On Saturday, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and Pakistani president Nawaz Sharif met for a conference in Islamabad, marking a rekindling of relations between the two adversarial countries. Sharif pledged that he would support President Ghani to bring peace to Afghanistan. Former President Hamid Karzai notoriously blamed Pakistani policy and leaders for the entirety of Afghanistan’s…
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani arrived in Beijing yesterday to begin meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. The recently inaugurated Ghani’s first official trip abroad as Afghanistan’s leading statesman will consist primarily of talks on the future of relations between the two countries. Ghani has made explicit his desire to strengthen relations with Afghanistan’s eastern…
Despite over $7.6 billion in expenditures by the United States to prevent opium cultivation in Afghanistan, crop yields have risen to their highest levels during the harvest this year. Cultivation of the poppy is a “significant” source of revenue for local Taliban groups, according to the new report released by the UN Office on Drugs…
Pakistani National Security Advisor Sartag Aziz paid a short visit to new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani over the weekend, with future meetings set up between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Ghani forthcoming, an apparent sign of detente. A formal invitation was extended from Sharif to Ghani to arrange a meeting to ‘share his vision’ for…
After almost a year of debate and delay by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) and Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) have been signed as of yesterday, which will allow American and NATO forces to remain in Afghanistan beyond the end of this year, and potentially until 2024, essentially ensuring a…
US Administration officials have announced that they expect the long-debated Bilateral Security Agreement, which will allow US forces to remain in Afghanistan after the end of 2014, to be signed by incoming president-elect Ashraf Ghani next week. Officials said the document would be official signed within “days” of his Monday inauguration. The deal allows some…
The outcome of the Afghan elections has finally been made clear. Officials in Kabul have announced that the next President of Afghanistan will be Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and World Bank official that was heralded as the front-runner during the election run-off held shortly after initial elections terminated inconclusively. The announcement of Ghani…
US Secretary of State John Kerry is urging Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah to abide by the released audit results, which have not been made public yet. It is speculated by many that these results still show Abdullah losing by a wide margin of votes to his rival, the former Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani.…
The outcome of the Afghan presidential elections appears destined to be delayed, at least in the near-term. Despite recent statements made by both candidates to the contrary, a resolution to the oft-delayed elections seems unlikely to arrive soon, as Ashraf Ghani recently declared that any “two headed government” cannot be tolerated. The negotiations for an…
An external audit of votes cast during Afghanistan’s presidential elections has finally been completed. The audit, which took into consideration an estimated 8 million suspicious ballots, took nearly seven weeks and was the source of much conflict throughout. Both leading candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, abandoned the audit the its neared its completion, albeit…
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