Tajikistan

KHUJAND, Tajikistan -- Officials say a suicide car-bomb attack at a police station in the northern Tajik city of Khujand has killed at least one policeman and injured some 25 other people.

It would appear to be the first suicide bombing in the Central Asian country.

A major international manhunt is under way after dozens of enemies of the Tajik state broke out from prison this week, but you wouldn't know it from the official reaction.

At least 25 inmates, including alleged members of a militant Islamic group, escaped from a maximum-security prison in Tajikistan on August 23 in a series of events that left six guards dead. The fugitives were believed to be headed for the Rasht Valley, a remote area of eastern Tajikistan where Islamic militants have been active in the past.

Abu-Umar Ahmadov says most of the eight- to 16-year-old students in his evening and weekend classes on Islamic principles and ethics are sent to him by well-intentioned parents.

They merely want to keep their kids out of trouble.

Tashkent is expanding its de facto trade embargo against Dushanbe, levying new tariffs for trucks crossing the border, and continuing to delay train freight bound for Tajikistan. Seven months into the blockade, Tajik businessmen are hurting, and the government is worried about its long-term economic impact.

Ayni air base in Tajikistan was supposed to become a showpiece for India. In the mid-2000s, India's military began renovating the facility, and New Delhi appeared poised in 2006 to announced that Ayni had become operational. But four years later, the base sits largely dormant - an airfield without any fighter jets.

Having already been pummeled by rising fuel prices and political instability in recent months, the creation of a Customs Union among Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia threatens to deal yet another economic blow to Kyrgyzstan, and is exerting pressure on Bishkek to decide whether to cast its lot with Moscow or the West.

The Pentagon appears set to spend over $40 million on security infrastructure projects in Central Asia. The money for the building spree will come from US Central Command’s counter-narcotics fund.

The Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a Europe-to-Asia resupply route for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was promoted by its architects as an economic development vehicle that could promote cohesion among Central Asian states. Reality is proving vastly more problematic than American war planners anticipated, however.

Kyrgyzstan’s recent upheaval and the war in Afghanistan have obscured the fact that other important developments are occurring in Central Asia.