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Literature Nobel Prize for Svetlana Alexievich, author of 1990 Afghanistan book Zinky Boys

Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among her many breath-taking and deeply unsettling books is one about Afghanistan. Published in 1990, Zinky Boys is based on interviews with former Soviet soldiers and their relatives in her Belorussian home country in the second half of the 1980s, then still a Soviet republic. […]

9 Oct 2015 Thomas Ruttig • Context and Culture

Airstrike on a Hospital in Kunduz: Claims of a war crime

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is now demanding an International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission look into the United States air strike which hit its hospital in Kunduz in the early hours of Saturday morning (3 October 2015). 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, including three children, were killed in the strike which came four days into fierce […]

7 Oct 2015 Kate Clark • War and Peace

The Fall of Kunduz: What does it tell us about the strength of the post-Omar Taleban?

The capture of Kunduz by the Taleban has surely written off any idea of the movement having been seriously undermined or fractured by the death of Mullah Omar and the leadership dispute that followed. His successor, Akhtar Mansur may still face some resistance from dissidents within the movement, but on the battlefield, the Taleban under […]

30 Sep 2015 Borhan Osman • War and Peace

Afghan Women’s Football: The players’ passion for the game

This year’s Afghan women’s football tournament has kicked off with a match pitting Kabul against Bamyan, shown live on national television. Kabul proved too strong for Bamyan and won 10:0. Yet, the Bamyan players were unbowed: Kabul has many of the Afghan national team players on its side and female soccer players in Bamyan can […]

26 Sep 2015 Kate Clark • Context and Culture

A Peaceful And Delightful Eid al-Adha!

دافغانستان د تحلیلګرانو شبکه د نیکمرغه لوي اختر د رارسیدو له امله ټولي اسلامي نړۍ، په ځانګري توګه د افغانستان مسلمان ولس ته دزړه له کومي مبارکی وایي. هیله ده چي دلوي اختر له برکته په افغانستان کې سوله، ثبات او ورورولي ټینګه شي. زمو‌‌‌ږ ورستۍ مقاله د لوی اختر د نمانځنې په باره کې […]

23 Sep 2015 AAN Team • Context and Culture

Young Technocrats Taking Over: Who are the new Afghan governors and what can they achieve?

Nearly one year into Ashraf Ghani’s presidency, about a quarter of the state’s highest representatives in the provinces are still missing – nine of 34 governors. So why the hold-up? AAN’s Christine Roehrs and Qayoom Suroush have been looking into the mechanisms of the process and found that the government seems to be able to […]

18 Sep 2015 Christine Roehrs • Qayoom Suroush • Political Landscape

The 2015 Insurgency in the North (2): Badakhshan’s Jurm district under siege

The foreign fighter communities are growing, their recruitment is speeding up and the national security forces deployed to fight them are regularly beaten back – or they give up their bases before, as some claim, “a single bullet has been shot.” Badakhshan, once a province almost free of insurgency, has become contested. AAN’s Obaid Ali […]

14 Sep 2015 Obaid Ali • War and Peace

A Taleb Lost in a Polish Forest and More: Afghanistan in western films (part 2), 2001 to 2015

Since 2001, there has been a relatively large number of western films that feature Afghanistan – either briefly or, in some cases, for the entire length of the movie. But despite the significant numbers of American and European mainstream films that deal with Afghanistan, there are few that truly explore the country and its people. […]

11 Sep 2015 Christian Bleuer • Context and Culture

The Second Fall of Musa Qala: How the Taleban are expanding territorial control

While Afghanistan’s northern provinces – mainly Kunduz, Faryab and Sar-e Pul – have been in the media’s focus on this year’s Taleban offensive, fighting in their southern Afghan strongholds has geared up too. Within one month the Taleban were able to capture two district centres in Helmand, Musa Qala (still contested) and Nawzad. This combines […]

3 Sep 2015 Thomas Ruttig • War and Peace

Trouble in Khas Uruzgan: Insults, assaults, a siege and an airlift

After three months of near non-stop fighting in Khas Uruzgan, a mixed Pashtun-Hazara district in northeast Uruzgan, the Taleban decimated the district’s Afghan Local Police (ALP) and forced most of the other security forces back into the district centre. The attack was not just part of a wider, concerted effort by the Taleban to put […]

2 Sep 2015 Martine van Bijlert • War and Peace

Economic Management in Afghanistan: What worked, what didn’t, and why?

Afghanistan’s past experience with economic management has seen both notable successes and salient failures. A new paper for AAN by Bill Byrd, a former head of the World Bank in Afghanistan (currently a senior expert with the US Institute of Peace), reviews several economic policies during the period 2002-2014. It points to important lessons for Afghanistan’s […]

26 Aug 2015 Bill Byrd • Special Reports

Economic Management in Afghanistan: Thoughts on what worked, what didn’t and why

The Afghan government and its international partners will meet in Kabul next month at the Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) to review progress since last December’s London Conference and to discuss specific reform programs for the future. Discussions are complicated by the fact that Afghanistan’s economy remains weak and its fiscal situation dire. In the deliberations on […]

26 Aug 2015 AAN • Economy, Development, Environment

Too Few, Badly Paid And Unmotivated: The teacher crisis and the quality of education in Afghanistan

The progress in the education sector has been reported widely as one of the success stories of the national international efforts in Afghanistan since 2002. However, this narrative omits severe problems – one is that the teachers who are supposed to facilitate the rapid growth of the sector are still often ill-trained, ill-equipped, badly paid, […]

22 Aug 2015 Qayoom Suroush • Christine Roehrs • Economy, Development, Environment

Afghanistan in World War I (2): “England must lose India” – Afghanistan as a German bridgehead

100 years ago and a good year after the outbreak of World War I, a German political-military mission crossed the border into Afghanistan on the night of 19 to the 20 August 1915. Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer and Werner Otto von Hentig, a Bavarian military officer and a Prussian diplomat, both with Persian experience, led the […]

19 Aug 2015 Thomas Ruttig • Context and Culture

“But This Gang Of Ministers Could Neither Fly Nor Swim Properly”: Memoirs from 1920s Afghanistan (Book Review)

In 1927, a tumultuous time for Afghanistan as King Amanullah attempted comprehensive social reforms, an Indian teacher, Syed Mujtaba Ali, came to Kabul. His travelogue, “In A Land Far From Home”, published in India in 1948, very entertainingly reports on Kabul during those days, recalling encounters on the street as well as with the Afghan […]

14 Aug 2015 Jolyon Leslie • Context and Culture

The Triple Attack in Kabul: A message? If so, to whom?

Kabul is facing the aftermath of yet another suicide attack, this time at the entrance to the airport where early reports suggested 21 people were killed or injured. People in the capital were already in shock from the bloody events of 7 August: three attacks in 24 hours that killed more than 50 people and […]

10 Aug 2015 Kate Clark • War and Peace

Highest Civilian Casualty Figures Ever: UNAMA details deaths by mortar, IED, suicide attack and targeted killing

UNAMA has published its mid-year assessment of the harm done to civilians by the warring parties in Afghanistan (full report here): the number of civilians killed and injured has risen again. There were 4921 civilian casualties, the highest number for the first half of any year since UNAMA started documenting them. 70 per cent were […]

5 Aug 2015 Kate Clark • War and Peace

The Murree Process: Divisive peace talks further complicated by Mullah Omar’s death

News of Mullah Omar’s death was leaked just a day before a second meeting between Taleban and Afghan government representatives was supposed to have taken place. The first meeting on 7 July near Islamabad, in Murree, initiated the so-called Murree Process. The revelation of Mullah Omar’s death and subsequent struggle for succession in the Taleban […]

5 Aug 2015 Borhan Osman • War and Peace

Thematic Dossier X: Peace talks and reconciliation

The flurry of recent ‘peace-related’ events – talks about talks, actual talks, denials of talks, re-definitions of peace, attacks and key figures dying – has compelled AAN to take another look at the whole body of our work on the subject. This “Peace Talks and Reconciliation Thematic Dossier” brings you all related AAN analyses in one […]

4 Aug 2015 AAN Team • Dossiers

From Mullah Omar to Mansur: Change at the Taleban’s top leadership

After almost two days of silence, the Taleban have finally admitted that their supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar Mujahed, as they call him, has died. On 31 July 2015, they also announced the appointment of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, previously Omar’s deputy, as their new leader. Reportedly, this also includes the key title of amir […]

31 Jul 2015 Thomas Ruttig • War and Peace