India’s Ministry of External Affairs on Monday condemned Pakistan's recent airstrikes on Afghanistan, which caused civilian casualties.

 “We have noted the media reports on airstrikes on Afghan civilians including women and children, in which several precious lives have been lost,” Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement.

“We unequivocally condemn any attack on innocent civilians. It is an old practice of Pakistan to blame its neighbours for its own internal failures. We have also noted the response of an Afghan spokesperson in this regard,” he added.

Nearly two weeks ago, bombardment by Pakistani military aircraft in Afghanistan's eastern Paktika province killed at least 46 people, most of whom were children and women.

The Islamic Emirate said it retaliated targeting several points across the Durand Line.

Farmers in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar have taken a solid step towards replacing poppy fields with pistachio plantations.

Local officials said that so far, 115 tons of pistachios have been harvested from 150 hectares of cultivated land.

They said pistachio farming is proving to be an effective alternative to poppies and that the local government is trying hard to encourage farmers to plant pistachio trees.

Most pistachio production occurs in countries with arid climates.

Turkey, Iran, Italy, and Syria are the principal pistachio producing countries, outside the United States and pistachio nuts are grown mainly for export in those countries.

Trees are also grown in Pakistan, Greece, India, and Australia.

According to some local farmers, they tend their pistachio orchards daily and employ between 30 and 60 workers.

Some farmers in Kandahar said however that establishing a pistachio orchard was costly and urged the Islamic Emirate government to assist them.

Officials from Kandahar’s Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock said pistachio farming was a good alternative to poppy cultivation. They in turn called on former poppy farmers to consider planting pistachio trees.

Pistachio trees can live up to 300 years, but they take five to seven years to begin producing nuts.

They are alternate-bearing, meaning that the harvest is heavier in some years than others.

Peak production is reached around 20 years.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview before exiting the White House that he would not make any apologies for having ending the war in Afghanistan.

Speaking to The New York Times, ahead of the Biden administration's exit, he said: “Americans don’t want us in conflict. They don’t want us in war. We went through 20 years where we had hundreds of thousands of Americans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

“People were tired of that, understandably. Well, when President Biden was vice president, he presided over the end of our engagement in Iraq. As president, he ended the longest war in our history, Afghanistan," he said.

The NYT journalist asked how the Afghanistan "failure" damaged America's credibility.

"First, I make no apologies for ending America’s longest war. This, I think, is a signal achievement of the president’s. The fact that we will not have another generation of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan, that’s an important achievement in and of itself," Blinken responded. 

He did however state that “in every possible way, the manner in which this (the withdrawal) was done and the state in which Afghanistan has been left could not have been what the United States desired."

"There was never going to be an easy way to extricate ourselves from 20 years of war. I think the question was what we were going to do moving forward from the withdrawal. We also had to learn lessons from Afghanistan itself," Blinken added.

The Biden administration was hit with pushback after the chaotic withdrawal. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan even reportedly offered to resign over the decision, according to The Washington Post's David Ignatius.

Sullivan also reportedly had concerns about the exit, but ultimately said it would have been challenging no matter what they did.

"You cannot end a war like Afghanistan, where you’ve built up dependencies and pathologies, without the end being complex and challenging," Sullivan told the Post columnist. "The choice was: Leave, and it would not be easy, or stay forever."

Sullivan added that "leaving Kabul freed the [United States] to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in ways that might have been impossible if we had stayed."