US to rely on India if Afghan supply route is not opened: official

[AVinayKumar]

^^ Didnt I see a request from a mod about avoiding senseless copy and paste of large articles?

 

[lem34]

The wars within

By: Imran Malik | December 24, 2011 |



The massacre at Salalah caused a brutal and violent change in the strategic paradigms of the Afghan war. It consummated a major breakdown in the US-Pak ‘non-alliance’, kick-started a dormant Pakistani nationalism and also revealed a number of “wars within” that have had immense negative influences on the conduct and character of the Afghan war.

The Wars Within - One; US Departments of State, Defence and CIA:

The US State and Defence Departments and the CIA, the main operative organs of US policies abroad, have been consistently at daggers drawn. The State Department has ruefully seen its various diplomatic initiatives go down the tube because of the arrogance and incompetence of the Pentagon-CIA Combine - headed by Messrs Panetta and Petraeus - the same gentlemen who had played rather divisive roles in their earlier avatars, as the CIA Chief and US Forces Commander in Afghanistan! They were singularly responsible for scuttling the State Department sponsored Bonn Conference through an ill-timed attack at Salalah -sending the US-Pak relationship into a deathly tailspin and turning the conference into a virtual “Bonn of Contention!”

Why did the Pentagon-CIA Combine execute this diabolical sneak attack at Salalah at this particular time? Was it simple incompetence, was it to spite the State Department or was it complicit in an act of sheer disloyalty to President Barack Obama? So what is then the actual casus belli of this war within that is defeating President Obama’s policies in Afghanistan? Is it simply poor statecraft or is it a selfish desire to claim the honours and glories as the Afghan campaign draws towards its endgame? Or is the ubiquitous Military-Industry Complex at work again to prolong the war with the concomitant mutual benefits?!

The Wars Within - Two; Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Pakistan and Afghanistan should have been natural allies. However, after the defeat of the Taliban and the advent of the US/NATO/ISAF in Afghanistan, affairs between them soured very quickly with the transit trade and the Durand Line emerging as the most abiding issues. Further within Afghanistan, the minority pro-India Northern Alliance came unnaturally into power denying the majority pro-Pakistan Pakhtun population its democratic right of forming the government. This did not sit well with Pakistan, who has excellent relations and influence with the Pakhtuns. Therefore, the antagonism! Further, quite contrary to Karzai’s and USA’s wishes, Pakistan is adamant in its opposition to any formal Indian role or ascendancy or hegemony in Afghanistan, the APR or even in South Asia. Thus, the tussle for influence in the APR. As long as these bones of contention remain within Afghanistan and between it and Pakistan, peace will not return to this unfortunate land or region.

The Wars Within – Three; US-Pakistan-India:

The US is caught up in a strategic Catch-22 in the APR and SCAR. In both contexts, it has a strategic compulsion to give India a formal and major role in the post-2014 Afghanistan. In the first case, India is expected to assume the role of the “regional cop” - fill in the vacuum created by the withdrawal of Western forces and assert control of the region, secure common Indian, US and Western geoeconomic and geostrategic interests there and keep the extremist ideologues at bay. In the SCAR context, a major Indian presence in Afghanistan is essential to the USA’s strategy to contain China and to deny the SCO access to Afghan and Iranian mineral/fossil fuel deposits and the Arabian Sea. Thus, the US and India have common national interests in two overlapping and almost concentric Asian regions.
However, Pakistan will never countenance an India sitting in its backyard and threatening it with a two front war on a regular basis. As long as the US does not keep India out of Afghanistan, there will be no peace in the APR. Period.

Furthermore, until the historical issues of Kashmir and the rivers that flow out of it - Siachen, Sir Creek et al - are resolved, there can be no peace between India and Pakistan either. It is also imperative for the US to correct a strategic error - its blatant nuclear bias towards India in its self-serving nuclear policy for South Asia.

Finally, Pakistan will never be part of any US design that is patently anti-SCO, anti-China or anti-Iran in deed or intent! The US must understand that to attain its policy ends and objectives in the APR-SCAR, the road passes through Islamabad and not New Delhi.
So, will the US now move for yet another regime change in Pakistan? Prophetic?

The Wars Within - Four; The Regional Dimension:

The US vision for the Europe-APR-SCAR complex entails imposition of a US-controlled unified trade and security mechanism upon the APR-SCAR, which will be connected to Europe through the New Silk Road Project (NSRP). However, it is too futuristic in concept and may be affected by regional instability and competing interests of regional powers.

In the SCAR context, the Indo-US combine is trying to outflank both Russia and China, keeping them away from this mineral rich region. However, they seem to ignore the reality of the SCO - an emerging powerhouse in itself. Futuristically speaking, two poles are likely to emerge in the APR-SCAR - the Indo-US combine and the SCO comprising the CARs, Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia. And that portends for a very fascinating struggle for geostrategic dominance and geoeconomic exploitation in the heart of Asia. The first moves in this new great game may have already been made!

In order to succeed in the APR-SCAR, the US will have to factor in all these wars within, these strategic contradictions, these competing interests, resolve them and then proceed further. If it tries to march ahead alone, with only India in tow, its domination of the APR-SCAR and the fruition of the trade-security mechanism in Europe-APR-SCAR (including the NSRP) will remain a pipedream in perpetuity!

Well China allready backs pakistan and iran has already started its leg of the ip pipeline we know that now all those that feel Russia maybe circumspect have a look at this:
Saturday 24th December 2011 | Muharram 28, 1433 dawn

Russia endorses full SCO membership for Pakistan


APP
November 7, 2011



ST. PETERSBURG: Russia on Monday, for the first time, publicly endorsed Pakistan’s bid to get full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made this announcement in response to Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani’s address at the 10th Heads of Government meeting of SCO, at the Constantine Palace.

The Russian Premier also supported Prime Minister Gilani’s proposals for implementing trade and energy projects.He announced financing 0.5 billion US dollars for the CASA- 1000 that would ensure power transmission from Turkmenistan Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Putin said in practical and tangible terms, Russia wants materialization of projects including TAPI (Turkmenistan- Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline project and the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Trade and Transmission Project (CASA 1000).

Later, the two leaders held bilateral meeting and discussed several important issues including fight against terrorism and extremism, besides calling for the need to adopt regional approach towards dealing with major challenges.

Russian Premier Putin termed his meeting with Prime Minister Gilani “very pleasant” and expressed satisfaction over bilateral and trade ties between the two countries.

“Pakistan is important for us in trade and economy and it is an important partner in South Asia and in Islamic world,” he told Prime Minister Gilani.

Putin offered Russia’s assistance in expansion of Pakistan Steel Mills and provision of technical support for the Guddu and Muzaffargarh power plants.

He said Russia could facilitate Pakistan in the execution of Thar Coal Project.

Gilani said this was his fourth meeting with Prime Minister Putin. He mentioned that he joined other leaders at the SCO forum despite the occasion of Eid, because of the importance of the forum and also of Pakistan’s commitment to the regional issues.

He appreciated Russia’s support for mega projects including CASA 1000.

Putin supported Pakistan’s stance on war on terror and agreed to pursue the policy of counter-terrorism for ensuring regional peace.

The two Prime Ministers agreed that collective regional efforts were required to eliminate terrorism from the region to usher in peace and stability, and re-direct all energies towards economic interaction among the members of SCO

Wielding soft power: US offers to finance TAPI gas pipeline
By Zafar Bhutta

Published: December 19, 2011

Asian Development Bank becomes a transaction adviser for the initiative. DESIGN: FAIZAN DAWOOD

ISLAMABAD:
The US has made a generous offer to finance the multibillion-dollar Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, an implicit gesture to lure Pakistan away from the Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline deal.

Addressing students of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on November 25, US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had termed Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline deal unfeasible. A viable alternative, in his view, was the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project via Afghanistan.

In the $7.5 billion TAPI gas pipeline project, Pakistan’s share will be 1.35 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) out of a total of 3.2 bcfd gas exports from Turkmenistan.

Asian Development Bank (ADB) has also become a transaction adviser for TAPI gas pipeline project, raising funds for it by forming a consortium of leading lenders.

Although Pakistan and Turkmenistan have signed the Gas Sales Purchase Agreement (GSPA) on TAPI project, the two countries are yet to take a final decision on it.

Sources inform The Express Tribune that the Export-Import Bank (EIB) of the United States as well as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an “independent” US agency, have offered Pakistan financing for TAPI. “As Pakistan has welcomed the offer, Pakistani and US authorities were scheduled to discuss it on the sidelines of the Bonn conference,” sources asserted, adding that the discussions could not take place due to the subsequent boycott of the moot by Islamabad.

Petroleum Secretary Ijaz Chaudhry, however, asserted that he had no knowledge of any financing offer by the US for the TAPI gas pipeline project.

“After finalising gas price, the approval of Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) would be sought to sign the final GSPA with Turkmenistan,” he added.

Pakistan is yet to finalise transit fees with neighbouring Afghanistan and India.

According to sources, the Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources is expected to leave for New Delhi next month to hold talks with his Indian counterpart after transit fee is finalised with Afghanistan.

Three options are under consideration for transit fee on gas imports.

The first deals with fixing it on transmission of gas from Turkmenistan. The second one includes linking it with the length of gas pipeline. The third option may involve taking into account the volume of gas to be consumed by each country.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19th, 2011.


and now america tries bribing pakistan no mention of india here mate lol

 

[AVinayKumar]

^ I think Salala incident has been played up beyond its expiry date.. At the ground level, all that incident has done is increase the monthly USA cost by 87 million USD.. Its like a bucket out of the ocean if you consider the overall cost of war in Afghanistan.

 

[lem34]

Now that we have had Indians come on here and either not know a clue what they are talking about or slag off pakistan or looking at this project within the indian pakistani hatred doctrine. Its not about india or about anti american or to be honest even pakistan is only one link in the chain so try not to look at it in a narrow way

Lets properly get back to the topic. I reckon this article best describes whats going on:


Russia, China, Iran defeat U.S. in the “pipeline wars”

While the West kills thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ravages both countries, Russia, China and Iran are acquiring the crucial energy riches of Central Asia and the Caspian area without firing a shot.

by Asad Ismi

A major reason for the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was the building of a pipeline through the country that would take natural gas from Turkmenistan to India and Pakistan. Canada and the other 44 Western countries occupying Afghanistan are supporting this U.S. objective by bolstering Washington’s military position in the country.



Turkmenistan, which borders Afghanistan, contains the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world. The U.S. has been trying to set up the pipeline for a decade, having first negotiated the venture with the ousted Taliban government. Two months after these negotiations broke down, Washington overthrew the Taliban in October 2001 when it invaded Afghanistan.

Since then, the U.S. has persuaded India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan to sign an agreement aimed at constructing the pipeline, but the war in Afghanistan and the U.S.’s failure to defeat the Taliban stalled actual work on this project. Washington’s occupation of Afghanistan and pipeline plans are part of its strategy to gain control of Central Asia’s and the Caspian Sea area’s energy riches and divert them away from Russia, China, and Iran.

As Richard Boucher, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, stated in September 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan so it can become a conduit and hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south… and so that the countries of Central Asia are no longer bottled up between the two enormous powers of China and Russia, but rather that they have outlets to the south as well as to the north and the east and the west.”

However, as the Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar put it in an article for Asia Times, “The United States' pipeline diplomacy in the Caspian, which strove to bypass Russia, elbow out China and isolate Iran, has foundered.”

Recently, the U.S.’s Turkmen-Afghan pipeline plans have suffered what appears to be a fatal blow. On January 6, Turkmenistan committed its entire gas exports to China, Russia, and Iran with the inauguration of the Dauletabad-Sarakhs-Khangiran (DSK) pipeline which connects Iran's northern Caspian area with Turkmenistan.

As Bhadrakumar explains, Turkmenistan “has no urgent need of the pipelines that the United States and the European Union have been advancing.” The operation of the DSK pipeline, along with the launching of another one between China and Turkmenistan in December 2009, has “virtually redrawn the energy map of Eurasia and the Caspian,” he maintains. “We are witnessing a new pattern of energy cooperation at the regional level that dispenses with Big Oil [private Western multinational oil companies]. Russia traditionally takes the lead. China and Iran follow the example. Russia, Iran, and Turkmenistan hold, respectively, the world's largest, second-largest, and fourth-largest gas reserves. And China will be consumer par excellence in this century. The matter is of profound consequence to U.S. global strategy.”

Bhadrakumar has served in diplomatic posts for India in the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Russia and Turkmenistan have also agreed to build an east-west pipeline connecting all of the latter’s gas fields to one network so that the pipelines going to Russia, Iran, and China can take gas from any of the fields. (See the accompanying map for the routes of these new and proposed pipelines.)

Three weeks before the opening of the DSK pipeline, China and Turkmenistan inaugurated a major natural gas pipeline between the two countries. The presidents of China, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan attended the opening ceremony of the 1,833-kilometre pipeline on December 14, 2009. The pipeline will transport natural gas from the Saman-Depe field in eastern Turkmenistan through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to China’s Xinjiang province, from where it will go to 14 Chinese provinces and cities. By 2012, the pipeline will deliver 40 billion cubic metres of gas per year, which is more than half of China’s present gas consumption.

Chinese President Hu Jintao described the pipeline as “another platform for collaboration and cooperation” between China and Central Asia. In return for access to Central Asian gas, China is building infrastructure and giving cheap loans to the area’s republics. According to John Chan, writing on the World Socialist Website: “Beijing’s broader aim is to bring the region within its own political and strategic orbit.”

Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov declared that the pipeline has “not only commercial and economic value. It is also political,” and will become “a major contributing factor to security in Asia”.

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov added: “China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”

As Chan puts it, “The opening of a major Chinese pipeline from Turkmenistan alters the Central Asian energy equation. The Financial Times commented last week that the pipeline “deals a blow to the European Union’s plans to win Turkmen supplies for the planned Nabucco pipeline.”

This pipeline is the U.S.’s and E.U.’s attempt at breaking Russia’s dominant role as the leading energy supplier to Europe. Nabucco depends mainly on getting gas from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. However, Russia now wants to double its consumption of Azerbaijani gas, and Iran is also becoming a consumer of this gas, further reducing supplies for Nabucco.

In December 2009, Azerbaijan signed an agreement to deliver gas to Iran through the 1,400km Kazi-Magomed-Astara pipeline. Russia's South Stream and North Stream pipelines (the latter’s construction starts in Spring 2010), will supply gas to northern and southern Europe, ensuring Moscow’s continued dominance of energy supplies to Europe.

As Bhadrakumar points out, the DSK pipeline shows that U.S. efforts to demonize, isolate, and terrorize Iran have failed miserably. In open defiance of U.S. policy, President Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan is busy creating “a new economic axis” with Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, whom he considers a valuable partner.

Washington’s and the West’s show of force in Afghanistan has also failed to impress Berdymukhammedov, who is giving all of his country’s natural gas to Russia, China, and Iran. These countries are not currently engaged in imperialist military occupation of another nation. All they had to do to get Turkmenistan’s gas was to offer it a decent economic deal. So, while the West kills thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ravages both countries, Russia, China and Iran are acquiring the crucial energy riches of Central Asia and the Caspian area without firing a shot.

Russian dominance of Central Asia was further cemented by the recent overthrow of the pro-U.S. government in Kyrgyzstan and its replacement by a pro-Moscow regime. The new government has told Washington that it can no longer use the Manas airbase, which is the main transshipment point for American supplies to Afghanistan.

In light of such major Western energy-related defeats, the continuing occupation of Afghanistan by 46 Western nations must have some other purpose. If their military venture were mainly economic — if they simply wanted greater access to Central Asia’s resources — why did they not offer the region’s countries acceptable prices for them, just as Russia, China, and Iran are doing?

The answer perhaps lies in a memorable remark by the great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said: “At the heart of the Western Idea is imperialism.”

The West did not become rich by offering resource-endowed countries fair and mutually beneficial economic deals. It became rich by subjecting countries in the Global South to 500 years of genocide and plunder through colonialism, neocolonialism, and the endless wars these aggressive actions entail.

The U.S. and its allies do not seem to realize that the dark age of “might-is-right” imperialism is coming to an end. Russia, China, India, and Iran are not countries that can be subdued by displays of military aggression in neighbouring nations. The continuing futile occupation of Afghanistan reflects the failure of the West’s political and military strategists to face this new geopolitical reality.

What possible threat could a financially and politically crippled West — a coalition that can’t even defeat the Taliban after nine years — pose to nuclear-armed Russia, China, and India? Countries like these are busy creating a post-imperial age in which aggression and occupation are not required to secure needed resources.

They are leaving the decadent West in the dust of history.


Read more: Russia, China, Iran defeat U.S. in the “pipeline wars” « RAWA News

Note India is mentioned is this article as opposed to pakistan, but of course pipeline is planned through pakistan. I think the author quoting an indian found it difficult to bring pakistan in lol. If india is or was to join it would have to make up with china/pakistan and also act against America. What a headache for dehli


Central Asia
Dec 24, 2009

THE ROVING EYE
China plays Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar

BEIJING - For all the rhapsodies on the advent of the New Silk Road, it may have come into effect for good last week, when China and Central Asia got together to open a crucial Pipelineistan node linking Turkmenistan to China's Xinjiang.

By 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying heights courtesy of gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer Central Asia Pipeline from Turkmenistan - operating at full capacity. The pipeline will even help China achieve its goals in terms of curbing carbon emissions.

And in a few years China's big cities will also be cruising courtesy of oil from Iraq. (See Iraq's oil auction hits the jackpot Asia Times Online, December 16.)

China needs Iraqi oil. But instead of spending more than US$2trillion on an illegal war, Chinese companies got some of the oil they needed from Iraq by bidding in a legal Iraqi oil auction. And in the New Great Game in Eurasia, instead of getting bogged down in Afghanistan, they made a direct deal with Turkmenistan, built a pipeline, profited from Turkmenistan's disagreements with Moscow (Gazprom stopped buying Turkmen gas last April, which cost the Central Asian "stan" $1 billion a month), and will get most of the gas they need.

The running myth is that China is addicted to oil. Coal would be more like it. The No 1 global emitter of greenhouse gases, China still produces more than 70% of its energy from coal. Beijing will inevitably get deeper into biogas or solar energy, but in the short term most of the "factory of the world" runs on coal. Of its verified energy reserves, 96% are coal.

This does not imply that China's shortage of raw materials such as oil and iron ore does not have the possibility of materializing Beijing's planners' worst nightmare - making the country a hostage to foreign raw-material producers (iron ore plays a significant part in China's strategic relationship with Brazil). But diversifying oil supplies is a matter of extreme national security. When oil reached $150 a barrel in 2008 - before the US-unleashed financial crisis - China's media accused foreign Big Oil of being "international petroleum crocodiles", and insinuated that the West's hidden agenda was ultimately to stop China's relentless development dead in its tracks.

Have sanctions won't travel
Twenty-eight percent of the world's total proven oil reserves are in the Arab world. China badly needs this oil - with its factories churning out everything from sneakers to laptops, its car market booming like there's no tomorrow (last month alone it produced 1.34 million vehicles), and Beijing constantly increasing its strategic oil reserves.

Few may know that China is actually the world's fifth-largest oil producer, at 3.7 million barrels per day (bpd), just below Iran and slightly over Mexico. In 1980, China consumed only 3% of the world's oil. Now it's already around 10% - the world's second-largest consumer, overtaking Japan but still way behind the US at 27%.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China will account for more than 40% of the increase in global oil demand up to 2030. And this assumes that China's gross domestic product will grow at "only" 6%. In 2009, even with the global financial crisis, China's GDP is expected to have grown 8%.

Saudi Arabia controls 13% of the world's oil production. It is the only swing producer capable of substantially increasing output. Not by accident, until recently it was China's main supplier - with 500,000 bpd.

China will get increasingly more oil from Iraq starting from 2013 or 2014. So from now on China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) will be very well positioned. But it's the Iranian equation that's really complex.

Chinese companies committed to investing no less than a staggering $120 billion in Iran's energy sector over the past five years. Iran is already China's No 2 oil supplier. Sinopec has just signed another memorandum of understanding with the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Co to invest an additional $6.5 billion to build oil refineries in Iran. Despite sanctions, trade between China and Iran grew 35% in 2009, to $27 billion.

[cant see China letting this investment go down the drain in an attack by america on iran]

Saudi Arabia - harboring extreme paranoia about the Iranian nuclear program - has offered to supply the Chinese the same amount of oil it currently imports from Iran, at much lower prices. Beijing scotched the deal. Then US President Barack Obama warned President Hu Jintao during his November visit to Beijing that the US would not be able to keep Israel from attacking Iran - as a tactic to persuade Beijing to agree to harsher sanctions.

Arguably nothing will happen in January, when China takes over the presidency of the United Nations Security Council. No matter what's spun in the US, Russia as well as China won't agree to more sanctions against Iran. But France takes over in February, and will definitely press the council to be harsher.

So many escape routes

From Beijing's point of view, both the US vs Iran conflict and the simmering US vs China strategic competition boil down to what could be called "escape from Hormuz and Malacca".

The Strait of Hormuz - the only entry to the Persian Gulf - at its narrowest is only 36km wide, with Iran to the north and Oman to the south. Roughly 20% of China's oil imports travel through it. Beijing frets at the sight of US aircraft carriers patrolling nearby.

The Strait of Malacca - very busy and very dangerous - at its narrowest is only 2.8km wide, with Singapore to the north and Indonesia to the south. As much as 80% of China's oil imports may travel through it.

The "escape" logic explains China's foray into Africa. China went to Africa because that continent is home to the few oilfields not owned by foreign Big Oil. When Chinese state oil companies buy equity stakes in African oilfields, they are protecting China from increases in oil prices, with the added bonus of no hassle - as happened in 2005 when China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) tried to buy Unocal in the US.

Hu Jintao goes to Africa every single year. Angola even overtook Saudi Arabia as China's main oil supplier in 2006. CNPC is extremely active in Sudan, owning equity in a number of oilfields. There are no fewer than 10,000 Chinese workers in Sudan building refineries and pipelines to the Red Sea. Beijing showers Khartoum with loans to build infrastructure. Sudan already is China's sixth oil supplier, responsible for about 6% of oil imports.

There are problems, of course. China's refineries deal mainly with low-sulfur sweet crude (predominant in African oilfields) rather than high-sulfur sour crude (predominant in Saudi Arabia). So more Chinese demand at first glance would mean the necessity to import more African oil. But that will change in time. China is building new refineries to process sour crude, some even financed by Saudi Arabia.

The road goes on forever
China's Central Asia strategy could be summed up as bye-bye Hormuz, bye-bye Malacca, and welcome to the New Silk Road.

Kazakhstan has 3% of the world's proven oil reserves. Its largest oilfields are not far from the Chinese border. China sees Kazakhstan as a key alternative oil supplier - with Pipelineistan linking Kazakh oilfields to Chinese refineries.

CNPC financed the Kazakh-China pipeline in 2005 (with a capacity of 400,000 bpd) and bought two-thirds of formerly Canadian PetroKazakhstan, which controls the Kumkol fields in the Turgai basin (the other third is owned by the Kazakh government) for $4.18 billion. And China Investment Corp, a sovereign wealth fund, bought 11% of KazMunaiGas Exploration Production (KMG), the oil-production subsidiary of the national energy company, for $1 billion.

China's first transnational Pipelineistan adventure was the China-Kazakhstan oil link. But this does not detract at all from China-Russia Pipelineistan - in both oil and gas. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently sealed more than $5 billion in deals with China, mostly on energy, advancing the agreement on a gas pipeline that will deliver up to 70 billion cubic meters of gas a year from Russia to China, according to Gazprom's Aleksey Miller.

But the Russia vs China chapter of Pipelineistan may be very tricky. Russia can at times behave as a strategic competitor. For example, the Kazakhstan-China pipeline operates with no hassle only for seven months a year. In winter the crude oil must be mixed with less viscous oils so it won't freeze. Russia supplies them. But Transneft delayed delivery of these additives in the winter of 2006, arguing that its own pipeline was already operating at the limit. CNPC was forced to transport the additives by rail from another part of Kazakhstan for a lot of money.

Central Asia - via Turkmenistan - will definitely be China's major supplier of gas, but on the oil front, it's much more complex. Even if all the "stans" sold China every barrel of oil they currently pump, the total would be less than half of China's daily needs.

This means that ultimately only the Middle East can placate China's thirst for oil. According to the International Energy Agency, China's oil demand will rise to 11.3 million barrels a day by 2015, even with its domestic production peaking. Compare that with what some of China's alternative suppliers are producing: Angola at 1.4 million bpd, Kazakhstan at 1.4 million as well, and Sudan at 400,000.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia produces 10.9 million bpd, the United Arab Emirates 3.0 million, Kuwait 2.7 million - and then there's Iraq, bound to reach 4 million by 2015. But Beijing is still not convinced - not with all those US "forward operating sites" in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, plus a naval battle group in the Persian Gulf.

China may also count on a South Asia option. China spent $200 million on the first phase of construction of the deepwater port of Gwadar in Balochistan. It wanted - and it got from Islamabad - "sovereign guarantees to the port's facilities". Gwadar is only 400km from Hormuz. From Gwadar, China can easily monitor traffic in the strait.

But Gwadar is infinitely more crucial as the pivot of the virtual Pipelineistan war between TAPI and IPI. TAPI is the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, which will never be built as long as a US/NATO foreign occupation is fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. IPI is the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the “peace pipeline” (TAPI would be the "war pipeline" then?). Iran and Pakistan have already agreed to build it, much to Washington's distress.

In this case, Gwadar will be a key node. And if India pulls out, China already has made it clear it wants in; China would build another Pipelineistan node from Gwadar across the Karakoram highway toward Xinjiang. That would be a classic case of close energy cooperation among Iran, Pakistan and China - and a major strategic Pentagon defeat in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

An additional complicating factor is that India harbors infinite suspicion about a Chinese "string of pearls" - ports along China's key oil-supply routes, from Pakistan to Myanmar. Washington still believes that if TAPI is built, India will refrain from breaking the US-enforced embargo on Iran. But for India it would be a much safer - and strategically sounder - deal to align with IPI than with TAPI.

A Maoist drenched in oil
For China there's also an "escape to South America" option. In the Venezuelan overall strategy it's essential to sell more oil to China so as to lower its heavy dependence on the US market. According to the existing terms of the China-Venezuela partnership, four tankers and at least two refineries will be built - one in the immensely oil-rich Orinoco Belt in Venezuela and the other in Guangdong. State-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) will be responsible for shipping the oil to China.

The Venezuelan target is to export 500,000bpd in 2009 - already reached - and 1 million by 2012. President Hugo Chavez - who in typical colorful manner described himself as a "Maoist" during his last visit to China - wants Venezuela to be no less than China's top oil supplier. China's energy analysts take this partnership extremely seriously; it means that Venezuela could replace Angola. Currently, according to China's Ministry of Commerce, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Iran are its top three oil suppliers.

Meanwhile, China has retrofitted many of its coal-fired plants in the past few years, and is accelerating moves to bypass high-intensity carbon-emitting technology, rebuilding its steel and cement industries. The country spends $9 billion a month on clean energy. There are plenty of wind farms across the countryside. A Shenzhen company is the world leader in lithium-ion battery technology. The first affordable, global electric car is bound to be made in China.

According to the China Greentech Initiative, the potential green market in China could reach a staggering $1 trillion a year by 2013 - that is, 15% of China's gross domestic product by then.

But for the moment, Beijing's strategic priority has been to develop an extremely meticulous energy-supply policy - with sources in Russia, the South China Sea, Central Asia, the East China Sea, the Middle East, Africa and South America.

As masterly as China may be able to play Pipelineistan, it will stride ever more confidently into a green future.

Pakistan has a great future.

The “Wars Within”

Posted on 10. Dec, 2011 by Imran Malik in Opinion

The "Wars Within" | Opinion Maker




US ‘ACHILLES’ HEEL IN THE AFGHAN WAR

By Brig Imran Malik

The Massacre at Salala left a lot of political debris in its wake. It caused a major breakdown in the US-Pak ‘non-alliance’ and also forced Pakistan to take some long overdue independent decisions. It also kicked to life the dormant Pakistani nationalism that had thus far been snuffed out by a corrupt, weak, pliant, and beholden to its masters pro-US Government. It also brought to the fore a number of “wars within” that had been effectively sabotaging progress in the Afghan War.

These Wars Within, at all levels, have the potential to become the Achilles’ Heel for the overall US war effort in the Region (APR) and South-Central Asian Region (SCAR) with extreme implications for the overall Great Game III.

The Wars Within – One ; US Departments of State, Defence and CIA:

1.The weak Obama Administration has not been able to come out with a unified whole-of-Government approach to the Afghan imbroglio.

2.The State and Defence Departments and the CIA, the main operative organs of US policies have consistently acted at cross purposes.

3.The State Department has taken a number of diplomatic initiatives but has ruefully seen them nullified because of the arrogance and incompetence of the Military-Intelligence Combine (MIC)/Pentagon-CIA Combine.

4.The lack of direction and control by their President seems to have exacerbated the situation too.

5.The Raymond Davis episode, the OBL saga, and now the Massacre at Salala are proofs of such confused decision making.

Now just when the US State Department had organized the Bonn Conference and was at the verge of carving out a successful start to the next phase of US policy in Afghanistan (From Transition to Transformation, 2014-2024) it had the rug pulled out from beneath its feet! And at just about the worst time possible the Pentagon-CIA Combine committed the Massacre at Salala – thus effectively sabotaging the Conference and sending the US-Pak relationship into a deathly tailspin! They erred in their assessments that Pakistan would not react so ferociously nor take other extreme retaliatory measures including boycotting the Bonn Conference alongwith the Taliban. This glaring incompetence on their part ensured an unqualified failure of the Bonn Conference, for the State Department and thus for President Obama’s policies in Afghanistan.

The timing of the tragic Massacre at Salala by the Pentagon-CIA Combine is intriguing. Was it part of some greater operational/strategic design or was it simply incompetence personified? Was it to spite the State Department or were they complicit in an act of sheer disloyalty to President Obama? So what is then the actual casus belli of this war within that is ruining President Obama’s policies in Afghanistan? Is it an attempt to gain decisive influence with the President? Is it simply poor statecraft or is it a selfish desire to claim the glories of “success” in the Afghan campaign as it draws towards its endgame? Or is it something more sinister, like the hugely effective Military-Industry Complex at work again to prolong the war with the ensuing mutual benefits?!

Whatever it is, these conflicting centrifugal pulls and centripetal pushes are taking Obama’s Afghan War and Afghan policy nowhere. Instead they are only prolonging the agony of the war, increasing its costs and casualties exponentially and threatening to scuttle President Obamas re-election campaign.

To succeed in Afghanistan all elements of power in the US will have to bury their bones of contention and work in a genuinely unified manner. Else these Wars Within the Afghan War may turn it into the next One Hundred Years War!

The Wars Within -Two; Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Pakistan and Afghanistan should have been natural allies. Pakistan provides the only viable avenue of trade to this landlocked country. They have a common border, same religion, common languages (Pashtu, Persian, Urdu), similar tribal culture and values, and a very large common Pakhtun population straddling the Durand Line. Pakistan played a cardinal strategic and operational role in defeating the erstwhile Soviet Union which should have translated into a great spirit of brotherhood between them. But that was not to be. Issues of transit trade and the Durand Line remain.

Later, after the defeat of the Taliban and the introduction of the US/NATO/ISAF in Afghanistan, affairs between them soured very quickly. Presently we have an unnatural democratic system in Afghanistan. The minority Northern Alliance is in power and the majority Pakhtun population is being denied their democratic right of forming or being a major part of the Government. Further the minority Karzai Government is clearly India-centric and anti-Pakistan while the latter has excellent relations and influence with the majority Pakhtuns. The Karzai and Pakistan Governments mutually blame one another for harbouring terrorists on their territories who ostensibly go cross border to carry out terrorist attacks against the other side. The US and Afghanistan seek a formal role for India in Afghanistan. Pakistan sees it as a strategic envelopment by India – who would thus occupy both her eastern and western borders much to her peril!

As long as these bones of contention remain between the majority Pakhtuns and the minority Northern Alliance peace will not return to this unfortunate land. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan will remain testy if India is given a major role in the post-US Afghanistan. The US will need to resolve all these issues if it wants to attain its goals and objectives in the APR and the SCAR.

The Wars Within -Three; US and Pakistan:

Although Pakistan is a major non-NATO ally of the US yet they have a number of wars within, specially in the geopolitical and geostrategic domains. This emanates from the lack of any confluence of vital/important national interests in the APR and the SCAR between them.

The US occupies this very central position (that is Afghanistan) in the APR-SCAR radiating influence and projecting power in all directions – over Pakistan, Iran, CARs, containing China and sitting at the extended southern under-belly of Russia!

The first bone of contention is that Pakistan will never be part of any US design that is patently or even by implication anti-China or anti-Iran! The other is the formal role that the US would like to give to India in post 2014 Afghanistan. And that is strategically and operationally anathema to Pakistan. They will never countenance India sitting in their backyard and threatening them with a two front war on a regular basis. These conflicting vital national interests of the US and Pakistan are the two major causes of dissent between the two. As long as the US does not agree to keep India out of Afghanistan there will be no peace in the APR and no progress on the US grand strategic design to emplace a trade and security regime in the APR-SCAR.Period.
Additionally, at the operational levels we have the Drone attacks and cross border air and ground violations by US/NATO/ISAF, et al. The Massacre at Salala has resulted in the eviction of the Americans from the Shamsi Air Base, a complete blockade of their logistics supplies, a Pakistani refusal to attend the Bonn Conference and a complete cessation of all cooperation in military, intelligence, technical, administration and other fields. The Russians too have threatened to close the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) unless the US stops deploying the Anti – Ballistic Missile Shield in Europe. This multiplies exponentially the effect of Pakistan’s blockades and catches the US in a painful nutcracker! On the other hand the US insists on Pakistan to go after the Haqqani Network in the North Waziristan Agency which Pakistan refuses to do for her own operational/strategic reasons. Of even more importance is Pakistan’s nuclear programme that just does not fit in with the US view of the world and the region. The US has adopted a very biased and discriminatory nuclear policy in South Asia. India – a fellow non-signatory of the NPT and CTBT – has been gifted nuclear legitimacy through the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Deal thus tilting the nuclear balance in South Asia alarmingly in her favour. Predictably Pakistan has undertaken the necessary remedial steps to bring the nuclear balance back on even keel.
Irrespective of how the US wants to attain her objectives it will still have to factor in Pakistani interests in all equations in the Afghan imbroglio. The US will have to adopt different ways and means to attain her policy ends and objectives in the APR-SCAR. And the US must understand that to do so the road passes through Islamabad and not New Delhi.

The Wars Within – Four; The Regional Dimension:

The Vision: The assessed US vision for the Europe-APR-SCAR complex appears to be a very fascinating one. The US would like to impose upon a pacified APR-SCAR complex a unified trade and security mechanism geared to serve its vital national interests deep into the future. This APR-SCAR complex would then be connected to Europe through the New Silk Road Project (NSRP), thus turning this whole Europe-APR-SCAR mass into a unified humungous trade and security complex – all under her tutelage, and control.
The Geo-Economic Domain:

By virtue of occupying the Central Position of Afghanistan the US gets to dominate the APR-SCAR and control their riches and destinies to her abiding benefit. It enables the US to sit atop the mineral riches of Afghanistan, overlook the mineral riches in Pakistan (Balochistan), exercise oversight on the fossil fuels of CARs and Iran and control the flow and price of fossil fuels across the APR-SCAR and the rest of the world.

The US could further visualize its multinationals investing in a series of refineries, factories and manufacturing industries to be built in India where the mineral resources of Afghanistan and Pakistan could be refined and re-exported. However establishing these refineries, factories and manufacturing industries on the Mekran Coast of Pakistan will be more profitable -a shorter route to and through the Arabian Sea to the Middle East, Africa, Europe and to the Americas. We could also service the enormous economies of China (through the Karakoram Highway) and India easily. Japan, South Korea and other nations in the Far East could be reached by sea. Pakistan must never allow this opportunity to go by her.

Were the US to choose India over the Mekran Coast, Pakistan, it will not find any avenue of taking the mineral ores out of Afghanistan – either through Pakistan or Iran much less through the CARs, China or Russia! Hobson’s Choice for the US, if there ever was one!

The GeoStrategic Domain

The geography of the region has bestowed a unique geostrategic gift to Pakistan. The Hindu Kush, Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges create the biggest natural barriers to all sorts of movement imaginable across the swathe of regions quoted above. Therefore all trade routes and fossil fuel pipelines must of necessity flow from West to East and South to North or from the CARs across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the colossal economies of China, India and beyond. Pakistan thus becomes the unavoidable crossroads for all trade routes. To ensure security of such large scale economic investments and trade a compatible regional security mechanism has to be emplaced – something that the US has rather unsuccessfully tried to initiate at the Istanbul and Bonn Conferences. However to have any realistic chance of turning this grandiose idea into reality the US must consider the various bones of contention between the two major players in the region – India and Pakistan. Unless and until overall regional balance is created and maintained and the historical issues of Kashmir and the rivers that flow out of it, Siachen, Sir Creek et al are resolved there can be no peace between the two. Further both India and the US will have to forego the option of enunciating any formal or major role for India in Afghanistan.

It will be imperative for the US to help resolve these regional and bilateral issues between these two antagonists before embarking upon any such ambitious projects.

The Geopolitical Domain

India seems to have thrown in her lot with the US. Together they seem determined to become the most dominating force in the APR-SCAR. However they seem to be ignoring the concerns of the other major power in the region – the emerging SCO, comprising Russia, China, Iran, CARs and Pakistan. The Indo-US combine is trying to outflank both Russia and China keeping them away from this mineral rich region. The Indo-US combine and the SCO may well turn out to be the two poles that emerge to contest dominance in the APR-SCAR. And that will make for a very fascinating struggle for the “Heart of Asia”.

The Way Ahead

President Obama needs to bring sanity into his administration. He must sack Leon Pannetta the one man most responsible for most of his woes abroad and censure General Petraeus! Thereafter the US should usher in peace in the APR-SCAR first starting with India-Pakistan and Pakistan-Afghanistan. Then it should come to a reasonable accommodation with the SCO and agree to a practical plan to exploit the riches of the APR-SCAR for everyone’s benefit. If the US were to go it alone with only India in tow, the project will not even take off. How on earth are they going to get the metals, minerals, rare earth materials etc out of landlocked Afghanistan in such an eventuality? All avenues out of Afghanistan go through either of the following – Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan!! None in the US camp. Therefore the US will have to come up with a win-win solution for the whole APR-SCAR including the SCO. Only then it can proceed further.

To sum up one can easily say that the US has maneouvered itself into one hell of a hole. It is fighting an unwinnable war in which it is dependent upon the generosity of others to ensure that its men are fed, its weapons have ammunition and that its vehicles have fuel. Further it needs military, operational, intelligence and many other types of support. Yet it is prone to fighting those very nations it is so dependent upon! Unless it resolves all these contradictions in its policies and works through all these minor and major wars within it will continue to falter at all levels – geopolitical, geostrategic and geoeconomic.
And the NSRP and victory in the Great Game III will remain as elusive as ever!

US sows discord in South Asia
By M K Bhadrakumar

Two templates in regional politics are seriously debilitating the United States's campaign to bring Pakistan down on its knees in the Afghan endgame. One is that Delhi has distanced itself from the US campaign and pursues an independent policy toward Islamabad.

The second factor frustrating US policies to isolate Pakistan is the South Asian nation's bonhomie with Iran. Pakistan would have been pretty much isolated had there been an acute rivalry with Iran over the Afghan endgame. The current level of cordiality in the relationship enables Islamabad to focus on the rift with the US and even draw encouragement from Tehran.

It's baloney
A recent statement by the Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on the US-Pakistan rift underscored that India doesn't see eye-to-eye with the US approach. (See US puts the squeeze on Pakistan, Asia Times, October 22). It was carefully timed to signal to Washington (and Islamabad) that Delhi strongly disfavored any form of US military action against Pakistan.
There is a string of evidence to suggest that the Pakistani leadership appreciates the Indian stance. The general headquarters in Rawalpindi acted swiftly on Sunday to return to India within hours a helicopter with three senior military officers on board which strayed into Pakistani territory in bad weather in the highly sensitive Siachen sector. The official spokesman in Delhi went on record to convey India's appreciation of the Pakistani gesture. Such conciliatory gestures are rare (for both sides) in the chronicle of Pakistan-India relationship.

Again, last week, India voted for Pakistan's candidacy for the Asia-Pacific slot among the non-permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and the Pakistani ambassador promptly responded that he would work with his Indian counterpart in New York. Ironically, the UN has been a theater for India and Pakistan's frequent clashes over the Kashmir problem.

Looking ahead, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan are likely to meet on the sidelines of the South Asian Association For Regional Cooperation summit in Male on November 10-11. Washington would have been quick to insist that it acted as "facilitator" in fostering the improving climate in India-Pakistan relations. But the US is instead watching with a degree of discomfort that its complicated South Asian symphony is throwing up jarring notes. Calibrating India-Pakistan tensions traditionally constituted a key element of the US's regional diplomacy.

Washington has "retaliated" to Krishna's statement by issuing a travel advisory cautioning American nationals from visiting India because of heightened terrorist threats. Delhi, in turn, ticked off Washington saying it considered the US move "disproportionate" - a cute way of saying that the advisory is a load of baloney.

Jundallah in retreat
What is happening in Pakistan-Iran relations is even more galling for the US. There has been a spate of high-level visits between Islamabad and Tehran and the two capitals have reached mutual understandings on a range of security interests. Last week, Tehran acknowledged that there had not been a single attack by the terrorist group Jundallah from the Pakistani side of the border in the Balochistan region during the past 10 months.

Tehran has accused the US of masterminding the Jundallah terrorists to stage covert operations to destabilize Iran. However, since the detention of Central Intelligence Agency operative Raymond Davis in Lahore in January, Islamabad has clamped down on hundreds of US intelligence operatives functioning on Pakistani soil, seriously cramping the US's capacity to dispatch Jundallah terrorists into Iran.

Tehran is satisfied that the Pakistani security establishment is finally acting purposively to smash the US-backed Jundallah network. It reciprocates Pakistan's goodwill by trying to harmonize its Afghan policy and scrupulously avoided pointing fingers at Pakistan for the assassination of Afghan Peace Council head Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was closely allied with Tehran.

Essentially, Iran appreciates that Pakistan's "strategic defiance" of the US will be in the interest of regional stability, the bottom line being that Tehran is keen to force the American troops to leave the region.

Tehran succeeded in the pursuit of a similar objective in Iraq by prevailing on Shi'ite political elites in Baghdad not to accede to the desperate pleas by the US to allow US troops to continue even after the stipulated deadline of withdrawal in December 2011 under the Status of Forces agreement. But Afghanistan is a different kettle of fish and a common strategy with Pakistan will help.

Pakistan keeps an ambivalent stance on the issue of a long-term US military presence in Afghanistan, but it can count on the Taliban to robustly oppose the US plans apropos military bases. Unsurprisingly, Tehran purses a multi-pronged approach toward the Taliban.

Concerted effort
In sum, the overall regional scenario is becoming rather unfavorable to the US. The easing of tensions in Pakistan's relations with India and Iran undermine US strategy to get embedded in the region.

The US's travel advisory was intended to raise hackles in India about the imminent possibility of Pakistan-supported terrorist activities. Again, US-sponsored disinformation is reappearing with claims that China and Pakistan are conspiring against India by setting Chinese military bases in the northern areas of Pakistan, which form part of Kashmir.

This is coinciding with a distinct improvement in the security situation in the Kashmir Valley, to the point that chief minister Omar Abdullah openly advocated last week in Srinagar that decades-old emergency regulations should be progressively withdrawn and that Delhi should initiate a serious engagement of Pakistan to settle the Kashmir problem.

United States-backed propaganda about the prospect of Chinese military bases in the Pakistani part of Kashmir is intended to serve a dual purpose: namely, creating discord between Pakistan and India and in Sino-Indian relations, too.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a significant statement last week that he was "convinced" that the Chinese leadership wanted a peaceful resolution of all problems between India and China, including the long-running border dispute. Significantly, he expressed his "sincere hope [that] it is possible for us to find ways and means by which the two neighbors can live in peace and amity despite the persistence of the border problem".

Manmohan's remarks assumed significance since the two countries are to shortly hold the 15th round of talks on the border issue in New Delhi. In a meaningful move, the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to Manmohan's political overture. Beijing said China was "ready to work with India to enhance the China-India strategic partnership". The statement said:

As important neighbors to each other, China and India have maintained sound momentum in the bilateral relationship. As for the border issue left over from history, the two sides have been seeking a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable solution through friendly consultations. Pending a final solution, the two sides are committed to maintaining peace and tranquility in border areas.

A season for propaganda
The speculative, unattributed - and unverifiable - reports regarding Chinese intentions to establish military bases in the upper reaches of the Kashmir region under Pakistani control are surging again at a formative point in regional security. Their labored thesis is that Delhi should be extremely wary about the "devious" intentions of China and Pakistan and should go slow on the normalization of relations with these "treacherous" neighbors.

Curiously, Delhi is also being bombarded at the same time with US propaganda that Washington is striking a "grand bargain" with Pakistan over the Afghan problem whereby there will be a mutual accommodation of each other's concerns, which may include US intervention to mediate the Kashmir problem and US pressure on Delhi to roll back its presence in Afghanistan.

In a motivated commentary in Foreign Policy magazine last week on the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Islamabad, two prominent US think-tankers wired to the Washington establishment actually tried to alternatively bait Islamabad and frighten Delhi by putting on the table the ingredients of the "grand bargain". Truly, this is all turning out to be a season for propaganda.

The heart of the matter is that the US is desperate to clinch a strategic agreement with the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul that would allow the establishment of a long-term American military presence in Afghanistan.

On Monday, hundreds of Afghans demonstrated in Kabul against US bases. The same day, the lower house of the Afghan parliament rejected terms guiding the operations of the Afghan government's existing agreement with the International Security Assistance Force as violating the country's sovereignty. The mood in the Afghan parliament seems hostile.

Karzai is convening a loya jirga (grand council) to seek endorsement for the US-Afghan pact. Matters will come to a head when it meets on November 16. Karzai promises that the US-Afghan pact will be sent to parliament for approval after being discussed in the jirga. Washington insists that the jirga approves the draft pact before the Bonn II conference convenes in December. Karzai's political future depends on whether he can deliver on the pact.

All sitting parliamentarians, some former members, one-third of the provincial council members, representatives of civil society and distinguished people, religious scholars and influential tribal leaders have been invited to the jirga. Two hundred and thirty representatives of Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan, Iran and Western countries will also be in attendance in the 2,030-strong jirga.

On September 13, Afghan National Security Advisor Dadfar Spanta told Afghan parliamentarians that the US might set up military bases in Afghanistan after the signing of the pact, but that the pact wouldn't be inked unless approved by parliament. Spanta added, "Concerns of our neighbors [over the US-Afghan pact] are genuine, but we will not allow our soil to be used against them."

The Afghan parliament fears, however, that Karzai might choose to bypass it after extracting endorsement from a pliant jirga and interpreting that as the collective opinion of the Afghan nation. Parliament directed the speaker on Monday to address an official communication to Karzai highlighting its constitutional prerogative to approve foreign policy issues.

The Afghan endgame is moving into a crucial phase; much will depend on regional politics. The worst-case scenario for the US is that subsuming the contradictions in the intra-regional relationships between and among Pakistan, Iran, India and China, these countries might have a convergent opinion on the issue of American military bases.

An accentuation of these contradictions, therefore, would serve the US's geopolitical interests at the present juncture, hence the US's "divide-and-rule" strategy.

The first option is between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, under the the stewardship (benign colonialism) of the US is a net plus for all ---- It has been argued that such a construct is a non-starter because other important layers, and none more important than Iran, are not included and indeed that this is indicative of what may be ins store for others - America does not like it when you don't treat him with deference he feels is due to him cause he threw money at you.

the idea that for the promise of a free Asia to be realized it has to be an Asia that is led by Asians, not default Asians such as the US, but for this to be realized India must fix her border problems -- However, we must ask, will the anti indian opinion be willing to accord India support for recognition as a permanent seat on the security council? Will they then open their hearts to India as they do to our great neighbor and brother, for indeed, brothers are those who are with you in every struggle, and whose counsel you value deeply, even as their counsel will leave a bitter unpalatable taste of a difficult truth ?

The issue to keep your focus on is the US - not India - India may sek to align her interests with those of the US and who can blame them for their judgment - Lets be very clear, the day Pakistan and India and China and India are normalized, there will be a great wailing and sorrow in the West and particularly in the US.

America may feel it harsh and undeserving - but is not the path to hell laid with good intentions - It does not matter what the US will touch. even if it's gold, it will turn to fecal matter in Muslim majority countries - and really the time for "stewardship" is past .

So what will ameica do? america wants a SOFA with their favorite Afghan mayor and is bound and determined to get it - our Indian friends see much merit in this approach and indeed some in Pakistan are arguing that it is the lesser of two evils -- should we buy into this line of reasoning? After all, if a reduced US military presence is a good, then zero US military presence must be better , hain ji?

See, so long as US military presence persists, commercial ambitions will not succeed - Stewardship is over, kaput! But the US remains unpersuaded.

this post draws its substance from a post by muse on another thread

China Steps Up Investment In Afghanistan
China Afghanistan

CHRISTOPHER BODEEN 03/24/10 01:13 PM ET AP


BEIJING — Facing criticism in the West over corruption and electoral fraud, Afghan President Hamid Karzai found a receptive audience in Beijing on Wednesday, overseeing the signing of economic pacts and reaffirming warm traditional ties.

The trip to Beijing comes as Karzai seeks to establish himself as a regional political figure with stature and independence, partly in response to new criticism of his leadership from the U.S., Britain and other foreign partners.

Such issues aren't likely to be raised in his talks with Chinese leaders, who oversee a one-party Communist state that brooks no internal dissent or outside criticism.

While China has no troops in Afghanistan – where Karzai relies on U.S. and NATO forces to prop up his weak government against Taliban insurgents – its proximity and booming economy make it a valuable partner for the war-battered country.

In their meeting Wednesday at the hulking Great Hall of the People, Chinese President Hu Jintao congratulated Karzai on his reelection in an August poll seen by the United Nations as deeply flawed.

"Your visit will definitely help promote practical cooperation between China and Afghanistan, and take our comprehensive and cooperative partnership to a new level," Hu said in opening remarks.

After their talks, the presidents then presided over the signing of new agreements covering economic cooperation, technical training and preferential tariffs for some Afghan exports to China.

Karzai's visit comes as he looks to burnish his international standing. Since he first took power after the Taliban regime's ouster in 2001, his government has been tainted by inefficiency and persistent allegations of corruption that Western officials say have only boosted support for the insurgency. Last year's electoral fraud further hurt his profile.

The Afghan leader – although mocked by some opponents as a puppet of the West – now appears eager to strike a more independent stance on the foreign stage.

"Karzai is seeking to strike a balance among foreign powers and is pretty much emulating the 'multi-vector diplomacy' of the neighboring Central Asian states, for example Kazakhstan," said Nicklas Norling of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program in Sweden.

"By playing foreign powers against each other it can maximize leverage on each and thereby strengthen its sovereignty," said Norling.

Karzai has participated as an observer in summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a grouping of Central Asian nations dominated by China and Russia that aims to challenge U.S. dominance. He has also cemented ties with India to balance the influence of neighboring Pakistan, with which Afghanistan has an acrimonious relationship.

And earlier this month, Karzai hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who used his brief visit to lob insults at the United States and argue that international forces in Afghanistan would only lead to more civilian deaths.

Karzai called Iran – with which Afghanistan shares a long land border – "our brother nation" with whom it had excellent relations.

China, which professes to have a noninterventionist foreign policy, is not known to have interposed itself in U.S. relations with Afghanistan. It has limited its involvement in the country to diplomatic and humanitarian support, some trade, and investment in the minerals sector.

Still, Afghanistan's woes incorporate issues that Beijing considers direct threats to its stability: Islamist extremism spreading to China's Muslim region of Xinjiang, the long-term presence of U.S. and NATO forces on its borders, cross-border drug smuggling, and the deepening involvement of India, with which China shares a disputed border and a sharpening rivalry.

It is China's growing economic clout could prove most telling in its relations with Afghanistan. It is already a major source of consumer goods for Afghanistan and two-way trade totaled $155 million in 2008, according to Chinese figures.

In what could be a major boon to Afghan government coffers, a Chinese company has pledged $3 billion to tap one of the world's largest unexploited copper reserves at Aynak in Afghanistan, and is favored to win the rights to iron deposits at Hajigak when bids are considered this year.

Those projects have lagged because of the insurgency. American officials have alleged that Karzai's former minister of mines accepted a $20 million bribe to award the Aynak contract in late 2007 to China Metallurgical Group Corp.

---------- Post added at 12:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:44 PM ----------

Pak-Iran gas pipeline to be complete by 2013
By Qamar Zaman / Zahid Gishkori
Published: October 28, 2011



ISLAMABAD: Dispelling impressions of external pressure to shelve the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project, Petroleum Minister Dr Asim Hussain informed the Senate that it would be completed by 2013, one year ahead of schedule.

Hussain said, “First gas flow is targeted by the end of 2014.” The estimated cost is $1.5 billion, but it will be firmed up after completion of a bankable feasibility study. Initial information for financing the project has been exchanged with international investors from China, Russia and the Middle East, he added. The Turkmenistan gas pipeline project has also taken a great leap forward after nearly a decade and the gas supply and purchase agreement will be signed on November 15. Major components of the project including tender for pipes and compressors will be floated this month, said the petroleum minister.

He said the government would introduce a new petroleum exploration and production policy to provide additional incentives to investors for exploration of oil and gas in the country. These incentives, he added, would compensate for risk taken by companies for doing business in the present environment.

Government introduces money bills

The government has tabled the Petroleum Levy Amendment Bill, 2011 and Gas Infrastructure Development Cess Bill, 2011” in the Senate amid criticism from the opposition on the imposition of gas surcharge on consumers. The petroleum levy was introduced in the National Assembly when the Senate was not in session.

According to an explanatory statement, the Iran-Pakistan and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline projects were being pursued to increase supply and a surcharge was necessary to develop the required infrastructure. The government would otherwise be forced to import liquid fuels which are more expensive than gas. PML-N’s parliamentary leader in the Senate and former finance minister Ishaq Dar said the bills should not have been introduced as money bills, since they read like a mini-budget.

The bill on petroleum levy states that the levy is payable as mentioned in the fifth schedule along with the applicable rates, but keeping in view the need to revise the rates in line with international prices and other relevant considerations, it is necessary to revive section 7 in its original form, and omit the fifth schedule from the constitution.




Published in The Express Tribune, October 28th, 2011.

the following draws from a post put up by develop but is relevant

Looking at this proposal purely from a business point of view, what are the indispensable benefits provided to either party? In other words, what does India bring to the table that Pakistan can't get elsewhere, and vice versa?

As I see it, there is absolutely nothing that India adds to the equation that cannot be provided by substituting China or any other country. India provides a market. Big deal. There are plenty of markets, and China will suck up all the energy we can transit.

Now, looking at a map, Pakistan provides a huge benefit to India. India can go around Pakistan to get to the CARs, but that's the long way round and possibly using an underwater pipeline, all of which add costs. It will also involve cosying up to Iran, which will strain its relationship with the US.

So, bottom line, Pakistan is in no hurry to sign up. It should focus on strengthening ties with Iran, Afghanistan and China. Once India is sealed off from the CARs, and as its energy needs put pressure on the government, it will be much more amenable to dialog on Kashmir and other matters. Pakistan will be able to deal with India from a position of much greater leverage

stanbul: The Search for Consensus

Posted: 01 Nov 2011 06:06 AM PDT

An orderly ‘transition’ in 2014, when American and Nato combat forces pull out from Afghanistan, rests on progress towards a negotiated political settlement. But a serious peace process to advance Afghan national ‘reconciliation’ has yet to get off the ground.

That is why a regional conference that will convene in Istanbul on November 2 will focus less on this pivotal issue than on how regional states will assist Afghanistan’s stabilisation. If the joint hosts of the conference, Turkey and Afghanistan, backed by the US, have their way – as they will – this summit will be as much about the region as about Afghanistan.

The conference marks a curious reversal of the order of business necessary to establish peace and security in Afghanistan. Progress in the process of reconciliation with the insurgency ought to have preceded declarations of support and cooperation by regional states. Instead the Istanbul conference is set to shift the emphasis beyond Afghanistan to the broader region. The region is defined for the purposes of the Istanbul initiative as consisting of fourteen so-called ‘Heart of Asia’ countries. Apart from Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours they include India, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, and the Central Asian republics.

Istanbul is the venue for the first of three conferences intended to erect a framework of international support and cooperation for Afghanistan during and after the planned transition in 2014. The Istanbul conference has been billed as an initiative ‘to promote regional security and cooperation in the heart of Asia for a secure and stable Afghanistan’. The Bonn and Chicago conferences will follow this December and May next year.

Had the Istanbul conference set its sights from the outset on eliciting the endorsement by regional states for the 2014 transition and Afghan reconciliation as well as affirmation of broad principles including mutual undertakings of non-interference, it would have been easy to mobilise a strong consensus and produce a successful outcome with no glitches along the way.

But the initiative’s backers and sponsors started by wanting much more. They sought to establish a new security architecture, complete with an institutional mechanism and a ‘contact group’ charged with implementing an ambitious set of confidence building measures. These were outlined in the draft outcome document originally drawn up for the conference.

This sparked contention rather than help to promote a consensus. The sponsors were urged by this to trim their ambition and give up the idea of having a signed and binding document adopted by the conference. Whether the document under negotiation will now turn out to be a declaration or an undertaking is unclear. More importantly last minute efforts are on to secure agreement on its content.

In two preparatory meetings held in Oslo on September 30 and Kabul on October 22, the main disagreement swirled around the attempt to create a regional security structure. Russia, Pakistan, China and Iran among others, objected to establishing any security apparatus or a new regional organisation. As delegates pointed out at the Kabul meeting, establishing another organisation would duplicate the work of at least ten other existing organisations. Others pointed to the fact that there were several mechanisms and trilateral or bilateral forums already available that could be utilised or strengthened for the same purpose.

Meanwhile the Russians tabled their own draft, essentially a statement of principles of regional cooperation, which listed a number of political, economic and other measures to build confidence and encourage collaboration. The Russian text won support from the Central Asian states and came closest to Pakistan’s position. But lack of agreement at the Kabul meeting meant that contentious issues were referred back to the participating states’ capitals for further consideration. Since then behind-the-scenes consultations have been underway with Washington playing a key role in trying to reconcile differences.

Although Islamabad has not made its reservations public, they were clearly conveyed by its diplomats in the meetings at Oslo and Kabul. They now relate mainly to the operative clauses in the revised Turkish-Afghan draft, which provide for a regional security process. Even though the word ‘mechanism’ has been dropped to meet objections from many countries, the document retains its ingredients. The “follow up” steps specified in these clauses that are to be pursued after the Istanbul conference reflect an effort to institutionalise meetings of “senior officials” from the Heart of Asia countries. They will be expected to start applying CBMs through ‘working groups’, if necessary.

These and other provisions that envisage a ‘structured’ level of regional collaboration are seen by Islamabad and other objecting countries as an effort that continues to aim at a regional security arrangement in all but name. If these clauses are not deleted or significantly modified to accommodate the views of Moscow, Islamabad and Beijing among others, they could be later taken up at Bonn and Chicago and given more concrete shape to eventually set up a full fledged security apparatus.

Some diplomats from certain western countries have invoked a Helsinki-type process as the template for regional cooperation i.e. a security-oriented conference leading to a more permanent regional structure to stabilise Afghanistan. The Helsinki process refers to the multilateral forum that was created in the 1970s to improve relations between the West and Eastern Europe and which eventually transformed, with the end of the cold war, into the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

To apply the Helsinki example to the region is to ignore fundamentally different contexts, issues and realities. The Helsinki process was an arrangement forged between two rival blocs during the cold war. It was aimed at sanctifying the territorial status quo already in existence for four decades. Here that process is being advocated by some as a way of pacifying a country in the throes of a raging insurgency, which is motivated by the presence of foreign ‘occupation’ troops. The contrast between the two situations cannot be starker.

The OSCE in any case took decades to evolve and this evolution was impelled by seminal developments including the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a profoundly mistaken view that the Istanbul conference could emulate and telescope that process through one document and that too without a buy-in by the major regional states.

With the conference only a day away the draft document will have to be amended to accommodate the views and interests of all the regional countries to ensure that the declaration at Istanbul is backed by consensus. If that is not done and a document is rammed through it will only run aground of complex and fraught regional realities. This will hardly be an auspicious start to an international effort to support and stabilise Afghanistan.

The way forward at Istanbul is to adopt an agreed document that enunciates practical principles to promote Afghanistan’s stability in line with the UN charter and supports a common vision for economic collaboration. The 2002 Kabul declaration on Good-Neighbourly Relations sets out many of these principles including non-interference in each other’s internal affairs and respect for Afghanistan’s territorial integrity. Supplemented by the commitment to support Afghan reconciliation as well as the economic agenda outlined in the ‘New Silk Road’ concept, this can provide a robust foundation for future cooperation.

But participating states at Istanbul will also need to acknowledge that Afghanistan’s stabilisation lies principally and fundamentally in actions taken within that country. That means stepping up efforts to spur the process of reconciliation with the Afghan insurgency and accelerating the search for a political solution to end a war that has brought so much grief to Afghanistan, the region and its people.

Dr. Maleeha Lodhi is a former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States and special adviser to the Jang Group/GEO

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---------- Post added at 01:12 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:09 PM ----------

The following post was put up by muse which i think is relevant:

Allow me to explain two very interesting and diametrically opposed ideas and their implications:

The Afghans, under tutelage (read US) argue that there are no problems in Afghanistan, All of Afghanistan's problems are manufactured in Pakistan -- The implication of course is that if you want to fix Afghanistan, you really have to be focused on Pakistan as as the source and location of the problem -- The US in these last 10 or 12 years has lost problem solving tools with the exception of it's hammer (military)

Now when Dr. Lodhi advises that Afghanistan’s stabilisation lies principally and fundamentally in actions taken within that country, you and I and most non-US readers will of course say, "well, that's obvious, why is she stating the obvious?" ---- Except that point 1 of this post is being and has been for the last 10 years pushed hard, for some it's Gospel -it's their "Aha, it all clicks" moment.

If point one makes it into any international agreement or undertaking, one of two things will have to happen, Pakistan as a serious player in the South/central Asia region, will simply be meaningless - and if it resists this, it will of course leave itself open to any number of sanctions --

See, the US don't want, do not seek, what you and I may understand as "withdrawal" , they are seeking a diplomatic mechanism that one, institutionalizes their Chaudry, institutionalizes Afghanistan as Tajik domain and ensures the Pakistan will be embroiled in conflict, this of course is an invitation for the US to re-enter as a "stabilizing" force, read (lets do Iran, while we are it) -

The role of our brother Turkiye's diplomacy is most disappointing.

Iraq pullout threatens US Afghan presence
By Barbara Slavin

WASHINGTON - Washington's failure to gain Iraqi approval for a significant United States military presence in that country beyond December could make it harder for Afghanistan to agree to a similar deployment beyond 2014.

Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the State Department on Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the Iraq experience could be a "model" for Afghanistan. "Nobody thought the US could go completely out [of Iraq]," he told Inter Press Service (IPS) on Tuesday. "Now they have."

Frank Ruggiero, the deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told IPS, "I'm not aware of a spillover" from the Iraq negotiations, which foundered over Iraqi refusal to grant US forces immunity from local prosecution.

But he acknowledged that negotiations on a so-called strategic framework between the US and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai are not proceeding quickly. He said that the Afghans are focusing on issues such as US night raids and detention practices rather than the question of how many US forces remain in the country long-term.

Nasr and Ruggiero spoke on the sidelines of a symposium at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that posed the question of whether there is "a regional endgame" for the decade-old US-led war in Afghanistan. Participants, who included former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, were subdued in their assessments, noting that Afghanistan's neighbors have different priorities and have already begun to hedge their behavior in anticipation of a US withdrawal.

The Barack Obama administration is hoping that regional representatives, meeting Wednesday in Istanbul, will sign onto a series of principles declaring "full respect for Afghan sovereignty and territory", according to a State Department official who briefed reporters on Monday and asked not to be named.

The official said that diplomats are also being asked to endorse a gradual transition from US security leadership to Afghan control, a political solution to the war and a so-called "New Silk Road" vision for regional economic prosperity.

Such declarations cannot paper over the real challenges Afghanistan faces in trying to build a stable future in an unsettled neighborhood.

Kissinger, speaking in his distinctive German-accented rumbling baritone, said that US administrations historically have gotten into wars with "objectives beyond the capacity of the US domestic consensus required to support and implement" them. In Afghanistan's case, he said, this included implanting a government "whose writ ran all over the country" and that would "represent some fundamental democratic principles such as women's rights and education".

Afghanistan, he said, "is a particularly difficult country to attempt this because it isn't really a state [but] a nation that comes together primarily to expel foreigners."

United States hopes to "win" the war are unrealistic, Kissinger suggested, given Pakistan's harboring of Taliban fighters. "I know of no guerrilla war that was won when there were sanctuaries within reach," he said.

He said the Obama administration should postpone major troop withdrawals as long as possible to maintain maximum leverage and should warn the neighbors that if they do not cooperate as the US withdraws, "You'll have to take the consequences on your own."

However, Afghanistan's two key neighbors - Pakistan and Iran - appear to prefer those consequences to a continued US military presence on their borders.

Iran has reportedly sent arms to the Taliban and cultivated an economic relationship with India that will allow both to trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia by circumventing Pakistan.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is believed to be harboring the Afghan militants with the most US blood on their hands, the Haqqani network, which is said to be responsible for a series of spectacular attacks in Kabul including attacks on the Intercontinental Hotel and US Embassy and a weekend suicide bombing that killed a dozen US soldiers.

A story in the New York Times on Tuesday quoted unnamed Western analysts as saying that senior members of the Haqqani family, including brothers and children of patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani, had been spotted recently in Islamabad.

Given that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found and killed by US forces in May in a nearby resort for retired military, Abbottabad, a senior Haqqani presence in the Pakistani capital would suggest that the Pakistani government is actively aiding the enemies of the United States while accepting billions in US military and economic aid.

Charges that Pakistan's intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were working with the Haqqani network first surfaced publicly in September when outgoing chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, told congress that the Taliban leadership known as the Quetta shura and the Haqqanis "operate from Pakistan with impunity. attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as US soldiers". Mullen went on to call the Haqqani network "a strategic arm" of the ISI.

The Obama administration subsequently tried a softer approach. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led a high-profile inter-agency delegation to Pakistan last month which urged Pakistani officials to cooperate with the US in reining in the Haqqanis and bringing them to the negotiating table. That visit preceded last weekend's suicide bombing.

Nasr, who left the State Department earlier this year, said that US relations with "the two countries that are really important - Iran and Pakistan" - had steadily worsened while the US had the best relations with the countries "that matter the least" in terms of Afghanistan's long-term future.

Iran and the US are at odds over multiple issues, including Iran's nuclear program and alleged support for terrorism.

Anti-US sentiment in Pakistan is at historic highs since the killing of Bin Laden. Politician and former cricket star Imran Khan attracted over 100,000 people to a recent rally in Lahore at which he said that Pakistan would not allow itself to be "enslaved" by the United States or attack Pakistani militants at US bidding.

Pakistan and Iran "are very happy to help us leave but they are not necessarily going to support our vision for Afghanistan which includes (a continued US military) footprint," Nasr told the Wilson Center audience.

United States officials have spoken of leaving 20,000-25,000 US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 to shore up the Afghan government and continue counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda and its Pakistani allies. However, the appetite for the war has waned as US casualties rise beyond 1,800 killed and 15,000 wounded.

Kissinger, who served during Republican administrations that first widened the Vietnam War and then ended it through a peace deal that swiftly crumbled in a communist victory, warned against treating the Afghan conflict as a partisan issue.

"What this country really needs is a reconciliation at home," he said, speaking of the United States. "The national interest of the US doesn't change" with every election.

---------- Post added at 01:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:16 PM ----------

A russian view

Clinton's Dubious Plan to Save Afghanistan With a 'New Silk Road'
By Joshua Kucera

Nov 2 2011, 11:05 AM ET

Most analysts seem to agree that the antiquity-era trade route is never coming back, so why is it America's new favorite idea for Central Asia?

When foreign ministers from Afghanistan, its neighbors, and several European countries meet today in Istanbul, U.S. diplomats will be pushing them to sign on to an ambitious plan for the future of Central Asia. The "New Silk Road," as the State Department is calling their strategy, would link the infrastructure -- roads, railways, power lines -- of the 'Stans of post-Soviet Central Asia southward through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. At the same time, they would work with the governments to reduce legal and bureaucratic impediments to trade, like corrupt border crossings.

The hope is that this would produce a flowering of East-West overland trade akin to the original Silk Road, by which China traded with the Middle East via Central Asian trade centers like Kashgar, Bukhara, and Samarkand. "Turkmen gas fields could help meet both Pakistan's and India's growing energy needs and provide significant transit revenues for both Afghanistan and Pakistan," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a speech outlining the vision. "Tajik cotton could be turned into Indian linens. Furniture and fruit from Afghanistan could find its way to the markets of Astana or Mumbai and beyond." (Clinton was originally scheduled to pitch her counterparts in Istanbul, but the death of her mother forced her to cancel the trip.)

If this is the best Washington can come up with, the future for Afghanistan looks bleak

But hope may be the only thing driving on the New Silk Road. The State Department has few good options in Afghanistan, and the U.S. doesn't want to leave (or at least wants to seem like they won't leave) a disaster behind once it starts pulling troops out in 2014. So it cast about for ideas and found the New Silk Road proposal, which had been bouncing around the post-Soviet think tank circuit in Washington since the mid-oughts.

The plan's architect is Fred Starr, the chair of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a small Washington, D.C. think tank, with the backing of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. State Department officials have long been wary of the plan, initially dismissing it as unworkable. But it began to gain favor last year at U.S. Central Command, and with its commander at the time, General David Petraeus. Since Marc Grossman became President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year, replacing the late Richard Holbrooke, the State Department has come around to support the strategy. And Clinton has appeared to embrace it as the economic foundation of the U.S.'s post-2014 strategy for Afghanistan, promoting it in her meetings last month with the presidents of three of Afghanistan's neighbors: Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The origins of the plan, however, lie in geopolitics rather than economics. In the mid-oughts, there were a variety of programs by which the U.S. tried to unite South and Central Asia, including an effort to tie together the electrical grids of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with those of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Authority for the Central Asian countries were also moved under a new State Department bureau, taking them out of the Europen bureau with the rest of the post-Soviet republics and connecting them with South Asia. What these schemes all have in common is that they attempt to weaken the economic (and as a result, political) monopoly that Russia, by dint of the centralized Soviet infrastructure, has on these countries.
As Marlene Laruelle writes in a new book, Mapping Central Asia, which includes a great chapter on the revived metaphor of the New Silk Road: "The underlying geo-economic rationales of these Roads is to exclude Moscow from new geopolitical configurations."

The State Department doesn't say this, of course, and it's possible (even likely) that the people now implementing the strategy don't think of it as such. Clinton even implied that there could be some sort of connection with the Russia-led Customs Union with Kazakhstan and Belarus, which is the basis for Vladimir Putin's notorious Eurasian Union.

But this geopolitical vestige lives on in the current iteration of the New Silk Road. Look at a map of South and Central Asia -- ideally, one where you can see topography and the quality of roads -- and it's apparent that the most sensible way to ship goods from India west is not the northern route over the massive mountain passes and crumbling roads of Central Asia. It's the southern route, through Iran and Turkey. But, obviously, a U.S.-backed plan can't include Iran.

There are also political barriers to inter-Central Asian trade. George Gavrilis, an expert on Central Asia and borders, described them in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs. Many of the countries in the region, he notes, have persistent problems with their neighbors: Pakistan with Afghanistan and India, Uzbekistan with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Trade agreements are fragile and susceptible to political difficulties; the border between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan was closed for 18 months following last summer's violence in southern Kyrgyzstan. More fundamentally, a region-wide strategy would be unlikely to work because the countries that surround Afghanistan -- China, Pakistan, Iran and the 'stans -- all have very different interests and little desire to cooperate with one another. "I love the idea," Gavrilis told me when I asked about the New Silk Road. "But I just don't see how it can be implemented,"

Notwithstanding the romance of the original Silk Road, Laruelle notes in her book, the geopolitical situation has changed quite a bit in the centuries since. "The border divisions of the 20th century have transformed these ancient trans-continental routes into cul-de-sacs of nation-states and no simple political will to declare a zone a 'crossroads' can suffice to influence the reality of being in the margins," she writes.

And the reason the first Silk Road died out? Sea transport became much cheaper, which is still true today. So plans, she continues, "to modify in depth the status quo of global trade, three-quarters of which is carried out by sea, by replacing it with continental trade on the pretext that, once upon a time, caravans used to travel along these routes, can not be taken seriously."

The State Department, in its public statements on the plan, highlights a handful of existing or proposed projects on which the New Silk Road could be modeled, including a free-trade agreement signed last year between Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline. But they give little reason for optimism. The Pakistan-Afghanistan agreement was laboriously, personally brokered by Holbrooke but has yet to be implemented, and with relations between the two countries suffering, may never actually happen.

The TAPI pipeline has been discussed since the 1990s, but as with similar schemes, insecurity in Afghanistan has scared away companies that might have the capital to build such a pipeline. With U.S. and NATO troops departing, the security situation is likely to decline even further, a problem that the plan's boosters acknowledge. "We have continued insecurity and instability in Afghanistan," Sham Bathija, senior economic adviser to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, said at a recent conference in Washington on the strategy. "Yet we have no choice but to forge ahead."

It's not clear what eventually convinced the State Department to embrace the New Silk Road. Starr is an eloquent proponent, and his enthusiasm can be infectious. But more than anything, the adoption of the plan speaks, as Bathija suggests, to the lack of good options for post-2014 Afghanistan. If this is the best Washington can come up with, the future for Afghanistan looks bleak.

But that's not to say that there are no other choices. Instead of pushing an ambitious multilateral plan for Afghanistan, Gavrilis' article suggests the U.S. should work with the countries it can actually do something with, tailoring individual strategies to each particular country's interest: "Resuscitating region-wide approaches is a fool's errand that will not save Afghanistan. It is time for the international community to dump diplomatic niceties and work with those neighbors whose policies could be molded to Afghanistan's benefit."

This lacks the romance of the Silk Road and the ambitious vision of a thriving Europe-Asia trade corridor. But it has a lot better chance of succeeding.


Well Russians are going to need convincing and Putin who is about to make a comeback is a little more cynical about america than his medewhateva mate

 

[AVinayKumar]

A bunch of off topic rants by a premium member that have nothing to do with the topic .. Where are the mods?

 

[lem34]

And now we have a Chinese view

China takes higher-profile role in Afghan diplomacy - diplomats
Reuters | 01:17 AM,Nov 03,2011

By Jonathon Burch and Myra MacDonald ISTANBUL (Reuters) - China called on Wednesday for an independent and stable Afghanistan free from outside interference, in what diplomats interpreted as a new, higher-profile effort by Asia's largest economy to take a more active role in its neighbour's future. Speaking at a conference on Afghanistan in Istanbul, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin urged the international community to respect Afghanistan's sovereignty and said Afghans must rally behind a national reconciliation. "The international community must support an Afghanistan run by the Afghans," Liu said. "We must pledge to respect Afghanistan's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, to respect the dignity and rights of its government and people to be masters of their own country." China has previously steered well clear of any serious political engagement in Afghanistan, focusing instead on investing billions of dollars in the Central Asian country as it hunts precious resources and profit. But senior Western diplomats said China's position in Istanbul reflected a positive move away from Beijing's wait-and-see stance when it came to Afghanistan's politics and security. "They realise that a policy of further being on the wings, watching what goes on and ready to pick up things, isn't good enough," said one senior diplomat. For the first time, diplomats said, the Chinese had taken an active role in the drafting of the conference communique mapping out regional cooperation on Afghanistan's security. "They were very vocal and raised several issues during the drafting. We weren't even allowed to begin the final version until the Chinese delegation had arrived," another Western diplomat said, adding that the final version was not finished until early on Wednesday. "Before, you would attend meetings on Afghanistan and the neighbours would be silent, and here you have them taking a lead and that's what it is all about," said another diplomat. "The Chinese for the first time were very comprehensive and constructive, you could really see an elevated role of China in the region and more outspoken than ever before," he said. All the diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity so they could speak freely on the subject. A senior member of China's delegation in Istanbul, who also wanted to remain anonymous, said: "The communique reflects the consensus of the regional countries". FOREIGN TROOPS LEAVING China has watched the Soviet Union and the United States struggle in Afghanistan, which has largely shaped Beijing's more reticent approach -- investing billions of dollars in the country but shying away from political or military influence. But China also fears the spread of Islamic militancy from Afghanistan into its restive Western Xinjiang region, home to millions of Uighur Muslims, and a new stance by Beijing may signal a fear of what will happen after 2014 when most Western forces will have left Afghanistan. "They understand the footprint of the international community, especially of international forces, will be reduced, if not all, to a very minimum," said one diplomat. "Attention is moving elsewhere and there is also increasing recognition that what this country (Afghanistan) needs is a serious security dialogue among the countries involved." China's ties with Afghanistan have long been strongly influenced by the powerful bonds that tie Beijing and Islamabad. China supplies finance and weapons to Pakistan and the two are also bound by mistrust of neighbouring India. "The West will also need to engage China to talk about the region and Afghanistan, especially bearing in mind China's close relations with Pakistan, and I don't think we have done that," said the same diplomat. "It's just a gentle reminder by China that the West has to talk to China and not only to India or Pakistan when it comes to Afghanistan and the region." Expectations were low before the Istanbul conference, with violence in Afghanistan at its worst levels after more than 10 years of war and with Afghan-Pakistani ties at a new low since the murder of the chief Afghan peace envoy in September. But delegates were upbeat at the end of Wednesday's talks, agreeing to a series of wide-ranging commitments in the 12-page communique. Among those were "resolutely combating and eliminating terrorism", preventing safe havens for terrorists and terrorism in the region", and "dismantling terrorist sanctuaries". "It's a very complex gathering of countries with very different, sometimes conflicting national agendas but if we can move forward in facilitating the birth of regional dialogue on security matters, that's what I think Istanbul is all about," said a Western diplomat after the conference. "But what is going to be most important is what will be the follow-up. Will they retain the momentum? Will they deliver with deeds and not only words?" (Editing by Tim Pearce)

the following substancive is drawn from a post on another thread by develop that is relevant with the american proposal

Nobody's suggesting that India and the US are 'friends', but it's hard to deny that they share some common interests in containing China and emasculating Pakistan's army.

As for India being the darling of the West, of course we know it's a recent phenomenon. The point was that India is brimming with self-confidence and has America's backing; this is precisely the wrong time to negotiate with India -- and certainly not with American involvement! Contrary to Indian belief, this self-assertiveness is not a one way street and will be tempered with time. As India's energy needs get more acute, let mainstream Indian businesses be forced to chose between Kashmir and their own business interests. They will make sure the Indian media -- and consequently the government -- sings the right tune on being 'pragmatic'. All Pakistan needs to do is to stand its ground and focus on Iran, Afghanistan, China, etc. to improve its economy. India is not a priority.

Finally, I still haven't seen anyone address the two central points:

A- What does India bring to the american deal that Pakistan can't get elsewhere? We know Pakistan brings its unique geographical location.

B- Since this american/cheng proposal is specifically designed to undermine China's interests in the region, why should Pakistan be a part of it?

---------- Post added at 01:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:22 PM ----------

a post from muse from amother thread that is relevant here

Aryan, Agnostic various


Chinese are very delicate and firm - our issue is day by day, Pakistan has to earn or lose it's relevance - it can't seem to come up with a position around which it can garner more and more support, even Indian support, after the Indians are not congenitally opposed to a Pakistani solution, so long as their interests get a fair hearing and fair consideration.

Agno points to what should be a no-brainer - Bonn in 2001 cut out all players who did not take US money, therefore this mistake should be remedied but that presupposes that the government of Afghanistan and the US want ot see reconciliation and not just surrender of the "terrorists", right?? And since the Pakistani, the Chinese and Russian and Iranian statements are all singing the same tune, namely solve the problem inside Afghanistan and the Afghan president choose to talk about "safe havens" and "terrorists" suggests that he remains unpersuaded (translation US military does not think that is a way forward)

So Istanbul fizzled, but this only means that the arm twisting and deal making will go in high gear, you haven't heard the last word from the US --

Aryan, sincerely appreciated the pieces about the Russian and Chinese view points and I have included below the piece the Russian article references - so it may help us understand further -This "heat of Asia" stuff is a dagger in the back of the powers in the region and to muscle into the region with military force, this idea is not new, recall that in the past the Chaudry was Pakistan till the Talib told the Pakistanis and Unocal and Gov Bush to take jump in the lake or come up with a better dea, now there is a new chaudry aspirant, will they fare better? Well, lok, so long as Pakistan is following her interets, why should it concern itself if there is a old or a new chaudry or no chaudry at all? :



October 18, 2011
SNAPSHOT
Why Regional Solutions Won't Help Afghanistan

The Myth of Neighborly Harmony
George Gavrilis

GEORGE GAVRILIS is Executive Director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue [1]and the author of The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries [2].

Determined to get out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, Washington, the United Nations, and NATO have been hunting for a multilateral regional approach to the country's woes. U.S. officials have called for neighboring countries to pitch in ahead of the drawdown and have urged Afghanistan's neighbors to develop strategic partnerships to build up infrastructure, boost trade, increase investment, and fight extremism. In effect, the move is a recognition that during its ten years in Afghanistan, the United States has handed off too little of the task of stabilizing the country to Kabul's neighbors. As U.S. General John Allen recently indicated [3], there are many issues that cannot be solved out of Kabul, and Afghanistan needs a regional, not a national solution. Now, the United Nations is working on a plan for a joint security arrangement in the region based on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe of the 1970s. And until September, NATO had been working on a cooperative security and development initiative that was to be unveiled at the May 2012 summit on Afghanistan.

At first glance, the region's governments seem to be on board with long-term neighborly solutions. In 2010, Turkmen officials brokered an agreement to construct a natural gas pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. This year, the Uzbek government inaugurated a rail line that connects the north of Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Not to be outdone, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari proposed developing a fast cargo train line to connect Pakistan to Iran via Afghanistan. He billed it as a win-win-win megaproject that would boost the economy of every country involved.

But if a harmonious regional solution seems too good to be true, that is because it is. In the past decade, several multilateral initiatives have flopped. At an economic summit in 2005, upbeat delegates from six of Afghanistan's neighboring states pledged to support Afghanistan's reconstruction with mutual initiatives on trade, energy, security, and counternarcotics. Privately, UN officials admitted that backroom discussions were tense and unproductive. The Uzbek delegation left after the first session, the Iranians kept a low profile, and a Chinese diplomat described the proposed regional partnerships as "hackneyed."

Everyone got together again in Paris three years later. The agenda was a carbon copy of the 2005 proceedings, and what little cooperative spirit existed dissipated once ministers returned to their capitals. Uzbek diplomats, who had informally agreed to strengthen regional trade and multilateral counternarcotics efforts, did an about-face and spent much of the rest of the year accusing Afghanistan of narco-aggression. They insisted that they would stick to unilateral measures to combat the drug trade in the future. At recent high-level meetings in Islamabad, London, and Lisbon, much energy was squandered ensuring that the region's diplomats did not take offense to one another or the discussions. In the end, other than the usual hollow calls to "facilitate," "strengthen," "look closely," and "work together" regionally, little was actually achieved.

In reality, the region's accomplishments on Afghanistan have had little to do with multilateral summitry. To be sure, regional cooperation has been credited with bringing Central Asian electricity to Kabul. Yet, out of its own national interest, Uzbekistan was providing electricity to northern Afghanistan well before the past decade's summits. The most consequential agreement for the region's economy, a bilateral free-trade agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan, came about because of protracted arm twisting by Richard Holbrooke, the late U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, with the recent deterioration in relations between Kabul and Islamabad over allegations that Pakistan's security agencies have aided the Taliban in several high-profile attacks and assassinations, the longevity of the agreement cannot be taken for granted.

The real problem is the fact that, at best, Afghanistan's neighbors are strange bedfellows -- Iran, China, and Uzbekistan are anything but models of multilateralism. As Afghanistan's insurgency worsened in 2006, for example, Iran ratcheted up its war on drugs at the Afghan border and sent legions of intelligence operatives into Afghanistan. The enhanced border controls were helpful in putting pressure on Afghanistan's illicit opiate trade and making up for the Afghan government's lackluster counternarcotics initiatives. But they hardly made the case for multilateralism; Iranian officials regularly complained that their efforts saw little follow-up from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Turkmenistan's government paid lip service to multilateral peace initiatives, but, at one point in 2007, it might have secretly donated food, clothes, and fuel to Taliban fighters in return for their moving further into Afghanistan's interior and away from the Turkmen border. Finally, China will not increase its economic and political footprint in Afghanistan as long as it means becoming an insurgent target. Indeed, the vast majority of China's billions of dollars' worth of investment in Afghanistan is sunk in the Mes Aynak copper mine, south of Kabul, where the U.S. military provides free security.

And those are the better cases. Pakistan and Tajikistan are directly invested in Afghanistan's failure. For years, Pakistan's security agencies have fomented chaos in Afghanistan to maintain strategic depth against India. And Tajikistan's ability to collect lucrative international development aid is greatly owed to its proximity to dysfunctional Afghanistan. Tajik officials regularly present international donors with long lists of "win-win" cross-border development projects that, they insist, must be built on their side of the border. This means that Afghanistan accrues no benefits until much later, if at all. So even as Afghanistan's neighbors eagerly talk up solving common problems such as the drug trade, extremism, and poverty together, they have each found ways to live with and even profit from Afghanistan's debilitated state.

Rather than expecting Afghanistan's region to band together to help the country succeed, the United States, NATO, and the UN should focus on deflecting Afghanistan's most difficult neighbors so that the country can survive on its own. Two very recent developments suggest that the time for such a policy switch may be ripe, at least on the part of the United States. First, the U.S. military is toying with the idea of shifting troops from southern Afghanistan to a buffer zone between Kabul and the frontier with Pakistan, to deter cross-border movement of Taliban operatives. This is an admission that the region is more of a problem than an opportunity for Afghanistan.

Second, at a recent meeting over Libya, U.S. State Department officials engaged in side conversations to prod NATO representatives to halt work on a regional strategy and suggested that it may be more prudent to consider how Arab states might contribute more to Afghanistan. Growing private skepticism about regionalism is likely driven by a desire to scare Pakistan into behaving better; as such, it sheds little light on how regional approaches can be replaced with less untenable initiatives.

Ultimately, the solution may lie in pursuing bilateral initiatives with the more agreeable of Afghanistan's neighbors. This would mean working closely over the medium term with authoritarian governments such as Uzbekistan and Iran. Despite Uzbekistan's disappointing unilateralism, it does at least allow electricity and nonlethal supplies to transit across its territory en route to Afghanistan. Uzbekistan's role after the U.S. troop drawdown in 2014 is undefined, and the United States should encourage it to relax its notoriously closed borders so that Afghan goods have ready access to Eurasian markets.

Iran already gives Afghanistan access to valuable trade corridors, yet Iranian-Afghan relations have cooled recently. It is important to ensure that Tehran keeps its roads and ports open to Afghan goods to reduce Islamabad's ability to use future trade spats and border closures against Kabul. After the recent scandal over Iran's apparent plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Washington is even more likely to isolate Iran, so the UN would conceivably have to take the lead in engaging Tehran.

China might also be encouraged to offset Pakistan's role. China and Pakistan enjoy relatively good relations, but these will inevitably come under strain if Pakistan-funded Taliban extremists in Afghanistan threaten Chinese mining investments, or destabilize Afghanistan's economy and thereby China's ability to export goods there. Rather than giving China the comfort of waiting until the 2014 troop drawdown to reassess its role, U.S. officials must start publicly and privately pressuring Beijing to act as a true stakeholder in Afghanistan -- reining in Pakistan and increasing its development and security aid to Afghanistan.

Resuscitating region-wide approaches is a fool's errand that will not save Afghanistan. It is time for the international community to dump diplomatic niceties and work with those neighbors whose policies could be molded to Afghanistan's benefit.

A bunch of off topic rants by a premium member that have nothing to do with the topic .. Where are the mods?

Indian if you cant bear to see articles that prove that no one wants India to be a proxy or have the role envisaged by Indian and Americans go away and dont read these article

It is accepted that Americans have been unsuccessful in their attempt to defeat the Taleban militarily. The Americans themselves are stating that they wish to withdraw and at the very least will reduce their troops in Afghanistan.

The American’s proposal is simply a way of denying the wishes of Afghanis. Whoever else’s wishes are taken into account it must a least include the wishes of Afghanis. America insists that Karzai is democratically elected representative of the Afghani people. However international observers stated categorically that his election was rigged.

We need free and fair elections supervised and monitored by the international community in particular Russia, China and other neighbors in Afghanistan but exclude Americans as they are participants in war with one of the components of Afghani society.

We need to encourage all parties within Afghanistan’s to go to the ballot box. We must not forget that Americans Pakistanis and Saudis have sponsored Taleban militants in the past. In this Pakistan can encourage all to participate? Saudis can be asked to provide money for financing infrastructure in Afghanistan and also encourage their co religionists to go to the ballot box.

Americans and Saudis should be asked to pour money into Afghanistan and visibly be seen to be making the life of the average Afghanis bearable.

Only once we have genuine representatives of Afghanis only then can the international community assist them in security.

Any alternative to the above will not work. What do Americans want Pakistan and the rest of the neighborhood to do? Destroy Taleban when they couldn’t? Commit genocide?


It is suggested that if Pakistan does not participate in american option then it may be put under sanctions. I don’t really see how when the likes of Russia China and Iran are unlikely to be convinced of american proposal. But Pakistan is no stranger to sanctions and it’s likely that China and certainly Iran would be supportive of Pakistan’s position. Further how would India benefit? How would the region benefit. What have Indians got that Americans haven’t? Why should or how could they succeed when America has failed?

There are no simple solutions but ignoring Afghanis is very naïve stupid and unhelpful to anyone american option is fatally flawed because it assumes Pakistani compliance.

---------- Post added at 01:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:28 PM ----------

South Asia
Nov 4, 2011




US's post-2014 Afghan agenda falters
By M K Bhadrakumar

There couldn't have been a more appropriate venue than the old Byzantine capital on the Bosphorus to hold a regional conference on Afghanistan at the present juncture. The conference at Istanbul on Thursday carried an impressive title - "Security and Cooperation in the Heart of Asia". The "heart" had 14 chambers - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The conference was packed with high drama, which was unsurprising, since its "brain" - the United States - acted almost imperviously to the beatings of the heart.

Intrigue and counter-intrigue dogged the conference from the


outset to such an extent that its eventual failure was a forgone conclusion.

The US and its Western allies began with high hopes that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partner Turkey would secure from the conference a declaration - preferably signed by the "14 heartland" states - that would prepare the ground for establishing a regional security and integration mechanism on the pattern of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In turn, this declaration would take wing at the forthcoming Bonn II conference in December (to which Germany has invited 90 countries and 15 international organizations).

In the event, Thursday ended on a somewhat miserable note in Istanbul, the heart of Asia having suffered even a minor rupture. Uzbekistan broke loose and stayed away at the last minute, with the remaining 13 countries finally settling for an anodyne joint statement that will become the latest in a series of platitudes and good intentions since the US invaded Afghanistan.

Bound to crash-land
The conference agenda was lop-sided in the first instance. Instead of focusing on the pivotal issue of a viable Afghan national reconciliation, how to set up such a process and how to secure it as "Afghan-led" and genuinely "Afghan-owned", the masterminds of the conference - the United States in particular - loaded it with geopolitics.

The conference was burdened with an ambitious agenda of imposing on the region under Western leadership a mechanism to mediate in a host of intra-regional disputes and differences which are, arguably, tangential issues that could have a bearing on Afghanistan's stabilization but are not the greatest concern today.
This was, to put mildly, like putting the cart before the horse. The Western masterminds needlessly introduced a controversial template for a new security architecture for Central and South Asia, complete with an institutional mechanism and a "contact group" for monitoring the implementation of a matrix of "confidence-building measures".

This was an idea that was bound to crash-land, given the deep suspicions about the US's intentions in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and the unwillingness of the regional states to accept the permanent habitation of the West as the arbiter-cum-moderator-cum-mediator in their region.

During the preparatory stages at official meetings in Oslo, Norway and Kabul through September and October, it became evident that there were no takers in the region for a new regional security organization presided over by the West. Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and most of the Central Asian countries demurred on the US proposal for a new regional security architecture. India, which resents outside mediation on its disputes, kept quiet so as not to offend the US, while probably remaining confident that Pakistan would do its job anyway.

Moscow came up with its own counterproposal in the shape of a statement of principles of regional cooperation listing political, economic and other measures to build confidence and encourage cooperation among the countries neighboring Afghanistan. The Russian approach found favor with China, Pakistan and Iran, and being unexceptional in any case, it gained traction and ultimately seems to have paved the way for Thursday's joint statement at Istanbul.

However, Washington (and Ankara) continued efforts until the last minute to somehow institutionalize a regional process through "working groups" and a "structured" form of consultations. But Pakistan would appear to have put its foot firmly down on these ideas, pointing out that an OSCE-type security related conference or a full-fledged security apparatus would be completely unacceptable since there was a world of difference between the Cold-War compulsions which initiated the Helsinki process and the prevailing Afghan situation.

Pakistan's contention is that Afghanistan's neighboring countries could at best have a supportive role in ensuring the peace, security and territorial integrity of that country and instead of proposing new mechanisms, the focus should be on implementation of the existing mechanisms for peace, security and development.

The US game plan served four objectives. One, Washington hoped to "shackle" Pakistan within the four walls of a regional security mechanism dominated by the West so that it becomes one protagonist among equals and its claim to an eminent status in any Afghan peace process gets diluted.

Two, the regional mechanism would give the US and its allies a handle to retain the lead role in the search for an Afghan settlement and also beyond during the post 2014 period. Three, Washington estimated that the regional security apparatus would inevitably come to overshadow the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the number one regional security process in Central Asia and South Asia which, in turn, would erode the dominant influence of Russia and China in Central Asia.

Finally, the US envisaged the regional mechanism to provide the security underpinning for its "New Silk Road" project, which is running on a parallel track - quintessentially a modern version of its "Greater Central Asia strategy" dating back to the George W Bush presidency. The New Silk Road proposes Afghanistan as a regional hub to bring Central Asia and South Asia closer together under the garb of regional development and integration.

Its real intent, however, is to roll back the pre-eminent position of Russia and China in Central Asia and to gain direct access to the vast mineral resources of the region through communication links that bypass Russia and Iran. The US's agenda included gaining for NATO some sort of formal, institutional role in regional security in Central Asia. (Safeguarding the energy pipelines is a newfound 21st century "challenge" that NATO proposes to assume.)

Conceivably, Moscow and Beijing spotted a red herring from day one. The most significant outcome of the Istanbul Conference, therefore, might turn out to be that the SCO will hasten its decision-making process and swiftly steer through the applications of Pakistan and India for membership of that organization.

A Russian statement issued on Monday following Foreign Ministry-level political consultations with China in Moscow stated that the two countries discussed the modalities of finalization of the membership of the two South Asian countries in SCO and "spoke of expediting the process" of membership of India and Pakistan (and Afghanistan's status as an SCO "Observer"). The likelihood is that a decision in this regard might even be formalized at the SCO Heads of Governments meeting due in St Petersburg on Monday.

Note of triumphalism
Underlying all this high drama has been the realization in Washington (and the regional capitals) that the political-military situation in Afghanistan is decisively shifting in Pakistan's favor, prompting a desperate Western attempt to ensure the US and NATO's permanent military presence in the strategic Hindu Kush.

Without doubt, a dangerous period lies ahead for the US and its NATO allies with the strong possibility of Mullah Omar's forces and the Haqqani network openly collaborating with a view to intensifying the insurgent activities.

The devastating suicide car bomb attack in Kabul killing 13 American and 3 Australian soldiers may well be the harbinger of a new offensive. Its timing - on the eve of the Istanbul conference - carried a barely-disguised message to the US administration that crunch time has come and the US strategy to degrade the Taliban and force them to come to the negotiating has not only failed, but the Taliban seem more than ever convinced that they are inching toward conclusive victory.

Clearly, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's visit to Islamabad 10 days ago has not helped reduce the huge trust deficit in the US-Pakistan relationship. The Pakistani military seems amused that Clinton made a virtue out of dire necessity by graciously "offering" to Islamabad the "primacy" to "squeeze" the Haqqanis and bring them to the negotiating table.

Whereas, the heart of the matter is that the US's covert attempts in the recent months to gain direct access to the Taliban leadership and to suo moto initiate a peace process from a position of strength lie in shambles today.

On the other hand, Pakistan's estimation is that US President Barack Obama is going to find himself more and more on the defensive as next year's election approaches, lessening even further the US's capacity to pressure Islamabad. A tone of triumphalism is appearing in the Pakistani discourses.

Indeed, the Obama administration, too, would sense that the factors of advantage are incrementally tilting in Pakistan's favor and that the US lacks any real leverage to influence the Pakistani military. The US roped in Turkey to push the agenda of the Istanbul Conference, given its traditionally warm and friendly relations with Pakistan. The Saudi and United Arab Emirates presence in Istanbul was also expected to influence Pakistan. But the Istanbul Conference may have resulted in causing some injury to Turkish-Pakistani ties. A Turkish observer wrote:

Cold winds have started to blow between the two [Turkey and Pakistan] due to the Afghan problem ... Islamabad is quite annoyed at Turkey for its role in the conference ... Basically, Pakistan is angry at Turkey and the US, which want a result oriented conference. For the conference to bear fruit an institutionalization of the process is a must. In other words in the absence of some kind of a mechanism, to monitor the process that might include implementing confidence-building measures, everything said in Istanbul will stay on paper.

Turkish diplomacy has tried to calm down the Pakistanis, telling them that the presence of Turkey in the regional framework should alleviate the concerns of Pakistanis vis-a-vis other players. After all the Turks do not have a secret agenda of strengthening the hands of India at the expense of Pakistan but I am doubtful that they succeeded in reassuring Pakistan.

All in all, from the Russian and Chinese point of view, it becomes desirable - almost imperative - from now onward while looking ahead, that Pakistan is enabled to have strategic autonomy to withstand the US pressure. Most certainly, they would appreciate Pakistan's steadfast role in frustrating the US design to install a regional security mechanism for continued interference in the Central Asian region.

On balance, the petering out of the Istanbul Conference constitutes a grave setback for the upcoming Bonn Conference II in December. With the Istanbul Conference failing to erect an institutionalized framework of regional cooperation, Bonn Conference II lacks a viable agenda except that 2011 happens to provide a great photo-op, being the 10th anniversary of the first conference in December 2001.

The original intent was to ensure that the Taliban representatives attended the Bonn Conference. But short of a miracle, that is not going to happen. That leaves the US and its NATO allies to work out the planned transition in Afghanistan in 2014 in isolation, as they gather for the alliance's summit in May in Chicago.

In sum, the regional powers are unwilling to collaborate with the US and its allies to choreograph the post-2014 regional security scenario. Russia and China insist that the central role of the international community in Afghanistan should be of the United Nations once the US and NATO's transition is completed in 2014.

Evidently, they would hope for the SCO to take a lead role in the stabilization of Afghanistan. Afghanistan's expeditious admission as an SCO observer alongside Pakistan's induction as a full member conveys a loud message that regional security is best handled by the countries of the region, while extra-regional powers can act as facilitators. That is also the final message of the Istanbul conference.

---------- Post added at 01:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:30 PM ----------

South Asia
Nov 4, 2011




US's post-2014 Afghan agenda falters
By M K Bhadrakumar

There couldn't have been a more appropriate venue than the old Byzantine capital on the Bosphorus to hold a regional conference on Afghanistan at the present juncture. The conference at Istanbul on Thursday carried an impressive title - "Security and Cooperation in the Heart of Asia". The "heart" had 14 chambers - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The conference was packed with high drama, which was unsurprising, since its "brain" - the United States - acted almost imperviously to the beatings of the heart.

Intrigue and counter-intrigue dogged the conference from the


outset to such an extent that its eventual failure was a forgone conclusion.

The US and its Western allies began with high hopes that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) partner Turkey would secure from the conference a declaration - preferably signed by the "14 heartland" states - that would prepare the ground for establishing a regional security and integration mechanism on the pattern of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In turn, this declaration would take wing at the forthcoming Bonn II conference in December (to which Germany has invited 90 countries and 15 international organizations).

In the event, Thursday ended on a somewhat miserable note in Istanbul, the heart of Asia having suffered even a minor rupture. Uzbekistan broke loose and stayed away at the last minute, with the remaining 13 countries finally settling for an anodyne joint statement that will become the latest in a series of platitudes and good intentions since the US invaded Afghanistan.

Bound to crash-land
The conference agenda was lop-sided in the first instance. Instead of focusing on the pivotal issue of a viable Afghan national reconciliation, how to set up such a process and how to secure it as "Afghan-led" and genuinely "Afghan-owned", the masterminds of the conference - the United States in particular - loaded it with geopolitics.

The conference was burdened with an ambitious agenda of imposing on the region under Western leadership a mechanism to mediate in a host of intra-regional disputes and differences which are, arguably, tangential issues that could have a bearing on Afghanistan's stabilization but are not the greatest concern today.
This was, to put mildly, like putting the cart before the horse. The Western masterminds needlessly introduced a controversial template for a new security architecture for Central and South Asia, complete with an institutional mechanism and a "contact group" for monitoring the implementation of a matrix of "confidence-building measures".

This was an idea that was bound to crash-land, given the deep suspicions about the US's intentions in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and the unwillingness of the regional states to accept the permanent habitation of the West as the arbiter-cum-moderator-cum-mediator in their region.

During the preparatory stages at official meetings in Oslo, Norway and Kabul through September and October, it became evident that there were no takers in the region for a new regional security organization presided over by the West. Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and most of the Central Asian countries demurred on the US proposal for a new regional security architecture. India, which resents outside mediation on its disputes, kept quiet so as not to offend the US, while probably remaining confident that Pakistan would do its job anyway.

Moscow came up with its own counterproposal in the shape of a statement of principles of regional cooperation listing political, economic and other measures to build confidence and encourage cooperation among the countries neighboring Afghanistan. The Russian approach found favor with China, Pakistan and Iran, and being unexceptional in any case, it gained traction and ultimately seems to have paved the way for Thursday's joint statement at Istanbul.

However, Washington (and Ankara) continued efforts until the last minute to somehow institutionalize a regional process through "working groups" and a "structured" form of consultations. But Pakistan would appear to have put its foot firmly down on these ideas, pointing out that an OSCE-type security related conference or a full-fledged security apparatus would be completely unacceptable since there was a world of difference between the Cold-War compulsions which initiated the Helsinki process and the prevailing Afghan situation.

Pakistan's contention is that Afghanistan's neighboring countries could at best have a supportive role in ensuring the peace, security and territorial integrity of that country and instead of proposing new mechanisms, the focus should be on implementation of the existing mechanisms for peace, security and development.

The US game plan served four objectives. One, Washington hoped to "shackle" Pakistan within the four walls of a regional security mechanism dominated by the West so that it becomes one protagonist among equals and its claim to an eminent status in any Afghan peace process gets diluted.

Two, the regional mechanism would give the US and its allies a handle to retain the lead role in the search for an Afghan settlement and also beyond during the post 2014 period. Three, Washington estimated that the regional security apparatus would inevitably come to overshadow the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the number one regional security process in Central Asia and South Asia which, in turn, would erode the dominant influence of Russia and China in Central Asia.

Finally, the US envisaged the regional mechanism to provide the security underpinning for its "New Silk Road" project, which is running on a parallel track - quintessentially a modern version of its "Greater Central Asia strategy" dating back to the George W Bush presidency. The New Silk Road proposes Afghanistan as a regional hub to bring Central Asia and South Asia closer together under the garb of regional development and integration.

Its real intent, however, is to roll back the pre-eminent position of Russia and China in Central Asia and to gain direct access to the vast mineral resources of the region through communication links that bypass Russia and Iran. The US's agenda included gaining for NATO some sort of formal, institutional role in regional security in Central Asia. (Safeguarding the energy pipelines is a newfound 21st century "challenge" that NATO proposes to assume.)

Conceivably, Moscow and Beijing spotted a red herring from day one. The most significant outcome of the Istanbul Conference, therefore, might turn out to be that the SCO will hasten its decision-making process and swiftly steer through the applications of Pakistan and India for membership of that organization.

A Russian statement issued on Monday following Foreign Ministry-level political consultations with China in Moscow stated that the two countries discussed the modalities of finalization of the membership of the two South Asian countries in SCO and "spoke of expediting the process" of membership of India and Pakistan (and Afghanistan's status as an SCO "Observer"). The likelihood is that a decision in this regard might even be formalized at the SCO Heads of Governments meeting due in St Petersburg on Monday.

Note of triumphalism
Underlying all this high drama has been the realization in Washington (and the regional capitals) that the political-military situation in Afghanistan is decisively shifting in Pakistan's favor, prompting a desperate Western attempt to ensure the US and NATO's permanent military presence in the strategic Hindu Kush.

Without doubt, a dangerous period lies ahead for the US and its NATO allies with the strong possibility of Mullah Omar's forces and the Haqqani network openly collaborating with a view to intensifying the insurgent activities.

The devastating suicide car bomb attack in Kabul killing 13 American and 3 Australian soldiers may well be the harbinger of a new offensive. Its timing - on the eve of the Istanbul conference - carried a barely-disguised message to the US administration that crunch time has come and the US strategy to degrade the Taliban and force them to come to the negotiating has not only failed, but the Taliban seem more than ever convinced that they are inching toward conclusive victory.

Clearly, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's visit to Islamabad 10 days ago has not helped reduce the huge trust deficit in the US-Pakistan relationship. The Pakistani military seems amused that Clinton made a virtue out of dire necessity by graciously "offering" to Islamabad the "primacy" to "squeeze" the Haqqanis and bring them to the negotiating table.

Whereas, the heart of the matter is that the US's covert attempts in the recent months to gain direct access to the Taliban leadership and to suo moto initiate a peace process from a position of strength lie in shambles today.

On the other hand, Pakistan's estimation is that US President Barack Obama is going to find himself more and more on the defensive as next year's election approaches, lessening even further the US's capacity to pressure Islamabad. A tone of triumphalism is appearing in the Pakistani discourses.

Indeed, the Obama administration, too, would sense that the factors of advantage are incrementally tilting in Pakistan's favor and that the US lacks any real leverage to influence the Pakistani military. The US roped in Turkey to push the agenda of the Istanbul Conference, given its traditionally warm and friendly relations with Pakistan. The Saudi and United Arab Emirates presence in Istanbul was also expected to influence Pakistan. But the Istanbul Conference may have resulted in causing some injury to Turkish-Pakistani ties. A Turkish observer wrote:

Cold winds have started to blow between the two [Turkey and Pakistan] due to the Afghan problem ... Islamabad is quite annoyed at Turkey for its role in the conference ... Basically, Pakistan is angry at Turkey and the US, which want a result oriented conference. For the conference to bear fruit an institutionalization of the process is a must. In other words in the absence of some kind of a mechanism, to monitor the process that might include implementing confidence-building measures, everything said in Istanbul will stay on paper.

Turkish diplomacy has tried to calm down the Pakistanis, telling them that the presence of Turkey in the regional framework should alleviate the concerns of Pakistanis vis-a-vis other players. After all the Turks do not have a secret agenda of strengthening the hands of India at the expense of Pakistan but I am doubtful that they succeeded in reassuring Pakistan.

All in all, from the Russian and Chinese point of view, it becomes desirable - almost imperative - from now onward while looking ahead, that Pakistan is enabled to have strategic autonomy to withstand the US pressure. Most certainly, they would appreciate Pakistan's steadfast role in frustrating the US design to install a regional security mechanism for continued interference in the Central Asian region.

On balance, the petering out of the Istanbul Conference constitutes a grave setback for the upcoming Bonn Conference II in December. With the Istanbul Conference failing to erect an institutionalized framework of regional cooperation, Bonn Conference II lacks a viable agenda except that 2011 happens to provide a great photo-op, being the 10th anniversary of the first conference in December 2001.

The original intent was to ensure that the Taliban representatives attended the Bonn Conference. But short of a miracle, that is not going to happen. That leaves the US and its NATO allies to work out the planned transition in Afghanistan in 2014 in isolation, as they gather for the alliance's summit in May in Chicago.

In sum, the regional powers are unwilling to collaborate with the US and its allies to choreograph the post-2014 regional security scenario. Russia and China insist that the central role of the international community in Afghanistan should be of the United Nations once the US and NATO's transition is completed in 2014.

Evidently, they would hope for the SCO to take a lead role in the stabilization of Afghanistan. Afghanistan's expeditious admission as an SCO observer alongside Pakistan's induction as a full member conveys a loud message that regional security is best handled by the countries of the region, while extra-regional powers can act as facilitators. That is also the final message of the Istanbul conference

Indo-US Hidden Agenda in Afghanistan
Date: 13 Jan 2012


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sajjad Shaukat

When US had invaded Afghanistan in 2001, political analysts had opined that America seeks to control the energy resources of Central Asia by making Osama Bin Laden a scapegoat. But now the sole superpower has included India in its hidden agenda by adding multiple strategic designs against Pakistan, China, Iran and Russia.

In this respect, after the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014, US has decided to establish six permanent military bases in the war-torn country. Even Afghan President Hamid Karzai has strongly supported American plan of permanent bases in the strategically located country. US is also holding peace talks with the Afghan insurgent group in Qatar for its long-term scheme in Afghanistan.

Iran fears that US bases in Afghanistan would enhance its ability to gather intelligence on Iran which could give the US a major strategic advantage, if the two countries go to war. Tension between Washington and Tehran soared in December, 2011 after Iranian authorities recovered a CIA surveillance drone which had been launched from Afghanistan. Now, war-like situation exists between Iran and America over the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran’s nuclear programme. Notably, on January 8 this year, Iran launched military exercises near its border with Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama unveiled a defence strategy on January 5 which calls for greater US military presence in Asia. Obama elaborated that the strategy also calls for the US military to “rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region...even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding.”

However, US new defence strategy cannot be seen in isolation as it is also part of Indo-US hidden agenda in Afghanistan. First of all, by maintaining its military presence in Afghanistan, America wants to protect the puppet regime of Karzai, and Indian influence in Afghanistan which could be toppled by the successful guerrilla warfare of the Taliban.

India which has already invested billion of dollars in Afghanistan, signed a strategic partnership agreement with that country on on october 5, 2011. Apparently, it is open strategic agreement, but secretly, New Delhi wants to further strengthen its grip in Afghanistan not only to get strategic depth against Islamabad, but also to use the war-torn country in destabilizing Pakistan. For this purpose, American CIA, Indian RAW and Israeli Mossad and Afghan Khad, based in Afghanistan have been sending well-trained agents and militants in Pakistan, who not only attack the check posts of Pakistan’s security forces, but continuously conducting suicide attacks and targeted killings, ethnic and sectarian violence in our country—coupled with ground shelling by the US-led forces and air strikes from time to time.

In fact, under the pretext of cross-border terrorism in Afghanistan, safe-havens of militants and Haqqani group in Pakistan’s tribal areas, CIA, RAW and Mossad have been destablizing Pakistan to ‘denculearize’ the latter. Especially, regarding Indian activities in Afghanistan the then NATO commander, Gen. McChrystal had revealed: “Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan…is likely to exacerbate regional tensions.”

India and US are supporting the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and other Balochi separatist leaders who have taken shelter in Afghanistan, while backing separatist group, Jundollah (God’s soldiers) which is working against the cordial relationship of Pakistan with China and Iran. In the past few years, Jundollah kidnapped and murdered a number of Chinese and Iranian nationals in Pakistan. This insurgent group has been committing acts of sabotage both in Pakistan and Iran. Regarding various suicide attacks in Iran, Tehran had directly accused CIA for funding of that type of terrorism, while diverting the attention of Iran towards Islamabad through secret propaganda. Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei revealed, “The bloody actions being committed in Iraq, Pakistan and Iran are aimed at creating a division between the Shias and Sunnis…those who carry out these terrorist actions are foreign agents.”

Particularly, Balochistan’s mineral resources and geo-strategic location with Gwadar seaport, connecting Central Asia have further annoyed America and India because China has already invested billion of dollars to develop this port. However, it is due to multiple strategic benefits that the US which signed a nuclear deal with India in 2008, intends to control Balochistan to encircle China and subdue Iran. The province of Balochistan has also shifted the Great Game to Pakistan which has now become its arena.

On October 15, 2010, Indian Army Chief General VK Singh had openly blamed that China and Pakistan posed a major threat to India’s security, while calling for a need to upgrade country’s defence. Indian former Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor had also expressed similar thoughts.

On the other side, in the recent years, several persons died in the terror-incidents and ethnic riots occurred in various regions of China’s Xinjiang-the largely populated Muslim province. For all the incidents, India accused Pakistani militants of supporting the insurgency in order to deteriorate Sino-Pak ties. In fact, New Delhi which had given shelter to the Tibetan spiritual leader, Dalai Lama and his militants has been playing a key role in assisting upsurge in the Tibetan and Muslim areas of China. Recently, US President Obama also met Dalai Lama so as to indirectly encourage insurgency in China.

It is of particular attention that, on July 20, 2011, during her trip to New Delhi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged India to be more assertive in Asia as a US ally, and should play a leadership role. She explained, “India has the potential to positively shape the future of the Asia-Pacific.” On the other hand, while indicating US double game towards Islamabad, She remarked, “Pakistan must do more to tackle terror groups operating from its territory being used for attacks that destabilize Afghanistan or India.”

Notably, American defence thinkers presume China’s fast-growing economy and military modernization, and its cooperation with Iran and Middle East—particularly strategic partnership with Pakistan as a great threat to Indo-American secret interests.
As regards Russia, it opposes US intention to deploy national missile defence system (NMD) in Europe, while differences already existed between Moscow and Washington over the US-led NATO’s attack on Libya. Both Moscow and Beijing have opposed UN incremental sanctions on Iran.

In the recent years, besides, various annual summits of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) which includes Russia, China and four Central Asian states including Pakistan and Iran as observers, on 16 August 2007, in their summit, the leaders of the SCO displayed strength against the US rising dominance in the region. The SCO is seen as anti-western club against the United States as well as the NATO military presence in Afghanistan, near the region of Central Asia.

Pakistan has been rapidly strengthening its relations with Russia and Iran so as to cope with Indo-US hidden agenda. Notably, America had opposed the Iran-India-Pakistan (IPI) pipeline project. So Islamabad and Tehran had signed the IPI without New Delhi as the latter was reluctant in this context owing to its pro-US tilt. Recently, Pakistan refused to cancel Pak-Iranian gas agreement on the insistence of Washington.

Although, tension already prevailed in Pak-US relations since May 2, 2011 when US commandos killed Osama Bin Laden by violating the sovereignty of Pakistan, yet these received a further blow when on November 26, US-led NATO aircraft deliberately carried out unprovoked firing on two Pakistan Army border posts in Mohmand Agency, killing 24 troops. In response, Pakistan’s civil and military leadership took tough measures such as blockage of the NATO supply to Afghanistan, vacation of the Shamsi Airbase, boycott of the second Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan, rejection of US investigation report in relation to the air strikes. Besides, Islamabad also decided to review its engagement with the US. For this purpose, the two-day envoys’ conference deliberated on the country’s foreign policy on December 12, last year with special focus to redefine the relationship with the United States.

Taking cognizance of Indo-US covert strategy, Pakistan and China have signed multiple agreements to enhance bilateral cooperation in diverse sectors. In this context, during the latest trip of Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to China, on January 6 this year, Beijing and Islamabad have pledged to strengthen military ties.

Nonetheless, America is determined to maintain permanent military bases in Afghanistan in order to fulfill Indo-US hidden agenda which is likely to destabilize whole of the Asia.

Sajjad Shaukat writes on international affairs and is author of the book: US vs Islamic Militants, Invisible Balance of Power: Dangerous Shift in International Relations

That's why Pakistan must not reopen transit routes or make it easy for Americans. Pakistan needs to coordinate with Russia and Iran not to allow any American supplies through to Afghanistan

---------- Post added at 04:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:36 PM ----------

Enter Russia as tension rises




The political fault line along the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, from Hindi Kush Mountains in Central Asia to the salty waters of the Mediterranean, started to crack earlier than expected as triggered by the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The day before we were talking about the U.S.-Taliban talks in Afghanistan that led to the reaction of Afghan President Hamid Karzai because of being left out. Since then an awful video was leaked to media showing four American soldiers urinating like barbarian on the dead bodies of supposedly Taliban militants.

The statement made by the Taliban in a few hours’ time in an extremely cold-blooded fashion saying that the video would not damage the talks – despite the prejudgments the other way around – underlined a few factors:

1) Taliban is focused on cutting a deal with Americans and assessed that the video was leaked by those who are against such an agreement; not necessarily Karzai, could be anyone else.

2) The deal they want to cut with Americans is to claim ownership on Afghanistan as soon as possible, since Obama wants to wash his hands out of the rough geography since the elimination of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last year. And

3) Knowing the political dynamics of the region, the Taliban assessed the fragility of the situation in Pakistan so does not want to be squeezed in between in the power struggle there.

The day before yesterday we were also talking about the radical political consequences in Pakistan following the ultimatum of the Army led by Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani to Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani; the probabilities include a military takeover of the government. Yesterday President Asif Ali Zerdari left his country “for a scheduled trip” amid rumors the U.S. applies pressure on the Army in order not to topple the government.

But will the Pakistani Army listen to the U.S.? That is another matter, since the main focus of the Americans in the region is Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s neighbor Iran.

Following the assassination of a nuclear scientist working in Iran’s program for which the Israeli Army spokesperson “shed no tears,” the tension around Iran increased further. The U.S. Navy sent another ship to the Hormuz Strait area, which is the passage for more than one third of the world’s oil exports, amid increased demands for more sanctions on Iran.

It was not a very good day for Washington regarding its sanction demands. The European Union demanded some more time to make its mind up, which in practice means playing with time, and Turkey said clearly that Ankara would only implement United Nations Security Council resolutions on sanctions, which are not very likely to come since China openly objected to it.

And enter Russia... Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev’s interview with Kommersant was something bold, warning the U.S. to avoid a military intervention in Iran, which Israel opts for the opposite. Moscow also warned NATO countries on Syria, including its neighbor Turkey, about a military intervention.
In response, the Turkish Foreign Ministry revealed Turkish Navy intelligence showing that the Russian ship reportedly carrying ammunition and which had been released by the Greek Cypriots the day before on the promise that it would not go to Syria, actually did go to the Syrian port of Latakia where the Russian fleet had a support visit last week. We might have more to see as the tension rises.

Why Putin is driving Washington nuts
By Pepe Escobar

Forget the past (Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi) and the present (Assad, Ahmadinejad). A bet can be made over a bottle of Petrus 1989 (the problem is waiting the next six years to collect); for the foreseeable future, Washington's top bogeyman - and also for its rogue North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners and assorted media shills - will be none other than back-to-the-future Russian President Vladimir Putin.

And make no mistake; Vlad the Putinator will relish it. He's back exactly where he wants to be; as Russia's commander-in-chief, in charge of the military, foreign policy and all national security matters.

Anglo-American elites still squirm at the mention of his now legendary Munich 2007 speech, when he blasted the then George W Bush administration for its obsessively unipolar imperial agenda "through a system which has nothing to do with democracy" and non-stop overstepping of its "national borders in almost all spheres"."

So Washington and its minions have been warned. Before last Sunday's election, Putin even advertised his road map The essentials; no war on Syria; no war on Iran; no "humanitarian bombing" or fomenting "color revolutions" - all bundled into a new concept, "illegal instruments of soft power". For Putin, a Washington-engineered New World Order is a no-go. What rules is "the time-honored principle of state sovereignty".

No wonder. When Putin looks at Libya, he sees the graphic, regressive consequences of NATO's "liberation" through "humanitarian bombing"; a fragmented country controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militias; backward Cyrenaica splitting from more developed Tripolitania; and a relative of the last king brought in to rule the new "emirate" - to the delight of those model democrats of the House of Saud.

More key essentials; no US bases encircling Russia; no US missile defense without strict admission, in writing, that the system will never target Russia; and increasingly close cooperation among the BRICS group of emerging powers.

Most of this was already implied in Putin's previous road map - his paper A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making. That was Putin's ippon - he loves judo - against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Monetary Fund and hardcore neo-liberalism. He sees a Eurasian Union as a "modern economic and currency union" stretching all across Central Asia.

For Putin, Syria is an important detail (not least because of Russia's naval base in the Mediterranean port of Tartus, which NATO would love to abolish). But the meat of the matter is Eurasia integration. Atlanticists will freak out en masse as he puts all his efforts into coordinating "a powerful supranational union that can become one of the poles of today's world while being an efficient connecting link between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region".

The opposite roadmap will be Obama and Hillary's Pacific doctrine. Now how exciting is that?

Putin plays Pipelineistan
It was Putin who almost single-handedly spearheaded the resurgence of Russia as a mega energy superpower (oil and gas accounts for two-thirds of Russia's exports, half of the federal budget and 20% of gross domestic product). So expect Pipelineistan to remain key.

And it will be mostly centered on gas; although Russia holds no less than 30% of global gas supplies, its liquid natural gas (LNG) production is less than 5% of the global market share. It's not even among the top ten producers.

Putin knows that Russia will need buckets of foreign investment in the Arctic - from the West and especially Asia - to keep its oil production above 10 million barrels a day. And it needs to strike a complex, comprehensive, trillion-dollar deal with China centered on Eastern Siberia gas fields; the oil angle has been already taken care of via the East Siberian Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline. Putin knows that for China - in terms of securing energy - this deal is a vital counterpunch against Washington's shady "pivoting" towards Asia.

Putin will also do everything to consolidate the South Stream pipeline - which may end up costing a staggering $22 billion (the shareholder agreement is already signed between Russia, Germany, France and Italy. South Stream is Russian gas delivered under the Black Sea to the southern part of the EU, through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia). If South Stream is a go, rival pipeline Nabucco is checkmated; a major Russian victory against Washington pressure and Brussels bureaucrats.

Everything is still up for grabs at the crucial intersection of hardcore geopolitics and Pipelineistan. Once again Putin will be facing yet another Washington road map - the not exactly successful New Silk Road (See US's post-2014 Afghan agenda falters, Asia Times Online, Nov 4, 2011.)

And then there's the joker in the pack - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Putin will want Pakistan to become a full member as much as China is interested in incorporating Iran. The repercussions would be ground-breaking - as in Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran coordinating not only their economic integration but their mutual security inside a strengthened SCO, whose motto is "non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-interference in the affairs of other countries".

Putin sees that with Russia, Central Asia and Iran controlling no less than 50% of world's gas reserves, and with Iran and Pakistan as virtual SCO members, the name of the game becomes Asia integration - if not Eurasia's. The SCO develops as an economic/security powerhouse, while, in parallel, Pipelineistan accelerates the full integration of the SCO as a counterpunch to NATO. The regional players themselves will decide what makes more sense - this or a New Silk Road invented in Washington.

Make no mistake. Behind the relentless demonization of Putin and the myriad attempts to delegitimize Russia's presidential elections, lie some very angry and powerful sections of Washington and Anglo-American elites.

They know Putin will be an ultra tough negotiator on all fronts. They know Moscow will apply increasingly closer coordination with China; on thwarting permanent NATO bases in Afghanistan; on facilitating Pakistan's strategic autonomy; on opposing missile defense; on ensuring Iran is not attacked.

He will be the devil of choice because there could not be a more formidable opponent in the world stage to Washington's plans - be they coded as Greater Middle East, New Silk Road, Full Spectrum Dominance or America's Pacific Century. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rumble


The only game in town is back on. It will be interesting how India's investments in Afghanistan will fair now.


Asia Times Online :: Why Putin is driving Washington nuts

US-Russia confrontation over Pakistan
14 March 2012, 18:41 (GMT+04:00)

Azerbaijan, Baku, March 14 / Trend /

Azer Ahmedbeyli, Trend analytical centre expert

About which reset can we speak, if the United States and Russia from time to time show polar positions on the major international problems? Examples abound: expansion of NATO toward Russia's borders, placement of missile defense in Europe, attitude to confrontation in Libya which has already become a history, today's confrontation in Syria, the parties' positions regarding Iran's nuclear program. There are also more subtle forms of confrontation, such as in Central Asia. If we remove the rhetoric and look at the action, it makes grade as a continuation of the Cold War. The names, as well as the scope and methods, in this case are not of fundamental importance, the main thing is that the essence of what is happening doesn't change: the confrontation, though not direct, as in the Caribbean crisis continues, and often without taking into account interests of third countries involved in it.

Pakistan by virtue of a range of circumstances may be the next target in the struggle for spheres of influence. Until recently, this question was not at agenda at all, Pakistan was, and is likely to remain a reliable strategic ally of the United States. Not mentioning the well-known fact in the recent cooling of US-Pakistani relations, let's focus only on one thing - the issue of gas pipeline project from Iran to Pakistan. Pakistan's economy, according to international organizations, is one of the fastest growing in the world. Acute need to provide it with hydrocarbon fuel makes Islamabad to act strictly from the perspective of its economic interests. United States, for obvious reasons, are dead set against this project, as well as any other, where the word Iran is. The U.S. uses such arguments as persuasion of Islamabad that Iran is an unreliable partner, and veiled threats, such as the submitting to Congress in February issue of self-determination of Balochistan province.

Pakistani press reported that these days the Pakistani side received from Russia a proposal to grant the right to build the Pakistani section of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline to Gazprom hors concours. As pointed out by the Pakistani media, in this case Moscow will provide funding for the project, which costs $1.2 billion. Pakistan itself has limited means to finance the project.

Isn't it an episode of the Cold War? However, we must mention that this is one of the few occasions when it is not Russia but the U.S. that needs to find a counter plea on a given initiative.

Recently, according to some media reports, the administration of Pakistani President said that new Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the invitation of Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Reza Gilani to visit this country. If the information is correct, then this will be the first visit of Russian President to Pakistan since 1948, i.e. since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries (the Russian Federation as the successor to the USSR), and it will also confirm the assumption that Pakistan is becoming another field of conflict of interests between the two great powers.

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and no end in sight. The economy of Pakistan, nearly half of consumed energy resources of which falls to natural gas could become hostage to high politics.

Pakistan's proven gas reserves, which, according to the international energy agencies are about 900 billion cubic meters, while maintaining the current production capacity, will reduce dramatically in 20-25 years. In 1999, Pakistan consumed 20.3 billion cubic meters of gas per year. After 10 years, in 2009, the figure nearly doubled - to 38.7 billion cubic meters. In 2015, this level is expected to reach 92 billion cubic meters. It is assumed that during this time natural gas production in the country will reduce to 31.5 billion cubic meters. Ten years later, Pakistan will need import of 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year to meet the domestic needs.


US-Russia confrontation over Pakistan - Trend

Russia & Iran shows interest for establishment of Pak-Iran gas pipeline
South Asian News Agency (SANA) ⋅ March 13, 2012 ⋅ Share/Save

ISLAMABAD, (SANA): Russia & Iran shown interest for establishment of Pak-Iran gas pipeline; meanwhile Iran also offered 20 million dollars initially for the project to Pakistan.

The meeting of Economic Coordination Committee was held in Islamabad and was chaired by Federal Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. The meeting approved Rs 6.1 billion for tumbling Pakistan Railways.

During the meeting, a committee has been constituted comprising Federal Minister Water and Power Naveed Qammar, Petroleum Minister Dr Asim, Governor State bank of Pakistan and Secretary Economic Affairs Division to review Pak-Iran gas pipeline project. The committee will present its report regarding the project within two or three days.

The meeting also formed a committee under the supervision of Naveed Qammar to review 1.2 million wheat exports to Iran. The Economic Coordination Committee also set urea price at Rs 1600 per 40 kilogram.

India’s geo-political importance in the emerging Asian environment is not as important the make-believing Indian analysts’ project. Pakistan’s importance and criticality is an acceptable fact and therefore the race between the three world powers i.e. US, China and Russia to befriend Pakistan. Indians need to accept this fact and learn to live with it. To explain this, I will palce a quote from an earlier posted analysis which is still current, even though it was written an year ago:

……………. Many believe that India is a regional power, yet they fail to realize the fact that its regional prowess can only be exercised against nations as small and vulnerable as Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bangladesh. It has not been able to convincingly project its power potential against present day Pakistan and China and it is unlikely to happen in the future as well. US Embassy, New Delhi (courtesy wikileaks) corroborates this fact indicating that, with present Indian military capabilities, Cold Start doctrine would encounter mixed results.

US, France, UK, China and Russia etc can project their power potential because either they do not have a powerful regional threat to counter or they have enough capability to deter a regional threat and also project their capability to take care of extra-regional threats.

India cannot laterally expand its influence beyond its western borders due the existence of geo-political impediments in addition to the geographical restrictions placed by the presence of Pakistan. Expansion of its influence towards the east is impeded due to the large geographical lay of China. Myanmar can provide India with limited ability to expand towards South East Asia. She attempted to undertake such a venture but due to its internal upheaval in adjoining areas failed to take timely advantage. Chinese influence in Myanmar has in the meantime increased manifold which may limit future Indian endeavours. Therefore the only direction it may be able to expand its influence is towards the vast expanse of sea in the south.

As per the perceived US game-plan for India, garnering of a seaward influence is likely to be supported by the US and West. This fact is corroborated by increased number of Indian naval exercises with navies of US and other western nations in recent years. The plan seeks India to act as a countervailing force against China, as a milkman to sustain US economy while competing with Chinese economic progress and to stabilize regional disputes with limited force projection capability.

India may become a strong economic power and be able to generate fair bit of economic influence in all those countries which are its trading partners and may also be able to exercise fair bit of negativity against Pakistan and China in this domain. However, it’s overall power projection and generation of influence in the key regions would still remain limited unless it drastically improves relations with both Pakistan and China. It also highlights the importance of strategic nature of Pak-China relationship

 

[Ajaxpaul]

^ it is true we cant bear the wastage of bandwidth for the above post. Please bear with us.

 

[lem34]

^ it is true we cant bear the wastage of bandwidth for the above post. Please bear with us.

Mate I have read all these articles and more to come to the conclusion. What I find irritating is that someone who you can tell by their post dont know their head from their arm then comes on here and argues as if they know whats going on. I do hope some of you read it and then come and explain what conclusions you would come to rather than glib comments of how America will fly supplies into Afghanistan from India

^^ Didnt I see a request from a mod about avoiding senseless copy and paste of large articles?

Yes you were ignored because clearly you have ulterior motives and you want to see India play a role which no one wants it to play in the neighbourhood. A role it is ill equipped to fulfill.

^ I think Salala incident has been played up beyond its expiry date.. At the ground level, all that incident has done is increase the monthly USA cost by 87 million USD.. Its like a bucket out of the ocean if you consider the overall cost of war in Afghanistan.

Well Americans wouldn't keep asking for it to be reopened would they if what you said was correct or it didn't bother them??

 

[SQ8]

Lets.. cost of goods transit via Pakistan = X
Throughput of goods via Pakistan =X
Costs of good transport via Nothern route = 4X.
Throughput of goods via Northern route = 1/2X.

Diplomatic costs of involving India = Priceless.

Great sustainability I think.

 

[India defense]

I dont have time to read these millions lines.....One thing I know.....It is Afghanistan to decide what would be role of India or Pakistan in their country...nobody else should tell ..what is right for Afghanistan....

 

[lem34]

A bunch of off topic rants by a premium member that have nothing to do with the topic .. Where are the mods?

What has the fact that I am a premium member got to do with anything??. They are not rants they are newspaper articles. Cant you swallow the fact that our forefathers deprived you of geo strategic location?? you cant bear it can you to even read these artilces??

I dont have time to read these millions lines.....One thing I know.....It is Afghanistan to decide what would be role of India or Pakistan in their country...nobody else should tell ..what is right for Afghanistan....

Listen mate if you dont have the time to read why do you feel the need to comment without reading?

Lets.. cost of goods transit via Pakistan = X
Throughput of goods via Pakistan =X
Costs of good transport via Nothern route = 4X.
Throughput of goods via Northern route = 1/2X.

Diplomatic costs of involving India = Priceless.

Great sustainability I think.

I also think these routes through Pakistan are connected not only with pipelines But American and Indian designs to contain china and in America's case keep an eye on Iran and have bases in Russia and Chinas back yard. Simple India odes not have geo strategic location that Pakistan has because it is not Pakistan lol.

 

[alphamale]

What has the fact that I am a premium member got to do with anything??. They are not rants they are newspaper articles. Cant you swallow the fact that our forefathers deprived you of geo strategic location?? you cant bear it can you to even read these artilces??

as if paksitan won't allow transit to india, india will be unable to do trade?? we are just looking for easy excess but if pak is not interested then let it be. we have many other ways also to do trade.

 

[SQ8]

as if paksitan won't allow transit to india, india will be unable to do trade?? we are just looking for easy excess but if pak is not interested then let it be. we have many other ways also to do trade.

Sure.. other .. very very expensive ways.

 

[Emmie]

^ I think Salala incident has been played up beyond its expiry date.. At the ground level, all that incident has done is increase the monthly USA cost by 87 million USD.. Its like a bucket out of the ocean if you consider the overall cost of war in Afghanistan.

You are oversimplifying the things.. If only paying extra 87 million a month was a problem then US wouldn't have been arranging another supply route. The article of Washington post you're quoting also says other things "While U.S. officials have acknowledged that using alternate transportation routes for Afghan war supplies is more expensive and takes longer, the total costs had not been revealed until now".

Its not only about US an entity called NATO is also there, it also needs supplies. An important fact that everyone seems to be missing here is the withdrawal of the forces from Afghanistan.

 

[India defense]

Listen mate if you dont have the time to read why do you feel the need to comment without reading?

I am here to reply this thread ...not your million lines garbage post....I dont have 3-4 hrs to read your post..next time write small and sensible post ...everybody will read and reply...