Russia, NATO and Afghanistan: High stakes Great Game

[Truthway]

US President Barack Obama's now expanding war against the Taliban is garnering support from liberals and neocons alike, from leaders around the world, even from Russia. “We are ready to support these efforts, guarantee the transit of troops, take part in economic projects and train police and the military,” Russian President Dmitri Medvedev declared in a recent press conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Moscow and Washington reached an agreement in July allowing the US to launch up to 4,500 US flights a year over Russia, opening a major supply route for American operations in Afghanistan. Previously Russia had only allowed the US to ship non-lethal military supplies across its territory by train.


Read more:http://www.inteldaily.com/news/172/ARTICLE/13122/2009-12-16.html">Russia, NATO and Afghanistan: High stakes Great Game

[bemildred]

1. Nato fails to gain Russia aid in Afghanistan

Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has failed to gain any commitment from Russia to help win the war against the Taliban insurgency.

On Wednesday Mr Rasmussen asked Moscow to provide helicopters to Afghanistan and also requested Russian help in training the Afghan air force.

But he told the BBC he had received no positive response from the Kremlin.

Mr Rasmussen's visit is the first by a Nato chief since relations chilled after last year's Russian-Georgian war.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8418292.stm

[wuvuj]

2. Lies I Learned in School....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24250.htm


Barrack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech included this self-congratulatory little gem:

“But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions—not just treaties and declarations—that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”

Before Mr. Obama dislocates a shoulder patting himself on the back, maybe we should look at the record.

When it comes to guaranteeing stability and promoting democracy, the United States’ record is pretty clear. “Global security” and “stability” mean the security and stability of a particular global order guaranteed by the United States—a global order that reflects the interests of the coalition of class forces that control the American government.

The United States’ record with regard to “enabling democracy” is also clear. When it has best served the interests of the corporate world order to replace a dictatorship with a formal democracy, the United States has done so. But when it has best suited the interests of corporate power to overthrow a democracy by force, the United States government has not hesitated to do so.

A lot of American blood has, indeed, been shed in battlefields around the world. Even more blood has been shed by the people who lived in those countries, fighting American soldiers. And the wars in which all that blood has been shed have had little to do with the prosperity, freedom, or other interests of the people where the wars were fought.

The list of killing fields, stained with “the blood of our citizens”—and of many other people—is indeed a long one. It includes the millions killed by military regimes and death squads in Central America, from the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 to U.S. support for the Contras’ terrorism in the 1980s. It includes the victims of the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone of Latin America, installed with the support of Operation Condor in the ’60s and ’70s. It includes the hundreds of thousands massacred by Suharto (with the CIA’s Jakarta station drawing up the hit lists) and millions more by Mobutu.

“Freedom,” in operational terms, has translated into whatever degree of freedom was compatible with secure profits for United Fruit Company and ITT—which wasn’t much.

More often than not, the United States has intervened to protect the corporations who own the world from the people who live in it. As Noam Chomsky put it, the Cold War in practical terms can be summed up as a war by the U.S. against the Third World, and by the USSR against its satellites, with the “threat” of the opposing superpower in both cases serving mainly as a pretext. It’s a lot like Emmanuel Goldstein described the three rival superpowers of “1984”: three sheaves of corn propping each other up, and enabling one another to defend their respective internal systems of power.

One of the most central items in the American creed is the belief that the troops “protect our freedom.” By definition, any war the United States fights is to “defend our freedoms.” Just watch the cable news shows, or read your local newspaper’s editorials on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, if you don’t believe it. If any one belief is central to the ideology of One Hundred Percent Americanism, this is it.

But it doesn’t bear much looking into. I once saw JCS Chairman Richard Myers on C-SPAN, addressing the Army War College, criticizing China (with a straight face) for having military forces beyond its “legitimate defensive needs.” This from the highest-ranking military officer in a global superpower whose military budget exceeded those of the rest of the world combined.

When most people of common sense think of “defending our country,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably defending against an actual military attack on the territory of the United States. But if you look at all the foreign “threats” the U.S. government “defends” itself against, strangely enough they mainly involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a few hundred miles of its own borders. Most of them don’t even have the logistical capability to project force more than a few hundred miles outside their own borders. So if you think about it, it’s only fair that the U.S. military “defend our country” and “protect our freedoms” on the other side of the world. If Uncle Sam weren’t generous enough to meet them more than halfway, we’d never get to have any wars.

Myers’ comments about China, and the nature of the other “threats” the U.S. national security state points to, provide an interesting glimpse into what “American exceptionalism” is really all about. The United States is the only country in the world that is permitted to define as “excessive military capabilities” the ability to successfully resist an American attack. The United States is the only country with the right to define as “aggression” what another country does in its own immediate vicinity on the other side of the world—while the United States itself intervenes militarily all over the globe to force others to obey its will. The United States is the only country which is allowed to define a “threat” as another country’s ability to disobey the orders of the global hegemon within a few hundred miles of its own borders. By definition, a “threat” is any country that doesn’t do what it’s told.

So when Liz Cheney criticizes Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism, she’s all wet. He believes in it, all right. As Chomsky pointed out, American liberals, as much as American conservatives, share the implicit assumption that “we own the world.” They may believe that Vietnam or Iraq was a “mistake,” but never for one second do they question the premise that the United States has the right to intervene in such cases.

Let’s get something clear. The United States’ military does not “defend our freedom.” There hasn’t been a war in my lifetime that involved a genuine foreign military threat to our freedom, and the United States government has been actively involved in suppressing freedom around the world for decades. The United States government is a threat to our freedom, and the freedom of people everywhere.

[wuvuj]

3. Contemporary Oceania?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24286.htm


Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010

By John Pilger

December 30, 2009 - "Information Clearing House" -- In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localised insurgency see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”