Afghanistan – New Kontinent

Afghan debacle cedes Eurasia to the dragon and bear

kontinent — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:00:15 +0000

China and Russia set to cement alliance with US withdrawal and existential common threat of jihad on their frontiers

By David P. Goldman via
“This is manifestly not Saigon,” said United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken as helicopters snatched fleeing Americans from the embassy roof in Kabul. It’s incomparably worse for America’s world standing.
Like the fellow in the Sam Cooke song, Blinken doesn’t know much about history or geography. Unlike the man in the song, he doesn’t know that one and one is two, by which I mean Russia and China.
Richard Nixon opened diplomatic relations with China three years before the fall of South Vietnam, securing China’s tacit agreement not to exploit the Communist victory by exporting the revolution to the rest of Southeast Asia.
America’s defeat in Vietnam, damaging as it was, had a limited impact in the region. Afghanistan, by contrast, will draw China and Russia into a dominant role in Central and Western Asia.
The defeat of an American proxy regime by Taliban irregulars marks the first victory for a jihadist army against Western military forces since the annihilation of a British expeditionary force in Afghanistan in 1842.
It will serve as a rallying point for jihadists in Russia, China, Central Asia and the Middle East. America’s display of casual disinterest in the region, to the point of abandoning significant numbers of its own citizens behind enemy lines and very large numbers of its allies, has persuaded all the region’s players that America is enervated and feeble.
It is the last ignoble installment in a series of errors compounding previous errors over 20 lamentable years.
China and Russia have no choice but to step in. If they do not excise the jihadist cancer today, it might metastasize into something uncontrollable.
By 2085, the number of South Asian Muslims – Pakistanis, Bengalis, Indonesians and Indian Muslims – will exceed the total number of East Asians, assuming constant fertility.
Southeast and South Asian Muslims will number 2 billion by the end of the century, nearly double the population of East Asia. Projections of this sort never are accurate, but the relative magnitudes make the point: The populations susceptible to jihadist influence are enormous and growing.
The educated and literate Muslim countries like Turkey and Iran have fertility rates well below replacement. Pakistan, with a literacy rate barely above 50%, still has four live births per female.
Imperial adventurism is not the motivation for the new Sino-Russian effort in Central Asia. Their overriding concern is internal security.
That concern is heightened by Chinese suspicion that the US will use jihadist elements to destabilize the Chinese state, especially through its porous western and southern borders.
Giving Iran full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was the first Sino-Russian response to the imminent collapse of Afghanistan. Iran had applied in 2006 and 2015, but faced objections from Central Asian republics.
These disappeared as Afghanistan dissolved and Iran’s imminent accession was announced on August 12. That by itself was a crushing blow to American policy in the region.
Since the late Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates co-authored a report for the Council on Foreign Relations calling for a “new approach” to Iran in 2004, the American foreign policy establishment has hoped to integrate Iran into a Western-led regional security architecture.
Now Iran is part of the Sino-Russian security architecture, and the much-debated Iran nuclear deal is a moot point.
To the extent that Western strategists hoped to separate Russian and Chinese ambitions, the Afghan debacle has cemented this alliance by presenting Beijing and Moscow with an existential common interest – containing jihad on their frontiers.
Russian and Chinese statecraft will follow the “Godfather” template: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Russia and China will embrace the enemies of the US, and their own prospective enemies.
When Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war in September 2015, a senior Israeli official met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin told him that the presence of tens of thousands of Muslims from Russia’s Caucasus, especially Chechnya, forced his hand.
The prospect of a large contingent of trained terrorists returning to Russia was an existential threat to the country’s internal security, Putin said. The Israelis took Putin at his word, the Israeli official told me later in the year.
Western media had reported that large numbers of Russian Muslims had joined the Syrian Sunni jihadists, starting in 2013.
The late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat kicked Russian advisers out of Egypt in 1972. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pulled the rug out from under Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak in 2011, with the enthusiastic support of the whole Republican establishment.
Washington threw its full weight behind the so-called Arab Spring, and the CIA-trained jihadists in Syria to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus. America’s delusion about Arab democracy gave birth not to democratic movements, but to a Sunni jihad, and forced Russia back into the Middle East after an absence of more than four decades.
The Israeli official recounted his interview with Putin at a hotel bar in Beijing, where we were both attending a series of private conferences on jihadist threats with Chinese military and foreign policy officials.
Thousands of Chinese Uighurs were also fighting in Syria. Many left China illegally through the country’s southern border with Myanmar and then to Thailand where – according to the Chinese – they obtained travel documents from Turkish consulates. Estimates of the number of Uighurs in Syria in the Western media ranged from 5,000 to 20,000.
As Christina Lin reported in Asia Times, China had warned about Uighur militants in Syria years earlier: “In October 2012, Major-General Jin Yinan of the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University, disclosed that Chinese militants belonging to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement/Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIM/TIP) were joining anti-government rebels in Syria, with Chinese Foreign Ministry then-spokesman Hong Lei issuing a stern warning that these militants “seriously harm China’s national security as well as regional peace and stability.”
China’s concern went well beyond the country’s 20 million Muslims and extended to Southeast Asia’s large Muslim populations.
A jihadist movement that enflamed China’s southern flank was the nightmare scenario of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) planners.
The collapse of the reality show posing as the government of Afghanistan in August created a problem for China as well as Russia. The United States spent US$2 trillion, or an average of $50 billion a year over 20 years, in a country whose annual GDP barely amounted to $20 billion.
The tsunami of American money corrupted everyone and everything, including the American military. The US created not a government, but a reality show in which hired actors stole all the props.
When the Americans announced their departure, the relevant Afghans said in so many words: “The show’s been canceled – where do we audition for the next one?”
In both Syria and Afghanistan, American blundering and self-delusion forced Russia and China to intervene in a region that the US had dominated for decades.
Xinhua reported August 5: “Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan began to conduct joint military exercises in the border area of Tajikistan adjacent to Afghanistan on the 5th. On the same day, Uzbekistan and Russia continued their joint military exercises in Uzbekistan’s border area near Afghanistan.
“Both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan border Afghanistan. In the context of the continued deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan due to the hasty withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, neighboring countries are increasingly worried about the spillover effects of the chaos in Afghanistan.”
On August 10, China and Russia conducted joint exercises in northern China. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that Russian soldiers would use Chinese weapons for the first time.
Xinhua wrote that “the exercises will deepen … joint anti-terrorism operations,” and “demonstrate the firm determination and strength of the two countries to jointly safeguard international and regional security and stability.”
And on August 19, China’s Ministry of Public Security announced a joint counter-terrorism exercise “to safeguard the national security of China and Tajikistan.”
One of the Chinese strategists I met during the late 2015 sessions was retired Admiral Luo Yuan, then the head of a military think tank. Admiral Luo told me that Chinese intelligence had tracked jihadists trained by then-US Commander in Iraq David Petraeus as they infiltrated back into China.
From this, Admiral Luo told me, China concluded that the US planned to use Uighur terrorists to destabilize China. I disputed the assertion; Petraeus was interested in bailing out the Bush administration and his own career prospects, in my view. Admiral Luo didn’t buy my explanation.
China may be paranoid about American intentions, but even paranoids have real enemies. After September 11, 2001, China gave tacit support for America’s invasion of Iraq in return for America’s designation of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization, as Mark Magnier reported September 2 in the South China Morning Post.
“Almost immediately after the World Trade Centre attack, China’s leadership saw the opportunity to change the channel and pivoted deftly. The US priority was now the war on terror, diverting attention from China. Washington needed Beijing’s support at the United Nations Security Council. And China could redefine challenges to its domestic control as global terrorism,” Magnier wrote.
China supported the US at the Security Council. The US put ETIM on its terror organization list, and the United Nations followed suit.
International recognition of Uighur terrorism was a pillar of Chinese diplomacy, and Beijing drew the direst conclusions when US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo removed ETIM from the terror list in December 2020.
China responded with outrage. In a January 25, 2021, editorial entitled “Mike Pompeo’s doomsday madness,” the English-language state daily Global Times said: “Pompeo is the most insidious hand behind terrorist activities. As we all know, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is a terrorist organization recognized by the UN Security Council and the international community.
“A long time ago, the ETIM spread violent terrorist thoughts in the guise of religion. It further incited, plotted and conducted a series of violent terrorist activities, causing tremendous damage to the safety of people’s lives and property.”
The ETIM organized, plotted and committed a number of terrorist attacks that shocked China and the rest of the world.
These included the October 28 Golden Water Bridge assault in Beijing in 2013, the March 1 violent attack in Kunming, Yunnan, in 2014, and the April 30 bomb blast that killed three and injured at least 79 at the south railway station in Urumqi, Xinjiang, the same year.
Washington has displayed a fatal combination of provocation and weakness. Beijing read the removal of ETIM from the State Department’s terror list as a provocation as well as a betrayal of a tacit deal with the US that had lasted two decades.
And it reads America’s helter-skelter departure from Afghanistan as a sign of imperial senescence.
I doubt that Secretary Pompeo had any plans to incubate Uighur terrorists as a weapon against the Chinese regime; the ETIM affair probably constituted no more than a Parthian shot at Beijing by an official of a lame-duck administration with future political ambitions.
But that is not how Beijing read the matter. Chinese analysts read the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2012 report warning that American support for Sunni jihadists would foster the new Caliphate movement that turned into ISIS.
As noted, they tracked jihadists from General Petraeus’ “Sunni Awakening” into their own counter-terror sphere. They watched Pompeo arrange for the release of 5,000 Taliban militants as part of the peace negotiations that preceded the Biden rout.
With its richly financed Belt and Road Initiative, China had already seized the diplomatic high ground in Central Asia – likely to the discomfort of Russia, formerly the dominant power among the former republics of the defunct Soviet Union.
Now Russia and China will set aside their differences and the dragon and bear will bestride Eurasia like twin colossi. That is the alliance that Richard Nixon set out to prevent in 1972, and it is now hard upon us.

Afghanistan Is a Debacle – But You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

kontinent — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 15:47:27 +0000

If one scans this week’s headlines they are all gloom and doom, running from despair and humiliation to disaster and debacle. But rarely do you see calls for a fundamental reset of the failed U.S. foreign policy of perpetual wars and a rethink the global leadership paradigm.

This is not surprising, since the mainstream media are, with rare exceptions, an essential part of the powerful lobby MICIMATT (the term coined by the former CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, who was responsible for Ronald Reagan’s morning briefs) that is actually in charge of this policy.

MICIMATT means “Military-Industrial-Congress-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank” complex. Here are some results of its activity for the last 20 years.

According to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs of Brown University: over 801,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war; over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting; 38 million — the number of war refugees and displaced persons. These horrific numbers do not include wounded but they are usually several times higher than those who are killed. According to Newsweek, “in 20 years of fighting, there have been almost 11,000 American deaths (including contractors) and more than 53,000 have been physically broken, while countless others suffer from traumatic brain injuries and other post-traumatic disorders.”

These numbers account only for American victims. Imagine their magnitude on the world scale. The author of this story, William Arkin, concludes that “after two decades of fighting, in fact, not one country in the Middle East—not one country in the world—can argue that it is safer than it was before 9/11. Every country that is now a part of the expanding battlefield of perpetual war is an even greater disaster zone than it was two decades ago.”

When I repeat Ronald Reagan’s famous “you ain’t seen nothing yet” I have in mind today’s visit of the Ukrainian delegation to Washington, where they will beg for more money and arms as well as doubling their efforts to drag America into yet another war, this time with nuclear Russia.

Needless to say, the MICIMATT will do everything possible to accommodate the visitors. The Ukrainian project was theirs in the first place. The same political technology that was used in Afghanistan to create, arm, and finance the Taliban against the Soviets is being now used to turn Ukraine against Russia. It started from the first day after collapse of the USSR 30 years ago. This time it is even more cynical than in Afghanistan, since we are talking about attempts to turn into enemies two Christian countries closely linked by centuries-long family, religious, economic, and cultural ties. I placed “family” in the first place, since it has always been my belief that it is one of the most precious western values, but it looks like it is not so for MICIMATT.

Russia is accused of annexing the Crimean peninsula and fomenting rebellion in the Donbas area, but besides being historically Russian territories with an ethnic Russian majority population it was a Western-backed coup in February 2014 that provoked Moscow into these actions. There are endless analyses from people in the know who present a clear picture of what happened at that time.

Just a few examples: “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war”, – says Seumas Milne in the Guardian, – “The reality is that, after two decades of eastward NATO expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defense structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from the territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line is now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by NATO or the EU.”
This is from Ted Carpenter of the CATO Institute: “The extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking… it was startling to have diplomatic representatives of a foreign country—and a country that routinely touts the need to respect democratic processes and the sovereignty of other nations—to be scheming about removing an elected government and replacing it with officials meriting U.S. approval…It was a grotesque distortion to portray the events in Ukraine as a purely indigenous, popular uprising. The Nuland‐Pyatt telephone conversation and other actions confirm that the United States was considerably more than a passive observer to the turbulence. Instead, U.S. officials were blatantly meddling in Ukraine. Such conduct was utterly improper. The United States had no right to try to orchestrate political outcomes in another country—especially one on the border of another great power.”
As Peter Kuznick from American University noted: “The U.S.-backed Ukrainian coup was the product of decades of U.S. maneuvering in its ill-fated quest for unipolarity. Zbigniew Brzezinski had written in his 1997 book Grand Chessboard that “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Other neocons like Wolfowitz, Libby, and Hadley shared this view. So when Bush called for NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, the game was over so far as Putin was concerned. U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, the current CIA director, sent Washington a confidential cable with the subject line “Nyet mean nyet: Russia‘s NATO enlargement redlines.”

John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago wrote this in the Foreign Affairs:

“The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia‘s orbit…For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine‘s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base.”
Finally, here is the opinion of the former U.S. Ambassador to USSR Jack Matlock in Time magazine titled: “Let Russia Take Crimea.”

“The fact is, like it or not, Ukraine is almost certainly better off without Crimea than with it. Nothing weakens a nation more than holding territory whose residents prefer to belong to another country. Though they may be difficult for all relevant parties to accept, the premises of a solution to the Ukrainian mess are clear: 1) The new constitution should provide for a federal structure of government giving at least as many rights to its provinces as American states have; 2) The Russian language must be given equal status with Ukrainian; and 3) There must be guarantees that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO, or any other military alliance that excludes Russia.”

Apparently, none of the participants of the pathetic “Crimean Platform” that met on August 23 in Kyiv to discuss how to return Crimea to Ukraine paid any attention to the opinion of the wise American diplomat. Instead of talking to ordinary folks in Crimea they preferred to engage in a fruitless discussion organized by the comic actor-turned President Zelensky – who is desperately trying to appease radical nationalists and the neo-Nazis who strikingly resemble their Afghan Taliban prototypes. Not a single Crimean Platform participant, or for that matter any Washington official, has criticized Zelensky for his water blockade to Crimea to the people that he claims belong to Ukraine. Depriving people from drinking water is an international crime but it looks like they preferred to ignore it. No one raised alarm when the head of the “Servant of the People” pro-presidential faction David Arahamiya and Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk warned Kyiv may be forced to acquire nuclear weapons to safeguard the country’s security if NATO does not accede to its membership demand.

Biden has a choice: build on the strategic stability talks with Putin that would be beneficial for both nations and mankind or listen to MICIMATT, and jump from Afghan to Ukrainian debacle, this time threatening Armageddon.

AFGHAN TALES

kontinent — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 14:02:16 +0000

By Paul Robinson

I’ve said before, and no doubt will say again, that depictions of Russia often have little to do with Russia itself and are more about those doing the depiction. For many in the Western world, Russia is, and long has been, a significant ‘other’, comparison with which serves a useful purpose in the creation of self-identity. Beyond that, negative (and on occasion even positive) portrayals of Russia feed into domestic political struggles and help legitimize one side or other in whatever argument people are having. Whether these portrayals of Russia are accurate is neither here nor there. What matters is their impact on domestic politics.

Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but historians who have looked at how Westerners have viewed Russia over the course of time have amassed enough evidence to show that it’s often the case. If you doubt it, then you have merely to look at what has happened in the United States in the past four years, during which time Russia has been elevated into enemy number one, an allegedly existential threat which is on the cusp of destroying American democracy and plunging the country into civil strife. The point of the Russiagate hysteria has never been Russia itself. Rather it has been to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump as American president by portraying him as, in effect, a traitor, who has sold out his country to a foreign enemy. This narrative, of course, presupposes a foreign enemy, for which purpose one has had to be created, and Russia has proven a convenient candidate for the role.

It is this, I think, which explains the latest Russia scandal to strike the United States – the claim this week in the New York Times that Russian military intelligence has been paying the Taleban in Afghanistan to kill Americans. I am, of course, not in a position to testify as to the accuracy of the complaint, but like others am deeply sceptical of anything that is based solely on the testimony of anonymous intelligence officials and that lacks any supporting evidence. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times’s story has led to much derision, being interpreted as a sign once again of the deeply Russophobic nature of the American press. I think, though, that that interpretation may miss the point, which is that the story, like so many others, is not really about Russia but rather yet another effort to discredit Donald Trump as a puppet in the control of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

This is because a key aspect of the story was an allegation that Trump had been briefed about Russia’s nefarious activity but had done nothing in response. As might be expected, Trump’s enemies in the media were quick to exploit the story to attack the president. For instance, MSNBC’s prime Russiagate cheerleader Rachel Maddow had this to say:

“Not only does the president know … there was that unexpected and friendly conversation he had with Putin. … President Trump got off that call with Putin and immediately began calling for Russia to be allowed back into the G7. … That’s how Trump is standing up for Americans being killed for rubles paid by Putin’s government.”

Maddow’s colleague, MSNBC morning news host Joe Scarborough, followed suit. ‘Donald Trump has known about Putin killing Americans for months and has refused even to condemn Russia diplomatically. What Republican senator will speak out against this shocking dereliction of duty?’ he tweeted. Other journalists were equally outright in their condemnation. ‘While Trump was cozying up to Putin, Russia was paying the Taleban to kill American troops in Afghanistan,’ said GQ’s Laura Bassett on Twitter; and so on.

Whether any of this was true was something that none of these journalists bothered to ask. They simply assumed that it was, for the obvious reason that always assuming the worst about Russia suits their political agenda. Most notably, Trump’s electoral rival, Joe Biden, said this about the president:

“Not only has he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law, Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin. … His entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation, to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way.”

The problem with all this is that, as with so much of Russiagate, it appears to be entirely false. The White House immediately denied any knowledge of the Afghanistan story, and the Director of National Intelligence backed up Trump by confirming that, indeed, the president had never been informed about the alleged Russian activity. As so often, The New York Times appears to have been peddling ‘fake news’. None of this, however, has stopped Trump’s opponents from seizing on the story as further evidence of the president’s treachery.

The question in my mind is what will happen should Trump lose the presidential election in November, an outcome that now seems likely. It strikes me that there are two possibilities. The first is that the Democratic Party and its supporters will lose interest in stories of alleged Russian malevolence, as they will no longer be needed. A Biden victory in November could, therefore, lead to a lessening in the current rhetorical tension. The second possibility is that nothing will change. Democrats, I fear, have come to believe the nonsense that they have been peddling, to the extent that it’s become part and parcel of who they are. They are therefore incapable of altering course, and will govern on the basis of the prejudices they have generated in themselves over the past few years. I would like to think that the first possibility will come to pass, but I have to say that I’m not too optimistic. As for what will happen in the event that Trump is re-elected, I dread to think. But at that point, America might well be engulfed in flames, and Russia will be the least of anybody’s problems.