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Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west.

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What politicians should be discussing in the mid-term election campaigns.

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This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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The year 2009 was a bad one for the United States. And no, I’m not talking about unemployment, or poverty, or home foreclosures, or banks too-big-to-fail, or any of the other normal bad news. I’m talking about something serious. As the world’s leading maker of things that go bang in the night (and I don’t mean Hollywood films), we took a hit last year. A big one.

The report of the Afghanistan Study Group makes arguments that stand a good chance of moving the Washington debate towards ending the war.