Salman Rafi Sheikh

Whereas the US has almost fully withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving it for Afghanistan’s neighbours to clean up the mess, the Joe Biden administration’s announcement to end the US military’s combat mission in Iraq is an ambiguous proposition, one that the administration is likely to use to conceal its active presence inside Iraq to combat and check Iranian presence and role...

When the US president Joe Biden decided to withdraw the US forces from Afghanistan and delivered his ‘victory speech’, he didn’t sound like a winning commander-in-chief of the world’s supposedly most powerful military force, especially the one that failed to defeat the Taliban (banned in Russia even after 20 years of war. America’s self-perceived and self-nurtured sense of invincibility has been further shattered...

The US ‘decision’ to not stand in the way of Nord Stream 2 is hardly a surprise. While the US officials made their decision to look like a diplomatic victory for them when they said that the US “will not tolerate Russia using energy as a geopolitical weapon in Europe or escalating its aggression against Ukraine”, it remains that the US did not have any leverage to force...