Head of the Duma committee for CIS affairs and contacts with ethnic Russians abroad, Kokoshin appeared today in a live cast of the Moscow Echo radio company.
Assisting the operation were anti-terror coalition forces deployed in Pakistan's north. Americans were the most active of all. The Uzbek fighters offered desperate resistance, said the MP. The Uzbek terror acts might have come in retaliation as Uzbekistan demanded the men extradited, he assumes.
Uzbekistan is a crossroads country, so developments might have come to a violent edge there as the USA is hard put striving to bring its action in Afghanistan to final success, added the interviewee. He mentioned terror outbreaks in Uzbekistan toward the end of the 1990s. That time, the regime had the upper hand.
Afghanistan saw a huge anti-terror operation since then, which put an end to the Taliban rule. However, new Afghan authorities are not strong and steady enough.
The Iraqi war alarmed many experts-they expected the USA to pay ever smaller attention to Afghanistan with it. In fact, that attention was distracted even before, when the United States clearly saw that it had scored an initial great success to be followed by painstaking everyday routine, with inevitable losses and failures, the interviewee went on.
US military presence in Iraq was not reduced with the war finished. The USA is making great political and financial efforts to establish a new regime in Iraq, and stabilise its economy. All that is channelling a great deal of money and military and political resources off from Afghanistan. Analysts point out local developments coming to the worse. Muslim extremists have been spotted in certain parts of the country.
The Iraqi war did not follow established logical patterns of the international anti-terror combat, and Russia stressed the point to the USA on many occasions, said Andrei Kokoshin.
