The quake’s epicentre was located at a latitude of 36.10°N and a longitude of 71.20°E, with a depth of 130 kilometers.
In the old and new Great Game, Afghanistan has held a central position. Peter Hopkirk, in his path-breaking book The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, chronicled the 19th-century geopolitical chessboard involving Britain and Russia.
There is an unconfirmed report that the US has redeployed at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. This base was the command centre for NATO and US forces throughout their occupation of Afghanistan.
Within Pakistan, the unforgiving regions of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan have had an especially violent ‘gun-culture’, for a long time. Bloody, inter-tribal, anti- ‘foreigner’ and familial feuds are a way of life, and often the family sentinels peer at their neighbours through rifle ports.
Afghan refugees awaiting resettlement to the United States have written an 'open letter' to Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to immediately halt their deportation to Afghanistan as the March 31 deadline approaches closer.
Hundreds of thousands of job losses have been seen in several key sectors which have been "devastated" since the takeover, ILO said.
After cutting and running from Afghanistan last year, and having earlier effectively Balkanised an Iraq which under the Ba’ath Socialists/Saddam Hussein was a functional, secular ~ albeit criminally oppressive ~ state, the US Administration has now clarified that nation-building is expressly not a part of Washington’s agenda in countries where it has intervened militarily, more often than not on a dodgy legal basis.
The report says that "many of the selected theologians are graduates of Darul Uloom Haqqania madrasa, one of Pakistan's oldest and largest Islamic seminaries".
The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan in August last year significantly reduced US airstrikes in the region, allowing the TTP to operate more freely, the report said.
Monday’s advisory has directed drivers not to play music in their cars carrying women. Still more crucially, drivers have been told not to pick up female passengers, if they are not wearing the hijab, covering the hair. Taliban’s police have erected checkpoints across the capital of Kabul to keep track of taxi drivers and ensure whether they were complying with the government’s orders. Of a piece with these directives is the Taliban decision to shut down all public bathhouses for women in Afghanistan’s northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
