To the Editor: Joshua Kucera’s May 13 dispatch, “Kazakhstan: Washington Experts Go on Spin Cycle,” is misleading and unfair. The whole idea of organizing a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., was to allow serious people to examine Kazakhstan in a serious way.
In his door-stopper of a memoir, Known and Unknown, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spends just three pages recounting what he calls "one of the most unfortunate, if unnoticed, foreign policy mistakes of our administration."
Kazakhstan's recent presidential election – won by incumbent Nursultan Nazarbayev with an extraordinary 95.5 percent of the vote and an 89 percent turnout – was controversial in many quarters.
Now that the Los Angeles Lakers have been bumped from the National Basketball Association playoffs, Kobe Bryant, the team’s star, faces an off-the-court challenge. This winter, Bryant alienated a large segment of the Lakers’ fan base, members of California’s large Diaspora Armenian community, with a decision to endorse Turkish Airlines.
The Pentagon plans a major change in the way it supplies aviation fuel to the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan. The new arrangement is very bad news for the current contract holder, Mina Corp.
The death of Osama bin Laden “is a major victory” for the Obama administration, but it does not change the basic challenge that the United States faces in Afghanistan, US Sen. John Kerry said during a May 3 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Azerbaijan’s recent move to indefinitely postpone joint military exercises with the United States is a sign that bilateral strategic ties are stagnating, analysts in Baku believe. Some wonder whether the social-network-inspired unrest that has swept the Middle East and North Africa, and which has also touched Azerbaijan, played a role in Baku’s decision.
It’s been an open secret for months, but government leaders in Kyrgyzstan have finally come out into the open with their aim: Bishkek wants full control of a US contract to supply aviation fuel to the Manas Transit Center.
Anti-American sentiment is at record high levels in Afghanistan, a factor that promises to complicate what is already shaping up as a tricky transfer of security responsibilities from Western forces to indigenous military and law-enforcement entities.
