Washington wants its own "String of Pearls" back: Part II

Yesterday's Washington Post covers the recent effort by the Pentagon to establishing new military basing agreements in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand, in line with the U.S.'s recent push to remilitarize the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.  Most interesting is the fact that all of the bases the Pentagon wishes to utilize were at one time bastions of American Cold War Power, which over the past 30 years the U.S. had been kicked out of.

Part II: Vietnam
Although it may be hard for the casual observer to believe, Communist Vietnam is slowly turning into an ally of the U.S. military.  While Hanoi has been "open" to the U.S. (economically, tourism) for nearly two decades now, it is only in the past few years that the Pentagon has been pushing for an increased military relationship, including basing rights.  Most recently, after attending the Shagri-La military conference in Singapore, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Cam Ranh Bay, home to a massive Naval facility and deep-water port constructed by the U.S.  during the Vietnam War.  After the war, the Soviet Navy's Pacific Fleet had docked at Cam Ranh until Hanoi stopped all military use of the port ten years ago.  Panetta's visit, the latest high-level trip (and the first for a U.S. defense secretary to the strategic port since the end of the war) signifies that the Pentagon is hoping to ramp up U.S.-Vietnamese military cooperation, and once again have Naval access to Cam Ranh Bay.

Vietnam's reembrace of the Pentagon can be traced back to 2003, when Hanoi began allowing once a year naval visits from the U.S.  By 2006, Navy Admiral William Fallon and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were visiting Vietnam, and the bilateral military relationship had expanded to include training of Vietnamese officers through the IMET program, as well as counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism joint military exercises.  In December 2009, Hanoi's Defense Minister, General Phung Quang Thanh, became just the second Vietnamese Defense minister to visit Washington since the end of the war.  This was shortly  followed in March 2010 by an unnannounced 16 day docking by a U.S. Naval Supply Ship at Cam Ranh's Van Phong port.  Panetta, now, is hoping that this relationship can be upgraded to allow permanent U.S. access to the strategic port.

There is, however, great trepidation on Hanoi's part to this new alliance with the U.S..  As the historian Gabriel Kolko (whose Anatomy of a War is one of the best scholarly accounts of the Vietnam War) recently wrote in an article for Counterpunch:

So much can go wrong with the Administration’s ambitious not-so-new, strategy. Not the least are divisions that exist within the Vietnamese military leadership, and perhaps the political leadership also, about making any kind of alliance—even informally—with the country that rained so much death and destruction on it for almost two decades; memories in Vietnam–among the people as well as political and military leaders–are an enemy of making some sort of arrangement with the Americans.

Washington wants its own "String of Pearls" back: Part I

Today's Washington Post covers the recent effort by the Pentagon to establishing new military basing agreements in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand, in line with the U.S.'s recent push to remilitarize the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.  Most interesting is the fact that all of the bases the Pentagon wishes to utilize were at one time bastions of American Cold War Power, which over the past 30 years the U.S. had been kicked out of.

Source: Washington Post

Part I: Thailand
Most recently, U.S. military officials, led by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey visited Thailand, where the major point of discussion was building a U.S. designed "regional disaster hub" at the U-Tapao Air Field, located 90 miles south of Bangkok.  NASA also has its eye on U-Tapao, as a headquarters of a proposed "Southeast Asia Composition, Cloud, Climate Coupling Regional Study," which will take place in August and September.  NASA has given Thailand a deadline of June 26th to allow or disallow the NASA project.

U-Tapao, which is currently run by the Royal Thai Navy, was constructed in 1965 by the U.S. military as a staging ground for the Vietnam War.  During the war, U Tapao's two-mile long runway served as a launching point for squadrons of B-52 bombers, which then flew north to drop ungodly tonnages of firepower on Vietnam (both North and South), Cambodia, and Laos.  In 1976, the U.S. withdrew its military from the base on request from the Thai government, however by the 1980's the Pentagon's access had begun to creep back.  Starting in 1981, the Cobra Gold military exercises between the U.S., Singapore and Thailand were held annually at the base.   After 9/11, Thailand was deemed a "major non-NATO ally" of the U.S. "war on terror," and sent 423 soldiers to Iraq between 2003-2004.  The Thai government also allowed U.S. military aircraft to stop at Thai airfields, including U-Tapao, on their way to the Middle East.  These developments, however, were kept quiet at the request of the Thai government, which wished to put forward a purportedly "neutral" stance on the U.S. invasion.

The most controversial part of this new alliance was the CIA's use of Thailand to host "black site" prisons and interrogation centers.  Although the location of these sites with Thailand is still contested, U-Tapao is thought to be a possible location.  As early as 2003, the New York Times reported that

Utapao is also probably where Qaeda operatives have been interrogated, retired American intelligence officials said, explaining that the base had facilities for sophisticated interrogations.  Last year, according to other American officials, at least two senior Qaeda operatives were brought here for interrogation -- Abu Zubaydah, thought to have been Al Qaeda's operations chief, and Ramzi bin al- Shibh, a planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Washington Post's famous article on the CIA Black Sites, written in 2005 by Dana Priest, elaborated on the details:

By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation. 

Many reports, including Priest's, indicate that the Thai black sites were closed at the end of 2002, replaced by similar sites in Poland.  Recently, however, evidence has come to light that this was not the case, as one man has testified that in 2004 both he and his pregnant wife were detained and tortured by the U.S. at Bangkok's Don Muang airport.  The man in question, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, was a veteran terrorist , an original participant in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad and subsequently a leader in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.  In 2004, at the time of Belhaj's capture, Libya was a new ally in the "War on Terror," and Anglo-American leaders were quick to help Gaddafi with security policies, and as such renditioned Belhaj and his wife back to Libya (stopping on the way at UK sovereign territory at Diego Garcia), where he was imprisoned and tortured for a further six years.

When the Anglo-American alliance pulled an about face and overthrew Gaddafi in 2011, Bellhaj became one of the main commanders of the rebel forces that took Tripoli.  Concurrently, Human Rights Watch discovered documents at the abandoned Libyan Intelligence Headquarters that implicated the UK as having been central to Belhaj's torture and renditions.  As it was put by the Guardian Newspaper, Belhaj was "a gift" to Gaddafi, one that was given at a fortuitous time:

Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised "a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism". At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast

Seeing these new documents, and taking advantage of his new position of power, Belhaj subsequently sued the UK government over his rendition.

One of the most troubling repercussions that sprung from the Thailand Black Sites is the use of the CIA's infamous "enhanced interrogation" method's by the Thai military against Southern Muslim dissidents.  An article from Asia Times Online explains that, "Thai security officials have recently used torture techniques ranging from sleep deprivation, forced nudity, exposure to extreme temperatures and even the threat to release German Shepherd guard dogs on detainees during interrogations."  The first thing that comes to mind at the mention of these practices are the infamous Abu Ghraib photos.

World Bank guarantees $100 million energy deal in Uzbekistan

As they often do, goodies from "International Finance" have gone hand in hand with goodies from the Pentagon, as the World Bank has just provided a $100 million guarantee for a natural gas deal in Uzbekistan, according to an article by Robert C. Murphy in Asia Times Online.  This is the first major such financing provided to Uzbekistan by the World Bank, under its "Multilateral Investment and Guarantee Agency" (MIGA), as well as the first major example of the World Bank's 7-month old "Country Partnership Strategy 2011-2015 (PDF)" with Uzbekistan taking hold.  Of note, the Partnership Strategy was agreed to at the same time (December 2011) that reports first began to come out about the Pentagon's "military transfers" to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgzistan.

According to Murphy, a senior research fellow at Canada's Carleton University and a longtime commericial analyst, the new MIGA financing amounts to:

US$100 million loan from a consortium of commercial banks having BNP Paribas Suisse as agent, for development of natural gas deposits in the Kandym Field group and the Khauzak-Shady bloc, of which the latter is already a producing reservoir, in the Bukhara-Khiva region of southwestern Uzbekistan.

Moreover, the World Bank's political backing was "a necessary condition" for the gas developments to receive so much attention from commercial banks.

Interestingly enough, the Anglo-American oil giants do not seem to be on the receiving end of any of this World Bank largesse.  Instead, the financing is being used mostly by Russia's Lukoil (through its subsidiary Lukoil Overseas Uzbekistan), as well as a South Korean company that plans to build a gas and chemical complex at Uzbekistan's Surgil field.  As I have discussed before, China is also heavily invested in the Uzbek energy sector, most directly with its ever-expanding Central Asia-China gas pipeline, which passes through Uzbekistan. In 2010, Uzbekistan agreed to export 10 bcm of gas a year to China through the pipeline, with a planned start date of earlier this year.  Although legal issues have mired this process, Uzbek officials say that they expect to export 2-4 bcm of gas to China this year.

Taking all this in, it seems that the World Bank financing, and perhaps entire 5 year "Partnership Strategy," is simply a Washington grab for political influence in Tashkent, and is not deeply rooted in the national interest of the U.S.  While previously Western multi-national corporations always had the upper hand, and were thus able to benefit from International Finance loans, now it is Russian and Asian multinationals that are on the ground.  As Washington hopes to greatly reduce its military footprint in Afghanistan, it still wants to assume its facsimile  of "control" over the region.  The political and economic reality on the ground, however, is currently much more rooted in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization bloc, which has its own postwar strategy for Afghanistan.  This means that states like Uzbekistan will continue to happily take Washington's guns and dollars, but are feeling no obligation to consider this a trade for U.S. long-standing influence in the region.

 

Karzai has a point to make

Following the dropping of a bomb on a wedding party in Afghanistan's Logar Province, killing 18 civilians, including nine children, earlier this month:

"An agreement has been reached clearly with NATO that no bombardment of civilian homes for any reason is allowed," Karzai said at a news conference at the presidential palace in Kabul. "This is an absolute disproportionate use of force."

"Even when they are under attack, they cannot use an airplane to bomb Afghan homes - even when they are under attack," he said to underscore his point.

Karzai said that at a meeting after the incident in Logar province, he asked U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan: "Do you do this in the United States? There is police action every day in the United States. ... They don't call in airplanes to bomb the place."

-h/t the indispensable Tom Englehardt

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2012/06/12/4074260/afghan-leader-no-airstrikes-on.html#storylink=cpy

Update: U.S. military transfers to Central Asia

The Pentagon is finalizing the details of a major arms gift to Uzbekistan, Kyrgzstan, and Tajikistan, the states involved with the Northern Distribution Network.  A leading Russian newspaper, Kommersant:

Cited “well informed sources” as saying the three Central Asian states – all of them members of the Kremlin-led Collective Security Treaty Organization – would be given armored vehicles, tank transporters, prime movers, tank trucks, special-purpose graders, bulldozers and water trucks after US and NATO forces pull out of Afghanistan in 2014. Some of this equipment would reportedly be stored at local installations. In addition, the Pentagon plans to provide Afghanistan’s neighbors with medical equipment, communications systems, fire extinguishing equipment and even mobile gyms and other housing-related facilities.

In the short term, these weapon transfers are designed to secure better transit rates for the Northern Distribution Network, especially as U.S. supplies are increasingly reverse running the route.  As 2014 approaches ever closer (or if that date gets pushed up by political considerations or disasters on the ground) the Pentagon will need to move more and more supplies out of Afghanistan.  By giving the Uzbeks and others a small treasure chest of armaments, Washington hopes to grease the wheels of this process.

However, in the long term this is merely a continuation of U.S. policy to gain military influence in Central Asia, which began as soon as the states gained independence from the USSR in 1992.  Throughout the 1990's, this process slowly hummed along, with Central Asian states participating in NATO's "Partnership for Peace" military training program.  After 9/11, the Pentagon's ties to the region saw an immediate uptick, as within months of the attack and the subsequent Afghanistan invasion  military bases were opened in Kyrgzstan and Uzbekistan.  The 2003 invasion of Iraq distracted U.S. strategists, however by 2007 their attention was back on Central Asia.

Source: "Central Asia and the Transition in Afghanistan," Senate Foreign Relation Committee Report, 12/19/11

The main opposition to U.S. influence in the region comes from Russia, and to a lesser extent China, both of which see Central Asia as within their Sphere of Influence.  Through institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Beijing and Moscow are working to make sure that Central Asian leaders don't grow to close to Washington.  Notice that none of the region's leaders accepted their invitations to the recent NATO summit in Chicago.  The SCO position seems to be to facilitate the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, and then to step in and gain control over the postwar environment.

Syria's "Four Seas" Strategy and China

What has gone unmentioned in the current year of Syria-bashing is the regional economic strategy proposed by Bashar al-Assad in 2009.  Known as the 'Four Seas" strategy, it called for Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran to unite in a bloc that would serve as a global crossroads for trade, connecting the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf.  Assad announced this ambitious plan with Turkish President Gul in a joint press conference in Ankara in May 2009, stating "Once we link these four seas, we become the compulsory intersection of the whole world in investment, transport and more.”

Between that time and the beginning of the Syrian protests in Spring 2011, Assad made a number of initial moves to reify his new strategy.  At the heart of the arrangement is the Syria-Turkey relationship, and energy links like the Arab Gas Pipeline (AGP).  The AGP connects Egypt to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but in 2009 Syria and Turkey agreed to a 62 km pipeline extension to reach Turkey, to be completed by 2011, as well as an integration of their respective electricity grids.  In the short term, this would supply much needed energy to northern Syria, but in the long term (especially as more of the Iraqi energy sector comes back online) the pipeline would allow for Middle Eastern supplies to be exported overland through Turkey to Europe.  In the same vein, Assad visited Azerbaijan in 2009, the first visit to Baku from a Syrian President since the Azeris received independence from the Soviets in 1991.  On his visit, Assad signed 19 economic and political agreements with Azerbaijan, most importantly a deal to import one billion cubic meters of Azeri gas every year.

Perhaps the biggest supporter of Assad's regional strategy was Beijing, where the Communist Party called Syria "ning jiu li" or cohesive force.  Beijing saw a possible cooperation in their foreign policy, increasingly looking west towards Europe, and Syria's "four seas" mindset.  Starting with Assad's visit to Beijing in July 2004, the Chinese-Syria economic relationship began to blossom, and by 2008 China was Syria's largest supplier of imported goods.  Chinese energy companies have also invested hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade Syria's energy infrastructure, and have entered into joint exploration deals with Syrian oil exploration companies.  Another large development is "China City", a large, popular industrial center in the Adra Free Trade Zone, located 25 km northeast of Damascus.  China City was established by wealthy entrepreneurs, and its products--everything from office to factory equipment--are increasingly popular with Middle East Businessmen, especially from Iraq.

Anatolian Eagle

In October 2010, Chinese Premier Wen Jaibao visited Ankara, his first visit to Turkey in eight years, and his warm reception was of great political significance.  After long discussions on trade and investment, China and Turkey declared that they had upgraded their bilateral ties to “Strategic Cooperation.”  Anybody in doubt as to what this turn of diplomatic parlance meant only had to witness the unprecedented two-week long Air Force exercises between Turkey and China that had directly preceded Jaibao’s visit.  The exercises, known as “Anatolian Eagle,” were an annual Turkish affair usually held between Turkey, the U.S, other NATO members, and Israel.  But in 2010 the drill was exclusively held between the Turkish air force and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), with Israel being disinvited and the U.S. choosing not to attend due to the lack of an Israeli presence.  For Chinese airmen, this was the first time they had trained in a NATO country, staging a mock dog-fight alongside Turkish pilots flying American-built planes, but according to Turkish and Chinese officials, it won’t be the last.  One Turkish analyst in London noted that Anatolian Eagle should be though of as a “debut,” and that “there is every indication to believe that the two militaries will engage in future cooperation wherever applicable.”[1]

 In a sign of the emerging geography of power, on their journey to Turkey the fleet of PLAAF SU-27 and MIG 29 fighter aircraft overflew Pakistan and stopped to refuel at the Gayem al-Muhammad air base near the town of Birjand, Iran, situated opposite the large American base near the Afghan-Iranian border town of Herat.[2]  The “Anatolian Eagle” exercises also overlapped the Shanghai Cooperation Organizations annual “Peace Mission” exercises in Kazakhstan, featuring China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, and Tajikistan.  These were only two of the 14 military-to-military training exercises that the People’s Liberation Army participated in that year, mostly with Asian or Oceanic countries, but also with Turkey, Romania, and Peru.[3]

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[1] “Turkey, China in Exercises: NATO blanches as Ankara looks east,” Defense News, 10/17/10. (http://www.defensenews.com/article/20101017/DEFFEAT04/10170302/Turkey-China-In-Exercises)

[2] “The New Silk Road: China’s Energy Strategy in the Greater Middle East,” Christine Lin, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Policy Focus #109, April 2011, Pg. 10

[3] “2012 Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Regarding the People’s Republic of China,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, pg. 33