Oriental Review

Can Petraeus repeat the Iraq story?

M.K. BHADRAKUMAR (India) A stronger United States President than Barack Obama would have probably given a dressing down to his commander in Afghanistan Stanley McChrystal for his team’s indiscretion in making tendentious remarks to the embedded journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, and then ordered him to get on with his job of “degrading” the Taliban. [...]

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The Opium Problem in Afghanistan and Russia at the End of the 20th Century

Nikita Mendkovich (Russia) Najibullah’s Kabul regime fell in 1992. Its defeat was a logical outcome of the termination of Russia’s material and technical support as US funding of the mujahedeen continued virtually unchanged even after Soviet forces withdrew. Unfortunately a new regime could not bring stability to the country: the commanders of the anti-Soviet troops [...]

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Kyrgyzstan is the latest drama in the Central Asian Great Power Game

Adrian PABST (UK) Last week’s outburst of mass violence in southern Kyrgyzstan killed thousands and displaced around 400,000 ethnic Uzbeks – with most lacking any humanitarian aid and 100,000 now in temporary camps in neighbouring Uzbekistan. Representing about 15% of the Kyrgyzstan’s 5.6 million population, ethnic Uzbeks are the victims of pogroms staged by shadowy [...]

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Episode 3. Assassination in Sarajevo (I)

Nikolay Starikov (Russia) “The Austrian and Russian emperors should not dethrone one another and pave the road to revolution.” Archduke Franz Ferdinand It was an ordinary, unremarkable visit by a senior leader of the Empire to one of its central cities. And for us, it would not be the slightest bit interesting, if not for [...]

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Strategy For Balkanization of Pakistan

Gulam Mitha (Canada) My generation, the baby boomers, was trained to think but the progressive generations are being trained to let a select few think. The control and brainwashing role has been delegated to the media, the voice of all politicians, over the past 20 years through disinformation. In the futuristic book, the Time Machine, [...]

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The Afghan Drug Threat As It Is

Alexander BARENTSEV (Russia) On 9-10 June Moscow hosted the forum ‘Afghan Drug Production-a Challenge to the International Community’. The event brought together participants from over 40 countries, including delegates from the UN, SCO, CSTO, NATO. Among the high-ranking participants there were Mr. Antonio Costa, Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); [...]

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“The War is Worth Waging”: Afghanistan’s Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas

Michel CHOSSUDOVSKY (Canada) The 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has been presented to World public opinion as a “Just War”, a war directed against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, a war to eliminate “Islamic terrorism” and instate Western style democracy. The economic dimensions of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) are rarely mentioned. The [...]

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Afghanistan’s Donor Strategy Crisis

Rudik ISKUZHIN (Russia) On commission from the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (March 2010 session of the Committee on Social and Cultural Issues in Palau), a delegation from the Russian Parliament began addressing the effectiveness of international financial aid in the reconstruction of Afghanistan in conjunction with Afghan Members of Parliament. As part of that discussion, the [...]

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Osh Massacre and International Politics

Andrei ARESHEV (Russia) The massacre in Osh, a city in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan, will have far-reaching consequences for entire Central Asia. There is an array of causes behind the recent developments in Kyrgyzstan. Some of the watchers charge that the clashes were provoked by supporters of the ousted Kyrgyz president K. Bakiev and [...]

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Outside Agitation In Kyrgyzstan

Peter CHAMBERLIN (USA) In Kyrgyzstan, we see the democratic-revolutionary counterpart to America’s “intelligence-driven wars”—rumor-driven confrontations. It can be clearly seen in the so-called “ethnic-conflict” in southern Kyrgyzstan, where ethnic and cultural differences are being amplified by unknown forces firing machine guns from untagged vehicles, young women and old ladies screaming or whispering the right phrases [...]

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Who Will Stop Civil War in Afghanistan?

During the last weeks Afghanistan is smoothly getting back to international focus. There were so many interesting events scarcely covered by the mainstream media around Afghan affairs. We will try to scrutinize the situation, analyze real motives of the key players and elaborate a forecast on what will happen next in that long-suffering land. First [...]

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Weak Europe

Andrei KONUROV (Russia) The world is facing a second wave of the global economic meltdown, with Europe being in the front line of it. And no matter how hard the European officials try to calm the world by saying that the European Central Bank is able to solve all financial problems of the worst affected [...]

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