Uzbek islamists now fighting in Afghanistan

[Lars77]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121973427&ps=cprs

"During the months-long debate over U.S. policy options for Afghanistan, critics of the war effort questioned whether the global fight against al-Qaida really depends on what happens in Kabul and Kandahar. Recent developments in the region, however, have raised the opposite question: Can the war in Afghanistan be contained in that country?"

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are now allied with the Taliban and are fighting in Afghanistan. This is what the US gets for supporting the most bloody and gruesome dictatorship in the world, i would say that in some respects they are even worse than North Korea.

Craig Murray has documented the behaviour of that regime since he left his post as Britains ambassador to Uzbekistan. Their preferred form of capital punishment is boiling people alive. The US has had a base in that country to launch attacks into Afghanistan. At the same time they have badly mistreated their own population which is becoming more and more radicalized, something that is a bit of a tragedy considering that one of the few positive things the Soviet Union brought to that country was secularization.

[Igel]

1. Uzbeks have been fighting for a while.

They're quite a problem in NW Pakistan, and have been since 2001 and even before. As long as they were left alone they weren't a big problem to any but the locals.

This is largely a case of somebody finding out something, assuming that if they didn't know it before then it must not have been happening before, and then finding a self-serving reason for explaining why it now exists.