US Troop Draw Down in Afghanistan by 2021

At least nine killed by bomb blasts on minibuses in Afghan city

Two bomb blasts aboard separate minibuses killed at least nine people Thursday (April 28) in Afghanistan's Mazar-i-Sharif, police said, a week after a deadly explosion rocked a Shi'ite mosque in the northern city.

The number of violent public attacks across Afghanistan has fallen since the Taliban returned to power last August, but the Sunni Islamic State (IS) group has continued to target Shi'ites, whom they view as heretics.

A string of deadly bombings targeting members of the minority communities has convulsed the country in the past two weeks of the fasting month of Ramadan, killing and wounding dozens...

Why the Afghan government collapsed after the US withdrawal

The first sentence of an interim report released yesterday on the collapse of the Afghan military concludes that, “the single most important factor in the [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’] collapse in August 2021 was the U.S. decision to withdraw military forces and contractors from Afghanistan through signing the U.S.-Taliban agreement in February 2020.”

Reuters adopted this sentence in its headline covering the report. But a deeper reading reveals that Washington built a dependent Afghan army reliant on open-ended U.S. combat support, which incentivized corruption, and ultimately lent credence to the Taliban’s narrative of a puppet government in Kabul. No reading of this latest report could lead one to reasonably believe that victory was just over the horizon.

Congress created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, in 2008 to provide oversight of Afghanistan reconstruction activities and most recently instructed it to assess why the ANDSF collapsed so rapidly last summer. Over the years SIGAR has unveiled shocking degrees of corruption, oversight, deception, and incompetence in the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. This report is no different, except that it bluntly describes the United States as the linchpin of the previous Afghan government’s success or failure...

High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad

Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions of dollars purchasing expensive homes in the U.S. and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.

According to a Wall Street Journal review of public documents, interviews and other records, some officials who held top jobs during former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani's tenure, which started in 2014, now are living in mansions along California's coast. Abroad, clusters of former officials and lawmakers reside in major European cities, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, the records and interviews show.

The Journal sought to determine the whereabouts of dozens of Mr. Ghani's cabinet officials, influential figures that made up his inner circle, and key lawmakers involved in security and foreign-policy matters. Most were found to have relocated overseas, often in countries where publicly available property and company records are limited...