January 8:
Since the first mass displacements in the 1980s, Iran has served as a refuge for Afghan refugees and migrants fleeing their war-torn countryside. Now, however, the Afghan expatriate community in Iran, swollen by their country’s six year war against the Taliban, has been issued an ultimatum by Tehran: either leave or wind up in jail. Since last April, Iran has expelled some 360,000 Afghan immigrants, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In many cases Iran has simply “dropped them off along the Iranian-Afghan border,” reports eurasianet.org, “often without even informing their families.” Those that have avoided the forced expulsions are facing more subtle means of intimidation, such as obstacles to opening bank accounts, buying homes, receiving passports, obtaining medical insurance, or sending their children to public schools.
January 9:
Is China making contingency plans for a North Korean collapse? The London Telegraph reports that, according to a new study by two leading Washington think tanks, the PRC may send troops into the DPRK to stabilize the Stalinist state and secure its nuclear arsenal in the event of a catastrophe. “If the international community did not react in a timely manner as the internal order in North Korea deteriorated rapidly, China would seek to take the initiative in restoring stability,” says the report, compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the United States Institute of Peace.
After years of unanswered calls for reconciliation with the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai can finally point to a small but strategically significant victory. In early January, Mullah Abdul Salaam, a former Taliban commander, was named the new district chief of Musa Qala - a town infamous as hotbed of Taliban activity. Yet, with the help of a defecting Salaam and his Alizai tribe, a Coalition offensive restored government control to the contested town late last year. Karzai and his allies in government insist that such deal-making, which has its critics both within NATO and the Afghan government itself, is essential to restoring peace to the violent countryside. Now, they provide as proof the fact that Salaam’s defection has brought “some 300 militia fighters to the side of the Afghan government in a strategic part of Helmand Province.” Another benefit of Salaam’s defection, reports Radio Free Europe, is that “his allegiance to Kabul helps extend the central government’s authority into an area seen as a bastion of popular support for the Taliban.”
January 12:
Nestled between the Himalayas and Asia’s two biggest powers is the small, landlocked country of Bhutan. After staying out of the headlines for decades, this feudal monarchy-turned-democracy has recently drawn intense interest from its two powerful neighbors, China and India, raising fears that it is becoming “either a strategic pawn or a malleable ‘buffer’” in their struggle for regional influence.
The Asia Times reports that the opening shots may have been fired late last year, when “Chinese forces demolished several unmanned Indian forward posts” in Bhutan’s Dolam Valley – which China has laid claim to – “drastically distort[ing] the Sino-Bhutanese border.” And in recent months, there have been several reports of Chinese “intrusions” into Bhutanese territory along the disputed “Line of Actual Control.”. For its part, India, traditionally closer to Bhutan’s royal family, has “moved 6,000 troops to the Sino-Indian-Bhutanese junction from the troubled states of Jammu and Kashmir.”