... keen interest in Afghanistan. Speculations abound regarding the future of strategic installations such as Bagram Air Base. The U.S. has longstanding objectives in the region: monitoring Iran, containing Russia and China, and managing influence over Central Asia. The possibility that the Taliban, under duress from economic collapse, might offer base access to the U.S. in exchange for recognition or sanctions relief cannot be ruled out.
Such a scenario would fundamentally alter the region’s balance of power and revive the era of proxy ...
... this excitement has largely died down. For example, the well-known extremist party Hizb ut-Tahrir [
3
] criticizes the Taliban for “refusing to go beyond Afghan borders, curtailing jihad and withdrawing support from the oppressed in Western China, Central Asia and Palestine.” The group argues that radicals from the region had expected the Taliban to help “
erase colonial borders
and restore Islamic rule, but instead, their actions play into the hands of the enemies, leading Afghan Muslims astray as they can no longer distinguish between good and evil.” It is fair to assume that further ...
The value of any potential deal with the Taliban is apparently not entirely clear to Russia, China or any of the Central Asian countries
The value of any potential deal with the Taliban is apparently not entirely clear to Russia, China or any of the Central Asian countries. As a rule, they combine active diplomacy towards Afghanistan with active military preparations, writes Valdai Club expert Vasily Kashin.
The defeat and abrupt ...
The bigger threat facing the Central Asian countries is not the possibility of an invasion by the Taliban or other more radical groups but rather the example set by the Taliban with their recent success
The rise to power of the Taliban (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) in August 2021 has raised a number of questions about how the world ...
... indirectly by aiding Al-Qaeda) [
9
]. Officially, the Taliban claim they will not wage war against Central Asian regimes (this claim was repeated during the Taliban representatives’ visit to Moscow in the summer of 2021). Indeed, there had been no direct Taliban incursions into Central Asia in the 1990s, when the Taliban approached the borders of the former Soviet republics. Yet, the Taliban, via Al-Qaeda, have always actively supported the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian extremist groups, maintaining ...
