GOVERNMENT CRISIS IN KAZAKHSTAN: WARM-UP FOR THE SUCCESSION TO NAZARBAEV?
By Robert M. Cutler (12/5/2001 issue of the CACI Analyst)
BACKGROUND: After Kazakhstan unwillingly obtained its independence upon the disintegration of the Soviet regime, Nazarbaev tacitly proclaimed war against the bloated state bureaucracy he inherited, which also constituted a potential opposition power base. After the first post-Soviet parliament was elected in 1994, on the basis of the country's first post-Soviet constitution, lobbies and alliances began to emerge between parliamentary groupings on the one hand, and the lower and middle ranks of the ministerial structures on the other. Nazarbaev engineered the parliament's dissolution in 1994 when, on the basis of an accusation of electoral fraud by an anti-Nazarbaev candidate in a single electoral district, the Constitutional Court ruled the entire parliament to be illegal.
AFGHANISTAN-BASED INTERNATIONAL DRUG-TRAFFICKING: A CONTINUED THREAT
By Hooman Peimani (5/8/2002 issue of the CACI Analyst)
BACKGROUND: The opium and heroin production in Afghanistan and Afghanistan-based international drug-trafficking are a byproduct of over two decades of chaos, lawlessness, and poverty caused and reinforced by the civil war that lasted until the fall of the Taliban, which removed a major obstacle to ending the Afghan civil war, but did not eliminate the four major factors contributing to the operation of the drug \"industry\": rampant poverty, lack of a viable economy, ethnic rivalries and the absence of a strong central government. The first two factors have motivated many Afghan peasants to substitute non-profitable traditional farming (e.g.AFGHANISTAN: THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE?
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.
THE COST OF THE CHECHEN WAR
By Miriam Lanskoy (11/7/2001 issue of the CACI Analyst)
BACKGROUND: In the 19th century, the cost of the North Caucasus conquest was Russia’s decline as a European power. The conquest became particularly cruel, intractable, and drawn out because Russian generals offered impossible terms: the resistance leaders were told to surrender unconditionally, and the territory would be incorporated into the Russian empire on the same basis as any Russian region. The leaders of the resistance sought negotiations on a number of occasions but were never so roundly defeated that they would accept such terms.
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Analysis Niklas Swanström and Leah Oppenheimer, "Invisible Ink: Looking for the Lost Trade between China, Russia, and Central Asia", ISDP Policy Brief, 13 March 2013. 
New Silk Road Paper S. Frederick Starr with Adib Farhadi, Finish the Job: Jump-Start the Afghan Economy, December 2012.
Conference Report Cheryl Benard, Eli Sugarman, and Holly Rehm, Cultural Heritage vs. Mining on the New Silk Road? Finding Technical Solutions for Mes Aynak and Beyond (in cooperation with the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage) December 2012.
Article Svante E. Cornell, "The 'Afghanization of the North Caucasus: Causes and Implications of a Changing Conflict", in Stephen Blank, ed., Russia's Homegrown Insurgency: Jihad in the North Caucasus, Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2012.