Afghanistan debate (Hillier, new troops)

[Hydrogen]

What is obvious to many many many many many people around the globe confounds you. I can't help you out there.

That does not even qualify as an answer.

Again, to which "learned people" are you referring to? When you say "most" do you mean a majority? Can you show a source for this statement?

On what basis can you show that Afghanistan is more dangerous than what existed before?

If no sources are forthcoming, I'll just take what you wrote to be the usual crap that type here.

 

[jade_lee]

That does not even qualify as an answer.

Again, to which "learned people" are you referring to? When you say "most" do you mean a majority? Can you show a source for this statement?

On what basis can you show that Afghanistan is more dangerous than what existed before?

If no sources are forthcoming, I'll just take what you wrote to be the usual crap that type here.

Do that. It will not hurt my feelings I assure you.

 

[kEiThZ]

PUBLICATION: Calgary Herald
DATE: 2009.04.03
EDITION: Final
SECTION: The Editorial Page
PAGE: A20
COLUMN: Susan Martinuk
KEYWORDS: PRESIDENTS; POLITICAL PARTIES; POLITICIANS; UNITED STATES
BYLINE: Susan Martinuk
SOURCE: Calgary Herald
WORD COUNT: 741

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This is what you get when you negotiate with taliban

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Interesting. Just as western leaders are publicly mulling a strategy of reconciling with moderate Taliban leaders to draw them over to the side of good, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reminded us of why that can never happen.

In an effort to secure political support for upcoming elections, Karzai approved a law that will strip away hard-won gains for the rights of Afghan women and return them to a sub-human existence as chattel, just as they were under the Taliban. A Shia minority woman won't be able to leave home without her husband's permission, decline his sexual advances or gain custody of any children.

Canadians and other members of the 42-country NATO group that is fighting to bring security and freedom to all Afghans are rightly outraged. We have collectively paid the financial and human cost for their freedom (Canadians more than most) and, in response, Karzai has thumbed his nose at western values in favour of his own political expediency. The law will win Karzai the support of the religious Shia group that may hold the balance of power in this summer's election. No doubt, it will also secure the support of pro-Taliban extremists and anyone else who seeks power by oppressing others.

In theory, the West has installed a democratic government. But most similarities to our governments end there. In Afghanistan, female members of government routinely face death threats and cries of "kill her"when they address parliament. No male parliamentarian-- including Karzai--has dared to defend or protect them. Other high-ranking women have been intimidated or even assassinated.

In practice, it's obvious that religious traditions still have considerable power over the decisions the government makes and how it acts. For centuries, Afghanistan had no central government. Its regions were governed by leaders of tribal factions (warlords), religious extremists, drug lords and basically anyone with enough money and/or fire power to gain local influence. Their factional fighting is associated with atrocities such as mass rape, torture and murder, and it's estimated that they still exploit and oppress about 75 per cent of the population-- mostly through the opium drug trade.

According to one Afghan, there is nothing to differentiate any of these leaders from the Taliban or al-Qaeda-- they are one and the same. They use corruption and intimidation to manipulate government action and they want it to govern with Islamic--not democratic-- traditions. In short, Karzai's government (which is composed of many former warlords and religious leaders) will never be free to govern democratically as long as these corrupt influences are at hand.

Perhaps that's why there's a growing consensus that the only way a central Afghan government can assert its control is to eliminate the opium trade--the very thing that gives warlords/ Taliban/terrorists their power over the Afghan people and government. Afghanistan supplies more than 90 per cent of the world's opium, producing enough cash to account for over onethird of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. These profits are then used to support terrorism and anti-government activities.

In October 2008, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan asked for a mandate to go after the opium trade, saying it was the only way to defeat the Taliban. Several months later, in February 2009, President Barack Obama announced that he would send additional troops to Afghanistan and a majority of them will be charged with eradicating the poppy trade that supports the insurgents.

Destroying the fuel that feeds the monster is the only way to victory. But it will be a difficult task, since many of the drug kingpins are members of government or have close friends in government. It's a commonly reported fact that government officials accept bribes to allow opium to be moved around--and out of--the country. Farmers also rely on opium crops to sustain them, even if it keeps them under the heavy foot of drug lords. Targeting them (at the lowest level of the opium chain) will destroy their livelihood and generate more discontent for the Taliban to feed upon.

There are no easy answers, but this week's events have shown us who pulls the political strings in Afghanistan. Beyond that, it's been made abundantly clear that abandoning this fight will result in terrible repercussions for Afghan women.

 

[kEiThZ]

PUBLICATION: The Toronto Star
DATE: 2009.04.08
EDITION: Ont
SECTION: News
PAGE: A02
BYLINE: Rosie DiManno
COPYRIGHT: © 2009 Torstar Corporation
WORD COUNT: 987

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Don't bail on Afghanistan now; The West must abide by the revered mujahedeen leader's words: There's no reasoning with the Taliban

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"The country has gradually been occupied by fanatics, extremists, terrorists, mercenaries, drug Mafias and professional murderers. One faction, the Taliban, which by no means rightly represents Islam, Afghanistan or our centuries-old cultural heritage, has with direct foreign assistance exacerbated this explosive situation. They are unyielding and unwilling to talk or reach a compromise with any other Afghan side."

- Ahmad Shah Massoud in a "Message to the People of the United States of America," 1998

He warned us. He warned the world.

And two days before 9/11, in a quid pro quo between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Massoud was assassinated by agents of Osama bin Laden posing as TV journalists, explosives hidden in a camera.

The "Lion of the Panjshir" is buried on a mountain crest overlooking his beloved and breathtaking Panjshir Valley, the river of that same name a torrent down below.

Rusting carcasses of Soviet tanks, bellies ripped open, still litter the valley, nearly two decades after they failed to penetrate the steep, narrow gorges in pursuit of Massoud and his loyal mujahedeen. Those obstinate "insurgents" - chased by Soviets, later chased by the Taliban - repeatedly retreated into their craggy bolt-hole, always maintaining the high ground, carting artillery into their caves on the backs of donkeys.

Helicopter gunships peppered the escarpments but invaders could gain no traction, no toehold, in the crevassed cul-de-sac that was Massoud's sanctuary. The Taliban, in their grim era, couldn't catch Massoud either, although his Northern Alliance forces were pushed to the edge of the precipice by their black-turbaned nemeses, at the end - just before the Taliban's end - holding no more than 5 per cent of Afghanistan soil, in the far reaches of Badakhshan province.

"There will never be another like him," a custodian, unlocking the green- domed shrine that has been built around Massoud's tomb, told the Star when we visited the site last June.

He's even more revered dead than alive.

And he remains as correct about the Taliban - the hard-core Taliban, aligned anew with Al Qaeda - as he was a decade ago.

In Kabul, in most of the country - but not the Pashtun south - Massoud's picture is still affixed to public buildings and private homes, garlanded with flowers in car windshields.

To understand the abiding love for Massoud is to understand, a bit, about Afghanistan; that the vast majority of citizens have nothing but revulsion for the Taliban and deeply fear the movement's return to power.

There is no such idolatry for Hamid Karzai, though the government has tried replacing Massoud's ubiquitous image throughout the capital with that of the president.

Massoud could in no way be viewed as a liberal, by Western standards. He was, in general terms, a warlord himself, accused of war crimes during the civil war era. But that comes with the territory of governing Afghanistan.

He was staunchly and conservatively Muslim. His wife wore a burqa. But he held firm to some principles of embryonic democracy, Afghan-style - government by shared power and accommodation, even if it meant holding his nose and bargaining with sworn enemies. His Islam was also practical, rather than confrontational and Sharia-obsequious.

But he full well understood that the radical Taliban, and most certainly Al Qaeda, could not be reasoned with. Fighting that alliance - underpinned as it was, and remains today, by Pakistan - could only succeed with the West's intervention.

Afghans believed - and perhaps this was their enduring naivete - that Western powers would protect them from Taliban resurgence and violent reprisals.

NATO and the U.S. have tried to do this over the past eight years, yet not forcefully enough. European leaders, in particular, have grown weary of the responsibility. Many Canadians demand that our troops be withdrawn forthwith. They ask, especially in light of repressive and misogynist laws under consideration by the Karzai government: What are we dying for?

Soldiers know what they're dying for because they see it every day in local shuras and schools attended by girls and Afghans who warn them about IED placements. Canadian governments keep recalibrating the reasons for our military involvement, alternately bruited as denying operational territory to anti-West terrorists - avoiding another 9/11 - or promoting the democratic institutions critical to nation-building.

In truth, there are many good reasons for abiding in Afghanistan. Technically, however, the reason Canada sent combat troops was to extend the writ of the central government. That was the NATO mission.

It was the U.S., with a separate and independent deployment - quite apart from their NATO contribution - that was tasked with routing Al Qaeda elements. This they have been doing for years in eastern Afghanistan and now, with President Barack Obama committing more troops, they are extending to the southern provinces.

Obama may talk about shifting the emphasis, laying out an alternative and less ambitious agenda, but his actions speak differently: America's military involvement is expanding. That may be a matter of strategic urgency but it ill- behooves a liberal, Democratic president to abandon America's moral commitment to Afghanistan, the promise of basic human rights pledged, in pursuit of a premature exit strategy.

Does this president of optimism for the planet really want to be the one who washed his hands of Afghanistan, disengaging to concentrate only on the security threat to the U.S.? Have Democrats turned into isolationist, self- absorbed and cynical Republicans?

This makes as little sense as NDP Leader Jack Layton calling for dialogue with the Taliban, in place of combative confrontation, then flipping over in indignation when political accommodation - the result of dialogue - results in regressive laws that would legalize marital rape and the renewed sequestering of Shia women.

Bringing moderate Talibans inside the parliamentary tent has been a key objective of both the Karzai government and the United Nations mission in Afghanistan since 2003. That Karzai, desperate to win this summer's elections, would knuckle under to the most extremist religious demands shows that he's just another politician corrupted by power and the desire to retain it.

But this is where negotiating with the Taliban hardcore command will inevitably lead: A medieval Afghanistan of enshrined cruelty, religious zealotry and hopelessness.

It's what Massoud fought against. It's what America and Canada and NATO were fighting against.

Back when we could look Afghans in the eye and say: Trust us, this time.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

 

[voxpopulicosmicum]

So...now we're at war in defense of Afghan women's rights? Or are we still fighting them over there before they fight us over here? I guess it is quite clearly no longer a defense of democracy and sovereignty (unless it needs to be next month, in which case it will be).

My point is, the purported rationales keep shifting, and that makes me suspicious. Keithz, your posts appear to be informed by "insider access", and yet your arguments consist of the NATO talking points.

Last time I was in this thread I asked about the claims that energy pipelines are a predominant motivation for our occupation of Afghanistan. I had heard this theme over the past 7 years but had dismissed it. TBH, I probably dismissed it because it didn't get any traction in the "mainstream" press, although Eric Margolis seems to have been pushing the argument for many years from his strangest of sinecures at The Sun.

Anyway, I have since found some more reportage. I wasn't going to share it here, but then I saw someone had posted the gibberish that the Star runs under the name of Rosie DiManno, so I figured I could smear the computer screen with feces and still make more sense. So here's another take:

 

[voxpopulicosmicum]

Liquid war: Welcome to Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus.

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for LNG. I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow - which digitally details every single pipeline in Eurasia - or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.

Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.

Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban - neo, light or classic - or that "war on terror", whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?

Calling Dr Zbig In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski - realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the US on its modern energy wars - laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy". Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).

For Dr Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia - from, that is, thinking big - it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system".

By now, Dr Zbig - among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama - must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.

Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan - and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington - will have the upper hand in whatever is to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a "long war", that can change that.

Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development of energy alternatives". Though you may not have noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.

In these early skirmishes of the 21st century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even before 9/11, its leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a while.

Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union - Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - which the Bill Clinton administration and then the new George W Bush administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.

Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves - and thus sell much more to the West than US-imposed sanctions now allow.

No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as former vice president Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neo-conservative chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a US attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to represent.

Global BRIC-a-brac

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang province, its Far West.

The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.

[cont'd...]

 

[voxpopulicosmicum]

[cont'd from previous post]

Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations - Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist - and, because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr Zbig and president George H W Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.

According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the 21st century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries - for those of you by now collecting New Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China - plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high-octane dream.

The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.

Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the Chinese border.

No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of US military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).

AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered in the US, is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan", slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a US-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by president Bill Clinton's energy secretary Bill Richardson and later by Cheney.

Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (from thence onto Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.

As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base the US had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary KBR would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo.

Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neo-con-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").

How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan?

Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's "global war on terror". Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable - but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.

Rainy night in Georgia

If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability - in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.

It was around the BTC pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant", less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

Now operational, that 1,767km-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.

From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing - and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.

The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.

For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the US version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.

Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.

Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC - its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe - means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.

In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.

In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC - once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil - lives or dies.

Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those US bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.

And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.

 

[lordmandeep]

Afghanistan has always been an important country to control.

Look in the past.
Russia vs British in Colonial times


Actually today securing Pakistan is very important...

If Pakistan goes under extremist control I think India would have no choice but to declare war.
Of course India would kick their ass as they made a developing country but they have a strong army.
Anyways what I am saying the NDP run to the hill types do not see if were not careful the whole region could errupt into a huge problem.

Really Canadian role is stop the Taliban from taking Kandahar. They have done that but Taliban is taking more control of southern Afghanistan.

The US is finally putting in real effort and should go after the Taliban in Pakistan.


Tell you the truth KEITH, I think we are dieing for no reason if the Enemy is sitting smoking Hooka in Pakistan...

 

[kEiThZ]

As I have pointed out several times before the pipeline issue has several fallacies which the lovely correspondents at Asia Times love to ignore. There's no doubt that a new Great Game is playing out in Central Asia. However, Afgahnistan is not necessarily central to it. China is already striking deals with many of the 'stans to get a pipeline network built that bypasses Afghanistan and delivers oil directly into Xinjiang. So what's any of that got to with Afghanistan?

Next, these conspiracy theorist can never seem to explain why the US would willing to spend blood and treasure simply to secure a pipeline corridor that would benefit other countries....the main beneficiary of any pipeline through Afghanistan would be India and/or Pakistan.

I don't dispute that there's some serious competition underway between the great powers and the emerging powers in central asia. However, I have yet to read any credible analysis on how this applies to Afghanistan. Most of these conspiracy theorists will bandy about useless fact about this oil contractor or that one having connections and business in country x or country y (routinely ignoring the fact that multi-nationals in every field do business that way) and then attempt to tie it to some overly simplistic grand strategy with no real annuciation of the geostrategic interests of the relevant powers in the region. Just because you mention oil, KBR, pipeline and USA in a story does not make it true.

Simple questions for the conspiracy theorists: How does the USA benefit from a pipeline that will feed oil from central asia into India and Pakistan? Can you show a cost:benefit ratio that would prompt the US to spend the billions of dollars and hundreds of lives it has to date? Ditto for the rest of NATO. Bush was incredibly unpopular but still managed to convince most of NATO to pitch in to the Afghan effort. So what's NATO's oil interest in Afghanistan?Politicians all over the Western world must all the incredibly naiive since with all their advisors, analysts and intelligence they still didn't realize it was all about oil for the USA.

 

[lordmandeep]

Mostly Afghanistan has now become a war against Islamic extremists in that whole region.

Afghanistan is not the home base of the Taliban, Pakistan is and Pakistan could be taken controlled by them allowing them to get more weapons and power

If Pakistan gets controlled by extremists, you think India is going to sit by???


Imo countries like Iran are dangerous but can be dealt with on a diplomatic level.


Taliban no way...

I think its important to stay there because I am certain that the Taliban would take control of Afghanistan. So the Taliban have Afghanistan and then Pakistan on the brink. Maybe the whole anti-war NDP crowd can say so what, however anyone with a sane mind can see the danger.

One could say, hey India should be in there with troops, however that would just make the problem worse.

 

[kEiThZ]

Afghanistan has always been an important country to control.

Look in the past.
Russia vs British in Colonial times


Actually today securing Pakistan is very important...

If Pakistan goes under extremist control I think India would have no choice but to declare war.
Of course India would kick their ass as they made a developing country but they have a strong army.

The tens of millions that would be dead as a result of a nuclear conflict and the billions who would suffer the economic impact of such a conflict are figures that are almost incomprehensible.

Anyways what I am saying the NDP run to the hill types do not see if were not careful the whole region could errupt into a huge problem.

I think most Canadians who have any inkling of the world outside Canada, understand that foreign policy is not the NDPs strong suit. I am curious to know what they would have done post 9/11. And where would the left have been on Afghanistan if Bush had not run off to Iraq. Opposition to the Iraq war made opposition to the Afghan war easy.

Really Canadian role is stop the Taliban from taking Kandahar. They have done that but Taliban is taking more control of southern Afghanistan.

As I have pointed out before, the equivalent would be trying to secure all of Nova Scotia with 800-1000 police officers, and do reconstruction, governance reform, rebuild social services, etc. all simultaneously. It's challenging but we are making progress. We just don't have enough boots on the ground. The incoming US troops in the south are sorely needed and sincerely appreciated by every Canadian in uniform. We need all the help we can get.

The US is finally putting in real effort and should go after the Taliban in Pakistan.

Pakistan is going to be in the hurt locker soon. Obama has always been much more hawkish on Pakistan. And his rhetoric has not really toned down significantly since he went from Candidate Obama to President Obama. Combine the increased US footprint in Afghanistan, the deployment of more air mobile forces into the sandbox, and the growing capability of the Afghan National Army, right on Pakistan's doorstep, and it's starting to make it very uncomfortable for the Pakistanis to tolerate the jihadis taking up in the guesthouses in the FATA and Quetta. All I gotta say, is that the next few months are going to be really, really interesting.

Tell you the truth KEITH, I think we are dieing for no reason if the Enemy is sitting smoking Hooka in Pakistan...

The 'CHANGE' is coming for them too. Jade_lee might not get the geostrategic implications of western failure in Afghanistan. But the US intelligence and foreign policy staff that I have met who brief Obama with his coffee every morning certainly do. The only question is, 'when will he take the gloves off?'

 

[lordmandeep]

I am glad Obama did not turn into those NDP types and realized how important western victory is there. It appears he is going to be rather involved on the foreign policy side which is good.

I have explained this to my friends, and they now don't drink the koolaid and just oppose the war because a university poster said they should...

My father opposes the war because he think we are dieing for no reason if the Taliban stands in Pakistan training and recruiting.

However I can see why politicians do not want the war to be seen as such.

As it would seem to people that were struggling domestically and we gotten ourselves in a mess in another foreign country (Pakistan).



About India, I know the politics in India, they WOULD GO TO WAR.

 

[kEiThZ]

^ Even with our government, there are those who want a harder line on Pakistan. There is no doubt in my mind that the US and NATO are losing their patience. And the US has already begun to build up alternate supply routes. They are even working with Iran and Russia to build up the alternate main supply routes (MSRs). That shows you much they distrust the Paks. I just don't think the Paks have begun to grasp how the world and particularly the US (under the Obama administration) perceives them. And they are running out of time to get a grasp on the situation....

I have heard several US officials make the exact same point you've made here. Why are we sending more troops to Pakistan simply to be killed by insurgents hiding out in Pakistan? They fully comprehend the situation and are working on some harsh solutions.

 

[lordmandeep]

I think Iran will not be a big problem. There are hotheads there but I think things will not to go out of hand if there is dialogue between Iran and the US. There has not been much said about Iran's relations to the Taliban??

How are they anyways???


Russia I think is more concerned about gaining influence back over its old domains and they have been successful in that. They may not be in Eastern Europe, NATO is winning that battle. However I think Russia has the Caucasus Mountains region and is gaining influence in central Asia by convincing of of those countries to kick out the US army base. However Russia imo is not poking its nose down that south, yet...

India is worried about it self and is trying to continue its growth and is now trying to grow its army as well.


You can sort of say you have Iran on one side, India on the other, Russian influence from the North and Us-NATO in the middle. China is also sticking it head in.

Its the great game part 2.

 

[kEiThZ]

Iran was covertly cooperating with the US until Bush lumped them into the 'Axis of Evil'. Now Obama is slowly changing that.

Russia may be concerned about US influence in its old stomping grounds but when it comes to Central Asia it's more worried about China and the threat of Islamic extremism becoming permanent. If NATO leaves, then it will have to do the dirty work in Central Asia.

As for India....they are massive donors to Afghanistan. That's exactly what makes Pakistan so paranoid. They are perpetually worried that this is Indian effort at encirclement.

For Pakistan, they look at Afghanistan almost entirely through the Indian prism. They see India trying to surround them and diminish their strategic depth. They are also worried about the rise of pan-Pashtun nationalism should Afghanistan become a prosperous Pashtun dominated country.