NATO and Afghan forces killed President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, one Yar Mohammed Karzai, 60 years old, during a night raid against suspected Taliban commanders. NATO and Afghan forces searched the village of Karz, the ancestral home of the Karzai clan and detained Farid Karzai, Yar Mohammed’s son’ under suspicions that he was a Taliban commander. […]
Charlie Rose put together an excellent conversation panel on General David Petraeus’ upcoming testimony to Congress. It features Retired General Jack Keane, columnist David Ignatius and James Shinn, a former policy maker, now academic at Princeton. The talk is lively, important, and perhaps most importantly, well worth your time. Please find the entire conversation here.
The United Nations annual summary of the state of civilian casualties was published earlier today, Wednesday March 9th. The data are appalling: 2777 civilians were killed in 2010-that’s a 15% increase in civilian casualties relative to the year previous. Most of the civilian deaths have come on the heels of brutal and sustained fighting in […]
Kazakhs walk past an election poster for President Nursultan Nazarbaev in Almaty last week. RFE/RL Kazakhstan is gearing up for a snap presidential vote on April 3, announced only one month ago and scheduled almost two years ahead of the originally planned 2012 election. There has been speculation whether president Nursuntan Nazarbayev’s decision to hold […]
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been in Afghanistan this week to assess how the expected July 2011 draw down will take place. There aren’t many surprises in store; the number of boots withdrawn is likely to be small-a token gesture, to begin the process of handing Afghanistan’s security to its own homegrown armed forces. […]
Tension is rising in Azerbaijan in the run-up to the 11 March “Great People’s Day.” The event was launched on facebook and has spread to other media, although specifics are somewhat vague, which seems to be a deliberate tactic. People are being urged to stage symbolic or actual protests “in a civil way without provocations” […]
President Hamid Karzai’ has rebuffed General Petraeus’ face to face personal apology for the misidentification of nine boys for wanted insurgents, and the subsequent slaughter that followed. President Karzai declared that “the people of Afghanistan are tired of these incidents and excuses, and condemnations cannot relieve their pain….I am asking you on behalf of the people […]
The news of nine boys killed by NATO helicopters has not travelled far or fast. The top story about that horrific turn in Afghanistan has been that General Petraeus has apologized to the Afghan people for the gruesome deaths. It seems the death of nine boys is hardly newsworthy enough to carry in the evening […]
TAPI Signatories in Ashgabat The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline or TAPI is a 1,680 km (1,050 m) natural gas line originating in the Daulatabad gas fields in southeastern Turkmenistan. It crosses Afghanistan and continues on through Pakistan ending in Fazilka, a northwestern Indian city close to the India-Pakistan border. TAPI is one of the largest pipelines in […]
Defense Minister of Afghanistan Abdul Rahim Wardak had an hour long conversation with noted interviewer Charlie Rose this past Friday evening. The conversation touched on everything that you might want to know about Afghanistan; how the Karzai administration intends to go work with President Obama impending draw down; what the interested reader and analyst concerned […]
Has former Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrossian been personally profiting from the Iranian narcotics trade? This is the conclusion that some people are drawing from a Wikileaks release on the Norwegian news site Aftenposten. The cable can be viewed here, and the story has gotten circulation on Armenian web sites, including PanArmenian.net, whose editors wrote the […]
Moments after seeing TV images of Vladimir Putin professing a liking for a then poorly rated white leopard as the Sochi Winter Olympics mascot, which was being chosen through a nationwide poll, my dad said: “Mark my words: that will be the one”. Funny how a lifetime spent living in Russia can develop one’s clairvoyance! […]
Uzbekistan is systematically sneaking electricity from Kazakhstan’s power grid beyond amounts agreed between the two parties, the Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company (KEGOC) claims. Kazakhstan has had tensions with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan off and on for the last ten years on electricity. Basically, there isn’t enough electricity for the latter two states during the winter. […]
Is the U.S. scaling back its military and political ambitions before the start of the July 2011 drawdown? The New York Times reported that the U.S military is withdrawing from its outpost in the Pech Valley, a post that it had previously thought crucial in its strategy to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. So, […]
A History of Inner Asia by Svat Soucek is a scholarly work about the history of Inner Asia which includes the present day five independent states of Central Asia (in historic terms also known collectively as Russian or Western Turkestan), Mongolia (Outer Mongolia) and China controlled Sinkiang (Eastern or Chinese Turkestan). It is not customary […]