A look at Afghanistan’s Regional Diplomacy in the Transformation Decade (2014-2024)
Published 3 weeks ago
Regionalism has played an important and fundamental role in the post-Taliban foreign policy of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s location at the center of turbulent regional subsystems such as South Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia has made regional cooperation and regionalism an inevitable option and a strategic necessity for the country. Due to this undeniable necessity, from 2001 to 2006,the initial steps towards regional cooperation were taken in Afghanistan’s foreign policy. However, in this period the level of engagement of Afghanistan with its surrounding regions was limited, Afghanistan’s understanding of the region was ambiguous, and there was no clear vision for a meaningful regionalism. Nevertheless, in the wake of the adoption of Afghanistan’s National Development Strategy at the London Conference (2006), regionalism became one of the fundament
Modern Diplomacy
Under Narendra Modi’s virulent Hindu nationalist leadership, India has lost another prize: it is no longer designated as ‘Free’ in the latest Freedom House freedom report. Based on civil liberties and political rights, the country rankings are published annually, and India’s new classification is “Partly Free’ like arch rival Pakistan.
Suffering a progressive decline since Modi took over, India barely made the cut-off last year scoring 71. For comparison, a country like Canada scores 98, the UK 93 and the US only 83. Norway, Sweden and Finland are the only three countries with a perfect score of 100.
If China under Xi Jinping is grasping for top economic status, living there is no panacea according to the Freedom House report. It is one of a very few countries given a negative for political rights and only 11 for civil liberties scoring a total of 9. Yes, that’s a single digit and close to countries like Saudi Arabia 7 and Tajikistan