First CIA director WIlliam Burns met with the Taliban. Now, Faiz Hamid, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence is visiting Kabul. Intelligence chiefs now do the job that foreign ministers used to do.
Category: Asia
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The Afghan Intelligence Agency Was Raided: Who Got the Files?
The people who seized the files at the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications may not have even been Taliban: The men did not speak Afghan languages, the officials said, and may have been agents of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency working in tandem with Taliban forces. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has long supported...
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U.S. Controls on Experiments With Supercharged Pathogens Have Been Undercut Amid Lab-Leak Concerns
From the reliable Washington Post: A decade ago, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health used ferrets to engineer a highly lethal flu virus. The purpose of the research — known as “gain of function” — was to better understand how viruses evolve and to help devise medicines to combat the potential disease threats.It...
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With the Taliban Ascendant, Nuclear Pakistan Is Only Getting Stronger
Today’s posting by the non-profit National Security Archive In Washington DC follows the recent admission by Pakistani President Arif Alvi that the country had already developed a “nuclear deterrent” by 1981, long before the underground nuclear tests of 1998. Alvi may have exaggerated in claiming that Pakistan had “joined those nations which were … equipped with...
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From the National Security Archive, the 20-Year War in 20 Documents
The non-profit National Security Archive at George Washington University is the place to go to understand the debacle of Afghanistan. The Archive provides original sources. not opinion. In Afghanistan 20/20: The 20-Year War in 20 Documents, the Archive enables you to go beyond recycled punditry The documents detail ongoing problems that bedeviled the American war...