A slight, kalpak-wearing man from Afghanistan with weathered cheeks, Abduvali Abdulrashid looks out of place at a posh sushi joint in downtown Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital. He’s a one-man advocacy delegation, seeking Bishkek’s help so that roughly 1,500 ethnic Kyrgyz nomads in Afghanistan can migrate to their titular homeland.
Red Star Enterprises Ltd., the controversial ex-supplier of aviation fuel to the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, has lost full control of a lucrative fuel contract at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
While some NATO members may be skittish about the alliance’s continuing involvement in Afghanistan, Georgia remains firmly committed, and will soon rank as the mission’s largest non-NATO supplier of troops.
With the United States and its allies preparing for the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, a top British defense official who recently visited the region believes that British forces are close to securing overland transit routes via Central Asian states to extract military equipment.
Russia has reportedly blocked a U.S. plan designed to help stem the flow of drugs from Afghanistan through Central Asia in a sign of Moscow's continued wariness about Washington's intentions in a region often thought of as "Russia's backyard."
With the planned US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014 looming ever closer, Russia is pressing to solidify strategic relationships with Central Asian states, especially with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
U.S. President Barack Obama has announced a major policy shift in the size and strategic goals of the country's defense forces. The announcement comes at the end of America's long involvement in the Iraq war and within sight of the end of fighting in Afghanistan.
It would seem that the Northern Distribution Network, the main supply line for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is soon to become a two-way street.
Commercial logistics companies operating on the NDN are on standby to start moving non-lethal freight out of Afghanistan as soon as the end of this year, according to transport industry insiders.
Reporting out of Afghanistan is decidedly downbeat these days, intimating that the United States is entangled in an unwinnable war. The focus tends to be on what is not working in the country. This is perhaps understandable given that foreign correspondents often cover violence, death, and destruction in Afghanistan. But they aren’t seeing, for a variety of reasons, what is working.
After a decade of involvement in Afghanistan, it appears the United States hasn't learned a critical lesson. Warlordism has been a key component in driving the country's vicious cycle of violence. Yet as the drawdown of US and NATO troops proceeds, American policymakers find themselves reliant on warlord-led militias to fill security gaps.
