Analysis & Opinion

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, China’s two global policy banks, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, have brought a stepwise increase in public finance for energy and infrastructure that has been filling major financial gaps and fostering economic growth in emerging market and developing countries.

Adraconian police and crime bill is making its way through parliament, and on Tuesday the home secretary, Priti Patel, told her party’s conference that she planned to remove even more rights from political protesters. New offences of disrupting motorways and national infrastructure will be added to legislation that already dramatically expands police powers.

Senior military officials in the United States have linked the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August to former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban in 2020 promising a complete withdrawal of US troops.

Angela Merkel is about to walk off the European Union stage — and it's about time, says DW's Cristina Burack. The EU needs to break with her reactive style to meet the challenges it's facing.

Against the backdrop of the 9.0-magnitude man-made earthquake that was the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, two Christian leaders, Pastor Johnnie Moore and Juliana Taimoorazy, convened a news conference last week under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Morocco’s moderate Islamist party suffered major losses in parliamentary elections on Wednesday, a stinging setback in one of the last countries where Islamists had risen to power after the Arab Spring protests.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan with great ease that few expected. Now that all foreign troops have withdrawn, the group faces the more difficult task of governing the country. Will it be able to cope?

Pashtana Durrani knows that she is on the Taliban’s radar. The 23-year-old teacher has been fiercely advocating for girls’ education since the group started making advances in Afghanistan after the U.S. announced it would withdraw troops from the country by Aug. 31. But despite being told that she is not safe, Durrani is staying put.

While Taliban atrocities are widely understood, those committed by western forces and their allies have been wilfully ignored. As the author and Afghanistan expert Anand Gopal told me, the Taliban all but evaporated in 2001. But Afghan politicians in the new government exploited a US desire to eliminate “bad guys” by falsely claiming their opponents were Taliban supporters.

As the Afghan government and the Taliban continue their struggle over who will control Kabul, they ignore the fact that they will not wield any legitimacy unless the Afghan people grants it to them. The Afghan people are the sole sovereign over the country and as such, the power is in their hands.