Radio War Nerd EP #95 — Tajikistan Civil War 1992-97
Guest: Bruce Pannier, correspondent
The War Nerd talks to longtime Central Asia correspondent Bruce Pannier of RFE/RL, about the little-known Tajikistan Civil War in the 1990s that killed some 50,000-100,000. Tajikistan is the poorest of the USSR's five Central Asian republics, and the only one dominated by ethnic Persian speakers rather than Turkic. Because it borders Afghanistan, the wars there since the Soviet invasion in 1979 through today impact Tajikistan, and visa-versa.
Afterwards, Brecher & Ames discuss the suspected jihadi stabbing in Hamburg; the bizarre CIA-backed Cuban civil war inside the Congo civil wars in the 1960s; Saudi Arabia's quiet war on its Shia population...
Linguistic map of Tajikistan (+northwest Afghanistan)
Photos of Tajikistan civil war (from Russian Afghanistan War Veterans site):
Total time: 2:32:38
Comments (10)
Great episode!
Great episode, great guest. Re: Russia & the Taliban - makes perfect sense to me, in a realpolitik kind of way. Geopolitical interests and alliances are always malleable.
Excellent episode. The guest was really informative and Mark's comments were really illuminating. Tour de force-more of these please!
This is one of my all-time favorite episodes thus far. But the discussion on former Soviet republics remind me that you guys are yet to delve into the topic of how and why the Soviet Union came crashing down in the first place – Ames have briefly mentioned a couple of times that the relative significance of USSRs debacle in Afghanistan has been overestimated, without elaborating on why. This is undoubtedly one of the most significant events of the 20th century, and yet I find hard to come across reliable and relevant information, as it seems that everyone will just go along with whichever watered-down explanation that best fits their predetermined perception of history or ideology/personal agenda (for example, my favorite YouTube lecturer - the otherwise brilliant Jordan B Peterson – credits Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for bringing down the USSR by publishing The Gulag Archipelago). I also concur with Partizan that an episode on Venezuela would be great.
A good account of the collapse from a left perspective can be found in the book Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. The main claim is that years and years of growth of the black market economy, permitted by the party since it took pressure of supply and demand planning (and allowed them to be lazier about planning) created a huge class of people in the USSR who personally benefited from the collapse of socialism (maybe up to a third of the population deriving a significant income from the "informal" market). At the same time the black market made planning a complete farce since nobody at Gosplan could possibly know what the supply/demand situation was. Cue their representatives taking power and allowing crises to spiral out of control and collapse the state. It's a very rigorous bit of research to boot, and worth reading. Would be interesting to see how it fits in with Mark's experiences.
The Hamburg attack was at an Edeka not a Lidl (a little more middle class & expensive than Lidl). The people who attacked the guy where not shoppers but people sitting at a cafe next to the store.
Anyway we could get an RSS feed? It's half the reason I'm a patron.
It's at the top of every newsletter.
Hey War Nerd, any upcoming episode on India-China border fracas and Doklam issue?
Great episode guys. You should do an episode on Venezuela and the Maidan v2.0 going on there.