Louise Arbour, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group writes in Foreign Policy that Central Asia may be in a list of "Next Year's Wars." Tajikistan faces both local and external insurgencies with little ability to cope with them, and relations with neighboring Uzbekistan have deteriorated over wate
President Islam Karimov attended the informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as well as a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Moscow December 19-20, although he made it absolutely clear prior to the meeting that he saw no need to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
Traffic continues to be stalled on the Termez-Kurgan-Tyube line as a result of an explosion on November 17 between the Galaba and Amuzang stations, Choihona reported citing the independent Tajik news service Asia-Plus.
An explosion on a railroad on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border was a "terrorist act," the Russian news service RIA Novosti reported. The explosion apparently occurred between the Galaba and Amuzang stations on the line between Termez, at the southern tip of Uzbekistan, and Kurgan-Tyube in Tajikistan.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov made a state visit to Pakistan November 14 and "agreed to expedite energy projects," in the cautious words of Pakistan's The Dawn.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) met in St. Petersburg on November 7 and appeared to continue its trajectory away from being a security group to an economic body, The Bug Pit reported. Tashkent has boycotted the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization, and didn't show up for the meeting about Afghanistan in Istanbul.
Turkmenistan seemed to come even closer to pledging support for construction of the Trans-Caspian pipeline last week, although it may have been a mirage in the desert still subject to the workings of commissions and committees devising frameworks and formulas.
Despite great expectations following talks in Tashkent last month between the Uzbek government and the US and German special envoys to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan did not show up at a meeting November 2 in Istanbul of foreign ministers from Afghanistan and its neighbors to discuss plans for stability in Central Asia after US and NATO troop withdrawal
