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Northern Distribution Network update

The Northern Distribution Network began being implemented in early 2009, as the Obama Administration moved into the White House, although it had been on the Pentagon's drawing boards for some time.  By the fall of 2009, the Pentagon had established a whole network of agreements and logistics operations in Central Asia.  A thorough rundown of the years developments was given by Cornelius Graubner in the September 1st issue of John Hopkins Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst:

In January the Commander of the U.S. Central Command General David Petraeus announced that transit agreements had been signed with Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In March, it transpired that the Uzbek government had allowed U.S. soldiers to be transferred to Afghanistan via the German base at Termez in Luftwaffe planes, and May saw the establishment of a de-facto U.S. supply hub at the Uzbek airport of Navoi using a South Korean transport firm as proxy. In June, it was announced that the lease agreement for the U.S. base in at Manas in Kyrgyzstan would be extended after earlier announcements that the Americans would have to leave in August, and finally in July it became public knowledge that the U.S. Air Force was running a small refuelling and resupply operation at an unspecified location in Turkmenistan.

This was just in time for the Obama Administration's "Afghanistan war debate" that took place in the fall of 2009, where the White House and the Pentagon tussled over the desired size of the military footprint that was to fight the war.  Thorough descriptions of this debate are given in Bob Woodward's Obama Wars and Michael Hastings The Operators.  The run down: When Obama assumed office, the U.S. had 34,000 troops in Afghanistan.  Within months, he had made small steps to bolster U.S. efforts in the war, agreeing to add another 21,000 troops, and then firing the General in charge of the war, David Mckiernan, and replacing him with General Stanley McChrystal.  By the fall of 2009, McChrsytal and his higher-ups in the Pentagon wanted another installment of troops, in order to implement a limited counter-insurgency strategy, and push back an expected collapse of the U.S. war effort.  Through a skilled bureaucratic and public relations campaign, top officials like McChrystal, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General David Patreus, then head of Central Command, pigeonholed Obama in to giving them their desired 40,000 troop escalation.  The White House, however, never budged on approving a full-on counterinsurgency campaign, and rightfully so, as the militaries own counter-insurgency manual puts the required troops needed for a successful counter-insurgency operation at 500,000+, a number currently unimaginable to Washington and the rest of the NATO capitals.

But regardless, in its first year in office the Obama Administration had tripled the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan, from 34,000 to over 100,000, and concurrently had established a new northern supply network through Central Eurasia.  By the fall of 2010, when the escalation in Afghanistan was complete, nearly a third of the cargo the military supplied to Afghanistan was going through the Northern Distribution Network.  By December 2011, this had increased to nearly 75% of ground supplies, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report.  Overall at that time, 40% of all cargo went through the NDN, 31% was shipped by air, and the remaining 29% transited through Pakistan.

And in order to secure this access, the U.S. government began to shower gifts on the autocratic governments of Central Eurasia.  Military aid to the region, authorized as part of the Pentagon's yearly NDAA bill, increased from $1.2 million in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2010, topping out at $1.69 billion in 2011.  The largest share of these funds go to Uzbekistan, a primary hub in the operation.  Perhaps more importantly, the 2010 bill added sweeping new language that further sweetened the military supply pot.  A January 2010 report from the website Eursasianet.org (run by the Open Society Institute), lays out the changes:

Recent modifications to Section 1223 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 indicate that the United States is prepared to lavish funds on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and possibly Turkmenistan, in order to expedite the troop surge.

According to the revisions, "certain coalition nations" providing "logistical, military, and other support," will be eligible for "reimbursements." The Pentagon has a reserve fund of $1.6 billion that it can tap into for programs falling under Section 1223 initiatives. Section 1223 assistance can also take the form of "specialized training to personnel" of Central Asian states, or "the procurement and provision of supplies to that nation in connection with such operations."

In effect, the Pentagon could loan "specialized equipment" to Central Asian states that it never intended to recover. Section 1223 revisions note that equipment loans would be made on "a non-reimbursable basis." Department of Defense representatives have declined to comment on the Section 1223 revisions.   

MoveOne Logistics

Logistics
All of these provisions, however, do not guarantee swift transport, and consequently the NDN is a slow, rickety beast of an operation.  According to documents from MoveOne Logistics., a major military logistics company, the trip from Latvia's Baltic Sea port of Riga to the Afghan-Uzbek border takes 30 days, as does the trip from Aktau, Khazakstan's Caspian port to the same border.  These are the two main routes of the NDN--a northern route from Riga, through Russia and Kazakhstan to Uzebkistan, and a Southern route from the Georgian port of Poti across the Caucasus and the Caspian to Aktau, Kazakhstan, and then down to Uzbekistan.  A third route, known as the Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan (KKT), is more secure, but has a longer transit time.



And these time tables certainly don't take into account the large delays that are routine in the Southern Uzbek city of Termez, which now finds itself as a bottleneck in two major logistics paths in the U.S. war effort .  Accordingly, the process in Termez has become slow and corrupt.  Internal Pentagon documents from 2010, obtained by a FOIA request, describe a shady deal.  Private logistics companies bidding on fuel transport contracts from Uzbekistan stated with without a "speed-up fee" the rail journey from Bukhara, Uzbekistan to Hairaton Afghanistan "takes up to 35 days," but that with “payment of informal fees, the time can be reduced to 7 to 18 days, (depending on amount of money paid).”  Another company noted that the Uzbek railways often shuts down service to afghanistan for a period each month, due to the massive backlog of freight.  Truck transport from Europe is even slower. Glenn Paxton, an officer at the Defense Logistics Agency, told Stars and Stripes newspaper, "From the time an order is placed to the time of delivery it takes on average about 75 days."

The newest development of the NDN is that it is being used in reverse, that is, to ship cargo out of Afghanistan as the U.S. forces drawdown.  On February 29th, 2012, FMN Logistics, a major Pentagon contractor in Central Asia, sent a convoy of trucks

The Northern Distribution Network

Lately, I have been very interested in the competing strategies of the U.S. and China for control of Eurasia.  Previously, I wrote about the Chinese high speed rail networks that have begun to transport freight to and from Western Europe and China, known as "Eurasian Land Bridges."

At the same time that these lines were being built, the U.S. was establishing its own transport network running East from the Baltic or Mediterranean Sea's to Afghanistan, to supply troops, weapons, and supplies for the Afghan war effort, a corridor known as the "Northern Distribution Network."  One main path, which became operational in 2009, starts in the Latvian port of Riga, on the Baltic Sea.  From there it travels by rail through Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, crossing into Afghanistan at the Uzbek city of Termez.  Another path starts in the Georgian port of Poti, on the Black Sea, and crosses the caucasus through Azerbaijan to Baku, where it then traverses the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, meeting up with the first path in Termez.

Source: Washington Post

Recently, the Kazakh government has been pushing for its Caspian port city of Aktau to become a major transportation hub for the NDN, with an expanded sea port being built, as well as rail lines to Turkmenistan and Iran and an expanded air cargo capacity.

As CNN put it--"to Afghanistan, on the slow train," --the NDN is not an efficient method of transport.  As of November 2011, the rail trip from the Latvian port of Riga, on the Baltic Sea, to Afghanistan takes about 10 days.  This seems to be a best case scenario, however, as a Eurasia.net report from 2010 stated that it can take up to 35 days for goods to reach Afghanistan from Uzbekistan, due to myriad problems related to congestion and corruption.  This touches on the larger problem of the network, namely that it requires the consent of the corrupt and dictatorial governments of the region.

Consider the case of Uzbekistan, the most populous state in Central Asia and one ruled with an iron fist by Islam Karimov since 1989.  Karimov is a Saddam Hussein like figure, a former Soviet secret policeman obsessed with power and violence, famous for such practices as boiling prisoners alive.  And like Iraq, Uzbekistan is flush with resources, namely gas, copper, uranium, and gold.  

Throughout the 1990's, Karimov played Washington's imperial expansion game, signing up for NATO military training programs like the "Partnership for Peace." Then, after 9/11, it took Uzbekistan barely one month to agree to host a U.S. military base, known as K2 at Khanabad airport.  Only one week after the base opened in October 2001, more than 60 planes had dropped off supplies and 1,200 soldiers were on the ground, primarily light infantry troops from Fort Drum’s tenth mountain division, the first U.S. soldiers to ever be deployed to former Soviet territory.  As Michael Klare had written one year earlier in his prescient book Resource Wars:

The extension of American military power into the Caspian Sea regions is, by itself, a momentous geopolitical development. As shown by the [Central Asian Battalion] exercises, it will require Washington to build and sustain military relationships with the Central Asian republics, as well as to construct a globe-spanning logistical capability. In time, it could also involve the establishment of American military bases in an area that was once part of the Soviet Union (Klare, Resource Wars, pg. 5)

Months later, Kyrgzstan followed suit, and allowed the U.S. military to use the Manas International Airport, located on the outskirts of the capital city of Bishek.  Within months, Air Force engineers had built a thirty-acre compound at Manas, the equivalent of six city blocks, to house 3,000 personnel.  A report in the Washington Post at the time contains some remarkable statements pertaining to this radical change in US military posture. Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before,” and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as admitting that the two new bases “may be more political than actually military.” Most blunt, though, was Thomas Donnelly, the Deputy Executive Director of the Project of The New American Century. In an email circulated among military analysts, Donnelly wrote that the “imperial perimeter” of the United States “is expanding into Central Asia.” The Post reflects on these opinions and concludes “all told, more than 50,000 US military personnel now live and work on ships and bases stretching from Turkey to Oman, and eastward to Manas airport, 19 miles outside Bishkek and 300 miles from the Chinese border.” (Vernon Loeb, “Footprints in Steppes of Central Asia; New Bases Indicate U.S. Presence Will be felt after Afghan War,” Washington Post)

But in a sign of the peril of expanding your "imperial perimeter," the U.S.-Uzbekistan relationship soon turned sour.  In the summer of 2005, after Karimov's security forces massacred hundreds of protesters in the eastern city of Andijon, U.S. and other international officials began making calls for a judicial inquiry.  Angered at this, and distrustful of the U.S. due to the recent "color revolutions" Washington had sponsored in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgzstan, Karimov kicked the Pentagon out of K2.

Now, with the growing importance of the Northern Distribution Network, the U.S. has been crawling back on their knees to Karimov, in order for him to open up his borders for U.S. military transit.  In late 2011, Washington lifted the last of the arms-sales restrictions placed on Uzbekistan following the Andijon incident.  More importantly, after an official visit to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent in November, Army Lt. General James L Brooks stated that transfering leftover or old U.S. military equipment from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan was one of the key points of discussion. "I think that there are ways that the excess equipment could benefit both countries, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, with the excess of US equipment from the war," he was quoted as saying.

Although it is ethically troublesome for the U.S. to supply military goods to such an oppressive government, it is simply a sign of the times, as Pentagon aid to NDN states, authorized in the yearly Defense Authorization Act, has increased from $1.2 billion in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2010 and $1.69 in 2011.  Uzbekistan, as the hub of the NDN operations,  receives the lion share of these funds.  In fact, in 2010 the U.S. added sweeping new language to the bill which set the stage for untempered military aid.   An article from the Open Society Institutes  EurasiaNet website describes the changes and their effects:

Recent modifications to Section 1223 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 indicate that the United States is prepared to lavish funds on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and possibly Turkmenistan, in order to expedite the troop surge.

According to the revisions, "certain coalition nations" providing "logistical, military, and other support," will be eligible for "reimbursements." The Pentagon has a reserve fund of $1.6 billion that it can tap into for programs falling under Section 1223 initiatives. Section 1223 assistance can also take the form of "specialized training to personnel" of Central Asian states, or "the procurement and provision of supplies to that nation in connection with such operations."

In effect, the Pentagon could loan "specialized equipment" to Central Asian states that it never intended to recover. Section 1223 revisions note that equipment loans would be made on "a non-reimbursable basis." Department of Defense representatives have declined to comment on the Section 1223 revisions.

This is a situation where Washington is enabling an entire region of corrupt dictators, for the stated purpose of propping up a corrupt Karzai dictatorship in Afghanistan.  And now, with the U.S. led forces planning to retreat hightail out of Afghanistan after realizing that the country cannot be occupied, the dictators have the upper hand and are want to make all sorts of demands on Washington, all for the purpose of the Pentagon being able to slowly snake its bullets and MRE's around Eurasia at an exorbitant price.

Besides the difficulties of the logistics, the entire effort is not a sustainable plan.  Taking Washington's pronouncements at face value, the U.S. plans to have a much smaller military footprint in Afghanistan after 2014, perhaps around 20,000 "non-combat" troops.  If this is the plan, why develop such an extensive military supply network?

For many Washington strategists, the NDN is the first step in creating what they term a "new Silk Road" for Eurasia, with Afghanistan serving as the heart of the network.  As it was put in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Kuchins, an analyst at Georgetown's austere Center for Strategic and International Studies:

At the heart of the New Silk Road strategy lies the promotion of trade liberalization between Afghanistan and its neighbors, with special a focus on reducing bureaucratic and administrative inefficiencies at border crossings and on improving transit and energy infrastructure.

However, as it stands today the "New Silk Road" is a military network, and the dream of converting it to civilian economic use is simply a plan.  Compare this to China, which has already constructed its own "New Silk Road" in the region, without a military dimension.  This highlights the major difference between U.S. and Chinese policy in the region, with the U.S. focusing almost entirely on military goals, while the Chinese move ahead with an economic strategy.

Collective Security in the Gulf

Today, Reuters is running a story that Bahrain and Saudi Arabia will soon announce a union, connecting the two countries on all matters of security and economics, with the possibility of a third state joining the union as well. Bahrain's information minister, Samira Rajab, explained the situation in an interview, stating, "Sovereignty will remain with each of the countries and they would remain as U.N. members but they would unite in decisions regarding foreign relations, security, military and the economy."

This announcement, coming directly after a Washington visit by Bahraini crown prince Samad bin-Hamad al-Khalifa, who was greeted by Senators bearing weapons catalogs, solidifies the current American position of doubling down on its 40 year alliance with the Gulf Arab Monarchs (70 years in the case of Saudi Arabia). The Bahrain-Saudi union is the first step in creating a new Collective Security bloc among the six GCC states, what U.S. officials have referred to as a "NATO-lite". As a New York Times article from last November described it, "the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense."

Since 2004, in fact, the militaries of the region have been learning under the behemoth of Collective Security, NATO. Under NATO's "Istanbul Initiative" program, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE have become "partners" with the U.S. led alliance, allowing them to participate in NATO exercises and training programs. This came at the same time as the Pentagon's massive militarization of the Persian Gulf that followed their 2003 Iraq invasion. The U.S. military now controls major airbases in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, and bases the Navy's ever expanding Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Additionally, the Qatar airbase--al Udied--also house Central Command's forward positioning headquarters.  With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq (which occurred based on the demands of the Iraqi government, and was opposed by Washington), this basing network is the major political spoil remaining from the 2003 war.  (For a much longer version of this history, dating back to the 1970's, see my paper "The Gulf Wars," or my post "All GCC states close their embassies in Syria")

Turkey, China, and the Eurasian Land Bridges

A follow-up to my post earlier this week on Turkey:

The recent visit to China of a high-level Turkish delegation, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, signified Ankara's growing role in China's Eurasian Land Bridge strategy, aimed at connecting the massive Sino factory base to the markets of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe.  Erdogan was the first Turkish Prime Minister to visit China in 27 years.  As the economist F. William Engdahl recently put it in an extensive article on the subject:

The fact that Erdogan was also granted a high-level meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the man slated to be next Chinese President, and was granted an extraordinary visit to China’s oil-rich Xinjiang Province also shows the high priority China is placing on its relations with Turkey.

Source: Bingol Online

While in China, Erdogan solidified plans for the Chinese to finance and build a high-speed rail line running across the Anatoloian plateau, connecting Turkey's easternmost province of Kars with its far west province of Erdine, a $35 billion project first introduced in 2010.  From Erdine, the rail line would link up with existing train lines running West, eventually reaching the Atlantic capitals of London and Madrid.  The Kars-Erdine rail corridor was neatly summed up in a report in the Turkish english language newspaper Today's Zaman:

The line is designed to pass through 29 provinces, connecting the east and west of Turkey and reducing the duration of travel from the current 36 hours to 12. With the completion of the planned Edirne-Kars line, the total length of high-speed rail inside Turkey is expected to reach 10,000 kilometers by 2023. Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway connecting Azerbaijan's capital city of Baku to Kars, currently under construction, increases the strategic importance of the Edirne-Kars line.

For China, the Erdine-Kars line is the key link in their attempt to build a third Eurasian Land Bridge, connecting the Chinese ports of Gaundong and Shenzhen to the Atlantic port of Rotterdam, and on the way connecting the giant markets of Southern Asia, running through Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Iran.  At this point, the line connects to Erdine-Kars, and then hooks up with the existing lines to Western Europe.  Overall, the third land bridge would touch 20 countries and have a total length of about 15,000 kilometers, a distance 3,000-6,000 km less than the maritime journey through the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca.  This plan was developed in 2009, at China's Pan Pearl River Delta Cooperation and Development Forum.  There is also future hope to build rail lines from Turkey down through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, connecting China directly to the African Continent.

Source: Yunus Emre Hatunaglo

Besides the Erdine-Kars line, China has made numerous other inroads into Turkish infrastructure development, tying together the world's two fastest growing economies.  Chinese firms are bidding to build two nuclear power plants in Turkey, at Akkayu on the Mediteranean Coast and Sinop on the Black Sea, as well as a major bridge over the Bosporus and a proposed third airport in Istanbul.  All together, 27 Chinese CEOs attended meetings with Turkish PM Erdogan on his recent visit to China.

For an example of how the  high speed rail networks effect commerce, one has to only turn back a year, to the launch of China's Second Eurasian Land Bridge Project, rail lines that run through Kazakhstan to Russia, then through Beluras to Western Europe.  May 2011 saw the launch of five-day-a-week direct freight rail service from Antwerp, Europe's second largest port and rail-hub, to Chongquin, the industrial center in southwest China.  It now only takes 20-25 for cargo like automotive and chemical goods to traverse Eurasia, compared to the 36 day maritime journey.  There are, however, plans to quickly cut the duration of the rail journey down to only 15-20 days, at which point the transcontinental journey would be cut in half, and the pace of industry doubled. 

For BMW, this has already become a reality, with the October 2011 launch of daily freight shipments over high-speed rail from their plant in Liepzieg, Germany to Shenyang, in Northeast China, crossing a distance of 7,000 miles in only 23 days. According (to Dr. Karl-Friedrich Rausch, a board member of DB Schencker, the transportation group that operates the German side of the railway, "the direct trains are twice as fast as maritime transport, followed by over-the-road transport to the Chinese hinterland."

Besides its function as an East-West corridor, Turkey also sits right next to the recent energy discovery boom taking place in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.  In the past three years, massive new natural gas and oil fields have been discovered underneath the waters of Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.  The story begins in Israel, when in 2009 Noble Energy, the Houston based firm that held the Israeli exploration contract, discovered the Tamar gas field 50 miles west of Haifa.  At first estimates, Tamar was thought to contain 8.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the largest gas discovery of the year, and one that increased Israel's gas reserves from 1.5 tcf to 9.8 tcf, a rise of over 900%. 

Prompted by this discovery, the U.S. Geological Survey undertook their first ever comprehensive assessment of the region, officially known as the Levant Basin Province.  Their results, published in April 2010, were stunning, finding that the Basin contained 122 tcf of natural gas, and 1.7 billion barrels of oil.  Brenda Pierce, the program coordinator, called the region "comparable to some of the other large provinces in the world," holding gas resources "bigger than anything we have assessed in the United States."

The possibilities of this new el Dorado were confirmed later that year, when Noble Energy discovered the Leviathan field, 84 miles west of Haifa and 3 miles undersea.  Leviathan is estimated to hold 16 tcf of gas, the worlds largest deepwater gas discovery in a decade.  Israel now found itself with enough energy to supply its electricity needs for 100 years, and soon positioned itself to become an exporter of energy.  

Hoping for their own bonanzas, other countries in the region began to explore for offshore energy deposits, and soon Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and potentially Syria had all discovered new resources.  In Greece, surveys conducted in 2010 estimated that the Ionian Sea contains 22 billion barrels of oil, while the Aegean Sea contains another 4 billion barrels.  Cyprus soon joined the club as well, with Noble Energy believing it will strike another major find at the Aphrodite field, in Cyprus's offshore Block 12 (located only 34 kilometers from Israel's Leviathan Field.  Estimates for Block 12's energy potential were originally as high as 10 tcf of gas, however in November 2011, Noble Energy Vice President Susan Cunningham revised this down, to 3-9 tcf, and gave only a 60% chance of reaching the deposits.  

These discoveries, or course, has created a whole new set of diplomatic kerfuffles.  Lebanon has claimed that some of the Israeli discoveries lie within Lebanese territorial waters (known as an "Exclusive Economic Zone"), going so far as to submit maps to the United Nations and drawing in the U.S State Department to mediate.  Cyprus, divided between a Greek North (an EU state) and a Turkish South, is partnering with Israel to develop a pipeline to export gas to Western Europe, against the wishes of Ankara.  For Greece, the EU-imposed economic austerity provisions took the sail out of the oil boom, as first on Brussel's chopping block were state-run enterprises like energy and port companies.  And this does not even touch on the "Arab Spring" protests that have shaken the region, the NATO backed regime change in Libya, or the armed insurrection in Syria.
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Source: James Fishelon, Yale SRAS

This type of energy geopolitics is at the heart of the Turkish-Chinese partnership, as Beijing's dream is to break the Seven Sisters (Houston and London "Big Oil") century-old control of world energy resources, and render the USAF and Fifth Fleet impotent in stopping them.  China has begun to achieve this dream, starting with the 2006 completion of an oil pipeline from Kazakhstan's Caspian littoral to China's western province of Xinjiang.  If they could build a similar pipeline from the Caspian to Turkey, they would have a direct connection to the new energy fields in the Mediterranean.  In fact, they would then have duel freight and oil lines crossing Eurasia, putting them in economic control of the worlds largest and richest continent.  As the economist Engdahl puts it, "the aim is to literally create the world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe."

China's international body to control this foreign policy is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), formed in 1996 between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, and Tajikistan.  Uzbekistan soon joined the group as well, and observer status was granted to Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia.  As it is put by the eminent Dilip Hiro in his book "After Empire:"

 The new charter adopted by the SCO in 2003 specified "noninterference and nonalignment" in international affairs while aiming to create "a new international and political order"--implying thereby to end the role of the United States as the sole superpower, an aim first expressed by China and Russia four years earlier.

It seems that Turkey is now the key to this new political order. To put it bluntly, if China can steal Ankara from under NATO's nose, they will have won the Great Game. The "Pan-Turkic world," dreamt up as a NATO sword striking into China will have instead been flipped into a new silk road for the benefit of a Chinese dominated Asia. Highlighted in this process is the implicit failure of of U.S. Post Cold War global strategy, what the Pentagon calls an attempt at "Full Spectrum Dominance." After spending the last two decades pouring money into militarizing Central Asia, the U.S. is now seeing their influence slip away as China rushes in with industrial development.  And now Turkey, a NATO member for 60 years, could go the same way.

Some brief updates: A war weary public, and the Levantine Bain

Some brief updates on subjects I have touched on before:
In a new poll recently conducted by the Associated Press and GfK, a private communications firm, support for the Afghanistan war has plummeted to its lowest levels ever. Among Democrats, only 19% support the war, and Independent and Republican support polls only slightly higher, at 27% and 37% respectively. Overall, as the AP put it, "66 percent opposed the war, with 40 percent saying they were “strongly” opposed. A year ago, 37 percent favored the war, and in the spring of 2010, support was at 46 percent. Eight percent strongly supported the war in the new poll.

As I have previously written about, these type of views are the norm now among the American public.  People are sick of fighting wars abroad, whether they are drawn out counterinsurgency campaigns or "humanitarian interventions" carried out by NATO cruise missiles.  Continuing to be militarily bogged down in the Afghan quagmire has virtually no supporters outside the beltway, (only 8% strongly support it!), and yet within Washington DC, executing a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan is a legitimate option to be debated.


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Concerning the recent discoveries of massive energy deposits in the Eastern Mediterranean's little explored Levantine Basin, Cyprus has now moved ahead to develop its Aphrodite offshore field, estimated to contain 200 billion cubic meters (BCM) of natural gas.  Aphrodite is just one of a set of large new gas fields discovered in the area over the past year, including Israel's Leviathan field (500 BCM), and the Tamar field (300 BCM) located in territory disputed between Israel and Lebanon.  Instrumental in all of these discoveries has been Noble Energy, a Houston based company, which partners with the Israeli Delek Group.  Gazprom, the Russian energy company, has also expressed interest in joining on both the Cypriot and Israeli projects.

As these fields provide a large excess of energy for Israel and Cyprus's needs, the two countries hope to join together and export the gas to Western Europe, through either tankers or a proposed underwater pipeline.  There are, however, many complications, not least the fact that transporting the gas to Western Europe would be prohibitively expensive.  As it was put in a recent Asia Times article on the subject:

Export routes and transportation modes currently under consideration seem, however, exorbitantly costly in relation to the likely volumes. One option would involve a pipeline on the Mediterranean seabed, from Israel's Leviathan project to Cyprus, onward on the seabed (possibly via Crete) to mainland Greece, and by overland pipeline(s) into European Union territory. 

Another option would entail liquefying the gas in Israel and/or Cyprus (both countries are vying to host this operation), shipping the liquefied product by tankers to mainland Greece for re-gasification, and delivering the product through Greek pipelines to EU countries. Under both of those scenarios, Cyprus has ambitions to host a strategic gas storage site. 

A third option would consist of exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) from these fields directly to consumer countries in the Mediterranean, or through the Suez Canal to East Asia. Those three options involve high shipment costs for bringing relatively limited volumes to markets, there to compete against suppliers with larger volumes or lower transportation costs. This would remain a disadvantage unless new offshore discoveries in Israel and Cyprus exceed the scale of the already confirmed reserves.

Turkey: an old ally, economic independence, and a "new strategic partnership"

Today, the Council on Foreign Relations released a 90 page report titled "U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership." Written by a large, blueribbon taskforce headed by Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley, the report urged that U.S. policy makers "to make every effort to develop U.S.- Turkey ties in order to make a strategic relationship a reality."

This is an interesting statement, as any student of recent history would think that the U.S. and Turkey already had a longstanding "strategic relationship," dating back to President Harry Truman's decision to start the Cold War in 1947 by announcing that he would furnish military aid to Turkey and Greece, both in the underbelly of the USSR.  Within five years, Turkey had joined the newly born North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite having a littoral rather far from the North Atlantic.  Within a decade, Turkey had hosted major NATO military drills--Operation "Grand Slam" and "Deep Water," with as many as 2,000 warships and 8,000 marines taking part.  Most consequentially, Turkey agreed in 1962 to host a battery of U.S. ballistic missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, near the coastal city of Izmir.  Moscow, in a stereotypical turn of Cold War logic, felt that they needed a similar capability, and set up their own nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro's new Communist Cuba, setting off what is known as the "Cuban Missile Crisis."  This, of course, resolved diplomatically, and both the U.S. and USSR removed their bombs from Turkey and Greece, respectively.

At the end of the Cold War, during the Reagan years, the U.S.-Turkey relationship grew stronger still, under the cunning eye of Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, one of DC's original cold warriors. Born to a wealthy Austrian family in 1903, Strausz-Hupe immigrated to America at age twenty, eventually ending up in New York City, where he worked at a Wall Street bank and wrote for Current History magazine.

As it was the 1930s, Strausz-Hupe's eye was focused across the Atlantic to his native Europe, where totalitarian societies were being nurtured in both Hitler's Germany and Stalin’s Russia. This time period influenced Strausz-Hupe greatly, and in his worldview he never abandoned this prism of totalitarianism. After World War II, he was offered a prestigious position at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he founded the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 1955. This would become his pulpit from which he preached a hard-line, totalizing view of the Cold War as a battle between ideological extremes.

The biggest hypocrites around: "Atrocity Prevention" and the U.S. Government

Earlier this year, I wrote about the "Atrocity Prevention Board" that had been set up in August 2011 through Presidential Security Directive 10.  Please read that post for much of the history behind the Atrocity Prevention Board (APB), its creator Samantha Power, and the doctrine on Responsibility to Protect.  Recently, while speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 23rd, President Obama announced that the Board would convene its first official meeting later that day, stating "We’re making sure that the United States government has the structures, the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities...This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline in our foreign policy."

The overriding theme of Obama's announcement was a pro-Israel message, both in terms of rhetoric and policy.  The President was introduced by Ellie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and strident backer of Israeli militarism, and spent the first half of his speech recounting his visits with Wiesel to Nazi concentration camps, taking up the "never again" motto, and recounting his pledge to "always be there for Israel."  With this stage set, the President took the opportunity to lay out a number of new policy goals, including the inaugural meeting of the APB and the declaration of new sanctions against Iran and Syria that targeted technology companies doing business with the pariah states.  

The hypocrisy of this announcement was rampant.  Most obviously, the pro-Israeli spin made clear than only atrocities committed by so called "rouge" states would be considered as worthy of a government response.  If an ally like Israel committed atrocities, a situation many thought occurred during the 2009 bombing of Gaza, there is no doubt that the new APB structure would offer more than a tepid shrug in response.  Such is the situation in all U.S. allies, from Columbia to Uzbekistan.        

Moreover, Obama's speech conveniently left out all mention of  "atrocities" committed by the U.S., both historically and today.  Do the mass drone strikes killing civilians in Pakistan and Yemen fall under the purview of the APB?  I think not.  The war in Afghanistan, and the counterinsurgency strategy employed, is an "atrocity generating situation," to steal a phrase from Daniel Ellsberg.  Army Infantry are sent to occupy and patrol areas with no strategic importance to the U.S., and when the locals fight back, it creates a vicious cycle that culminates in the type of behavior exhibited by Sergeant Bales in his killing raid earlier this year.  As Stephen Walt writes, "this new initiative still looks hypocritical to a lot of people whose familiarity with the sharp end of American power is extensive, intimate, and unpleasant. It would be easier to take this initiative seriously if we seemed as concerned by the atrocities that we commit as we are by the crimes of others."

 

Back in the States, Catching up on the news

Just got back to the U.S., but a 9 hour layover at LAX means i get to enjoy the dulcet commercialism of Santa Monica--relaxing after 13 hours in economy over the Pacific.  Slowly trying to piece together the news I missed while away, and reflecting on how to incorporate reflections from my travels into the blog.

To start off with, I would like to highlight two recent pieces by some Jedi's of geopolitics, F. William Engdahl and Pepe Escobar.  Engdahl's, who's masterful work Century of War: Anglo-American oil politics and the New World Order I just reread, just finished writing about the new possibilities for a Eurasian economic sphere, connecting China all the way to Western Europe.  He focuses on the new rail links being developed in Turkey, and the recent visit by Turkish PM Erdogan to China, the first such trip for a Turkish leader since 1985.

The Turkish-China railway discussion is but one part of a vast Chinese strategy to weave a network of inland rail connections across the Eurasian Continent. The aim is to literally create the world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe. Direct rail service is faster and cheaper than either ships or trucks, and much cheaper than airplanes. For manufactured Chinese or other Eurasian products the rail land bridge links are creating vast new economic trading activity all along the rail line.

More After the Jump

Hanoi recollections

Just left Hanoi, Vietnam, where I had a more than enjoyable experience.  My take (after only 5 days): The city seems to be right on the balancing point between a developing (and still impoverished) South East Asian metropolis, and a more urbane European capital.  There are sidewalk-less streets teeming with motorbikes and piles of trash, all manners of delicious street food prepared in less than sanitary conditions, and prices to make a Westerner smile wide (including the famous bia hoi draft beer--the worlds cheapest beer--for 25 cents U.S a glass).  And yet there is also areas with wide, beautiful promenades, a virtual army of young ex-pats and backpackers, and near blanket wi-fi coverage.  If you want a city were you can eat to your hearts content for a mere pittance, and still drink and talk with the beautiful and interesting people of the world, then Hanoi is your place.
Some drawbacks:  European backpackers are sometimes idiots, and want to keep drinking even when it is clear the vietnamese establishments are all closed down.  This is an awkward feeling, cultural colonialism and drunken loutism.
Also, the communist government has managed to stifle political opinion: ask a Vietnamese if they like their government, and you will not get a response one way or the other (although there does not seem to be the level of fear you would see from this question in Myanmar or Suharto-era Indonesia).  It is the worst political side of communism, without the economic benefits that come with a welfare-based socialist government.  One American expat, who has lived in Hanoi for 4 years, told me that the Vietnamese are ripe for an "Arab Spring" style breaking point--that the government in power is too corrupt, the political system is too closed and the young people are too educated.

As I will be returning to the U.S. tomorrow, I will try and sum up my trip in a longer post at a later date, as well as getting back to my regular news updates.