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Effort To Contain China FAILED: Bangladesh Strike Cuts down Abe’s Covert Naval Gambit

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EDITOR'S CHOICE | 09.07.2016
Effort To Contain China FAILED: Bangladesh Strike Cuts down Abe’s Covert Naval Gambit

http://www.strategic-culture.org/ne...strike-cuts-down-abe-covert-naval-gambit.html


Yoichi Shimatsu

The nighttime attack that killed 20 foreigners in the Gulshan diplomatic district of Dhaka, Bangladesh was not simply a random terror attack since it had all the features of a meticulously prepared military-style operation against a selective target and for specific causes.

The attackers identified themselves as ISIS supporters, but their demands to police negotiators included release of members of the local Jamaat-al-Mujaheedin (JM), a widespread and well-connected militant outfit that advocates an Islamic state to replace Bangladesh’s secular party system imposed by the Indian intervention that ended its union with Pakistan.

JM is supported by prominent local clans, including families of military officers and police chiefs, and has access to classified national intelligence files, including reports on Japan’s military-strategic interest in Bangladesh and the Andaman Sea region.

The objective of the attack on the Holey Artisan bakery cafe was to prevent a budding Japanese-Indian-American-Australian alliance called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which is secretly establishing an allied naval base in Bangladesh to serve as a “Crusader fortress” against Islamic interests in South Asia-Mideast and to counter China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean-Andaman region.

The JM counterintelligence operation against the Japaneseassets in Bangladesh required months of surveillance and the tracking of movements of Japanese operatives, including visiting delegations, whose elimination was the objective of the military-style strike.

The seven Japanese meeting at the lakeside cafe were not “engineers” with a “construction” project as claimed to the news media by the Shinzo Abe government. Only one man worked for a genuine engineering firm; the other six were with “planning offices” involved in influence-peddling and bribery of Bangladeshi politicians and bureaucrats with the aim of installing a naval base as part of a plan to construct a civilian shipping port.

Abe and QSD: A New Co-Prosperity Sphere

Shinzo Abe’s plan to establish a naval base on the northern Andaman Sea is part of a geopolitical strategy called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD), under which the U.S.-Japan (offensive) alliance aims to involve Australia and India in the naval containment of expanding Chinese power. QSD is in essence NATO for the Pacific and Indian Ocean battle theater.

For the neo-militarist goverment in Tokyo, QSD is a US-sanctioned revival of the Greater East Co-prosperity Sphere, Japan’s bid to establish a pan-Asian military empire during World War II. Abe’s grandfather, the wartime munitions minister Nobusuke Kishi, was a key architect of the co-prosperity strategy.

Abe hailed the legacy of Japan’s “liberation” of South Asia in World War II on his first state visit to India. His revanchist speech was followed up with the sale of ShinMaywa seaplanes to the Indian military to protect its new offshore oil fields in the southern Andaman and to conduct long-distance aerial surveillance on the energy-rich region.

Clandestine Naval Base against the Chinese

Bangladesh was chosen as the site for a de facto allied naval port for both geographic and political reasons. The economically weak nation provides a third-party platform for military basing and clandestine operations against Chinese influence in the Andaman Sea, without direct and open involvement by regional powers India, Thailand and Myanmar, which are reluctant to get further entangled with US military operations.

After political setbacks in neighboring Myanmar, China has developed closer military ties with Bangladesh, strengthened with the Chinese proposal to build a deep-water port at Sonadaria, a construction project estimated at 8 billion USD.

To counter the Chinese plan, Tokyo actively intervened with a rival bid for another port at nearby Matarbari, with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) offering a softloan of 3 billion USD for a 4.6-billion dollar project.

The Matarbari port project includes four coal-fired power plants with a total 2,400 megawatt electricity-generation capacity along with dredging of shipping channels for LNG tankers – and capable of handling destroyers and submarines. The ostensible civilian port would be gradually converted to military purposes, initially through “rescue and recovery operations” during Bangladesh’s frequent cyclone catastrophes.


Sumitomo Heavy Industry and the Marubenitrading company are involved in the deal, which quickly overshadowed the earlier Chinese project despite being only half the size of Beijing’s package. The difference in scale was made up in bribery of government officials by the Japanese lobbying network.

JICA as the J-CIA

Significantly, the Japanese aid program JICA and many of its related contractors in Myanmar and Bangladesh are dominated by two cult-like yakuza-allied groups, the Sasakawa organization (which includes the Nippon Foundation) and Soka Gakkai. The Soka Gakkai new religion sponsors the Komeito (Clean Government Party), which is a member of the ruling coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party.

SG is allied with the Yamaguchi-gumi organized crime group, especially in money-laundering through its overseas religious branches and networks of smalls businesses (including Japanese-style restaurants).

The Sasakawa organization, acting nominally through the Nippon Foundation charity and the Unification Church, is a crime network that runs gambling operations involving speedboat racing in Japan.

This underworld water-sports enterprise, which is linked with the methamphetamine (shabu) trade, is conducted in cooperation with the Tosei-kai, a Tokyo=based yakuza group run by ethnic Koreans (zai-nichi) mobsters, descendants of soliders who served the Japanese empire in occupied Korea.

The rightist yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama created Tosei-kai, as paramilitary force hired out to the CIA station in Tokyo to protect US military bases from Japan’s leftist student movement during the Cold War and Vietnam War era. Since then, The Nippon Foundation has sponsored ocean-related projects as a means of promoting Japanese naval expansion overseas, including the Oceans Day holiday, which promotes Japanese naval expansion and the whaling industry.

The Sasakawa organized crime group has a long history of covert cooperation with Italian fascist groups, starting from its late founder’s prewar People’s Party (Kokusai Taishu-to), modeled after Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

The cooperation with Italian fascist black operations continued in the postwar era, with Japan serving as a safe haven for rightwing terrorists, including a suspect named Zorzi, involved in the 1969 false-flag bombing of the Milan headquarters of Banco Agricola.

The continuing criminal connections between Japanese neo-militarists and Italian fascists is a thread that connects to the nine Italians killed in the Holey Bakery attack. Some of the Italians are apparently working in the Bangladesh clothing industry, but textiles also provide convenient cover for any NATO operatives assigned to that region.


Tokyo-style Corruption

How did Tokyo overtake the rival Chinese bid so quickly? The seven contractors dining at the Holely Artisan Bakery represent the underhanded methods used by Japanese to gain favors from the political elites in the developing nations. Only one was a real engineer.

Three others, including two women, were visiting employees of Almec, a Shinjuku “design” company with a sketchy role in planning and facilitating projects with typical Japanese practices of wooing clients with junkets, favors and gifts, including briefcases of cash.

The three other Japanese contractors at the dinner were with a recently organized spinoff of Oriental Consultants, another “planning” company with a 57 year history of overseas facilitation for JETRO (Japan External Trade Relations Office) and JICA.

The newly spun-off affiliate Oriental Consultants Global was created in 2014, a timeline coinciding with Shinzo Abe’s formation of a national intelligence agency modeled after the US National Security Agency, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Oriental Consultants has a satellite mapping division, indicating the Bangladesh team were involved in geospatial surveillance aimed at creating a Japanese defense enclave in the Andaman Sea region to counter Chinese military influence.

The parent company also has a satellite communications division providing secure data transmissions. Aspects of their clandestine mission would include anti-terrorism, putting the Japanese consultants on a collision course with Jamaat-al-Mujaheedin/ISIS.



Offending Militant Islam

The clandestine operation involving the Japanese port project was designed to avert nationalist anger in Bangladesh, where the Muslim population is increasingly distrustful of Shinzo Abe’s involvement in wars in the Middle East and Japan’s ever-closer military alliance with New Delhi, the hegemon of South Asia.

The popular distrust of India has increased due to the coming to power of Modi’s BJP party, a Hindu nationalist coalition with a track record of mass atrocities against Muslims in India.

Shinzo Abe’s covert involvement in the Syrian conflict led directly to the ISIS decision to behead Japanese hostages, including the “military otaku (fan)” Haruna Yukawa and journalist Kenji Goto.

The transsexual spy Yukawa was a secretagent of retired Air Force general Toshio Tamogami, the founder of Nippon Kaigi, the powerful conservative parliamentary lobby for constitutional revision and the remilitarization of Japan. Tamogami acts as spokesman for politicized neoconservative officers in the Self-Defense Forces, who support offensive military capability for Japanese forces.

The Japanese intelligence operations in Syria and Abe’s belligerent stance has triggered repeated threats from ISIS. In a vain attempt to absolve Abe’s jingoism of responsibility, Tokyo has denied this factor in the killing of a Japanese aid worker in Bangladesh and the stalking of other Japanese nationals in that country.

The Dhaka bakery attack shows that Japan is now the primary target for hostage-taking mass executions due to Abe’s strategy to establish military bases in South Asia, along with weapons sales, covert operations and so-called humanitarian interventions to block China’s One Belt project across South Asia.

This ambitious effort to contain China, however, has put Japan on a collision course with Islamic militants opposed to American and Indian forces in the region.

With their international network of supporters, the militant groups affiliated with ISIS can strike at Japanese interests anywhere in the world, including inside Japan. Tokyo is now deeply enmeshed in a global war that it cannot survive, much less win.
 
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This is interesting. To prevent PLAN being outflanked MSS could have used ULFA in this project. We will never know the truth except that this looks plausible.
 
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Strategic Culture Foundation... Looks like a pro-Russian journal based in Moscow...

Anyway, the construction of Matarbari port was supposed to start early this year. They are just working on the thermal power plants as of now. Also, $4.5 billion is too less for a full fledged deep sea port... that too including the costs of the 2,400 power plants...
 
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The article doesn't say who is behind the Gulshan attack but we are meant to assume the Chinese. I doubt the Chinese could pull off something like this.
 
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Strategic Culture Foundation... Looks like a pro-Russian journal based in Moscow...

Anyway, the construction of Matarbari port was supposed to start early this year. They are just working on the thermal power plants as of now. Also, $4.5 billion is too less for a full fledged deep sea port... that too including the costs of the 2,400 power plants...

The power plant is 1200 MW, which is comprised of 2 600 MW units.

4.5 billion US dollars is reasonable when you consider the port is only designed for the coal that the plant will need
to operate and nothing else.
 
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The power plant is 1200 MW, which is comprised of 2 600 MW units.

4.5 billion US dollars is reasonable when you consider the port is only designed for the coal that the plant will need
to operate and nothing else.

Wait the whole port is purely just for the coal for the powerplant?
 
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Yes!

I have been hearing a lot of nonsense lately about it being a "fully-fledged" deep sea port which it is not.

My understanding is that Matarbari will have,
  1. A deep sea container port in first phase and,
  2. A captive port for unloading coal and LNG in the second phase for the power-plant there, and
  3. Third phase will see development of EPZ's around the port like Thilawa port south of Yangon.
matarbari_project-03.jpg
matarbari_project-02.jpg


Bangladesh's Deep Sea Port Problem
China, Japan, and India are all competing to build Dhaka’s first deep sea port.

By Wade Shepard
June 07, 2016

Bangladesh needs a deep sea port. The country has one of world’s fastest growing economies, which is expected to rise at a 7.1 percent clip this year. It is on Goldman Sachs’s list of the “Next 11” emerging economic powerhouses of the 21st century. On the strength of the second-most dynamic textile industry on the planet, Bangladesh’s export sector is booming, and is expected to eclipse $50 billion per year in value by 2021. This is all in a country without adequate maritime infrastructure.

In its 45-year history as an independent state, Bangladesh has never built a new port. While $60 billion of annual trade currently pours through the country’s two existing seaports, Chittagong and Mongla, both are too shallow for large container ships and require costly load transfers to smaller vessels to get cargo in and out — an added step that can cost an additional $15,000 per day and severely decreases the ports’ global competitiveness.

However, finding solutions to this problem has proven problematic for Bangladesh. But this isn’t because of a lack of options, a deficit of investors, or even a dearth of international support, but exactly the opposite: too many powerful players are pushing for too many contending plans. This has left Bangladesh geopolitically stalemated, making and breaking deals, going with one project and then changing position and going with another. Ultimately, this plethora of options has pitted China, Japan, and India in direct competition with each other to build Bangladesh’s first deep sea port.

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Although a small country, Bangladesh is of clutch geopolitical importance, being located in the armpit of India and right on the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean region contains 25 percent of the world’s land, 40 percent of its oil and gas reserves, and a third of the global population. It hosts one of the world’s busiest and most important shipping lanes, which supplies East Asia with the bulk of its Middle Eastern crude oil. Dhaka is still politically and economically pliable–like a ball of clay–and has become one of the preeminent global staging grounds of interests from east and west, which are trying to mold the country to be what they want it to be and not get pushed out of the game. Bangladesh is a keystone nation in the region, balancing together the contending influences of India, China, the United States, and Japan.

The Belt and Road initiative is the formalization of China’s strategy for securing and bolstering their commercial trade routes, and Bangladesh is a major part of its maritime agenda. China has been establishing a network of ports, dubbed the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, extending from their own coastlines through Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, the east coast of Africa, and up through the Mediterranean to Greece. Although designed as a commercial project, this endeavor has instilled a sense of trepidation in the other actors in the South Asian theater, who perceive it as potentially having militaristic ramifications — or at least leveraging this reasoning to push their own competing agendas. This trepidation was brought up by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in a 2005 internal report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense, which first dubbed this plan the “String of Pearls” — a label that has been used ever since to denigrate China’s ambitions in the watery parts of South Asia.

This geopolitical competition has risen to an apex when it comes to selecting the site and the financier of Bangladesh’s first deep sea port, with some powers making great financial and political strides to secure their own interests and to keep those of others at bay. There are currently at least four potential locations for the impending new port: Chittagong, Sonadia, Matarbari, and Payra.

Chittagong

Chittagong, positioned a little way up the Karnaphuli River on the northeast curve of the Bay of Bengal, has always been the largest and by far most important seaport in Bangladesh. Once a major hub on the ancient Maritime Silk Road, Chittagong has a history that stretches back to the fourth century B.C. Ptolemy, the Chinese traveler-monk Faxian, and Ibn Battuta all wrote about the place. Today, this position of relevance still rings true.

“We handle 98 percent of the country’s container cargo, 92 percent of the total cargo volume,” a port development administrator explained. “So you can imagine how important this port is to Bangladesh. If Chittagong port collapsed the whole economy will collapse.”

Ninety-two percent of Bangladesh’s total ocean freight equates to over 30 million tons of bulk cargo and more than 1.8 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) each year. And these numbers are rising fast. Cargo volume through Chittagong port is rising at a 14 to 15 percent clip annually, and at the present growth rate it is estimated that the port would top out by 2018.

The problem with Chittagong is that the current maximum draft of the port is just 9.2 meters — definitely not deep enough for many modern container ships. This requires a time-consuming and costly transfer operation, as smaller ships must be used to transport cargo to and from big ocean freighters that are anchored out in the bay.

One proposal to remedy this problem is the construction of a new port on a 1,200 acre island in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of Patenga, and in proximity to Chittagong. Dubbed the Bay Terminal, this would not technically be a deep sea port–as its maximum draft would be up to 13 or 14 meters, rather than the 15 needed to be granted this designation–but it would allow for larger ships to come directly into port.

As early as 2010, China was publicly invited to get on board with expanding and modernizing Chittagong port, and at one point the country pledged $9 billion toward the endeavor.

“It will be a great achievement if China agrees to use our Chittagong port, which we want to develop into a regional commercial hub by building a deep seaport in the Bay of Bengal,” Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Dipu Moni told Reuters.

This plan bode well for China’s broader ambitions of building an overland corridor from Yunnan province to a port on the Bay of Bengal. The plan would essentially provide China with a link to the sea that, aside from transiting Myanmar, could bypass Southeast Asia and the snake pit of potentially volatile interests there. This prompted international commentators to quickly brand the Chittagong deep sea port proposal as one of China’s “pearls,” which put Bangladesh in a rather precarious geopolitical position. So much so that in June 2015Bangladesh granted Indian cargo ships permission to use Chittagong port.

Sonadia

Realizing that Chittagong may fall through, China had a contingency plan for another deep sea port in Bangladesh all cued up and ready to go. A few years following a 2009 Japanese survey in Sonadia, an island near Cox’s Bazar in the south of the country, which determined it a suitable location for a deep-draft port, China jumped in and offered its financial assistance.

China Harbor Engineering Company, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Communications Construction Company–the same enterprise that is building Colombo Port City in Sri Lanka, and which also happens to be blacklisted by the World Bank on allegations of corruption–was chosen as the developer, and Bangladesh appeared to have given China the green light. During Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 2014 visit to Beijing it was widely assumed that a deal for Sonadia was going to be formally signed, but then it wasn’t.

It was widely assumed that political pressure was put on Bangladesh from India and the United States to disallow China to build and operate the Sonadia port. With China already building ports in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Maldives, and Myanmar, Bangladesh was the last remaining link on a chain that would leave India completely surrounded.

“India’s not very happy that China and Pakistan are holding a strategic and economic relationship, and part of their objection is the One Belt, One Road and the Pakistan-China economic corridor,” said Shahid Islam, a research fellow at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, a Dhaka-based center for policy research.

After a period of being quiet about the prospective port, in February of 2016 Bangladesh made the formal announcement that it had been scrapped.

“The cancellation of Sonadia is clearly a strategic decision by Bangladesh, doubtlessly helped along by India, Japan and the U.S.,” wrote Indrani Bagchi in an article in the Times of India.

Matarbari

Another reason for the potential cancellation of the Sonadia port was that Bangladesh had granted a contract to Japan to build a deep sea port at Matarbari, just 25 kilometers away.

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is to build the port along with a liquefied natural gas terminal, a series of four 600 MW coal-fed power plants, as well as rail lines, roadways, and electrical systems as part of a monumental infrastructural package deal. The master plan is that the port would be used to receive coal, which could power an entire new industrial zone in the far southeast of the country.

To make this happen, JICA offered a loan to take care of $3.7 billion out of the total $4.6 billion price tag, at 0.1 percent interest for 30 years and a 10 year grace period thrown in on top of that, according to the South China Morning Post.

Payra

Originally seeming like a condolence prize for China, which had been beaten out for a deep sea port in the south of the country by Japan, Bangladesh proposed a deep sea port at Payra, which is located on the northwestern coast of the Bay of Bengal.

The construction of this port, which was being financed on a public-private partnership (PPP) platform, was originally granted to a Chinese company, and it was starting to look like China was finally going to get its deep sea port in Bangladesh. Then the usual chorus of India, Japan, and the United States resounded once again.

However, as a change of pace, India stepped in and stated that they wanted to get in on the action and be one of the port’s big investors. This was a very different strategy than simply trying to prevent China from having their port while offering no other viable alternative, which had previously been the diplomatic model.

The Payra deep sea port was then reconfigured as a cooperative port that many different countries could invest and operate terminals in. It has been reported that Indian companies are now participating and 10 countries have considered jumping in with $15.5 billion of investment, which is felt to be very different than China having a port in Bangladesh all to themselves.

“Bangladesh politics are driven by India, and the U.S. to some extent,” Shahid Islam explained. “Bangladesh can’t move ahead with China in terms of big collaborations, in terms of making the Silk Route or One Belt, One Road or an economic corridor.”

Like many other countries along the Belt and Road, Bangladesh wants to leverage its keystone position between major global powers and be “a friend to everyone.” But at this junction the country finds itself in very turbulent waters as the great game of geopolitics exerts its influence on every horizon.

Wade Shepard is a journalist and author of Ghost Cities of China.
 
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The power plant is 1200 MW, which is comprised of 2 600 MW units.

4.5 billion US dollars is reasonable when you consider the port is only designed for the coal that the plant will need
to operate and nothing else.
Initially it was planned for Coal but could be modified to handle container ship too. The plan is to bring Sonadia under this port as well.
 
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The power plant is 1200 MW, which is comprised of 2 600 MW units.

4.5 billion US dollars is reasonable when you consider the port is only designed for the coal that the plant will need
to operate and nothing else.

Well, the OP says there will be 4 600MW units forming a total generation of 2,400MW.

There was a proposal to expand the port into a full-fledged one gradually... I don't know if that's approved or not...

Initially it was planned for Coal but could be modified to handle container ship too. The plan is to bring Sonadia under this port as well.

Sonadia is scrapped if I'm not wrong...
 
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Sonadia or anything scrapped on paper can be revived because it is not a verse of an old Script!
 
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The article said Japan had plan to gradually convert Matabari port to a defense one from a civilian sea port. So we do not know whether any plan they had to invest more into the port.
 
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1.BD coast sits at a commanding position in the Bay. The East-West sea trade passing through the Andaman Sea, Malacca Strait and Moluccas passes nearby. China has bases / arrangements at Gwadar, Trincomalle, Male, Ramree and Coco Island. The Japanese might have planned to outflank PLAN by establishing themselves at the planned deep-sea port of Matarbari. This would form a chain with Vyzag, Sitwe/Akyab (Indian presence) and Andaman-Nicobar.

2. It is becoming likely that Chinese MSS links with ULFA might have been used.
 
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