> Afghan islamism may be contagious and fuel
> centrifugal tendencise in Tibet and other places. In sum, the US war in
> Afghanistan
> creates a positive externality or "neighborhood effect" from which both
> Russia and China benefit without bearing the cost of the war effort.
I don't buy this at all. The Afghan resistance is about kicking out foreign mercs and occupiers, period -- a completely different thing from al-Qaeda's petro-fundamentalism. More importantly, Russia and China simply want stability in their neighborhoods, period, and ham-handed neocolonial occupations in the 21st century are engines of instability they don't need.
The real issue isn't what Russia and China want, because they are not in charge of NATO. The real issue is that NATO is acting like a braindead neocolonial jackass -- moving anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe, sponsoring bogus color revolutions, arming war criminals like Saakashvili, and now spreading NATO-colonialism in Afghanistan, the graveyard of pretty much every Empire in world history.
-- DRR