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Dear reader,
Welcome to Gandhara s weekly newsletter. This briefing brings you the best of our reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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Taliban’s quest for victory
Frud Bezhan reports on the Taliban’s strategy to militarily take over Afghanistan as it pushes to run over more territory in the wake of the U.S. troops withdrawal. The group already controls as much of the country as the Afghan government and hotly contests the rest.
“The Taliban can mass more forces in the field once U.S. airpower is gone,” Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, which has tracked the Taliban’s battlefield advances for years, told us. “The Taliban is going to push to take large areas of the south and east, secure the passage to Kabul, maintain pressure on provinces surrounding the capital, all the while continuing to fight in the north and west to keep Afghan forces occupied.”