“Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban are teetering on the brink of a major crisis,” Afandyar Mir, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a Washington-based US government think tank, noted in a recent commentary. “After taking over the country, the Taliban gave the TTP de-facto political asylum. The TTP has used its improved political status in Afghanistan to step-up cross-border attacks and is now regularly sending fighters into Pakistan,” Mir said

Violent Extremism

Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Frederic C. Hof discusses his memoir about trying to achieve peace between Israel and Syria

“All of this goes to the bigger reality, I think, that the Russians simply do not want an offramp,” said Don Jensen, director of the Russia and Europe program at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Additionally, the Azerbaijani government has not recognized the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. As Mary Glantz, the U.S. State Department Senior Fellow at the United States Institute for Peace, explains, “Azerbaijan has a historically strong relationship with Ukraine, which has voiced support for the integrity of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”

The round table titled Political Reforms in Kazakhstan in the Context of Geopolitical Shifts gathered Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Central Asia at Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard University), Yerkin Tukumov, Director at Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, Gavin Helf, Senior Expert on Central Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace and Maureen Haggard, Office Director Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State.

"I believe that France has made considerable mistakes in its foreign policy in the Sahel and fails to look it in the mirror," Kamissa Camara, senior adviser for the Sahel at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C., told Newsweek.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor joined MTP Daily on set to discuss the war in Ukraine and the potential of Putin declaring war on May 9th.

A senior Shan analyst observed that China’s priority is “to stabilize the borderlands, and create an enabling environment for a border trade boom to deliver economic growth for their poorest provinces in their northwest, led by Yunnan.”