Friendship with Russia…

This sounds like bad news, assuming the Russian news media is correct:

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said Tuesday at a news conference in Moscow that “all due procedures” were being initiated to close Manas Air Base, the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reported.

The announcement was made after news reports of a multimillion-dollar aid package from Russia to Kyrgyzstan.

That base is a key supply point for Afghanistan. We provide some $60 million in aid to Kyrgyzstan (in the form of a lease on the base) and employ hundreds of their citizens on the base. The Russians are having the base shut down in order to do little more than stick a finger in our eye and assert their influence in the region. This is more my former colleague James Poulous’s territory than my own, and if he was here I’d ask him what, exactly, he’d make of this little act of aggression.

(I’d also ask James what his post Culture11 plans are, but that might be a question for another day.)