Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

War and Peace

This thematic category brings together AAN’s reporting on the conflict in Afghanistan, its underlying causes and drivers, the various armed actors and how it affects Afghans in their everyday lives.

Ashura Attacks (3): A new type of violence in Afghanistan

Fabrizio Foschini •

One of the last taboos of violence in Afghanistan was broken by yesterday’s suicide attacks on the Ashura commemoration in Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif. Historically, sectarian tensions or conflicts have occasionally been seen in Afghanistan, but they have usually been stirred up and leveraged by politics or war. Sectarian hatred has never enjoyed public recognition […]

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Ashura Attacks 2: Flash from the Past, Ashura 2002 (amended)

Kate Clark •

The bombs which ripped through Ashura processions in Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif and likely targeted – futilely – a ceremony in Kandahar killed dozens, raising the spectre of sectarianism in Afghanistan. Every year since 2001, says Kate Clark, the Ashura ceremonies have become larger and more public as the Afghanistan’s Shi’a communities have grown in […]

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Ashura Attacks (1): Playing with Fire

Kate Clark •

Attacks have targeted Shi’as in two of Afghanistan’s major cities as they gathered for Ashura, to lament the martyrdom of Imam Hussein and members of his family in Iraq in 680 AD. The attack in Kabul was particularly serious and left dozens dead. Such violence is a new phenomenon, says Kate Clark, deeply troubling and […]

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2001 Ten Years on (3): The fall of Loya Paktia and why the US preferred warlords

Kate Clark •

In Loya Paktia the people, rather than commanders, overthrew the Taleban in 2001 – one of the very few places where this happened. Tribal councils took power, driving out al-Qaida fighters and doing all of it peacefully. Khost and then Paktia provinces fell to tribal coalitions on 14 November 2001, just one day after the […]

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2001 Ten Years On (2): Getting Home to Kabul

Shoaib Sharifi •

While Kabul was falling to the Northern Alliance ten years ago, a young Kabuli journalist found himself in the Taleban heartland of Kandahar trying to get home. He had to head against the tide of Taleban fighters who were all streaming southwards. Our guest blogger, Shoaib Sharifi, said that everyone feared for their lives as […]

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2001 Ten Years On (1): How the Taleban fled Kabul (amended)

Kate Clark •

It is ten years since Taleban-controlled Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance after just five weeks of US bombing. AAN’s Kate Clark, then the BBC correspondent, had been expelled from Kabul in March 2001 over reporting on the Taleban’s destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamyan and had spent eight months based in Islamabad. She […]

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Two Eid messages from the Warring Leaders

Kate Clark •

Both General Allen, overall ISAF commander, and Mulla Omar, supreme Taleban leader, have issued messages of felicitations to Afghans for Eid ul-Adha. They make interesting reading. Allen, in a message which rivals Omar’s in terms of Islamic references, appeals to the Taleban to stop fighting and urges the Afghan people to continue standing ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with […]

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War of the Narratives: Words, Stories…and Killing

Kate Clark •

It has been a bad week for the international military, but – according to the Pentagon – it has also been a good six months. On 28 October 2011, ISAF suffered its worst attack in Kabul ever, with 13 people* killed in a suicide attack, along with four Afghan civilians, 2 of whom were children. […]

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Trouble in Gizab; the fight everyone chose to ignore

Martine van Bijlert •

On 13 September 2011 a large convoy of armed men, accompanied by US Special Forces, travelled from the centre of Gizab to Tamazan, an area bordering Daikondi province. A murky chain of events led to a confused fight between what should have been friendly forces, in what should have been a stable area. By the […]

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How outside interference politicised the Achin land conflict

Fabrizio Foschini •

Reading the news in the morning sometimes brings big surprises. Even before a suicide car rammed into a US military convoy on Kabul’s Dar-ul-Aman road yesterday, causing the heaviest death toll among ISAF troops ever in the capital, the AAN office was already puzzled by another event: the latest bloody outcome of the years-old land […]

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Under Atta’s Shadow: political life in the Afghan north

Enayat Najafizada •

The collapse of the Taleban regime in 2001 paved the ground for the start of what had the potential to be a comparatively democratic political scene in Afghanistan. In due course, the existing jihadi parties and former communists in the northern province of Balkh slowly started to deal with the new situation. In the case […]

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Counting victories and losses: the war of stats

Kate Clark •

In the last week, there has been a lot of discussion about what sort and how many Taleban are getting killed and captured, how many attacks the Taleban are launching and who, indeed, is ‘winning’ the war. Is ISAF beating the Taleban back or has it been exaggerating its claims? Kate Clark has been trying […]

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