Daily Current Affairs

By: DAVID FRENCH As ISIS crumbles, the chances for conflict with the Assad regime increase. There was always going to be a reckoning. When President Obama began the American war against ISIS in 2014 — a belated and necessary step to stop ISIS’s blitzkrieg across Iraq — there was a lingering question: Then what? If and when we defeat ISIS …

By: MICHAEL R. GORDON and IVAN NECHEPURENKO WASHINGTON — Long-running tensions between the United States and Russia erupted publicly on Monday as Moscow condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates. The Russians also said they had suspended their use of a …

By: Zahid Hussain THE decision by the Trump administration to bolster the presence of US troops in Afghanistan raises questions about America’s getting into the third phase of its Afghan war. The number of additional troops is likely to be 3,000 to 5,000 in addition to the 8,800 or so American soldiers already engaged in the war that is in …

By: Parvez Hasan PAKISTAN’S annual GDP growth rate has touched five per cent in 2016-17 after almost a decade. However, it is noteworthy that Pakistan was one of the high economic performers among developing countries over 1960-1990 and had a much higher economic growth than either India or Bangladesh. Sadly, this is no longer true. Pakistan’s economic growth was over …

By: MICHAEL D. SHEAR and NOAH WEILAND WASHINGTON — A member of President Trump’s legal team said on Sunday that the president was not under investigation by the special counsel looking into Russia’s election-year meddling, contradicting Mr. Trump’s assertion in a Friday morning tweet that he is a subject of the widening inquiry. The denial on Sunday by Jay Sekulow, …

By: MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL R. GORDON WASHINGTON — When President Trump made his first major decision on the war in Afghanistan, he did not announce it in a nationally televised address from the White House or a speech at West Point. Instead, the Pentagon issued a news release late one afternoon last week confirming that the president had given …

By: MICHAEL R. GORDON and THOMAS ERDBRINK WASHINGTON — An American fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane on Sunday after it dropped bombs near local ground forces supported by the United States, the first time the American military has downed a Syrian aircraft since the start of the civil war in 2011, officials said. The confrontation represents a further …

By: Hajrah Mumtaz A LONG time ago, I was in a quandary. I’d obtained basic academic qualifications, attempted a professional degree, and needed to figure out a career path. And while I did that, my far-from-impressed parents insisted that I get a job. So I took the path trod by thousands of young women in urban Pakistan. I got a …

By: EUGENE LINDEN In tiny Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa, about one-third of its estimated two million people spent much of the past two years in danger of starving because of the lingering effects of a drought. That is just the latest woe afflicting this cursed nation, and just one example of how fragile the future seems for …

By: Roger Cohen This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Israeli victory in the 1967 war and of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The jubilation of military victory, quicker and more comprehensive than seemed possible, has long since subsided into a grinding status quo: the oppression of 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, the confrontation with 1.8 …