Indian discourse on regional security has traditionally paid scant attention to the country's extended neighbourhood of Central Asia. No discourse on the Afghan problem will be complete without co-relating it with the geopolitics of Central Asia, and yet our strategic thinkers somehow manage without it.
The crisis in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan no doubt holds out grave implications for regional security and India cannot remain impervious to them. Kyrgyzstan too is a land-locked country like Afghanistan that at once becomes highly susceptible to foreign interference. Again, the deepening crisis in Kyrgyzstan contains a mirror image of almost all the elements associated with the Afghan civil war. The international community's reaction to the Kyrgyz crisis, especially the glaring absence of a coordinated regional response, is bound to cast shadows on the endgame in Afghanistan.
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