President Biden and Afghanistan.

President Biden's reset of US' Asia policy will primarily determine the future contours of Sino-US relations. It will address the massive Chinese ingress into the various Asian sub-regions like the Greater Middle East, South-Central Asia and Indo-Pacific as major policy objectives/compulsions. Will President Biden bluntly confront China as President Trump did; will he co-opt it for larger bilateral and universal benefit or will he just try to contain and manage its rise? Regardless, he will block all Chinese challenges to the US' singular position as the sole economic power and hegemon of the world.

US' Afghan policy, a subset of its overall Asia policy, will determine the strategic direction/fate of its Afghan campaign.

President Biden will only continue with the Afghan Campaign if it contributes directly to achieving his major policy objectives in Asia of, at the least, containing and managing the rise of China; the strategic implication being stemming the BRI-CPEC-China's economic juggernaut! Could there then be a paradigm shift in the objectives of the US Afghan campaign-from counter terrorism to containing China and its BRI-CPEC? If so, then the badly mis-firing Afghan campaign might yet get rejuvenated and reinforced; else President Biden might just cut his losses and make a clean break.

Shibli Faraz says Broadsheet case reveals opposition's lies

Afghanistan is located at the confluence of the three Asias-West, Central and South. This central position affords any power (currently the US) occupying it unblemished spheres of influence and strategic reach into these regions. Geopolitically, by egressing Afghanistan the US will lose these and other geopolitical, geostrategic and geo-economic advantages. China will be left unopposed in the region. The resultant vacuum will cause the regional powers-China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan (CRIP), to gravitate purposefully towards Afghanistan; even peripheral India will have pretensions. China will be keen to incorporate Afghanistan into its BRI-CPEC and create an interconnected and economically interdependent network between the three Asias through it. Afghanistan could potentially become the BRI's fulcrum, it's pivot in this region. Russia too will re-engage Afghanistan. Pakistan and Iran will remain crucial to Afghanistan's prosperous future. Geo-economically, leaving Afghanistan will deny the US close oversight on the BRI-CPEC and its East-West and North-South trade corridors across the region and...