Taliban seize strategic Afghan district in Ghazni province

Taliban fighters have seized control of a strategic district in the Afghan province of Ghazni, officials say.

Insurgents killed about 70 villagers after taking Ajrestan district late on Thursday night after a week of battle.

A spokesman for the provincial governor said 15 people suspected of collaborating with authorities were beheaded, including women.

The Taliban is active in many parts of Ghazni, an important gateway to the capital, Kabul, from the south-east.

Fighting is continuing as security forces try to regain the district but officials fear surrounding districts are now vulnerable to attack.

Strategic district

Some analysts say that control of Ajrestan also provides militants with a launching pad for attacks into adjacent provinces in the east of the country.

What’s Wrong with Pakistan?

Why geography — unfortunately — is destiny for South Asia’s troubled heartland.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Perversity characterizes Pakistan. Only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher on this year’s Failed States Index. The country is run by a military obsessed with — and, for decades, invested in — the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes. But despite an overbearing military, tribes “defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence,” as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas.