By Pepe ESCOBAR

The year 2022 started with Kazakhstan on fire, a serious attack against one of the key hubs of Eurasian integration. We are only beginning to understand what and how it happened.

On Monday morning, leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held an extraordinary session to discuss Kazakhstan.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev framed it succinctly. Riots were “hidden behind unplanned protests.” The goal was “to seize power” – a coup attempt. Actions were “coordinated from a single center.” And “foreign militants were involved in the riots.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin went further: during the riots, “Maidan technologies were used,” a reference to the Ukrainian square where 2013 protests unseated a NATO-unfriendly government.

Defending the prompt intervention of CSTO peacekeeping forces in Kazakhstan, Putin said, “it was necessary to react without delay.” The CSTO will be on the ground “as long as necessary,” but after the mission is accomplished, “of course, the entire contingent will be withdrawn from the country.” Forces are expected to exit later this week.

But here’s the clincher: “CSTO countries have shown that they will not allow chaos and ‘color revolutions’ to be implemented inside their borders.”

Putin was in synch with Kazakh State Secretary Erlan Karin, who was the first, on the record, to apply the correct terminology to events in his country: What happened was a “hybrid terrorist attack,” by both internal and external forces, aimed at overthrowing the government.

The tangled hybrid web

Virtually no one knows about it. But last December, another coup was discreetly thwarted in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Kyrgyz intel sources attribute the engineering to a rash of NGOs linked with Britain and Turkey.

That introduces an absolutely key facet of The Big Picture: NATO-linked intel and their assets may have been preparing a simultaneous color revolution offensive across Central Asia.

On my Central Asia travels in late 2019, pre-Covid, it was plain to see how western NGOs – Hybrid War fronts – remained extremely powerful in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Yet, they are just one nexus in a western nebulae of Hybrid War fog deployed across Central Asia, and West Asia for that matter. Here we see the CIA and the US Deep State crisscrossing MI6 and different strands of Turkish intel.

When President Tokayev was referring in code to a “single center,” he meant a so far ‘secret’ US-Turk-Israeli military-intel operations room based in the southern business hub of Almaty, according to a highly placed Central Asia intel source.

In this “center,” there were 22 Americans, 16 Turks and 6 Israelis coordinating sabotage gangs – trained in West Asia by the Turks – and then rat-lined to Almaty.

The op started to unravel for good when Kazakh forces – with the help of Russian/CSTO intel – retook control of the vandalized Almaty airport, which was supposed to be turned into a hub for receiving foreign military supplies.

The Hybrid War west had to be stunned and livid at how the CSTO intercepted the Kazakh operation at such lightning speed. The key element is that the secretary of Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, saw the Big Picture eons ago.

So, it’s no mystery why Russia’s aerospace and aero-transported forces, plus the massive necessary support infrastructure, were virtually ready to go.

Back in November, Patrushev’s laser was already focused on the degrading security situation in Afghanistan. Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov was among the very few who were stressing that there were as many as 8,000 imperial machine Salafi-jihadi assets, shipped by a rat line from Syria and Iraq, loitering in the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

That’s the bulk of ISIS-Khorasan – or ISIS reconstituted near the borders of Turkmenistan. Some of them were duly transported to Kyrgyzstan. From there, it was very easy to cross the border from Bishek and show up in Almaty.

It took no time for Patrushev and his team to figure out, after the imperial retreat from Kabul, how this jihadi reserve army would be used: along the 7,500 km-long border between Russia and the Central Asian ‘stans’.

That explains, among other things, a record number of preparation drills conducted in late 2021 at the 210th Russian military base in Tajikistan.

James Bond speaks Turkish

The breakdown of the messy Kazakh op necessarily starts with the usual suspects: the US Deep State, which all but “sang” its strategy in a 2019 RAND corporation report, Extending Russia. Chapter 4, on “geopolitical measures”, details everything from “providing lethal aid to Ukraine”, “promoting regime change in Belarus”, and “increasing support for Syrian rebels” – all major fails – to “reducing Russian influence in Central Asia.”

That was the master concept. Implementation fell to the MI6-Turk connection.

The CIA and MI6 had been investing in dodgy outfits in Central Asia since at least 2005, when they encouraged the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), then close to the Taliban, to wreak havoc in southern Kyrgyzstan. Nothing happened.

It was a completely different story by May 2021, when the MI6’s Jonathan Powell met the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra – which harbors a lot of Central Asian jihadis – somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border near Idlib.

The deal was that these ‘moderate rebels’ – in US terminology – would cease to be branded ‘terrorists’ as long as they followed the anti-Russia NATO agenda.

That was one of the key prep moves ahead of the jihadist ratline to Afghanistan – complete with Central Asia branching out.

The genesis of the offensive should be found in June 2020, when former ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2018, Richard Moore, was appointed head of MI6.

Moore may not have an inch of Kim Philby’s competence, but he does fit the profile: rabid Russophobe, and a cheerleader of the Great Turania fantasy, which promotes a pan-Turk confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples from West Asia and the Caucasus to Central Asia and even Russian republics in the Volga.

MI6 is deeply entrenched in all the ‘stans’ except autarchic Turkmenistan – cleverly riding the pan-Turkist offensive as the ideal vehicle to counter Russia and China.

Erdogan himself has been invested on a hardcore Great Turania offensive, especially after the creation of the Turkic Council in 2009.

Crucially, next March, the summit of the Confederation Council of Turkic-speaking States – the new Turkic Council denomination – will take place in Kazakhstan. The city of Turkestan, in southern Kazakhstan, is expected to be named as the spiritual capital of the Turkic world.

And here, the ‘Turkic world’ enters into a frontal clash with the integrating Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership, and even with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that, crucially, does not count Turkey as a member.

Erdogan’s short term ambition seems at first to be only commercial: after Azerbaijan won the Karabakh war, he expects to use Baku to get access to Central Asia via the Caspian Sea, complete with Turkey’s industrial-military complex sales of military technology to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Turkish companies are already investing heavily in real estate and infrastructure. And in parallel, Ankara’s soft power is on overdrive, finally collecting the fruits of exercising a lot of pressure, for instance, to speed up the transition in Kazakhstan from Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet, starting in 2023.

Yet both Russia and China are very much aware that Turkey essentially represents NATO entering Central Asia. The organization of Turkic states are cryptically called the Kazakh operation ‘fuel protests’.

It’s all very murky. Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism – which comes with massive cheerleading by his Muslim Brotherhood base – essentially has nothing to do with the pan-Turanic drive, which is a racialist movement predicating domination by relatively ‘pure’ Turks.

The problem is that they are converging while becoming more extreme, with Turkey’s right-wing Grey Wolves deeply implicated. That explains why Ankara intel is a sponsor and, in many cases, a weaponizer of both the ISIS-Khorasan franchise and those Turan racists, from Bosnia to Xinjiang via Central Asia.

The Empire handsomely profits from this toxic association, in Armenia, for instance. And the same would happen in Kazakhstan if the operation is successful.

Bring on the Trojan Horses

Every color revolution needs a ‘Maximum’ Trojan Horse. In our case, that seems to be the role of former head of KNB (National Security Committee) Karim Massimov, now held in prison and charged with treason.

Hugely ambitious, Massimov is half-Uyghur, and that, in theory, obstructed what he saw as his pre-ordained rise to power. His connections with Turkish intel are not yet fully detailed, unlike his cozy relationship with Joe Biden and son.

A former Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security, Lt Gen Felix Kulov, has weaved a fascinating tangled web explaining the possible internal dynamics of the ‘coup’ built into the color revolution.

According to Kulov, Massimov and Samir Abish, the nephew of recently ousted Kazakh Security Council Chairman Nursultan Nazarbayev, were up to their necks in supervising ‘secret’ units of ‘bearded men’ during the riots. The KNB was directly subordinated to Nazarbayev, who until last week was the chairman of the Security Council.

When Tokayev understood the mechanics of the coup, he demoted both Massimov and Samat Abish. Then Nazarbayev ‘voluntarily’ resigned from his life-long chairmanship of the Security Council. Abish then got this post, promising to stop the ‘bearded men,’ and then to resign.

So that would point directly to a Nazarbayev-Tokayev clash. It makes sense as, during his 29-year rule, Nazarbayev played a multi-vector game that was too westernized and which did not necessarily benefit Kazakhstan. He adopted British laws, played the pan-Turkic card with Erdogan, and allowed a tsunami of NGOs to promote an Atlanticist agenda.

Tokayev is a very smart operator. Trained by the foreign service of the former USSR, fluent in Russian and Chinese, he is totally aligned with Russia-China – which means fully in sync with the masterplan of the BRI, the Eurasia Economic Union, and the SCO.

Tokayev, much like Putin and Xi, understands how this BRI/EAEU/SCO triad represents the ultimate imperial nightmare, and how destabilizing Kazakhstan – a key actor in the triad – would be a mortal coup against Eurasian integration.

Kazakhstan, after all, represents 60 percent of Central Asia’s GDP, massive oil/gas and mineral resources, cutting-edge high tech industries: a secular, unitary, constitutional republic bearing a rich cultural heritage.

It didn’t take long for Tokayev to understand the merits of immediately calling the CSTO to the rescue: Kazakhstan signed the treaty way back in 1994. After all, Tokayev was fighting a foreign-led coup against his government.

Putin, among others, has stressed how an official Kazakh investigation is the only one entitled to get to the heart of the matter.

It’s still unclear exactly who – and to what extent – sponsored the rioting mobs. Motives abound: to sabotage a pro-Russia/China government, to provoke Russia, to sabotage BRI, to plunder mineral resources, to turbo-charge a House of Saud-style ‘Islamization’.

Rushed to only a few days before the start of the Russia-US ‘security guarantees’ in Geneva, this color revolution represented a sort of counter-ultimatum – in desperation – by the NATO establishment.

Central Asia, West Asia, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South have witnessed the lightning fast Eurasian response by the CSTO troops – who, having now done their job, are set to leave Kazakhstan in a couple of days – and how this color revolution has failed, miserably.

It might as well be the last. Beware the rage of a humiliated Empire.

thecradle.co

The short-lived attempt at a colour revolution in Kazakhstan has brought into focus the geo-political game being waged by the West in Central Asia. This clumsy attempt to once again destablise the region was quickly squashed thanks to the response of Kazakhstan’s fellow members of the CTSO, led by Russia. As all colour revolutions do, it tapped into genuine anger among the populace about rising fuel costs and other legitimate grievances. However any pretence that this was an organic, leaderless uprising was soon exposed, the beheadings were the giveaway.

The Central Asian region encompassing all the “Stans” has been largely at the periphery of world affairs until comparatively recently. Remote in the extreme, even during its time as a part on the USSR, it received little attention due to its strategic irrelevance. The emergence of China and Russia has changed that. Kazakhstan, sandwiched between them, along with its Central Asian neighbours, is now a battleground for the “great power politics” being played out. Kazakhstan is an essential component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and as such is a target of the Western powers, who are intent on doing all possible to stop it.

A cursory look at a map will show that China shares borders with 14 countries, seven of which are Islamic nations. It enjoys good relations with all of them. China itself has a large Muslim population, not concentrated in Xinjiang. They are to be found everywhere in China, along with the mosques at which they worship. Not alone as a minority group, China has five different ethnic groups inside its borders. All are free and encouraged to practice and celebrate their individual cultures and languages. In Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, there are at least eight separate Muslim sects with their own mosques. Muslims are not forced to send their children to Chinese schools, and during the almost 40 years of China’s one child policy, the Muslims were the only group who were permitted to have more than one child. The suggestion that China persecutes Muslims is just a Western concoction.

Xinjiang is in the extreme N.W. of China, it borders six of the other central Asian Islamic countries. Once remote and undeveloped, it has in recent years received huge investment from the central government to help it modernise and develop a real economy for the first time. Parents there overwhelmingly want their children to go to Chinese schools, learn the language and have the prospect of a better life than the Islamic schools can offer. The enemy of the majority of the people there, is the same as it is in their neighbouring moderate Islamic countries, radical Islam.

Many Uyghurs have already been radicalised, they comprise a large part of the terrorist factions that have been present in Syria, Iraq, Libya and many more once stable countries that have been reduced to ashes. They are heavily armed and paid a $50 daily stipend, but by whom you may ask? That is not a question that need detain us for long. The Turkic Islamic army is one such faction that sprouted from Central Asia. The U.S. Government took them off the “terrorist” watchlist a year ago. They are just moderate terrorists apparently.

So, does China persecute Muslims? No. But it does have a genuine Western-backed radicalised Islamic faction looking to infect the youth of Xinjiang. It is a problem it shares with all the moderate, peaceful Central Asian countries. If China does indeed have re-education camps as the West claims, most Uyghur parents would prefer their children were there rather than waving an AK47 from the back of a Toyota pickup in a country they don’t belong.

As America continues to bleat on about human rights in China, it supports and promotes the head-choppers to whom it has granted a franchise. Many of the participants of the Kazakhstan violence were killed and many more were captured. In the coming days and weeks we can expect more revelations as to who the “instigators behind it were. It should make for interesting reading.

By Vijay PRASHAD

Afghanistan and Tajikistan share a 1,400-kilometer border. Recently, a war of words has erupted between Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon and the Taliban government in Kabul.

Rahmon censures the Taliban for the destabilization of Central Asia by the export of militant groups, while the Taliban leadership has accused Tajikistan’s government of interference.

Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government — Zabihullah Mujahid — tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar Province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but — given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan — it is unlikely.

Russian President Vladimir Putin awarding Tajik President Emomali Rahmon the Order of Alexander Nevsky in February 2017. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Panjshir Exiles

On Sept. 3, Afghanistan’s former Vice President Amrullah Saleh tweeted, “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.” A few days later, the Taliban took the Panjshir Valley, where Saleh had taken refuge for the past fortnight, and Saleh slipped across the border into Tajikistan. The resistance inside Afghanistan died down.

From 2001, Saleh had worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and then had become the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (2004-2010). He had previously worked closely with Ahmad Shah Massoud of the right-wing Jamiat-e Islami and of the Northern Alliance.

Saleh fled by helicopter to Tajikistan with Massoud’s son Ahmad. They were later joined in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe by Abdul Latif Pedram, leader of the National Congress Party of Afghanistan.

The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue. I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity. https://t.co/FaKmUGB1mq

— Amrullah Saleh (@AmrullahSaleh2) September 3, 2021

These men followed the lead of the Northern Alliance, which had taken refuge in Tajikistan’s Kulob region after the Taliban victory in 1996.

The personal ties between Ahmad Shah Massoud and Tajikistan’s President Rahmon go back to the early 1990s.

In March, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar remembered that in the early 1990s Massoud told a group of Tajik fighters in Kabul, “I do not want the war in Afghanistan to be transferred to Tajikistan under the banner of Islam. It is enough that our country has been fraudulently destroyed. Go and make peace in your country.”

That Massoud had backed the anti-government United Tajik Opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party, is conveniently forgotten.

Map of Afghanistan with Tajikistan to the north. (CIA, University of Texas at Austin, Wikimedia Commons)

After the Taliban took Kabul on Aug. 15, and just before Saleh and Massoud escaped to Dushanbe, on Sept. 2, Rahmon conferred upon the late Ahmad Shah Massoud the highest civilian award of Tajikistan, the Order of Ismoili Somoni.

This protection afforded to the Saleh-led resistance movement, and Tajikistan’s refusal to recognize the Taliban government in Kabul sent a clear signal to the Taliban from Rahmon’s government.

Rahmon says that the main reason is that he is dismayed by the Taliban’s anti-Tajik stance. But this is not entirely the case. One in four Afghans are Tajiks, while half of Kabul claims Tajik ancestry. The economy minister — Qari Din Mohammad Hanif — is not only Tajik, but comes from the Badakhshan province that borders Tajikistan. The real reason is Rahmon’s concerns about regional destabilization.

Tajik Taliban

On Sept. 11, Saidmukarram Abdulqodirzoda, the head of Tajikistan’s Islamic Council of Ulema, condemned the Taliban as being anti-Islamic in its treatment of women and in its promotion of terrorism. Abdulqodirzoda, the lead imam in Tajikistan, has led a decade-long process to purge “extremists” from the ranks of the mosque leaders. Many foreign-trained imams have been replaced (Abdulqodirzoda had been trained in Islamabad, Pakistan), and foreign funding of mosques has been closely monitored.

Abdulqodirzoda frequently talks about the bloody civil war that tore Tajikistan apart between 1992 and 1997.

Between 1990, when the U.S.S.R. began to collapse, and 1992, when the civil war began, a thousand mosques — more than one a day — opened across the country.

Saudi Arabia’s money and influence rushed into the country, as did the influence of the right-wing Afghan leaders Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Rahmon — as chair of the Supreme Assembly of Tajikistan (1992-1994) and then as president, beginning in 1994 — led the fight against the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), which was eventually crushed by 1997.

The ghost of the civil war reappeared in 2010, when Mullah Amriddin Tabarov, a commander in the IRP, founded Jamaat Ansarullah.

Great Mosque in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in 2013. (Soman, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Cocons)

In 1997, Tabarov fled to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), one of the fiercest of the extremist groups in that era. The IMU and Tabarov developed close ties with Al Qaeda, fleeing Afghanistan and Uzbekistan after the U.S. invasion of 2001 for Iraq, later Syria. Tabarov was caught by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani in July 2015 and killed.

As the Taliban began to make gains in Afghanistan late last year, a thousand Ansarullah fighters arrived from their sojourn with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. When Darwaz fell to the Taliban in November 2020, it was these Ansarullah fighters who took the lead.

Tajikistan’s Rahmon has made it clear that he fears a spillover of Ansarullah into his country, dragging it back into the war of the 1990s. The fear of that war has allowed Rahmon to remain in power, using every means to squash any democratic opening in Tajikistan.

In mid-September, Dushanbe hosted the 21st meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Council of the Heads of State. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan had several talks with Rahmon about the situation in Afghanistan. As the war of words escalated, Khan called Rahmon on Oct. 3 to ask that the tension be reduced. Russia and China have also called for restraint.

It is unlikely that guns will be fired across the border; neither Dushanbe nor Kabul would like to see that outcome. But both sides are using the tension for their own ends — for Rahmon, to ensure that the Taliban will keep Ansarullah in check, and for the Taliban, for Rahmon to recognize their government.

Globetrotter via consortiumnews.com

On September 25, 2021, Afghanistan’s Economy Minister Qari Din Mohammad Hanif said that his government does not want “help and cooperation from the world like the previous government. The old system was supported by the international community for 20 years but still failed.” It is fair to say that Hanif has no experience in running a complex economy, since he has spent most of his career doing political and diplomatic work for the Taliban (both in Afghanistan and in Qatar). However, during the first Taliban government from 1996 to 2001, Hanif was the planning minister and in that position, dealt with economic affairs.

Hanif is right to point out that the governments of Presidents Hamid Karzai (2001-2014) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-2021), despite receiving billions of dollars in economic aid, failed to address the basic needs of the Afghan population. At the end of their rule—and 20 years of U.S. occupation—one in three people are facing hunger, 72 percent of the population lingers below the poverty line and 65 percent of the people have no access to electricity. No amount of bluster from the Western capitals can obscure the plain fact that support from the “international community” resulted in virtually no economic and social development in the country.

Poor North

Hanif, who is the only member of Afghanistan’s new cabinet who is from the country’s Tajik ethnic minority, comes from the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan. The northeastern provinces in Afghanistan are Tajik-dominated areas, and Badakhshan was the base from which the Northern Alliance swiftly moved under U.S. air cover to launch an attack against the Taliban in 2001. In early August 2021, the Taliban swept through these districts. “Why would we defend a government in Kabul that did nothing for us?” said a former official in Karzai’s government who lives in Badakhshan capital, Fayzabad.

Between 2009 and 2011, 80 percent of USAID funds that came into Afghanistan went to areas of the south and east, which had been the natural base of the Taliban. Even this money, a U.S. Senate report noted, went toward “short-term stabilization programs instead of longer-term development projects.” In 2014, Haji Abdul Wadood, then governor of the Argo district in Badakhshan, told Reuters, “Nobody has given money to spend on developmental projects. We do not have resources to spend in our district, our province is a remote one and attracts less attention.”

Hanif’s home province of Badakhshan—and its neighboring areas — suffer from great poverty, the rates upwards of 60 percent. When he talks about failure, Hanif has his home province in mind.

For thousands of years, the province of Badakhshan has been home to mines for gemstones such as lapis lazuli. In 2010, a U.S. military report estimated that there was at least $1 trillion worth of precious metals in Afghanistan; later that year, Afghanistan’s then Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani told BBC radio that the actual figure could be three times as much. The impoverished north might not be so poor after all.

Thieves in the North

With opium production contributing a large chunk of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, it is often a focus of global media coverage on the country’s economy and has partly financed the terrible wars that have wracked the country for the past several years. The gems of Badakhshan, meanwhile, provided the financing for Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Jamiat-e Islami faction in the 1980s; after 1992, when Massoud became the defense minister in Kabul, he made an alliance with a Polish company—Intercommerce—to sell the gems for an estimated $200 million per year. When the Taliban ejected Massoud from power, he returned to the Panjshir Valley and used the Badakhshan, Takhar, and Panjshir gems to finance his anti-Taliban resistance.

When the Northern Alliance—which included Massoud’s faction—came to power under U.S. bombardment in 2001, these mines became the property of the Northern Alliance commanders. Men such as Haji Abdul Malek, Zekria Sawda and Zulmai Mujadidi—all Northern Alliance politicians—controlled the mines. Mujadidi’s brother Asadullah Mujadidi was the militia commander of the Mining Protection Force, which protected the mines for these new elites.

In 2012, Afghanistan’s then Mining Minister Wahidullah Shahrani revealed the extent of corruption in the deals, which he had made clear to the U.S. Embassy in 2009. Shahrani’s attempt at transparency, however, was understood inside Afghanistan as a mechanism to delegitimize Afghan mining concerns and push through a new law that would allow international mining companies more freedom of access to the country’s resources. Various international entities—including Centar (United Kingdom) and the Polish billionaire Jan Kulczyk—attempted to access the gold, copper and gemstone mines of the province; Centar formed an alliance with the Afghanistan Gold and Minerals Company, headed by former Urban Development Minister Sadat Naderi. The consortium’s mining equipment has now been seized by the Taliban. Earlier this year, Shahrani was sentenced to 13 months’ jail time by the Afghan Supreme Court for misuse of authority.

What Will the Taliban Do?

Hanif has an impossible agenda. The IMF has suspended funds for Afghanistan, and the U.S. government continues to block access to the nearly $10 billion of Afghan external reserves held in the United States. Some humanitarian aid has now entered the country, but it will not be sufficient. The Taliban’s harsh social policy—particularly against women—will discourage many aid groups from returning to the country.

Officials at the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), the country’s central bank, tell me that the options before the government are minimal. Institutional control over the mining wealth has not been established. “What deals were cut profited a few individuals and not the country as a whole,” said one official. One major deal to develop the Mes Aynak copper mine made with the Metallurgical Corporation of China and with Jiangxi Copper has been sitting idle since 2008.

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in mid-September, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon spoke about the need to prevent terrorist groups from moving across the Afghan borders to disrupt Central Asia and western China. Rahmon positioned himself as a defender of the Tajik peoples, although poverty of the Tajik communities on both sides of the border should be as much a focus of attention as upholding the rights of the Tajiks as a minority in Afghanistan.

There is no public indication from the SCO that it would prevent not only cross-border terrorism, but also cross-border smuggling. The largest quantities of heroin and opium from northern Afghanistan go to Tajikistan; untold sums of money are made in the illegal movement of minerals, gemstones, and metals out of Afghanistan. Hanif has not raised this point directly, but officials at DAB say that unless Afghanistan better commandeers its own resources, something it has failed to do over the past two decades, the country will not be able to improve the living conditions of its people.

Globetrotter via counterpunch.org

The shock of Afghanistan imploding – as if blown away in a puff of wind – plus the frantic U.S. scramble to get away, even as loyal local retainers, and billions of dollars’ worth of baggage were left abandoned on the tarmac, has triggered a political earthquake that is unfolding across Asia. The ‘ground zero’ (i.e. the U.S.) to a complex network structure has been pulled out on old and settled structures and relationships.

In a very real sense, Washington was the hub: and states – particularly Gulf States defined themselves more in relation to the hub – than to each other. Now those relationships, and associated policies, many of which were geared to pleasing and being favoured by the hub, are up for radical review.

Recently, the lately-returned Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren (a Netanyahu appointment), warned a key Israeli commentator, Ben Caspit, in respect to Israel’s future options, to pause. Israel, of course, unlike others, is actually an integral part of the ‘hub’, and not a ‘spoke’, like other states that do have some modicum of space by which to re-order their network connections. Israel however, only has outwardly projecting vectors of external relations based on a strict calculus of Israeli interest. It has had no notion of any wider regional interest – only its own.

Ambassador Oren gave this advice to Caspit: Before settling on our Israeli options, we need to see where the Afghan withdrawal leaves the U.S., too. Where will it be? He noted that in the wake of the fall of Saigon, the U.S. had embarked on a series of diplomatic initiatives. Can it be this (such as reinvigorating regional normalisation with Israel), or will the U.S. sink into the mire of its divisions?

Today’s divisions are far broader — not just economic and political, but social, moral, cultural and racial: Abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights divides Americans. Socialism and capitalism divides Americans. Affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, urban crime, gun violence and critical race theory divides them. Allegations of white privilege and white supremacy, and demands that equality of opportunity give way to equity of rewards, divide them. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of masks and vaccine mandates divides them.

Well, if there was doubt about where the U.S. ‘is’, consider this: The stunning betrayal of France by America over the eleventh hour surprise provision of nuclear submarine technology for Australia signals a huge geopolitical shift in U.S. strategy. In its growing confrontation with China, a ruthless Washington has demonstrated that what matters to it now is not Europe, but the Indo-Pacific region. This is where the new Cold War is to be fought.

On Wednesday night, Biden, the Australian PM and Britain’s Johnson held a virtual trilateral summit whereby they affirmed a new agreement, entitled AUKUS – a ground-breaking pledge to intensify military cooperation between the three Anglosphere allies, bringing them even closer by pooling critical technologies and research. The goal is to intensify attempts to contain China militarily, even though the three countries did not say so directly. But, the submarine pact involved Canberra abruptly scrapping a $43 billion deal with France to build 12 such submarines – a move which provoked outrage from senior officials in Paris, who effectively accused the U.S. of ‘betrayal’.

Some commentators have pointed to the U.S.’ removal of its most advanced missile defence system and Patriot batteries from Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, as a hopeful token of Washington preparing the ground for a deal with Iran. But after the ruthless shafting of France, the redeployment of missiles from Saudi Arabia is more likely another move in redeploying resources to the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific’ region. This is the site for the new Cold War. If France does not matter any more, what price Gulf States?

Alliances that only a year ago seemed to be set in timeless solidity are dissolving, and are in motion towards new frameworks. The revolution in Afghanistan is but one cog in a major ‘Great Game’ ‘re-set’. Afghanistan is in indeterminate metamorphosis, but Iran began its strategic reset, when its National Security Committee refused to accept the draft JCPOA drawn up by the EU3. It took things a further major step forward, with the announcement that President Raisi will attend the SCO in Dushanbe. It is highly likely that Iran will become a full member of the SCO as a result of this week’s meeting, and ultimately will join a market (the EAEU) representing 41% of world’s population and 23% of global GDP. So too is Pakistan in transit: It refuses any U.S. military presence on its territory. And Lebanon and Syria are tiptoeing towards one another and opening tears in America’s Caesar Act ‘siege’ of these two states.

All of Central Asia, in brief, is re-setting towards the SCO, EAEU, Russia and China. The former is now ‘lost’ to the U.S. And the emanations of the grinding tectonic shift triggered by the U.S. airport scramble, have been felt just as keenly in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv, as across Central Asia.

David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye:

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“UAE officials claim to be conducting a “strategic reassessment” of foreign policy. It starts with Biden. The UAE noted two features of its changed relationship with Washington … The first was a consistent message from the new U.S. administration to ‘de-escalate’ tensions in the Middle East. The second was the sheer unpredictability inherent to U.S. policy.

“Abu Dhabi consequently is not the only signatory of the Abraham Accords, which is reassessing the [merit of being part of a] pro-U.S. bloc in the Gulf. One year on from the signing in Washington, the Abraham Accords are losing their shine …

“[They seemed to offer] a way of bypassing the Palestinian conflict, without the need for messy, time-wasting things like negotiations, elections or popular mandates. The accords were a solution imposed from above – a fait accompli, which the Arab masses would have to live with …”.

“They had two fundamental flaws however. Firstly, they depended on individual leaders – not states – meeting at first in secret as project drivers. This means that when two key players were removed from the picture – Trump and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the project itself lost sponsorship and momentum.

“The other problem was that they were all about the relationship between regional states and the U.S. They did not address the fundamental problems of relations between the key regional actors themselves. The UAE’s motive for moving closer to Israel had been to cement its relationship with Washington. Recognition of Israel was always a means to an end, not the end in itself…”.

“Coupled with this, [sources] claim, is a hard-headed assessment of what the UAE has actually achieved. Its interventions have indeed beaten the Muslim Brotherhood back as a political force in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, and partly in Libya. But the cost of the UAE’s secular jihad is enormous.

“Three of these countries are in smoking ruins, and the other two, Egypt and Tunisia, are nearly bankrupt. What has MBZ gained for the billions of dollars he has invested in Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?

“The new policy, then, is apparently to spread influence through economic cooperation, rather than military intervention and political competition”.

For Israel, the problem is more acute as former Ambassador, Michael Oren, has outlined:

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The new Israeli government is facing this doomsday nuclear threat [from Iran]. In five years’ time, it will be worse: Iran’s programme will be further along. [This conflict] is going to happen eventually, of that I am absolutely certain, so I prefer it happens now, rather than in 5 years’ time – when it will be more difficult for Israel to respond … The new Israeli government should be building its case as to why Israel cannot co-exist with Iran [reaching even ‘threshold’ status]. Israel’s ability to respond to threats will be greatly impaired – were we to have [even ‘threshold’] pressed to our head all the time. It will become impossible to act.

Another respected Israeli commentator, Amos Gilad – a former senior Israeli security official – noted last week in Yedioth Ahoronot, too that:

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“[W]ith the U.S. focusing its efforts on preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, Iran is liable to reach the conclusion that as a nuclear threshold state, it will not be the target of a military retaliation. And if sanctions are imposed on it – it can look to other world powers for help, such as China and Russia. If Iran reaches the conclusion that there is no point in developing real nuclear weapons because this could produce a frontal clash with the U.S. and the West; yet still become a nuclear threshold state, the challenge to Israel is liable to be particularly difficult”.

Israel’s Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, outlined, in an interview with Foreign Policy last week, that Israel would be willing to accept a return to a U.S.-negotiated nuclear deal with Iran – but Israeli officials are also pressing Washington to prepare a serious ‘demonstration of power’ should negotiations with Tehran fail. Gantz added that Israel would want to see a “viable U.S.-led plan B” that includes broad economic pressure on Iran in case the talks fail. And he gestured at Israel’s own ‘plan C’, which would involve military action. He was skeptical, he said, about the chances of diplomacy successfully reversing Iran’s progress. And he outlined what Israel would view as a “viable” back-up plan: political, diplomatic, and economic pressure imposed on Tehran by the U.S., Europe, Russia, and—crucially—China:

“We have to connect China in this too, Asia has to play a role,” Gantz said, highlighting the key trade ties between Iran and Asian countries. “Israel has no ability to lead a real plan B, we can’t put together an international economic sanctions regime. This has to be led by the U.S.”

Gantz estimated that Iran was two to three months away from having the materials and capabilities to produce one nuclear bomb (this has been claimed many times over the years, but Iran may well be close to threshold this time. We do not know).

Gantz’s A – C plans suggests an Israel flopping about on the fishmonger’s marble, seeking a way back to life-sustaining water. It is, however, rhetoric. Israel will not accept an Iranian return to the JCPOA, without all its centrifuge advances, and accumulation of 60% enrichment, undone. Plan ‘B’ is fantasy: Russia and China are not about to sanction an Iran on the verge of joining the SCO.

But in respect to Plan ‘C’, Yossi Melman, an eminent Israeli security commentator, had this to say:

“Even if [officials] won’t admit it publicly, it is clear … what real options Israel has at its disposal, and what it is unable to do. We can present two axioms: 1. The United States will not attack Iran’s nuclear sites. 2. Even if Israel has prepared an attack plan or other creative scenarios, it has no genuine practical military ability to attack alone, and achieve a significant result. [And] even if Israel has an original, daring and feasible plan, the United States will not accept it for fear that any military step would drag it into a war against its will”.

The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don’t be fooled. It couldn’t be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp.

“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Both were right, but not in the ways they intended. Indeed, the collapse of Kabul was not comparable. It was worse, incomparably so. And its implications for the future of U.S. global power are far more serious than the loss of Saigon.

On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.

Amid a massive North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975, President Thieu panicked and ordered his army to abandon the northern half of the country, a disastrous decision that precipitated Saigon’s fall just six weeks later. As the Taliban swept across the countryside this summer, President Ghani retreated into a fog of denial, insisting his troops defend every remote, rural district, allowing the Taliban to springboard from seizing provincial capitals to capturing Kabul in just 10 days.

With the enemy at the gates, President Thieu filled his suitcases with clinking gold bars for his flight into exile, while President Ghani (according to Russian reports) snuck off to the airport in a cavalcade of cars loaded with cash. As enemy forces entered Saigon and Kabul, helicopters ferried American officials from the U.S. embassy to safety, even as surrounding city streets swarmed with panicked local citizens desperate to board departing flights.

Critical Differences

So much for similarities. As it happens, the differences were deep and portentous. By every measure, the U.S. capacity for building and supporting allied armies has declined markedly in the 45 years between Saigon and Kabul. After President Thieu ordered that disastrous northern retreat, replete with dismal scenes of soldiers clubbing civilians to board evacuation flights bound for Saigon, South Vietnam’s generals ignored their incompetent commander-in-chief and actually began to fight.

On the road to Saigon at Xuan Loc, an ordinary South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, fought battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks, trucks, and artillery to a standstill for two full weeks. Not only did those South Vietnamese soldiers take heavy casualties, with more than a third of their men killed or wounded, but they held their positions through those long days of “meat-grinder” combat until the enemy had to circle around them to reach the capital.

In those desperate hours as Saigon was falling, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, head of the only intact South Vietnamese command, faced an impossible choice between making a last stand in the Mekong Delta and capitulating to communist emissaries who promised him a peaceful surrender. “If I am unable to carry out my job of protecting the nation,” the general told a subordinate, “then I must die, along with my nation.” That night, seated at his desk, the general shot himself in the head. In South Vietnam’s last hours as a state, four of his fellow generals also committed suicide. At least 40 more lower-ranking officers and soldiers also chose death over dishonor.

On the road to Kabul, by contrast, there were no heroic last stands by regular Afghan army units, no protracted combat, no heavy casualties, and certainly no command suicides. In the nine days between the fall of Afghanistan’s first provincial capital on August 6th and the capture of Kabul on August 15th, all of the well-equipped, well-trained Afghan soldiers simply faded away before Taliban guerrillas equipped mainly with rifles and tennis sneakers.

After losing their salaries and rations to graft for the previous six to nine months, those hungry Afghan troops simply surrendered en masse, took Taliban cash payments, and handed over their weapons and other costly U.S. equipment. By the time the guerrillas reached Kabul, driving Humvees and wearing Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, and body armor, they looked like so many NATO soldiers. Instead of taking a bullet, Afghanistan’s commanders took the cash — both graft from padding their payrolls with “ghost soldiers” and bribes from the Taliban.

The difference between Saigon and Kabul has little to do with the fighting ability of the Afghan soldier. As the British and Soviet empires learned to their dismay when guerrillas slaughtered their soldiers in spectacular numbers, ordinary Afghan farmers are arguably the world’s finest fighters. So why wouldn’t they fight for Ashraf Ghani and his secular democratic state in far-off Kabul?

The key difference would seem to lie in the fading of America’s aura as the planet’s number one power and of its state-building capacities. At the peak of its global hegemony back in the 1960s, the United States, with its unequalled material resources and moral authority, could make a reasonably convincing case to the South Vietnamese that the political mix of electoral democracy and capitalist development it sponsored was the way forward for any nation. Today, with its reduced global clout and tarnished record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (as well as in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), America’s capacity to infuse its nation-building projects with any real legitimacy — that elusive sine qua non for the survival of any state — has apparently dropped significantly.

The Impact on U.S. Global Power

In 1975, the fall of Saigon did indeed prove a setback to Washington’s world order. Still, America’s underlying strength, both economic and military, was robust enough then for a partial rebound.

Adding to the sense of crisis at the time, the loss of South Vietnam coincided with two more substantial blows to Washington’s international system and the clout that went with it. Just a few years before Saigon’s collapse, the German and Japanese export booms had so eroded America’s commanding global economic position that the Nixon administration had to end the automatic convertibility of the dollar to gold. That, in turn, effectively broke the Bretton Woods system that had been the foundation of U.S. economic strength since 1944.

Meanwhile, with Washington mired in its self-made Vietnam quagmire, that other Cold War power, the Soviet Union, continued to build hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles and so functionally forced Washington to recognize its military parity in 1972 by signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Protocol.

With the weakening of the economic and nuclear pillars on which so much of America’s paramount power rested, Washington was forced to retreat from its role as the great global hegemon and become a mere first among equals.

Washington’s Relations with Europe

Almost half a century later, the sudden, humiliating fall of Kabul threatens even that more limited leadership role. Although the U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 20 years with the full support of its NATO allies, when President Biden walked away from that shared “nation-building” mission, he did so without the slightest consultation with those very allies.

America lost 2,461 soldiers in Afghanistan, including 13 who died tragically during the airport evacuation. Its allies suffered 1,145 killed, including 62 German soldiers and 457 British troops. No wonder those partners held understandable grievances when Biden acted without the slightest notice to or discussion with them. “There is serious loss of trust,” observed Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington. “But the real lesson… for Europe is this: Do we really want to be totally dependent on U.S. capabilities and decisions forever, or can Europe finally begin to be serious about becoming a credible strategic actor?”

For Europe’s more visionary leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, the answer to that timely question was obvious: build a European defense force free from Washington’s whims and so avoid “the Chinese-American duopoly, the dislocation, the return of hostile regional powers.” In fact, right after the last American planes left Kabul, a summit of European Union officials made it clear that the time had come to stop “depending on American decisions.” They called for the creation of a European army that would give them “greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world.”

In short, with America First populism now a major force in this country’s politics, assume that Europe will pursue a foreign policy increasingly freed from Washington’s influence.

Central Asia’s Geopolitics

And Europe may be the least of it. The stunning capture of Kabul highlighted an American loss of leadership that extended into Asia and Africa, with profound geopolitical implications for the future of U.S. global power. Above all, the Taliban’s victory will effectively force Washington out of Central Asia and so help to consolidate Beijing’s already ongoing control over parts of that strategic region. It, in turn, could prove to be the potential geopolitical pivot for China’s dominance over the vast Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the globe’s population and productivity.

Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2013 (though nobody in Washington was then listening), China’s President Xi Jinping announced his country’s strategy for winning the twenty-first-century version of the deadly “great game” that nineteenth-century empires once played for control of Central Asia. With gentle gestures that belied his imperious intent, Xi asked that academic audience to join him in building an “economic belt along the Silk Road” that would “expand development space in the Eurasian region” through infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea.” In the process of establishing that “belt and road” structure, they would, he claimed, be building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

In the eight years since that speech, China has indeed been spending over a trillion dollars on its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to construct a transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines, and industrial infrastructure in a bid to become the world’s premier economic power. More specifically, Beijing has used the BRI as a geopolitical pincers movement, a diplomatic squeeze play. By laying down infrastructure around the northern, eastern, and western borders of Afghanistan, it has prepared the way for that war-torn nation, freed of American influence and full of untapped mineral resources (estimated at a trillion dollars), to fall safely into Beijing’s grasp without a shot being fired.

To the north of Afghanistan, the China National Petroleum Corporation has collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a system that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles across the heart of Eurasia. Along Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, Beijing began spending $200 million in 2011 to transform a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi committed $46 billion to building a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, rails, and pipelines stretching nearly 2,000 miles along Afghanistan’s eastern borderlands from China’s western provinces to the now-modernized port of Gwadar.

To the west of Afghanistan, Beijing broke through Iran’s diplomatic isolation last March by signing a $400 billion development agreement with Tehran. Over the next 25 years, China’s legions of laborers and engineers will lay down a transit corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines to China, while also building a vast new rail network that will make Tehran the hub of a line stretching from Istanbul, Turkey, to Islamabad, Pakistan.

By the time these geopolitical pincers pull Afghanistan firmly into Beijing’s BRI system, the country may have become just another Middle Eastern theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia. While the religious police harass women and troops battle festering insurgencies, the Taliban state can get down to its real business — not defending Islam, but cutting deals with China to mine its vast reserves of rare minerals and collect transit taxes on the new $10 billion TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan (which desperately needs affordable energy).

With lucrative royalties from its vast store of rare-earth minerals, the Taliban could afford to end its current fiscal dependence on drugs. They could actually ban the country’s now booming opium harvest, a promise their new government spokesman has already made in a bid for international recognition. Over time, the Taliban leadership might discover, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, that a developing economy can’t afford to waste its women. As a result, there might even be some slow, fitful progress on that front, too.

If such a projection of China’s future economic role in Afghanistan seems fanciful to you, consider that the underpinnings for just such a future deal were being put in place while Washington was still dithering over Kabul’s fate. At a formal meeting with a Taliban delegation in July, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi hailed their movement as “an important military and political force.”

In response, Taliban head Mullah Abdul Baradar, displaying the very leadership that American-installed President Ashraf Ghani so clearly lacked, praised China as a “reliable friend” and promised to foster “an enabling investment environment” so that Beijing could play “a bigger role in future reconstruction and economic development.” Formalities finished, the Afghan delegation then met behind closed doors with China’s assistant foreign minister to exchange what the official communiqué called “in-depth views on issues of common concern, which helped enhance mutual understanding” — in short, who gets what and for how much.

The World-Island Strategy

China’s capture of Eurasia, should it be successful, will be but one part of a far grander design for control over what Victorian geographer Halford Mackinder, an early master of modern geopolitics, called the “world island.” He meant the tricontinental land mass comprising the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the past 500 years, one imperial hegemon after another, including Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States, has deployed its strategic forces around that world island in a bid to dominate such a sprawling land mass.

While for the last half-century Washington has arrayed its vast air and naval armadas around Eurasia, it generally relegated Africa to, at best, an afterthought — at worst, a battleground. Beijing, by contrast, has consistently treated that continent with the utmost seriousness.

When the Cold War came to southern Africa in the early 1970s, Washington spent the next 20 years in an arm’s-length alliance with apartheid South Africa, while using the CIA to fight a leftist liberation movement in Portuguese-controlled Angola. While Washington spent billions wreaking havoc by supplying right-wing African warlords with automatic weapons and land mines, Beijing launched its first major foreign-aid project. It built the thousand-mile Tanzania-to-Zambia railway. Not only was it the longest in Africa when completed in 1975, but it allowed landlocked Zambia, a front-line state in the struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria, to avoid South Africa when exporting its copper.

From 2015 on, building upon its historic ties to the liberation movements that won power across southern Africa, Beijing planned a decade-long trillion-dollar infusion of capital there. Much of it was to be designated for commodities-extraction projects that would make that continent China’s second-largest source of crude oil. With such an investment (equaling its later BRI commitments to Eurasia), China also doubled its annual trade with Africa to $222 billion, three times America’s total.

While that aid to liberation movements once had an ideological undercurrent, today it’s been succeeded by savvy geopolitics. Beijing seems to understand just how fast Africa’s progress has been in the single generation since that continent won its freedom from a particularly rapacious version of colonial rule. Given that it’s the planet’s second most populous continent, rich in human and material resources, China’s trillion-dollar bet on Africa’s future will likely pay rich dividends, both political and economic, someday soon.

With a trillion dollars invested in Eurasia and another trillion in Africa, China is engaged in nothing less than history’s largest infrastructure project. It’s crisscrossing those three continents with rails and pipelines, building naval bases around the southern rim of Asia, and ringing the whole tricontinental world island with a string of 40 major commercial ports.

Such a geopolitical strategy has become Beijing’s battering ram to crack open Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge what’s left of its global hegemony. America’s unequalled military air and sea armadas still allow it rapid movement above and around those continents, as the mass evacuation from Kabul showed so forcefully. But the slow, inch-by-inch advance of China’s land-based, steel-ribbed infrastructure across the deserts, plains, and mountains of that world island represents a far more fundamental form of future control.

As China’s geopolitical squeeze play on Afghanistan shows all too vividly, there is still much wisdom in the words that Sir Halford Mackinder wrote over a century ago: “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

To that, after watching a Washington that’s invested so much in its military be humiliated in Afghanistan, we might add: Who does not command the World Island cannot command the World.

counterpunch.org

Moves come after Tajikistan and Uzbekistan agree to drop objections following regional security concerns in Afghanistan

Iran is finally set to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) after Tajikistan and Uzbekistan agreed to drop their objections. Iran had originally applied to join in 2006 and 2015, however with the country like landlocked Tajikistan and Uzbekistan also bordering Afghanistan in addition to offering seaport access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, both nations have opted to welcome Iran as an ally.

The secretary of the SCO’s Supreme National Security Council stated, “Fortunately, the political obstacles to Iran’s membership in the Shanghai agreement have been removed and Iran’s membership will be finalized through technical formalities.” Iran has instead been an observer nation since 2005, at the same time as India and Pakistan. The latter two joined as full members in 2017, leaving Iran to wait.

However, pressing regional security developments in Afghanistan require Iran’s full cooperation to resolve, with the Taliban now occupying all borders with Iran, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, together with sections of both the Turkmenistan and Pakistan borders. Iranian full membership will provide a significant boost to the SCO’s overall security planning and assist Tajikistan and Uzbekistan with intelligence and possible military assistance.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are both landlocked, while Iran has been developing the International North-South Transportation Highway (INSTC). This multi-modal route connects Iran’s southern Chabahar Port to the Caspian Sea and with Turkmenistan ports that connect with Uzbekistan and will in turn also interconnect with Tajikistan. Caspian Sea connections provide links both West via Azerbaijan to Turkey and Europe, while south to Chabahar opens markets in the Middle East, Africa, and India.

An additional rail line link from Iran’s INSTC leads to the Afghan border. There are in time plans to extend that east across Afghanistan to Kabul, where it would intersect with another planned Trans-Afghan rail line from Uzbekistan to the north, travelling south-east across Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it links with Pakistan’s road and rail network and connects to ports at Karachi and Gwadar.

Without Iran’s active presence and its role as the link between East and West in these routes, it will be hard for the Central Asian nations to create new markets either West or South. It also interferes with China’s Belt and Road Initiative plans to create and link overland route East-West across Central Asia and link China to the Black Sea and Middle East. Iran’s geopolitical position along the Belt and Road Initiative is vital to accomplishing these goals.

Trade studies of the level of development in Central Asia show that they provide good opportunities to advance their own and Iran’s export goals.
Iran can expand its exports to these countries in various fields, including energy (oil, gas, and electricity) much needed to reconstruct Afghanistan.

Iran’s role in economic relations, the geopolitical situation of the region, the transportation route of Central Asia out of its current remoteness, and facilities and infrastructure at Iran’s Anzali and Chabahar ports can prove to be very effective.

silkroadbriefing.com

So I looked forward to Khan’s first meeting with Trump at the White House. Pakistan’s relationship with the US looks strained on the surface as Trump cut off aid packages to Pakistan at a time when the country’s finances have been, to say the least, challenging.

Khan is in a incredibly difficult position, trying to legitimize the civilian government while reining in the de facto military one. I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs but it should be obvious that Khan is facing the same kind of ‘deep state’ pushback that Trump, Salvini and others like him are experiencing.

Pakistan is the lynchpin on which China’s Belt and Road Initiative rests. China has pumped more than $60 billion into Pakistan through the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. That money has itself become a political football Khan has had to deal with.

At the same time, the US is still obsessed with keeping central Asia chaotic and unsettled.

Those forces within both the US and British Deep States have worked hard to sabotage any gains made by Khan to navigate the roiling waters around him. They cling to the more than 150 year-old view of disrupting central Asia, what Halford Makinder called “The Heartland,” as the key to maintaining supremacy over China and Russia.

Preventing rapprochement between India and Pakistan was the point behind the terrorist attack back in February which nearly set the two countries to war, as Khan made a strong first impression at ending the forever war between the two countries.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a committed neoliberal if there ever was one, took full advantage of the attack to ensure his re-election in May.

And since then he has gone out of his way to virtue signal how upset he is with Khan over not getting control over ‘terrorism’ in Pakistan. No invitation to his inauguration, snubbing him at the recent SCO conference. Modi knows full well the challenges Khan is facing and his behavior has been nothing short of abominable these past few months.

But he also knows that the Afghanistan peace process is proceeding without India’s input. And both sides of the conflict have been elevating Pakistan to get what they want. While India has fumed and stamped its feet over both BRI and Afghan talks the world has moved on without it.

Trump is moving forward with some form of end to the Afghan war. He needs this for political purposes. It won’t be a full withdrawal, not with the people surrounding him in place.

India is wedded to the Ghani government, barely hanging on in Kabul by the grace of US support, and keeps making investments outside of BRI, namely the port at Chabahar in Iran, and railways to Afghanistan, to spite the Chinese, who they are still angry with over the Tibetan border.

And India’s pride has ultimately isolated them because they are not central to solving Afghanistan like Pakistan is.

Talks with the moderate Taliban leaders began in December 2016 when China, Russia and Iran elevated Pakistan to lead the talks, knowing full well that for any lasting peace between the two countries, Pakistan would have to be a primary negotiator. This has kept India on the sidelines, hoping the US would support them in talks.

But it hasn’t worked out that way at all under Trump. If anything Trump has been dismissive of India, relegating their concerns to the back burner. Russia, China, the US and Pakistan have all agreed, in principle, to a path forward towards de-escalating the situation in Afghanistan.

This is why it was important for Khan to come to Washington D.C. now while Trump is mad at Modi for buying Russian S-400 missile defense systems and giving Khan a stage.

And, to Khan’s credit, he did just that.

Going on Fox News and making the public offer to give up Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if India would was a masterstroke of diplomacy. Will anything come of it? Not directly. India isn’t giving up its nukes because Imran Khan asked nicely.

Will the war hawks in Washington decry Trump for meeting with Khan and talking peace? Yes.

In fact, to over-shadow Khan’s offer the media, both US and Russian sadly, has focused on Trump’s tweets about ending the war in Afghanistan (10 million dead) and India denying there was an offer to mediate on Kashmir.

Lost in all of that was Khan, again playing it very smart, saying he made the offer to Trump back in February to mediate a settlement on Kashmir.

“Nuclear war is not an option between Pakistan and India. The idea of nuclear war is actually self-destruction,” he replied.

Speaking on the recent tensions between the two South Asian neighbors in February, Prime Minister Imran Khan said he had asked President Trump to play his role and mediate between the two countries.

“The US is the most powerful country in the world, the only country which could mediate between Pakistan and India and resolve the only issue which is Kashmir. The only reason for 70 years we have not been able to live like civilized neighbours is Kashmir,” Prime Minister Imran Khan told Fox News.

“I really feel that India should come on the table, US could play a big part, and President Trump can certainly play a big part. We are talking about 1.3 billion people on this earth. Imagine the dividends of peace if somehow that issue could be resolved,” he added.

And the answer from Modi was to deny there was ever an offer of such mediation and Trump had to back down as the State Department went into spin control mode. Modi, of course, has to say that, even though it’s clear that the subject has come up.

But Khan has been consistent in his working towards peace in the region since his election.

It’s all ridiculous and sad, as it is becoming clearer by the day that the forces of the status quo and war are working over-time to erect phantom barriers to peace through perceived slights and political chicanery.

Modi is still playing up the terrorism angle and hard-liners in India prevent him from moving forward with any real diplomacy outside of the SCO, of which both India and Pakistan are full members. No one in the West is happy about this arrangement and it’s clear to me the terror attacks in February were meant to split either Pakistan or India from the SCO and set things aright in The Heartland.

So if Modi continues to act like an inconsolably aggrieved party that may be your signal that we’re no closer to regional peace than we’ve been. But it hasn’t been for a lack of trying by all the major players.

In the end, it all comes down to Trump and his parallel position within the US government to Khan’s in Pakistan’s. Does he have the clout and the will to achieve his goals of ending the war in Afghanistan while effecting a tactical retreat from the Heartland?

I don’t know, but it’s beginning to look like that is his plan. So much has changed since the G-20 and the meetings in Doha and Beijing since then concerning Afghanistan, that it is possible to entertain this hope.

Trump has little control over the forces unleashed in his maximum pressure campaign on Iran. His presidency represents a threat to a very old policy that transcends governments and political systems.

Like with North Korea he is doing what he can to signal to his ‘partners,’ as Russian President Vladimir Putin would put it, that he won’t make things worse in Pakistan and Afghanistan while they work out the details and through his inaction force players like Modi to accede to reality.

Trump needs a way to save face after doubling down in Afghanistan at the behest of the war hawks in 2017. Khan can give him that, publicly. It may be Russia, China and Iran doing the heavy lifting but it’s Khan and Pakistan that can be the politically palatable face on it.