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Dmitry Popov
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Independent analyst and researcher
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On February 16 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Obama administration is making contingency plans to use air bases in Central Asia to conduct drone missile attacks in northwest Pakistan in case the White House is forced to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan at the end of this year without having an agreement of the status of forces… The implementation of United States plans to deploy drones in Central Asia will expand the US military presence in the region and create conditions for conducting secret operations using unmanned aerial vehicles while negatively affecting the regional balance of forces.
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The US Department of Defense (DOD) is building an extremely expensive dual purpose biological laboratory in Kazakhstan. These kinds of facilities are built by the Pentagon along the Russian border creating a potential threat for the Russian Federation and the states of Central Asia… The program is overseen by Richard Lugar, the Senator who is known to have close ties to military establishment. He had dealt with dismantling former Soviet nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan and other states of CIS switching later to tackling the issue of biological weapons, in particular in Ukraine and Georgia (the latter had no biological weapons in the times of the Soviet Union, but the laboratory named after Richard Lugar has been built there in our days)…