The Bug Pit
Russia's drug chief Viktor Ivanov has been complaining about the failure of U.S. antidrug efforts in Afghanistan for some time, and a while ago an analyst quoted in this blog (via the Christian Science Monitor) argued that these complaints were merely a pretext for Russia to be more involved with Central Asia.
Is U.S. military aid to Kyrgyzstan in some way to blame for the terrible violence there? That's what a blogger at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, asks.
The International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch have sent a letter to the UN Security Council asking for UN peacekeepers, including military forces, to be sent to southern Kyrgyzstan:
The evidence is mounting that Kyrgyzstan's military played a significant role in the ethnic violence against Uzbeks in Osh. Reports The Guardian:
Is it naive to hope that the U.S. and Russia will work together to help Kyrgyzstan?
Is Kyrgyzstan offering a new opportunity for the U.S. and Russia to work together on security issues? This is what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius argues:
Is Afghanistan more important to the U.S. than Azerbaijan? Shockingly, that may be true. Veteran Azerbaijan hand Thomas Goltz visited Baku just before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates did, and that's what an intelligence official told him:
Not everyone in Uzbekistan is happy with the fairly moderate statement on the violence in Osh that Tashkent made on Saturday, saying that the violence was provoked by "forces, whose interests are totally remote from the interests of the Kyrgyz people." I talked today with Sukhrobjon Ismailov, the ace Tashkent-based analyst who told me that many people in the Uzbekistan military and security services want to
The move by Kyrgyzstan's interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, to appeal for Russian military intervention to stop the ethnic violence in Osh and the rest of southern Kyrgyzstan, could be a geopolitical watershed for the country and for Central Asia in general. The last twenty years have shown that, when Russian troops intervene somewhere in Eurasia, they tend not to leave (see: Tajikistan, South Ossetia, Abkhazia).
When Uzbekistan agreed last week to pull its heavy weaponry out of Sokh (the Ferghana Valley exclave completely surrounded by Kyrgyzstan territory) it raised the obvious question of why, exactly when tensions were rising, that Tashkent would decide to downscale its military presence.