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.

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.

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.