By Pavel Baev (4/24/2002 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: The Pankisi Gorge is only a tiny blip on Pentagon’s global map of the counter-terrorist operation. The information about direct links between the Chechen resistance and the Taliban (and even bin Laden personally), eagerly supplied by Moscow, has never been particularly reliable. There is, however, sufficient evidence to assume that a few dozen Arab fighters have indeed taken part in the Chechen War, using Pankisi as one of the points of entry.

By Stephen Blank (8/14/2002 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: In every respect, America's war against terrorism has diminished China's power and standing in Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO), the linchpin of its strategy to fight terrorism and separatism, has been discredited and shown to command no effective military resources or political support by the members.   Although this organization had actually agreed to collective security resolutions that would have committed China to project its military power abroad in the case of an attack against its members, when the time came they turned to Washington.

By Michael Dillon (8/14/2002 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: Uyghur, the language of the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, is a Turkic language closely related to Uzbek and less closely to Kazakh and Kyrgyz.  It is written in a modified Arabic script which helps to identify its speakers as Muslims, although a Latin script also exists and was used during the 1970s and 1980s.  It has been the main language of instruction in many schools in Xinjiang alongside Chinese which has increasingly become predominant.