Two meetings occurred this week to address the Taliban’s relations with the world. The first occurred in Tashkent, Uzbekistan between international envoys (including the U.S.) to Afghanistan and various Taliban officials. The second was a meeting between a delegation headed by a leading Islamic scholar from Pakistan and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which is sometimes popularly referred to as the ‘Pakistani Taliban.’
The meetings in Tashkent were supposed to be followed by planned, direct talks Wednesday between the Taliban and U.S. delegates "to address the economic challenges faced by the Afghan people,” according to a U.S. statement reported by Voice of America.
The first meeting focused on the need for Afghan girls to be permitted to attend secondary school, other human rights abuses, Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves which remain frozen in the United States and Europe, and the overall economic development of the country. The United States is the largest provider of aid to Afghanistan which has continued throughout Taliban rule with over $775 million in aid sent to the people of Afghanistan since last summer.
But an aid-dependent Afghanistan is not sustainable indefinitely and therefore steps must be taken to normalize the economy. On several occasions U.S. special representative for Afghanistan Thomas West has expressed an ultimate desire to return Afghanistan’s frozen foreign exchange reserves to the country’s central bank and rejected rumors that the funds would be used for aid. The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has also issued seven general licenses which act as exemptions to U.S. sanctions on the Taliban. However, the chilling effect of these sanctions remains. The Taliban have also failed to take basic actions that would reassure the international community such as providing clear policies against terrorist financing and money laundering or removing sanctioned individuals from leadership positions at the central bank.
It is also necessary to understand that Afghanistan’s economy would remain in dire straits even if sanctions were lifted tomorrow and the frozen foreign exchange reserves returned in full. This is because Afghanistan is a landlocked country with a majority rural population in which dried fruit, coal, and rugs make up the majority of exports. An artificial economy ballooned for two decades as a result of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan which fostered war-related industries such as bulk fuel transport and led to a parallel aid economy. Afghanistan’s future growth is likely to remain slow at best as it now faces the constraints of its geography, infrastructure, and Taliban governance.
Security also remains a significant concern for the United States and region. ISKP — an offshoot of the Islamic State —continues to target Afghanistan’s minorities, particularly the Hazara community. It also carries out targeted attacks on Taliban checkpoints. Across the border in Pakistan the TTP carried out a renewed offensive over the last spring and is currently in negotiations with the Pakistani government. The Afghan Taliban is mediating talks between the Pakistani military and the TTP but the Taliban’s refusal to otherwise rein in their TTP partners is a point of frustration in Islamabad. Pakistan’s most recent negotiating strategy is to send a delegation led by the prominent Karachi-based Deobandi cleric Taqi Usmani to speak with the TTP.
Washington and Afghanistan’s neighbors continue the difficult but necessary process of dialogue with an increasingly stubborn Taliban, but actual progress on the issues remains slow.
Adam Weinstein is Deputy Director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, whose current research focuses on security and rule of law in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
FILE PHOTO: Taliban soldiers stand in front of a sign at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, September 9, 2021. WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY./File Photo
Top photo credit: Demonstration raising awareness of the conflict and humanitarian crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in Brussels in the Brussels Capital province of Belgium on October 8, 2025. (Hans Lucas/Reuters)
Earlier this week, Donald Trump made the bold claim that he’s responsible for ending eight wars since taking office this past January — in other words, nearly one war each month of his presidency.
Among the wars on his list is the decades-long conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, which has mired central Africa since the days of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s in a quagmire conflict involving over one hundred armed groups.
But despite Trump’s claim, the DRC-Rwanda conflict is not yet over. And despite belligerent actors taking some positive steps to bring about a lasting peace — including Tuesday’s announcement that the Rwanda-supported M23 rebel group and the DRC have agreed on a mechanism to monitor a fragile ceasefire — the war remains an active conflict between the two neighbors and their allied groups.
In June, the foreign ministers of both the DRC and Rwanda sat together in the Oval Office to sign a peace agreement brokered in part by the United States. During the public event, the leaders from both countries lavished praise on the role Trump and his administration had played in securing this deal, and each expressed hope that this would serve as the first major step in ending the conflict.
Though the deal served as a positive step for all parties and great publicity for a White House eager to be seen as brokering peace in conflicts across the globe, there was a glaring omission in the agreement that threatened the durability of the peace from the onset.
The Rwandan-supported M23 rebel group — which is the primary belligerent against the DRC and its allies — was not included in the deal’s negotiations and was not a party to the inked agreement. The M23 has said that any deal between the DRC and Rwanda is merely an agreement between those two countries, and does not apply to them.
The success of the agreement, therefore, depends on getting M23 to agree to end its hostilities towards the DRC. This would happen if Rwanda tried to rein in the group by stopping or limiting its supply of materials to M23 and ending its logistical support for the group’s operations.
In the weeks following the signing ceremony, the DRC and M23 engaged in discussions in Doha, Qatar, mediated primarily by the Qataris. The talks led to an initial ceasefire and a framework agreement for a long-term peace deal between the two sides on July 19, which stated that negotiations for a final, long-term peace deal would begin on August 8 and conclude with an agreement signed no later than August 18.
But since the July 19 agreement, fighting has continued between the M23 rebels and the DRC, as well as with the many other rebel groups a part of the conflict.
As evidence that M23 is not the only major group involved in the war, on July 27, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) — another armed group fighting against the DRC — killed at least 40 Christians worshiping at a Congolese church. This came days after the ADF killed 82 civilians in eastern Congo.
And between July 10 and July 30, M23 was responsible for killing at least 140 people near the Virunga National Park in eastern DRC, including at least 14 people cut down by machetes. This is in addition to at least 319 people killed by M23 between July 9 and July 21 across four villages in eastern DRC.
In both sets of attacks, M23 continued to fight and kill for days after the July 19 ceasefire agreement was signed. Earlier this month the DRC government accused M23 of killing “hundreds” of people through “assassinations and summary executions” in September — weeks after the initial ceasefire agreement was adopted.
Long-term negotiations have sputtered. August 18 came and went without a final peace deal, as disagreements between the two sides on whether the initial framework required the M23 to fully withdraw from territory it had conquered proved to be an impasse in negotiations.
With the war continuing past stated deadlines, earlier this week the United Nations’ (UN) special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa, Huang Xia, said that while the peace efforts to end the war “are commendable and promising, they have not yet delivered on their promises: the agreed ceasefire is not being respected.”
In a major positive step towards a permanent ceasefire and lasting peace, on Tuesday the DRC and M23 agreed to form a monitoring body which will oversee the ceasefire between the two sides. The agreement came after weeks of negotiations primarily mediated and hosted by Qatar, with the United States also participating in discussions. The monitoring body is composed of representatives from the DRC, M23, and the 12-member regional body for that area known as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region. In addition, representatives from Qatar, the United States, and African Union will be a part of the monitoring team.
This monitoring body is one of two steps required before the two could start negotiating the long-term peace deal, per the July framework agreement. The other is a prisoner swap. Although it was agreed to in September, the exchange has yet to take place.
Ending a war in which many rebel groups have joined rival factions to fight in a decades-long conflict stemming from a genocide is far easier said than done.
Trump’s focus on peace is in the right place. But his claim that his administration has successfully “ended the war” disintegrates in the face of continued fighting and killing in the eastern DRC. More work will be required from the president’s team to propel this process over the finish line.
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Top photo credit: Donald Trump (Anna Moneymaker/Shutterstock) Volodymyr Zelensky (miss.cabul/Shutterstock) and Vladimir Putin (paparazzza/Shuttterstock)
Trump on right course with terms for Russia-Ukraine peace
As President Trump prepares to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky on Friday, much public discourse has focused on whether the United States should provide Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles to increase pressure on Russia. But a much more important question has been all but ignored: What is this increased pressure on Russia intended to achieve?
The short answer — to force Russia to the negotiating table — obscures the fact that Russia has already been negotiating with the United States over what it regards as the root causes of the war.
The Russians claim that at the Alaska summit, Trump and President Putin reached significant understandings on a framework for ending the conflict. Putin showed flexibility by dropping Russia’s insistence on Ukrainian withdrawal from Kherson and Zaporizhia, and he indicated at the concluding press conference that Russia was ready to address ways to ensure Ukraine’s security.
As Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with stalled progress toward a settlement, Putin and other senior Russian officials have emphasized in recent public statements that they hope to continue the process of negotiations in accordance with the Anchorage understandings. What then has gone wrong?
Two possibilities come to mind, each rooted in crossed signals between the White House and the Kremlin. Judging from Putin’s public remarks after the summit, it is likely that Trump and Putin agreed on a fundamental geopolitical compromise over Ukraine, whereby the United States would close the door on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and Russia would accept Ukrainian accession to the European Union.
In the wake of the summit, however, controversy almost immediately erupted over the question of a post-settlement peacekeeping operation. Putin probably indicated a readiness to accept such an operation, but this question quickly became entangled in Europe’s insistence that it include a European “reassurance force” of combat capable troops.
For the Russians, there is an important distinction between a neutral peacekeeping operation, which they believe should be under United Nations auspices and focus on monitoring the implementation of a ceasefire, and a deterrence force aimed at countering the Russian military. Russia has for decades opposed the possibility of Western combat forces in Ukraine, and in fact one of the chief objectives of its invasion has been to preclude such an outcome. If one of the purposes of increased US pressure on Russia is to force Moscow’s acceptance of a post-settlement European military presence in Ukraine, that pressure will fail.
The other crossed signal very likely involved the question of direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations over territory, reparations, cease-fire provisions, and other largely bilateral matters. At Alaska, Putin may well have indicated a willingness to negotiate with Ukraine on these issues and even to meet with Zelensky, but it is likely that the important question of sequencing was not addressed.
At the post-Alaska meeting in the White House between Trump and European leaders, it became clear that Trump expected Putin to meet quickly with Zelensky to negotiate the parameters of a ceasefire agreement. But Putin has long insisted that any summit meeting with Ukraine must follow — not precede — working-level negotiations that would hammer out most of the key elements of a deal. This would allow the presidents (as is the norm in international diplomacy) to focus only on the remaining disagreements and minimize the likelihood that a summit would fail.
These miscommunications over peacekeeping and sequencing have allowed Europeans and other opponents of a compromise settlement with Russia to paint Putin as both disingenuous and opposed to negotiations. The only viable path toward peace, they argue, is toughened economic and military pressure on Russia.
There is profound irony in the fact that Trump seems to be contemplating an approach that doubles down on former president Biden’s policy of maximizing pressure on Russia to force Moscow’s capitulation, an approach he had heretofore consistently criticized.
That approach failed because it was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that Putin views the war as an elective, a bid for land and empire that he will abandon if the costs of conquest prove too high. But Putin has always viewed this war as a security imperative, designed to prevent the NATO alliance from ensconcing its forces in Ukraine and threatening Russia’s heartland. He will not end the invasion until he at a minimum achieves Russia’s key security objectives.
At this point in the war, there is little that already overstretched Western military factories can do to address Ukraine’s shortage of air defense systems at a time when Russia has amassed a formidable arsenal of missiles, glide bombs, and drones, and is intensifying its strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Deep strikes into Russia with Tomahawk missiles, which cannot be provided in large numbers even if Ukraine were to devise some means of launching them, will not change this picture.
Moreover, Ukraine is losing the manpower war, as Russia is consistently exceeding its monthly recruitment targets while Ukraine falls short of the numbers needed to replenish its growing losses, including to many of its most effective forces.The only way Trump can remedy this shortfall would be to commit Western troops to combat operations alongside the Ukrainians.
Trump therefore faces a fundamental choice. If he backs his way into the Biden strategy, Russia will almost certainly accelerate its military operations. Sooner or later the increasingly exhausted Ukrainian military will approach a collapse, in much the same way that the attritional warfare in World War I ended. Trump will be forced either to stomach an unstable and dysfunctional Ukrainian rump state or bring the United States into war with Russia.
But the path toward a compromise that addresses core Russian concerns while still ensuring Ukraine has an effective, Western-aided self-defense capability is still open, at least for now. That will require putting an end to European insistence on a combat-ready “reassurance force” in Ukraine, pressing Zelensky to re-open working level negotiations with the Russians, and codifying the understandings Trump and Putin reached in Alaska.
The result could be a framework agreement that — not unlike the Gaza deal — still requires further negotiation but puts the war in Ukraine on a clear path toward a stable settlement.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.
The Bunker appears originally at the Project on Government Oversight and is republished here with permission.
Congress is MIA when it comes to war
In serious matters of war and peace, Congress has decided, yet again, to take a pass. By a vote of 51-48, the Senate on October 8 voted down a bipartisan proposal that would have required congressional approval before the Trump administration carries out additional strikes against suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea bound for the U.S. It represents yet another lawmaker leap into irrelevance regarding one of the fundamental duties of the legislative branch of the U.S. government.
It also telegraphs something new: In the past, Congress has often passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (technical legal name: fig leaf, from the Latin meaning “don’t blame us”) before a president ordered military attacks. But this time around, lawmakers are so weak-kneed they’re refusing even to backdate a blank check for combat.
In recent weeks, the administration has acknowledged five such attacks. They have killed, by the administration’s own count, 27 people it labeled as Venezuelan “narco-terrorists.” The White House maintains the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with “unlawful combatants.” So it has chosen to respond by launching its own armed conflict through unlawful attacks.
Trump administration justifications for the attacks have been both meager and dubious. “Can you imagine a doctrine in which we just blow up ships off of Miami and say ‘whoops’ if they didn’t have any drugs on board?” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said(PDF) on the Senate floor. “We allow searches. But we don’t kill every suspected boat off of Miami suspected of having drugs because 25 percent of them don’t have any drugs.”
It is illegal for the U.S. military to target civilians who — even if they may be peddling narcotics — are not engaged in “hostilities” against the United States, the Army’s former top law-of-war officer told the New York Times. “This is not stretching the envelope,” Geoffrey Corn added. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
The Bunker is not in favor of drug smugglers. It just would like to see those in charge stay within the well-established boundaries of the laws of war. And that has to start with Congress, charged in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution to debate, and then to declare or not declare, war on enemies of the United States. At a minimum, U.S. citizens deserve to see the Congress they pay take a stand. But lily-livered lawmakers haven’t seen fit to step up to the plate and declare war against any state or organization since 1942. Their abdication comes despite dozens of combat deployments since then, some of which — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 — surely warranted such a debate.
Each week seems to bring an ever-tighter ratcheting of autocracy to the U.S. government. First it was over ballots. Now it is over bullets.
Aimed at them.
For now.
The F-35 still spends too much time on the tarmac
When The Bunker was but a boy, he grew up in a Chevrolet neighborhood. Dad would get upset whenever someone parked a new Cadillac in their driveway. “More money than brains,” he’d grouse. “Living beyond their means.” Dad may have died 35 years ago, but if he were still with us, he’d be saying the same thing about the Pentagon’s $2 trillion F-35 program.
“The F-35 remains the most advanced fighter in the world, but too many of them are sitting idle on ramps,” Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, groused at the soon-to-be top Air Force general at his October 9 confirmation hearing. “The Air Force cannot project power if its most advanced fighter cannot get off the ground.”
This is a perennial problem for a military more concerned with presents (gold-plated weapons favored by generals and defense contractors) than presence — the ability to get to the fight and prevail. It too often leads to a bevy of hangar queens. “Our pilots are flying about two to two-and-a-half times a week in a fighter aircraft,” General Kenneth Wilsbach, tapped to be the service’s next chief of staff, conceded to the Senate panel. “That is not enough.”
Building an air force (the Marines and Navy also fly F-35s) is a tough balancing act that would challenge the Flying Wallendas:
Long-standing Pentagon logic says more costly warplanes are better warplanes.
But more expensive warplanes require more money to buy, and, more critically, to keep them flying. The Air Force’s F-35 broke down nearly twice as often as planned in 2023. Its readiness rate fell from a poor 69% of the time in 2021 to a pitiful 52% in 2024.
Inevitably, the more money the U.S. military spends on keeping its aircraft flying, the fewer hours those planes can fly. “That means that you can’t fly your full fleet,” Wilsbach said. “What that means is the pilots and the crews aren’t training.”
Highly-trained pilots — it costs more than $13 million (PDF), in 2025 dollars, to train an F-35 pilot — love to fly. They don’t take well to hours sitting in simulators or hanging around ready rooms waiting for their planes to be repaired. Flight hours for Air Force combat pilots have dived from 16 per month in the 1990s, to 10 in the mid-2010s, to about five hours monthly today.
So they’re more inclined to bail out of the service, forcing the military to spend $13 million training replacements.
That, in turn, takes $13 million per new pilot that can’t be spent on maintenance, leading to fewer flying hours, air infinitum.
Wilsbach, predictably, said the Pentagon should spend more money to keep F-35s airborne. But a former top Air Force officer says service leaders “can use our imaginations” to solve the flying-hour crunch. Merrill McPeak, a fighter pilot who served as Air Force chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, suggests his service equip its F-35 units with gliders to keep their pilots flying. “Time spent in the air flying anything builds airmanship and confidence,” he says. “Better still, it’s fun.”
Then again, thinking of good ol’ Dad, we could just fly Buicks.
Pentagon press to be branded with scarlet letters
Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has launched a war against the press. Like the war in Afghanistan, it is not going to end well for the Pentagon. Sure, the flag-pocket-squared SECDEF can bombard those in uniform with a barrage of memos and require them to salute. But the Pentagon press corps — like all reporters, bolstered by the nation’s founders — prizes its independence.
The Bunker spent 37 years reporting from inside the Pentagon, seeking to inform readers about what the U.S. military was doing in their name. He was proud to tell their stories, but didn’t pull punches, either. He was more concerned with being fair than being friendly. He believes he earned a career’s worth of respect from most of those in uniform.
This October 6 memo(PDF) from Sean Parnell, Hegseth’s spokesman, reads like an OPLAN for an attack on the First Amendment and those who embrace it. It reads as if this Pentagon hierarchy views the press as the enemy. Hegseth & Co. seem oblivious to the need for independent and robust reporting on the U.S. military. They are trying to squelch the press from doing its job with a crude one-two punch: First, dramatically cut down on officially released information, and second, bar reporters from “soliciting” (also known as “reporting”) anything else.
News organizations are making it clear they will not agree to its terms. That could lead to their “chaotic withdrawal” from the building beginning October 15, much like the U.S. left Afghanistan in 2021, one veteran Pentagon scribe told The Bunker. “This whole episode stems from Hegseth’s hatred of the media because of the coverage he received leading up to his nomination and after,” he believes.
And here’s the bright red maraschino cherry on top: The Defense Department also will soon begin issuing “Additional Press Identifier Badges” (PDF) that, according to Parnell’s memo, “will have ‘PRESS’ clearly imprinted on them in red letters both vertically and horizontally to assist in identifying members of the press within the Pentagon.”
Here’s hoping they print up one labeled “FOOL” for themselves, as well.
Hundreds of small defense companies are sprouting in Rust Belt cities thanks to local talent, cheap labor and state cash incentives, Sheera Frenkel reported October 13 in the New York Times.
President Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield would rely heavily on space-based missile interceptors, an unparalleled technical challenge, Josh Luckenbaugh reported October 7 in National Defense.
The VA’s rapidly expanding disability benefits program has become a rich target for fraudsters, the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock, Lisa Rein, and Nate Jones reported October 8.
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