The Bug Pit
Even before we had any idea what was going on in Kyrgyzstan, there was a lot of hand-wringing yesterday over the status of the Manas Air Base/Transit Center after the "revolution" that seems to have taken place there. That has tamped down a bit, once it emerged that Roza Otunbayeva, the new leader of the caretaker government, said that Manas would be unaffected.
Well, a little. Major Chris LeCron, executive officer for CENTCOM Deployment & Distribution Operations Center, which handles logistics of moving equipment into Afghanistan, including via the Northern Distribution Network, flags the story on his official blog, and adds a little comment:
The situation in Kyrgyzstan appears to be pretty grave, with protesters in Talas taking over a government building. It's ongoing, and to make too many conclusions just yet would obviously be premature. Still, I was struck by this paragraph in EurasiaNet's latest story:
Gallup has done a new survey of the non-NATO former Soviet countries, and found that in only one -- you get one guess which -- did more than 40 percent believe NATO to be a "protection" of their country. Yes, it was Georgia, where 56 percent of people believed NATO to be protecting their country.
So, American and British troops will march through Moscow in this year's Victory Day parade, but Georgian troops won't. Reports RIA Novosti:
Trying to figure out what is going on with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization always requires a bit of tea-leaf reading and Kremlinology, given that the organizations who most reliably report on the group tend to be the state-owned media of the member countries. My experience covering one of the SCO summits (in Bishkek in 2007) made clear just how opaque the group is.
A Georgian opposition website claims that the notorious Imedi TV stunt exposes Mikheil Saakashvili's lack of trust in the army:
While the international media have given a lot of attention to Russian National Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev's floating of the possibility that Georgia could have been behind the Moscow Metro attacks, South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity's contribution seems to have slipped under the radar. The same day as the attacks, GeorgiaTimes reported:
Turkey, a NATO member, has been one of the U.S.'s top defense industry customers. But could it be serious about buying a new air defense system from Russia or China? That's what Hürriyet Daily News is suggesting. In addition to bids from the U.S. and Italy, Turkey is "taking the Russian and Chinese options seriously":