By Ankit Panda
The 15-day siege of Kunduz will be a wake-up call for Kabul and Washington.
It was good to learn on Wednesday morning that the Taliban had announced a formal end to their siege of Kunduz in Afghanistan. “The Islamic Emirate considered it in its best military interest to fortify its trenches surrounding the city rather than keeping the city, which would result in casualties to the mujahedeen and unnecessary waste of ammunition,” the group noted in a statement posted on its website.
The 15-day skirmish between Taliban fighters and Afghan security forces, buttressed by NATO air support, shredded the heart of Afghanistan’s fifth-largest city and turned the northern Afghan city into a war zone reminiscent of something out of late-2001. Indeed, the siege marked the Taliban’s first successful seizure of a major Afghan city since the U.S. invasion in 2001–an ominous milestone as the United States continues to draw down in the country, leaving its future security in the hand of Afghan forces.
The Kunduz saga revealed quite a bit about the state of Afghanistan today and about what it’ll take to keep the country from sliding out of the grasp of the Ghani-Abdullah unity government in Kabul.
Read the full story at The Diplomat