Afghanistan’s exportable threat

(Muhammad Rizwan – Lowy The Intepreter) On a spring evening earlier this year, an object the size of a dinner plate flew in low over Rawalpindi, the garrison city that houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s army. Air defences caught it before it hit anything. But it wasn’t alone. The Taliban claimed credit for a number of drone strikes inside Pakistan, reaching from the alleys of Quetta to the outskirts of Islamabad. The machines involved were not much to look at: plastic frames, lithium batteries, and motors you could buy on a hobbyist website, the whole thing assembled for a few hundred dollars. Nobody in Washington or Brussels said much of anything. That silence is the story. Almost five years after the last American military cargo plane left Kabul, Afghanistan has become the world’s most ignored security problem. The country doesn’t appear in the latest US National Security Strategy. It hardly stands out in European capitals preoccupied with Ukraine, Iran, Gaza and migration policies. The reasoning, when articulated, usually goes like this: the war has ended, the Taliban are now in control, and whatever unfolds within that country is no longer our concern. This line of thinking is not holding up. – Afghanistan’s exportable threat | Lowy Institute