Associate of CCW, Dr Melissa Skorka, has been published in Foreign Affairs. The article is titled “Afghanistan’s Most Dangerous Threat: Why America Can’t Take on the Haqqani Network Alone.”

The article looks at the resurgence of international terrorism and how the Haqqani network drives this. The Haqqani network is little-understood but the most powerful faction of the Taliban government that maintains ties to al Qaeda and to some elements of the Islamic State Khorasan (also known as ISIS-K).

So far, world leaders have failed to develop a coherent strategy to contain the Haqqanis.

Dr Skorka argues that even in minimal form, a multilateral approach among the United States, Russia, China, and other nations toward the Haqqanis in Afghanistan would do much to limit the expansion of ISIS-Khorasan and al Qaeda into the broader region and potentially stave off a devastating wave of destabilization from the new global terror threat. According to Western officials, the Haqqanis have already begun to focus on Tajikistan, Kashmir, Syria, and Yemen. The United States needs to take a more robust stand against Pakistan’s support for the terrorist syndicate.

Dr Skorka is an expert on Afghanistan and completed her DPhil at Oxford in 2019. At Oxford she worked on “the 21st Century Terrorist Political Adaptation to Western Policy.”

The article can be read here.