[KhaamaPress] Could Afghanistan Be Heading Toward Another Civil War? New Report Warns of Growing Instability in the country.
Japan-based news outlet Nikkei Asia has warned that escalating tensions between Kabul and Islamabad, combined with unsuccessful Chinese mediation efforts, could further destabilize Afghanistan and increase the risk of renewed civil conflict.
In a report published Friday, the outlet said continued festivities between the two sides and growing military activity by anti-Taliban ...mindless ferocity in a turban... groups were complicating Afghanistan’s security situation. It warned that the current trajectory could strengthen opposition groups and undermine prospects for lasting peace.
Nikkei Asia pointed to recent festivities involving the Afghanistan Freedom Front and Taliban forces as an indication that gangs opposing Taliban rule are continuing or expanding their military operations.
The report also highlighted the failure of China-led efforts to ease tensions between Kabul and Islamabad. Beijing has hosted or facilitated several rounds of discussions, including meetings in 2025 and weeklong talks in Urumqi in April 2026, urging both sides to prevent further escalation and pursue a comprehensive agreement. However,
alcohol has never solved anybody's problems. But then, neither has milk... the efforts have not produced a lasting settlement.
Two Pak government officials told Nikkei Asia that the failure of peace efforts could encourage anti-Taliban groups to intensify their attacks. One official reportedly said opposition groups might see the continuing deadlock between Pakistain and the Taliban as an opportunity to expand their activities if tensions between the two sides worsen.
Analysts cited in the report said prolonged confrontation with Pakistain could weaken the Taliban’s position. They also cautioned, however, that a rapid resolution through Chinese mediation remained uncertain, with any breakthrough depending on both sides’ willingness to reach an agreement.
The dispute between Pakistain and the Taliban has centred largely on cross-border militancy. Islamabad accuses the Taliban authorities of allowing the Pak Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP), to operate from Afghanistan territory, an allegation Kabul denies. The dispute has contributed to repeated border festivities, Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s and diplomatic tensions.
Nikkei Asia warned that continued fighting, alongside increased activity by armed opposition groups, could reverse efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and raise the risk of wider violence, including a return to civil war. The report presents this as a potential outcome rather than a confirmed or inevitable development.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Dmitry Gubin
[Regnum] "The city of Dobropolye has been liberated by the troops of the Center group," Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov reported to Supreme Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin on October 16.
"Search operations are currently underway to identify and eliminate individual Ukrainian servicemen hiding in the basements of buildings," the Chief of the General Staff added during a meeting at the Joint Group of Forces' auxiliary command post.
The actions of the Russian assault forces were coordinated and, despite the transformation of Dobropolye into a fortified area, allowed them to encircle the enemy and capture the city, TASS quotes Putin as saying.
The Supreme Commander-in-Chief called the capture of the city a significant event. "During a special military operation, this opens a direct path to reaching the borders of the DPR," Putin stated.
The city is located in the northwestern part of the DPR, in the steppe on the left bank of the Byk River. Its location made it a key defensive hub for the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the approaches to the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk "fortress."
RUSSIAN FARM PARASKOVEEVKA
The liberation of Dobropillia brings to mind a short but instructive story about how industrial development transforms a hopeless place into a full-fledged city, and, unfortunately, this process may be reversible.
People settled in these areas only about two centuries ago. It is known for certain that the land there belonged to the landowner Albansky, whose name can be found on the list of nobles of the Bessarabian province.
It was on his estate in 1859 that the Paraskoveyevka farmstead was registered, named, according to local historians, after one of the owner's relatives. It had four households and 44 residents. Three years later, after the abolition of serfdom, seven serfs there received four dessiatines of land each, leaving 19 households with nothing.
Paraskoveyevka would have remained an ordinary hamlet if not for coal deposits discovered nearby in the 1870s and 1880s. At that time, no Albanian nobles lived in the area: 28 dessiatines belonged to local peasants, the rest belonged to landowners, including the Enin family. Ivan Enin took advantage of the geologists' research and decided to begin mining coal for personal use and for sale. Thus, the first mine was established in the area.
STEIGER AND RAZGON
Along with Russian industrialists, foreign capital also arrived in the Donbass in the late 1870s. Belgian firms showed particular interest in the mineral resources in the area of Bakhmut (modern-day Artemovsk), Konstantinovka, and Yenakiyevo.
In 1910, the Russian-Belgian Society began exploiting the Erastovsky mine, around which a settlement arose (now the settlement of the Almaznaya mine, formerly the Red Army mine within the city limits of Dobropolye). Land was leased long-term from landowners and a wealthy peasant named Razgon. In 1912, engineer Grebenev and foreman Podolsky founded the Svyatogorsk mine, named after the nearby village.
Another settlement arose near the nearby railway station, named Dobropillya, hence the name of the future city.
There's no definitive explanation for the origin of the name. It's believed to derive from the expression "good field," but the soil around the present-day city isn't known for its "goodness"—its fertility. One possible explanation is that the name served as a kind of amulet, based on the principle that "whatever this place is called, so will life be." There are numerous examples of such positive toponymy in the Donbas, Novorossiya, and the Sloboda lands. For example, there are seven villages named Blagovatnoye in the Kharkiv Oblast, four villages of the same name in the Donetsk People's Republic, five in the Kherson Oblast, and three in the Zaporizhia Oblast. Not far from Dobropillia are Raigorodok, Rai-Aleksandrivka, and the village of Prelestnoye.
The line on which Dobropolye station grew was built from Grishino station in 1915 specifically for the shipment of coal from the Erastovsky and Svyatogorsky mines.
The Belgian company left no fond memories among the residents of these villages. The endless workday, the system of fines and short-changes, and the manual labor without basic mechanization led to strikes.
During the First World War, these places were deep in the rear; almost a thousand miles separated the mining settlements from the front line; miners and railway workers had a reserve, and only residents of nearby villages were subject to mobilization.
During the Civil War, the villages changed hands several times.
On February 2, 1920, the surrounding lands were confiscated from the landowners, and the process of nationalization of the Svyatogorsk and Erastovsky mines began.
"THEY RAISED THE MINERS TO REVOLT"
It wasn't until around 1931 that modernization of the existing mines and construction of a new one, Dobropolskaya, began. Then came the opening of a hospital and two secondary schools to replace the one elementary school. In 1935, the surrounding villages were merged into the Dobropolsky District.
With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, Dobropillia actively prepared for the front to approach. Mining equipment was dismantled and transported to Kazakhstan. Many miners were also evacuated there.
On October 19, 1941, the village was occupied by the Nazis. An underground organization remained there, but it was quickly betrayed by local traitors, and resistance remained unorganized until January 1942, when the 5th Cavalry Corps of Major General Andrei Grechko (the future Marshal and Minister of Defense) drove the Germans out of Dobropillia—but, alas, not for long. Over the course of a month, until February 20, the town changed hands twice.
During this time, Soviet fighters managed to create a partisan group in Dobropillia, led by Comrade Taradaiko. For a year, it successfully resisted Nazi attempts to restore coal production, cutting off communications and throwing guards at the "Gigant" mine down the shaft.
This group joined the advancing Red Army units on February 10, 1943. But this liberation of Dobropillia was also short-lived—lasting only ten days. Until the final purge of Germans in September, the local population actively resisted the Nazi terror.
"In the Dobropolsky and Selydovsky districts, under the leadership of Litvinenko, secretary of the underground party organization of the workers' settlement of Kurakhovka, a sabotage group was actively operating, " wrote Ivan Omelyanenko, an associate professor at Donetsk University and a veteran of the Great Patriotic War." The group carried out a number of sabotage operations, disrupting enemy telephone and telegraph communications. On September 8, when Red Army units were 6 kilometers from Kurakhovka, the group roused the village population and workers of Mine No. 38 to an armed uprising."
WHAT KIND OF ZHDANOV DO YOU NEED?
When the 279th Rifle Division of the Southwestern Front drove the enemy out of Dobropillia on September 9, 1943, ending the Nazi occupation, the consequences of the German scorched earth tactics became evident. The mines were flooded, and the industrial infrastructure was destroyed.
The restoration of industries and urban neighborhoods proceeded at an accelerated pace. Less than a year after liberation, in 1944, the mines began producing coal, schoolchildren returned to school, and the city club opened.
To ensure the smooth operation of industrial enterprises in Dobropillia, organized resettlement was carried out both from surrounding villages and from the Vinnytsia and Zhitomir regions.
On August 18, 1953, the workers' settlements were united into the city of Dobropillya with a population of 18 thousand residents.
At the same time, the year of Stalin's death, the enrichment plant was commissioned. The settlement of Zhdanovsky began to develop around it.
Incidentally, in the early 1990s, this settlement was “renamed without being renamed”—instead of being named after the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Mariupol native Andrei Zhdanov, it began to be named in honor of its famous fellow countryman, Academician Viktor Zhdanov, a native of the village of Svyatogorovka, who was the first in the USSR to study AIDS.
THE TROLLEYBUS GOES THROUGH THE VILLAGE
Industrial development transformed Dobropillya from a few workers' settlements into a fully-fledged city. In 1959, coking coal deposits were discovered nearby. Construction began on mines No. 1 "Vodyanskaya" and No. 3 "Dobropillya," named after the 21st Congress of the CPSU. But what distinguished the city from all its neighbors appeared a little later.
On August 23, 1968, trolleybus service opened in Dobropillya. As a result, it became one of the smallest cities in the world and the smallest in the USSR to have trolleybus lines. This distinctive feature remained in Dobropillya until 2011, after which only regular minibuses remained.
At the beginning of 1980, the city had a production association, Dobropolyeugol, consisting of nine coal mines, a processing plant, a reinforced concrete products and structures plant, a bread factory, and a dairy plant.
According to the 1979 census, 32,500 people lived in the city, and Dobropillia reached its peak in 1993, when, according to local statisticians, the population reached 41,000.
From that point on, the population steadily declined—depopulation became common in Ukrainian single-industry towns where production facilities closed in the post-Soviet era.
THE FIRST LINE OF RESISTANCE
In the spring of 2014, protests against the coup in Kyiv and for self-determination took place in Dobropillya, as throughout the Donbas. This mining town in the northwest of the DPR was one of the first to experience the Kyiv-style "anti-terrorist operation." As early as April 9, 2014, Ukrainian Armed Forces tanks were spotted near Dobropillya, moving toward Donetsk. This was despite the fact that the "ATO" was officially declared by acting President Oleksandr Turchynov only on April 13.
Despite threats from neo-Nazis, in May 2014, a referendum on self-determination for the Donetsk Republic was held in Dobropillya, as throughout the DPR. This referendum confirmed the residents' unwillingness to remain in the same state as the ideological heirs of the Banderites.
But by early summer, the city was already under Ukrainian occupation and the National Battalions. The village near the Mertsalovo railway station, 12 kilometers east of Dobropillia, became the line of resistance. According to reports from June 13, 2014, a local DPR militia unit fought with the support of BTR-80 armored personnel carriers and a Grad MLRS. But the forces were clearly unequal—under enemy fire, the militia fighters were forced to retreat.
The Dobropillya region long served as a rear base for the Ukrainian army in the occupied part of the DPR. After the start of the Second World War, when the line of contact began to shift from Donetsk north and northwest, Dobropillya became an important hub in the immediate rear of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, supplying the Ukrainian forces in the cities of Krasnoarmeysk and Dimitrov (Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in Kyiv's terminology).
In the underground premises of six mines and two processing plants, the Ukrainian Armed Forces stored ammunition for almost the entire group in the occupied part of Donbas.
With the liberation of the Krasnoarmeysk-Mirnograd agglomeration and the Russian army's advance toward Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, Dobropillya began to rapidly "lose its strategic value," as the enemy command puts it. The liberation of the city and the continued advance of the Russian Armed Forces opens the possibility of Dobropillya's revival—after its restoration, it's quite possible that trolleybuses will be restored.
[NationalReview] Economic nostalgia has proven a potent force in modern American politics. Social media feeds are filled with decades-old receipts and price tags to show how cheap things used to be. Populists in both parties allege that most families can no longer support themselves on one parent’s income as they once did. Many claim that the essential components of a middle-class lifestyle have become less affordable over the past several decades.
For the most part, this message resonates with Americans. Consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, is at a record low in 2026, having collapsed from pre-pandemic levels that mirrored the late-20th-century highs. The high and rising cost of living dominates polls of voters’ most important issues. For many adults, the 1980s and ’90s were the golden age of affordability — at least within their living memory — and everything has gone downhill since.
These are claims that deserve scrutiny. By any metric, Americans’ incomes have risen significantly since the late 20th century, both in nominal terms and adjusted for inflation. There is legitimate debate over how much incomes have grown, but not over whether they’re higher than they used to be. We can check hourly compensation, weekly earnings, personal income per capita, median personal income, median household income, median family income, or any other relevant metric. All the lines point in the same direction.
Yet rising incomes, even inflation-adjusted, do not necessarily mean that the standard middle-class lifestyle has become more affordable. For one, a larger percentage of married couples now have two earners than in the 1970s and earlier, which naturally boosts household income. Two workers can afford to buy more things than one worker, of course, but it’s hard to call that a gain in broad affordability. The components of the Consumer Price Index, which measures general inflation, may also not line up with a typical family’s budget over time.
Nor can we wave away affordability concerns by pointing to technological progress. Yes, Americans now enjoy far more modern luxuries, such as air conditioning and cellphones, at far lower prices than they once did. But these conveniences never made up a large share of households’ budgets, so their value is purely additive. The question at hand is whether the essential facets of life have gotten costlier for families.
To answer this, we must look at the consumption side of Americans’ ledger, not just the income side. This approach can show how households’ spending in different categories has changed over time. We should also hold the type of household fairly constant, as the country’s composition of living arrangements has changed dramatically since the 1970s: more childless single people, fewer married parents.
Fortunately, the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has decades of data on consumer expenditures by category and breaks them down further by household type. If a standard middle-class household can be defined as married couples with children — excluding childless married couples and single parents — data are available for this group from 1972—73 onward. The most recent data are from 2024, allowing us to look at regular ten-year intervals. Throughout this article, I select past comparison years that best reflect the overall trend, as shown below.
Using artificial intelligence, I collected the relevant data and converted all figures to 2024 dollars by adjusting for inflation. Pretax income numbers for each year are also available, so we can also calculate each spending category’s share of household income over time. With that, let’s dig into how the budget needed to support a typical American family has changed since the periods we remember most fondly.
A neat visual at the link of inflation-adjusted costs (1984-2024)— which may or may not be paywalled for you, dear Reader, but I have only two more free articles this month — shows pretax income up 76%, but education up 134%, healthcare up 121%, housing up 31%, entertainment up 14%, transportation up 11%, food up 8%, but clothing down 44%. But that is change within categories. separate from portion of income.
THE UNDENIABLE IMPROVEMENTS
In many categories, expenses as a share of household income have gone down since the ’80s, even as overall spending has gone up.
Includong the categories listed above, in 1972-73 the total was 67% of income, in 1984 was 77% of income, in 2024 was just 53% against average pretax incomes in 1972 of $110,570, 1984 of $95,600, and 2024 of $168,471.
THE LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES
At last, we reach the consumption categories where economic nostalgia contains a genuine point. And unfortunately, they’re some of the big ones.
Take health care. In 1984, families spent an average of $3,654 per year on health insurance and out-of-pocket medical expenses combined, or 3.8 percent of pretax income. In 2024, they spent $8,090 on those categories, or 4.8 percent of income.
Health care has gotten a lot better over the past few decades, of course. Technological and pharmaceutical advances have raised life expectancy and survival rates for many diseases, and those advances cost money. But for most families, higher health-care spending that’s been socialized from sick patients feels like a loss in everyday living standards. And there’s strong evidence that health-care prices have been inflated even beyond what improvements in quality might justify.
Then, there’s the elephant in the room: Since 1972—73, total spending on housing has risen from $23,287 per family to $34,655 — the largest absolute increase ($11,368) of any category by far. Because of growth in income, however, families are actually spending a lower share on housing than they did a half century ago. Within the broad housing bucket, spending on shelter — which includes mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance — rose from $11,468 to $20,522. Spending on occupant-owned homes specifically (excluding rented dwellings and other lodging) increased from $7,832 per year to $15,036.
Some of that increase has been counteracted by falling costs for other housing-related expenditures. Electricity, other utilities, and household furnishings have all become more affordable in both inflation-adjusted dollars and relative to earnings. But housing is still the greatest burden on family budgets, eating up a fifth of pretax income. The second-largest category, transportation, is approximately half that share.
Importantly, higher spending on housing is not due to mortgage rates. Anyone who was around in the 1970s and ’80s can tell you rates were much higher then — even as they rise again today. The main burden, rather, is the home prices that show up in mortgage payments (paying off principal is counted as asset accumulation, so only interest costs appear in the consumption data), as well as in property taxes and other charges. Those underlying prices have been going up ever since the 2008 housing crash, even adjusted for general inflation. From 2020 to 2022, they went kaboom! to record highs.
Critics will respond that homes have gotten much larger and better than in the past, and in fact they have. The typical floor area of a new single-family house is now more than 2,100 square feet, compared to around 1,500 in 1973. When adjusting for residents per household, living space has almost doubled.
Yet part of the issue is that home sizes across the board may have gotten too big. The percentage of new houses under 1,400 square feet has collapsed from 40 percent in 1972—73 to under 10 percent in the 2020s. Traditional three-bedroom homes have been increasingly displaced by those with four or more bedrooms. Starter homes such as duplexes, triplexes, and townhouses have been zoned out of existence in many neighborhoods, and minimum lot sizes push up the size — and thus the cost — of single-family detached homes.
For families who are already settled in a home with a low mortgage rate and built-up equity, housing costs aren’t top of mind. But for younger Americans trying to grab the first rung of the housing ladder, the current combination of home prices and interest rates is very daunting. Since the early 1980s, housing affordability for new buyers truly isn’t what it used to be.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...
