Remember when everyone from this blog to the Taliban was making a big deal of the news that Kazakhstan was sending some troops to Afghanistan? Well, that may have been a bit premature. It turns out that the Kazakh contingent will number... four:
"Under the agreement signed by Kazakhstan and NATO, the republic is going to send four servicemen to work at the ISAF headquarters in Afghanistan ... which means that we are not sending a contingent of the military forces, but we are joining in the international effort to help the Afghan government and parliament to ensure security and restore the peaceful life in this country," he [Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Askar Abdrakhmanov] said.
Those four, my colleague Joanna Lillis reports, include "two military analysts, one epidemiologist and one logistics expert." That's six less servicemembers than Luxembourg has deployed, and the same number as Iceland, which doesn't even have a military.
The Taliban, in their statement, bragged that "the dispatch of a few hundred troops will not change the fate of the invaders who are already on their way to defeat. Nor they will turn the defeat into victory." And if a few hundred troops wouldn't turn the tide, four desk jockeys certainly won't.
That said: Kazakhstan is still the only Central Asian country to provide even that small of a contribution, and it will no doubt be noted approvingly in Washington and Brussels.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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