"Since the supposed collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the key centers of power - political, economic, military, intelligence - in Russia and the other "former" Soviet states have remained in the hands of lifelong Communists.

Medvedev's mentor, Vladimir Putin, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while he was a law student at Lenningrad State University. He joined the KGB while young and served the Soviet spy agency until 1991.

In 1998 President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB). In 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin acting prime minister of the Government of the Russian Federation. Putin was elected president in 2000 and was reelected in 2004.

Unable to serve for a third term, Putin was replaced by his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who subsequently appointed Putin prime minister of Russia.

Though Russian cooperation with the United States concerning Afghanistan is usually attributed to the nation's (as the USSR) prior costly war in Afghanistan - and subsequent "fear" of radical Islamic militarism - the most radical Muslim groups have long subsisted on Soviet-Russian support.

For example, shortly after Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed at the Arab-Cairo Summit in 1964, the group began sending hundreds of recruits to terrorist training camps in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Cuba.

For years, Arafat's chief contact in the Soviet Union was Vladimir Buljakov, head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Middle East Department. In a 1982 speech to a Soviet delegation visiting Beirut, Arafat stated:

'We look to you, comrade, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the socialist bloc, full of hope, as friend to friend ... in considering the question of liberation and progress in the world.'

Former KGB agents and current SVR/FSB/GRU agents in Russia still maintain connections within the Islamic terrorist network. In this writer's opinion, if the key players who control Russia appear to be lending a helping hand to Americans to engage themselves deeper into the Middle East imbroglio, it is likely that they are as "sincere" as their Soviet predecessor who "considerately" walked out of the United Nations Security Council in feigned protest just before the start of the Korean War.

During his absence, the Security Council voted to commit the United Nations to a "police action" action in Korea that drained the United States of men and resources, and has kept us militarily entangled in that country to this day. Had the Soviet delegate been present, he would have been expected to veto this supposed action against a Soviet satellite, North Korea.

The Soviets/Russians have always been more than willing to facilitate the sending of more U.S. soldiers to die in yet another no-win war. So if they cooperate in helping us ferry more men and matériel to Afghanistan - a country they know only too well - it should surprise no one", American edition notes.