The Soviet Military Experience in Afghanistan: A Precedent of Dubious Relevance
The Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s had been largely forgotten until last month, but it is now back in the news. The attacks on New York and Washington,…
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Afghanistan
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From Afghanistan To Ingushetia
Recently, I have been receiving many calls from journalists who want me to discuss what lessons, if any, the United States can learn from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. It…
Ethnofederalism: Lessons for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Preserving Pakistan, and Keeping Russia Stable
Ethnofederalism is a federal political system in which territorial governance units are explicitly designated as ethnic homelands. It has proven quite workable in multiethnic states from India to today’s Russia,…
Why Peace Operations in Afghanistan Should Heed Soviet Lessons Learned
Common wisdom says that the United States has little to learn from studying the military lessons of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. U.S. military actions have been designed not to encounter…
Assuaging Ethnic Factionalism Dagestan’s Lessons for Post-Taliban Settlement in Afghanistan
Studies of post-conflict settlement have shown that political decentralization rarely eliminates ethnopolitical violence. Yet, some form of decentralization often has to be used as a confidence building mechanism in the…
Political Implications of the U.S. Military Intervention for the Transcaspian
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the U.S. military response in Afghanistan, a number of apparent changes have quickly taken place in U.S.-Russia relations with significant implications…
After Afghanistan Implications of the “War on Terrorism” for Central Asia
U.S. policymakers have already begun to ask and develop answers to the increasingly common and undeniably important questions of what a post-Taliban Afghanistan might look like and what the role…
September 11 and the Challenge of Integrating Russia into the West
The events of September 11, 2001, have triggered a significant rethinking of international security priorities in major states that has not occurred since the end of the Cold War. Clearly,…
Separately Together: U.S. and Russian Approaches to Political Settlement in Afghanistan
The sudden collapse of Taliban power in Kabul and other cities in the north of Afghanistan, followed by the liberation of most of Afghanistan from Taliban control, happened much faster…
‘Extremists and Bandits’ How Russia Views the War against Terrorism
When President Vladimir Putin picked up the phone to express his sympathy to President George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11, and then followed-up by providing concrete assistance to the…