By Rizwan Zeb (2/12/2003 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: Last December, a high-level defense delegation from India visited Iran. The Indian team also evaluated the proposed development of a transport corridor from India to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Iran and submitted its findings in a report to the Defense Ministry. The Indo-Iranian defense cooperation agreement was signed on January 19 in Tehran by Admiral Madhavendra Singh, Indian Navy chief and chairman of the Chief of Staff Committee, and Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, Iranian Minister of Defense and Logistics of the Armed Forces.

By Brian Williams (2/12/2003 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: In 1999, the democratically elected head of the de facto independent republic of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, asked the Kremlin for assistance in suppressing several Wahhabi militant formations based in Urus-Martan and the mountains of southeastern Chechnya. Far from assisting the beleaguered moderate president of Chechnya in expelling such radical Muslim field commanders as the Arab jihadi leader Amir Khattab, the Russians worked to undermine Maskhadov\'s secularist-national government vis-à-vis the Islamic militants. Ironically, when Amir Khattab\'s Islamic Battalion soon thereafter acted against Maskhadov\'s wishes in August and September of 1999 and invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, the Kremlin cynically accused Maskhadov of being behind the invasion.

By Roger N. McDermott (2/12/2003 issue of the CACI Analyst)

BACKGROUND: Conscript service, according to President Islam Karimov, has tended to engender corruption within the armed forces since local officials are placed in a position of deciding \'whom to call for military service, and for whom to extend an induction term, or whom to completely omit, and sometimes for a certain gain, they arbitrarily decide to release someone from the army\'. In turn, this encouraged a culture of corruption to exist within the Uzbek armed forces, undermining discipline, and ensuring personnel upheaval and further constraining the forces\' ability to meet high levels of combat readiness. Reducing the length of conscript service from 18 months to one year, may go some way to addressing its widespread unpopularity amongst Uzbek youth, but it will not prove an instant remedy and it will perpetuate manpower problems, as Botir Mirzamuhamedov, head of the Uzbek MoDs conscription department, acknowledges.