It's caused by US import restrictions for those countries - its not a Cisco specific issue.
As this is potentially a large scale replacement programme, it is unlikely that there is sufficient stock in said countries so they trey and flag this to their customers.
There are alternatives to this process (no communication, hope things don't fail, use a vendor that never has hardware failures) but it's not as terrible as you make out.
By the way, if you find the hardware vendor that doesn't have failures, can you let us all know? Just make sure you use a realistic sample size (i.e. at least 100 units, ideally 1000) so it matches the real world.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
