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Afghanistan
Michael Rubin: The Taliban Are Planning Their Move On Central Asia
2022-10-03
[19Fortyfive] Throughout the two-decade U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Kremlin played a double game. President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
Among those whom the Taliban brought to Kabul [on August 20] were Haji Forqan, the leader of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement; Mawlawi Ibrahim, the head of the Ansarullah Jamaat of Tajikistan; Shaikh Zakir, the head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; and Abdul Haq Uighuri, the head of the Al Qaeda branch in northern Afghanistan.
did not want the United States to win for that would humiliate Russia that, as the Soviet Union, lost a brutal war in Afghanistan. He also did not want the United States to lose, for that could mean the empowerment of the Taliban
...Arabic for students...
 and the export of its extremism into the former Soviet states of Central Asia. This led to contradictions in which Russia leveraged its influence to expel the United States from Central Asian bases and cultivated the Taliban while simultaneously facilitating logistical routes across Russian territory to keep the American war going. As far as the Russians were concerned, the ideal scenario was for both the United States and Taliban to bleed each other dry into perpetuity.
Posted by:trailing wife

#1  I hope Russia and Afghanistan and China have fun playing the great game until the last man is standing.
Posted by: ruprecht   2022-10-03 22:41  

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