Morning all,
I see Moscow is threatening to drop some bombs on Afghanistan because the
Taliban is allegedly (and unsurprisingly) helping out the Chechen
separatists. If that's their logic - and they may well have embarked on a
road whence there is no exit for Putin - they'll end up having to waste
great chunks of real estate across quite a few borders, no? This could be
bigger than Russia's economy (and her mothers) can handle, doncha reckon?
What got Putin in could yet take him (and a few thousand countrymen) out.
And I've no faith in what and who might follow in a defeated,
poverty-stricken erstwhile superpower - the historical record on that kind
of thing is not quite on the side of the angels (not least because the
hegemons du jour prefer their foreign radicals to be of the right - as
Trotsky warned when the boy Hitler first came under notice - and as Caspian
oil projections might recommend).
Nervously yours,
Rob.
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