Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
Joshua has written 1801 articles at Registan.
by Joshua Foust
This past weekend, I attended the NATO Summit in Chicago. There I heard from many heads of state, foreign ministers, defense ministers, secretary-generals, officials, and analysts about what NATO is doing and how it’s evolving into an enlightened global actor for peace. The challenge with what I heard is that a lot of is little [...]
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by Joshua Foust
Alisher Usmanov, the world’s richest libel tourist and oh yeah Uzbek-turned-Russian magnate of extractive industries, stands to profit massively from the upcoming Facebook IPO: As other investors were demanding tough terms, he said in an interview this week, he and his Russian business associates were willing to buy almost 10 percent of the company while [...]
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by Joshua Foust
Celebrating the year anniversary of bin Laden’s demise, I wrote for the Atlantic about the weird inflated hyperbole that’s arisen about al Qaeda. This week marks one year since Osama bin Laden’s death. We’re hearing a lot about what the anniversary means for the larger struggle against Islamist violence around the world. Most assessments of [...]
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by Joshua Foust
Fareed Zakaria wants to blame (or whatever) Borat for a recent increase in tourist visa applications to Kazakhstan: When the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan premiered in 2006, Kazakhstan’s government banned the film and threatened to sue its star. Six years later, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister is thanking [...]
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by Joshua Foust
I had the pleasure of attending the Eurasia Foundation’s 2012 Gala Dinner last night. They were using it to kick off their Sarah Carey program, which tries to connect young professionals in the US with young professionals in Eurasia, and to give their first annual Sarah Carey Award for the advancement of civil society. Their [...]
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by Joshua Foust
I have a piece up at the Atlantic, discussing why chickens sometimes factor heavily into national politics. Chickens are a surprising bellwether for international economic and political issues. Sounding for all the world like some modern-day Khrushchevian Red Plenty economic master plan, the Uzbek government has demanded that not only agriculture do more, but that [...]
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by Joshua Foust
The following is a guest post written by Azamat Seitov of the Regional Policy Foundation, Polit.uz. It was originally published there. *** The last of the EurAsEC summit in Moscow demonstrated that for all the optimistic public statements, the integration processes are not advancing well in practice. It was predicted that the summit will announce [...]
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by Joshua Foust
![Thumbnail image for Another Peace Corps Rejection [UPDATED]](http://registan.net/wp-content/themes/thesis_183/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fregistan.net%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F04%2F4358470902_65884f2087_z-1-e1333383589942.jpg&w=96&h=96&zc=1&q=100)
Update: I got in touch with a spokesperson at the State Department about this. The spokesperson disputed some points I made, specifically over the visa issue compared to a broad push against the Peace Corps, and offered the following: Six U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers departed Turkmenistan at the end of March 2012. They departed after [...]
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by Joshua Foust
The Kazakh terror group Jund al-Kilafah claimed responsibility for the crazy shootout in Toulouse, France, last week. Like its other claims for attacks outside of Kazakhstan, there’s very little evidence they actually do this beyond saying so on some website. Even so, it makes for an interesting evolution of the Kazakhstan Terror phenomenon, as it [...]
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by Joshua Foust
Last month, the all-girl Russian punk band Pussy Riot did something amazing: they staged a “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Before that, they’d staged an illegal concert on top of the detention center where dissident Alex Navalny was being held — demanding his release. The band staged a protest [...]
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