Every spring, as the Amu Darya floods, the border it marks with Turkmenistan moves deeper into this corner of northwestern Afghanistan.
Now, the river is as much as 25 kilometers farther south than it was 30 years ago in parts of Jawzjan Province. In the village of Yaz Ariq Dinar, just a stone's throw from the advancing border, fear runs high.
This week's visit by the US president's national-security adviser and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to Pakistan was portrayed as a feel-good trip that highlighted the high level of cooperation between Washington and Islamabad.
Former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev fled into exile in Belarus last month in the aftermath of a violent uprising that unseated his regime and saw an interim leadership installed.
BRUSSELS -- The European Parliament has called for greater EU involvement in the South Caucasus, including in efforts to resolve the region's frozen conflicts,
The call came in a nonbinding report adopted by the parliament, which underscores the European Union's vast potential in advancing stability and prosperity -- as well as its own interests -- in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
LASHKAR GAH -- Aziz Ahmad is a deeply worried man. With two wives and seven children at home, the 30-year-old farmer depends entirely on his opium-poppy crop to make a living.
This year, it's proving to be an increasingly difficult task. First, falling water tables stunted his crop. Then a mysterious blight emerged to destroy most of what remained.
Sources close to the strategic Uzbek conglomerate Zeromax claim the company's operations are being wound down by the government, RFE/RL's Uzbek Service reports.
The top US military commander in Afghanistan says this summer's planned operation to rid Kandahar of the Taliban will not put the city's population unduly at risk.
In Washington to accompany the visit of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, General Stanley McChrystal told reporters on May 13 that clearing the Taliban from Kandahar is central to winning the war in Afghanistan.
It's been five years since public protests in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon turned bloody.
What is now widely known as the "Andijon massacre" transpired when government forces opened fire on crowds of protesters who had been staging peaceful antigovernment demonstrations in the city for several days.
A proposed constitutional reform project could provide the answer for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's retirement plans once he leaves office in 2013, claims RFE/RL's Russian-language site Ekho Kavkaza.
Under the project, approved on May 11 by the State Constitutional Commission, Georgia's prime minister (and cabinet) would be chosen from its parliamentary majority. That individual would then "receive the right to define" the country's foreign and domestic policy. The prime minister's signature would be required on "substantial" documents signed by the president.
The president, meanwhile, would still be directly elected, and serve as commander-in-chief of the Georgian military and Georgia's chief representative abroad.
In "private conversations," members of the constitutional commission reportedly indicated to Ekho Kavkaza that the document "gives Mikheil Saakashvili the possibility to remain in power for several years more" if he runs for parliament.
Saakashvili's United National Movement currently holds a comfortable majority in parliament; fresh elections are set for 2012.
The project will head off on a European feedback tour before being put to a vote in parliament.
RFE/RL held a small press conference in Washington yesterday with Waheed Omer, Hamid Karzai's spokesman, and a representative from Freedom House. The official theme of the event was press freedom, and a discussion of Freedom House's new report that called Afghanistan's press "not free." But of course -- as anyone could have predicted -- the journalists who showed up were more interested in the visit of Karzai to Washington this week than (with all due respect to the fine people at Freedom House) a report on the Afghan media environment.
But when Omer had finished his defense of the state of press freedom in Afghanistan -- he argued that the country should not be judged by global standards, but in terms of how much progress it has made in the last ten years -- and it was the journalists' turn to ask questions, Omer clearly got flustered by the reporters' insistence on asking about Karzai's visit, such as what the Afghans hopes to bring up with the Americans. He protested (pdf):
"[T}hat is when you use freedom of expression in the wrong way because I was not prepared for this question."
The irony was not lost on the assembled reporters, several of whom responded "Freedom of the press! Free speech!" One suspects most reporters left with a distinct impression of the Afghan government's attitude to the press, and it wasn't the one Omer wanted.
