A year after President Donald Trump announced his strategy for Afghanistan, the war there is at a virtual stalemate, and Pakistan holds the key to whether the Taliban insurgents it has sheltered and supported for decades join the peace process or continue to fight for their avowed aim of forcing the United States to withdraw its troops.
The United States and Afghanistan both say they will not attend Russia-hosted peace talks scheduled for next month, with Kabul asserting it prefers instead to hold direct talks with the Taliban.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to appoint Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, as his special envoy on Afghanistan, media reported on August 22.
Representatives of the Afghan Taliban plan to take part in peace talks in Moscow next month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.
Afghan officials say government security forces on August 20 freed 149 people who had been taken hostage by the Taliban several hours earlier in the northern province of Kunduz.
The Taliban has seized a district center in the northern Afghan province of Faryab, officials say, days after the militants captured a military base in the same province.
Irrespective of the latest battlefield wins and losses, the Taliban appear to have achieved some major political and military objectives by overrunning Ghazni, a vital Afghan city home to an estimated 280,000 people.
Twenty amputees have kicked off a trek of more than 600 kilometers across Afghanistan to call for an end to the country's 17-year war.
U.S. and Taliban officials met this week for direct talks aimed at setting up peace negotiations to end 17 years of war in Afghanistan, a Taliban official said.
Members of the People’s Peace Movement of Afghanistan ended their three-day sit-in protest outside the Iranian Embassy in Kabul on July 27.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has dismissed the Taliban’s rejection of his offer of peace talks, suggesting that the militant group can still be persuaded to come to the negotiating table.
Few places can be more symbolic for demanding peace than a road divided between the Afghan government forces and the Taliban in one of Afghanistan’s most volatile provinces.
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