaders and learn their habits. Names like China Gordon, T.E. Lawrence, I think all testified to the wisdom of that custom, a custom that the British Army continues today. Think about a culture-centric approach to future warfare that creates a cadre of what commonly now has been called global scouts, officers and non-commissioned of...

  Russia, SCO, BRICS: The Normalization of Afghanistan PEPE ESCOBAR   The whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity. This past Sunday in Doha, I had a meeting with three high-level representatives of the Taliban Political Office in Qatar, including a founding member of the body (in 2012) and a key official of the previous Taliban government of 1996-2001. By mutual consent, their names should not be made public. The cordial meeting was brokered by Professor Sultan Barakat, who teaches at the College of Public Policy at Hamad bin Khalifa University – set in an outstanding, immaculate campus outside of Doha which attracts students from across the Global South. Prof. Barakat is one of those very few – discreet – players who knows everything that matters in West Asia, and in his case, also in the intersection of Central and South Asia. With my three Taliban interlocutors, we talked extensively about the...

  Remember What Happened Right Before 9/11? It's Happening Again. THE CORBETT REPORT by James Corbett Remember way back in the year 2000, when the Taliban took over large swaths of Afghanistan and set about eradicating the nation's poppy crop that feeds the world opium supply? Of course you do. Well, guess what? It's happening again. That's right. After Uncle Sam's ignominious  retreat from the graveyard of empires  in 2021, the Taliban infamously regained control of the country and set about reinstituting their campaign to ban the cultivation of opium poppies. And, once again, the results of that ban have been nothing short of remarkable. In fact, the Taliban's latest anti-poppy campaign is already  being hailed  as the "most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history" by self-proclaimed Afghanistan experts, with the country's opium production down a jaw-dropping 90% this year. And since you  do  remember the story of the Taliban's f...