A note to my subscribers, and an announcement

I’m flattered, and embarrassed, to see that my almost-nonexistent substack has lately been accumulating more followers.

I can’t tell if this is in response to my tweets (which are almost always about current events in Afghanistan) or my comments on other people’s substacks (which are almost always about other topics—though I sometimes contrive to bore people by dragging Afghanistan into the conversation anyway).

But you’ll already have noticed that there’s not much content being posted here at the moment. I hope anyone who’s interested in Afghan affairs will follow me on Twitter, at least until that site implodes for good.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t find Twitter to be less useful than it was before the Musk takeover, perhaps because it still works as designed when most of your followers and followees are interested in a single, now rather obscure topic.

There’s no guarantee that will continue, but we live in hope.

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I’ve never claimed to be an expert on this country, although I lived here for five years during the war and am now in Kabul once again. But with the world’s engagement and attention all but completely withdrawn, I realized last year that it didn’t take much expertise to contribute in a useful way to the public debate—a debate in which facts became very scarce after August 2021.

(Not that they were so abundant before.)

Whatever value I’ve been able to add derives largely from being a small fish in an even smaller pond.

However, it may now be time for me to start writing about Afghanistan in longer form. And as I’ll explain, I’ve recently been invited to do so.

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My Twitter followers are aware that if there’s one subject I do know a certain amount about it’s the Fund for the Afghan People, which the US government set up just over a year ago to hold part of the reserves of Afghanistan’s central bank.

It’s been as much of a surprise to me as to anyone, but people really can learn a few things about the Afghan Fund by reading my threads, several of which have exposed serious problems that need to be addressed by the Biden administration.

If there were any journalists covering the Fund, they’d be doing this better than I could. But it seems there aren’t.

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I gather my tweets are read with interest by many Afghans, including some in high positions in the new government. And it seems they’re also read by a few of the overseas policymakers who have a hand in what goes on here.

(With rare exceptions the big shots don’t actually follow my account, which is understandable. To put it mildly, not everyone appreciates my takes.)

So I’m cautiously hopeful that what I’ve written, particularly about the Afghan Fund, might end up steering events in a positive direction. But Twitter has its limits, and I see those limits clearly whenever one of my lengthy threads requires cross-referencing other lengthy threads that appeared months earlier.

At this point even I don’t know what I know. There must be a better way.

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So I’m pleased to report that early next year, the Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies will be publishing a special issue on Afghanistan, to which the editors have kindly invited me to contribute an article on the Fund for the Afghan People.

I won’t name the other contributors but suffice it to say they’re much more famous than me. I’m very grateful to be included in their company.

As my tweets on this subject will have suggested, I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to say. That’s because there are a number of important questions about the Afghan Fund which have yet to be answered.

I hope some of the answers will arrive before my deadline does. And once the journal article is online, you’ll find a copy here.

Thank you for coming to my empty blog. I’ll try to make it less empty in future.