Since the fall of 2014, Tashkent has been boosting diplomatic engagement with its neighbors (see Part One in EDM, October 3). In particular, Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov met with President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan in Dushanbe on September 11 (press-service.uz September 13, 2014), and visited... MORE

Breaking with decades of distancing itself from Afghanistan’s various armed conflicts, the Chinese government has offered to facilitate peace talks between the Afghan national government and the Afghan Taliban insurgency movement. On November 29, Sun Yuxi, China’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan, for the first time... MORE

Buoyed by its rising hydrocarbon revenues, Turkmenistan is using some of that income to reduce its geographical isolation by upgrading and expanding its railway network while linking it to those of its neighbors. The most recent development is an Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan railroad, scheduled to be inaugurated... MORE

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told a session of the National Assembly on January 29 that his government would pursue peace negotiations with Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants in spite of a recent spate of attacks and named a four-member committee to facilitate these talks (Dawn... MORE

For decades, works on the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan were limited to an aging generation of Western academicians tucked away in ivory towers. These scholars carried out their field research in the region prior to the 1979 Soviet invasion. Few of this generation of... MORE

A clandestine Taliban splinter group claimed the killing of British-Swedish journalist Nils Horner in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul in March. With this act, Islami Tehrik Fedai Mahaz, led by Haji Najibullah, achieved the international notoriety that the group with its media propaganda has been working toward.... MORE

The government of Turkmenistan has begun mobilizing the country’s army reservists and has sent them to the border with Afghanistan. At least a few dozen reservists were deployed to the town of Serhetabad, (formerly known as Kushka) on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border. The border situation worsened... MORE

In January 2014, the chairman of the National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan party, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a well-known politician and leader of ethnic Uzbeks in Afghanistan, made unofficial visits to Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent, the Kazakhstani capital of Astana, and Almaty—Kazakhstan’s largest city. According... MORE

The Afghan Taliban, formally called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, has proved to be resilient in its commitment to imposing its own version of Islam. The hardline movement is steered by a dozen veteran leaders collectively called the Rahbari Shura, better known as the Quetta... MORE