By Stephen Blank (12/5/2001 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: Of the making of international quagmires there seems to be no end.  Afghanistan is only the latest example where governments have failed or disintegrated due to their own belligerence, leaving the international community no choice but to reconstitute public order lest humanitarian disaster and war endlessly ravage it. As in many other previous cases, Afghanistan’s prognosis, despite the undoubted progress of the Bonn conference on establishing a future government, is guarded.

By Maria Sultan (12/5/2001 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: Asymmetry of firepower has always been both a goal in itself and a method of war for powerful states, who have felt the desire to have a leading edge over their adversaries’ capacity to fight. However, the logic of the use of asymmetry of power in itself understandably leads to an asymmetric response by the weaker party. The most obvious examples of different actors turning to fight such asymmetric wars, from the American perspective, is the Viet Cong, which in the early stages of the conflict was repeatedly defeated by overwhelming US power, but turned it into an eventual success due to its use of asymmetric methods of war, making use of terrain, local population, ambushes, i.

By Jyldyz Sydygalieva (12/5/2001 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: During the Soviet era, the Kyrgyz Republic was a major source of uranium for both military and industrial purposes. There are approximately 130 sites in Kyrgyzstan containing about 620 million cubic meters of waste products that were buried during the Soviet time, mostly from the mining industry. About half of these sites contain waste from nuclear production - an industry that most Kyrgyz citizens were not aware had existed within their territory because it was kept a secret by the Soviet authorities.