Kyrgyzstan is a new headache for US policy

Washington Post. "In Central Asia, a new headache for US policy". By Andrew Higgins, August 31

• Excerpts: Kyrgyzstan's generally pro-Western but increasingly impotent president, Roza Otunbayeva, has retreated from U.S.-backed security programs that Washington hoped would help fortify a fragile Kyrgyz government. These include a counterterrorism and anti-narcotics training center and an international police mission...

• The government's paralysis, most notable in its inability to control truculent Kyrgyz nationalists in the south...does raise the prospect of prolonged and possibly bloody clashes ahead and strengthens forces inimical to Washington's interests in the region...In a severe and humiliating blow to the president's authority, the mayor of Osh, a rabble-rousing Kyrgyz nationalist hostile to what he sees as foreign interference, defied an order last week that he give up his post...
• "The president has lost face and also power," said one Western official. "This is a catastrophe." Otunbayeva had earlier in the week contacted the European Union's senior diplomat for Central Asia and others to tell them that the mayor would be gone within hours, said people familiar with the conversations.

• "The damage to the government in general and the president in particular is incalculable," said a report on Kyrgyzstan issued recently by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. The Osh episode "underlined the government's impotence and incompetence."

View all - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/31/AR2010083102620.html