The United States wants to significantly expand traffic on the Northern Distribution Network, the rail, road and air network that ferries supplies across Central Asia to US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. As Pentagon planners and commercial carriers contemplate their transit options, attention is focusing on Turkmenistan.
The United Nations is struggling to remain relevant in Afghanistan. At the heart of the UN’s challenge is a growing perception that it has lost the trust and respect of Afghan leaders, as well as considerable segment of the general public.
At a time when Uzbekistan was under European Union sanctions relating to the Andijan massacre, the German government paid 67.9 million euros from 2005-2009 for use of the Termez air base in the Central Asian nation.
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.
Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of US military forces in Afghanistan, asserted during a recent US Senate hearing that American troops had made sufficient progress against Islamic militants to proceed with a plan to hand over responsibility for security to the Afghan government by 2014.
US Special Operations Forces have permission to enter Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on a “case-by-case” basis when conducting counter-terrorism operations.
A controversial, opaque US defense initiative to make payments to Taliban fighters who renounce violence has been extended until September 2012. While a large, but unspecified amount of funding is devoted to the program, no one appears to be keeping track of how the money is being spent.
More than nine years after Taliban militants were driven from power in Kabul, women in Afghanistan are making slow but steady progress in their effort to secure basic rights.
About 8 million Afghans, or more than one out of every four residents of the war-torn country, are in acute need of humanitarian assistance. The best way to meet this tremendous demand is through long-term investment in Afghanistan’s sustainable development.
