Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral
Mike Mullen are asking Obama to double US troop presence in
Afghanistan. Both Gates and Mullen said that while they're thinking
about the war in Afghanistan in terms of a 3-5 year time frame,
their immediate goals are ‘unclear.’ That’s highly revealing. It is
clear from the deliberate pattern over months, despite vehement
protest from Pakistan’s government, of US bombing attacks on
villages inside Pakistan, allegedly to hit Taliban targets, that
the US intends to widen the conflict to Pakistan as well. What
could be the possible aim?
Militarily, adding 30,000 more
US troops to Afghanistan could never secure peace in that wartorn
tribal region. It has been documented that many of the groups whom
the US Command labels ‘Taliban’ are in fact armed bands controlled
by local warlords, and not ideologically close-knit Taliban cadre
in any sense. By labelling them Taliban, Washington hopes to
convince its NATO allies such as Germany to send their troops to
fight in an unwinnable war. Afghanistan presently has an estimated
40% unemployment and some five million living below the poverty
line. It has been ravaged by more than four decades of continuous
war.
Adding a mere 30,000 more for a
total of 60,000 US troops in Afghanistan where the current killing
rate for US soldiers is running fifteen times above that in Iraq,
is ludicrous. According to the official US Marine Corps
counterinsurgency guidelines, to run a country-wide
counterinsurgency strategy with the absolute minimum force levels
required by US Army and Marine Corps doctrine, the US would need
almost 655,000 troops, or an escalation roughly 600,000 troops
higher than the force levels in the proposed Gates strategy. In
fact the US strategy as it now appears seems to be a replay of the
gradual escalation strategy the US pursued in Vietnam in the early
1960’s.
Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, whose foreign policy guidance, as that of her husband, is
virtually indistinguishable from the Bush faction’s, has just
convened a dinner discussion of leading policy experts on
Afghanistan and South Asia. It included Defense Secretary Gates,
CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, and National Security
advisor Gen. James L. Jones. It follows the appointment of former
Ambassador and hawk, Richard Holbrooke as the State Department's
Special South Asia Envoy.
In January 2008, more than a
year ago, present National Security adviser to Obama, General James
Jones headed a private Afghan Study Group which recommended drastic
steps to ‘revitalize’ the war in Afghanistan. Revitalize a war
whose goals have not even been clearly formulated? Not
surprisingly, Moscow suspects another agenda is at work when
Washington puts such heavy concentration strategically on the issue
of the forgotten war on terror in Afghanistan, a region with no
discernable direct national security implications for the United
States or NATO member countries. No conceivable combination in
Afghanistan, a failed state if there ever was one, could tnreaten a
war of aggression abroad. The tribal warlords around President
Karzai seem to be struggling just to maintain their heroin export
flows at record levels.
Moscow’s
response
Not surpisingly, the Kremlin
has reacted to the US plans for Central Asia..
The president of Kyrgyzstan just flew to Moscow where he received
promises of debt relief and billions of dollars in
aid. Bakiyev was told he would get a write
off Kyrgyzstan's $180 million debt to Russia, a
$2 billion discounted loan and $150 million in financial aid from
Russia. On the occasion,
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev
announced plans to close a US air base crucial to the war in
Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan has been home to the only remaining
US base in the strategically crucial region to Afghanistan's
north.
After the Bush
Administration declared its War on Terror and announced plans to
strike Afghanistan to root out the arch evil Osama bin Laden from
the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, Washington secured air force basing
rights in both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
At about that
same time, they covertly began preparing to unleash a series of
US-financed ‘regime change’ Color Revolutions in Georgia (The Rose
Revolution, in November 2003) and Ukraine (Orange Revolution in
2004). It tried and failed in Belarus as well as Uzbekistan. A
glance at a map of Eurasia makes clear the pattern of those
pro-NATO efforts was to militarily encircle the territory of
Russia, especially as at the time Washington believed it had the
government of Kazakhstan in its pocket with military training
agreements and Chevron’s large oil investment in
Tenghiz.
Once Washington
announced in January 2007 that it would station strategic missiles
and advanced rarad systems in Poland and the Czech Republic to
‘defend against rogue missile attack from Iran,’ as I detail in my
soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance:
Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order,
then-President Putin told the Munich Wehrkunde conference in
February 2007 that the true target of the US ‘missile defense’
strategy was not Iran but
Russia.
Similarly,
today the US insistence Afghanistan military buildup is about
Taliban, rings equally hollow. That’s clearly why Moscow is acting
to secure its borders from a US militarization of the entire
Central Asian region. Oil and gas pipeline routes are a major
consideration, including US wishes to build a natural gas pipeline
from Turkmenistan to India that would deprive Russia’s Gazprom of a
vital component of its current gas supply.
The prime
objective of the Afghan escalation however, is to draw a new ‘iron
curtain,’ this one between the two formidable Eurasian powers with
the only capacity to challenge future US global dominance: Russia
and China. Should the two former rivals firm their cooperation not
only in raw materials and industrial economic trade, but as well in
the military cooperation sphere, as Obama campaign foreign policy
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has stated, the combination would
present a devastating threat to America’s global
hegemony.
Now the
decision, aided with the help of generous Russian financial
concessions, to abruptly cancel US Air Force landing rights at
Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base, deals a devastating blow to US Great
Game grand strategy to encircle the key powers of Eurasia—China and
Russia.
When Washington tried to use
its various NGO’s to foment a Color Revolution in Uzbekistan in
2005, the country’s not-so-democratic President,
Islam Karimov, demanded the US evacuate its
air bases, repatriate US Peace Corps volunteers, and most NGOs were
shut down and foreign media banned. Karimov
moved to firm his frayed ties with Moscow at the time. Today
Washington is reported to be feverishly trying to re-establish
itself in Uzbekistan, but the sudden cancellation of base rights in
Kyrgyzstan deals a new devastating blow to the entire Eurasian
encirclement Great Game strategy.
With the major NATO supply
routes to Afghanistan going through Pakistan from the Port Karachi,
and strikes on those supply lines increasing by the day, the
Pentagon is eagerly searching to find alternative supply routes to
the North. Militants just blew up a key bridge in
Pakistan's strategic Khyber Pass.
The securing of alternate
Afghan supply routes is at least the official explanation.
Unofficially, it would also provide the pretext to beef up US
military presence in Central Asia. Now, with loss of Manas Air
Base, a gaping hole in the Washington Great Game ‘Mach IV’ has been
left.
To further complicate
Washington’s strategy, Moscow is moving to firm defense cooperation
ties across former Communist states in Central
Asia.
A Central Asia Answer to
NATO?
At the same time as it
hosted the CSTO summit, Russia hosted a meeting of the so-called
Eurasian Economic Community in Moscow, EurAsEC. That group consists
of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan as full
members. EurAsEC, established in 2000, also involves Armenia,
Moldova, and Ukraine which hold observer status.
They discussed
establishing a $10 billion joint assistance fund to deal with
effects of the global economic crisis, as well as establishing an
international hi-tech technology exchange center and implementing
various innovative projects in member countries.
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