The White House statement presented the exercises in the context of routine behavior among Allies, timid and defensive. The Defense Department and UN Command statements indicated the exercises are pointed, aggressive and intended to be intimidating. The two statements neutralize each other because reassurance always trumps vigilance.
Undermining both statements is the fact that the US did not respond in a timely fashion to the defense of South Korea, which was attacked on 26 March. The response lag time erodes the cogency of all the lofty American words. The bottom line is that South Korea was attacked, but the US response took four months. That is not “strategic reassurance.”
As noted yesterday, in four months, a healthy North Korean army could overrun the Peninsula. Fortunately, it is not all that healthy. Somewhere in Washington the strategic thinking is muddled, timid and misguided in dealing with the Far East.
The Korean peninsula has now become an acute hotspot where an accidental clash can escalate into a full-scale war.
Press Release — Embargoed until 18 June 2010, 9:00 am Managua Time (GMT-7)
Managua, 18 June 2010 — As Nicaragua celebrates completion of its mine clearance activities, Central America becomes the world's first landmine-free region, said the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) today. North and Central America, from the Arctic Circle to the Colombian border, are now free from the threat of landmines. This success demonstrates that with sustained efforts a mine-free world is possible.
“Communities in the region that suffered from conflict in recent history are now free from the threat of mines and can move on with rebuilding their lives,” said Yassir Chavarría Gutiérrez of the Instituto de Estudios Estratégicos y Políticas Públicas, the ICBL member in Nicaragua. “As Central America emerged from conflict, over a decade of mine clearance served as a regional confidence-building measure and embodied the Mine Ban Treaty's spirit of openness, transparency, and cooperation.”
Central American governments, the Organization of American States (OAS), and international donors showed significant political will and demonstrated the importance of international cooperation and assistance in mine action.
Of Central America's seven countries, five used to be mine-affected: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica (the other two being Belize and Panama). All have met their mine clearance obligations under the Mine Ban Treaty, which requires that all known mined areas be cleared within ten years. Nonetheless, residual mine clearance capacity will still be needed in the region, including in Nicaragua, as there are still likely mines in weapons caches or emplaced in unknown areas.
“The job is not done now that all the mines have been cleared. Landmine survivors, their families, and communities require lifelong assistance. Government funding that previously supported clearance should now be channeled to victim assistance initiatives,” said Jesús Martínez, Director of the Fundación Red de Sobrevivientes, the ICBL member in El Salvador, and a mine survivor himself.
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Colombia is among the world's states most affected by antipersonnel mines and Chile will likely meet its 2012 treaty-mandatory mine clearance deadline. Ecuador and Peru have made slow progress despite the relatively small amount of land remaining to be cleared, and Venezuela has yet to clear a single mine from six contaminated military bases.
Production
In the past, more than 50 countries have produced antipersonnel mines, both for their own stocks and to supply others. Cheap and easy to make, it was said that producing one antipersonnel mine costs $1, yet once in the ground it can cost more than $1,000 to find and destroy.
As of 2008, 38 nations have stopped production, and global trade has almost halted completely. Unfortunately, 13 countries continue to produce (or have not foresworn the production of) antipersonnel mines. For the latest updates see Landmine Monitor.
Nine of the 13 mine producers are in Asia (Burma, China, India, Nepal, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, and Vietnam), one in the Middle East (Iran), two in the Americas (Cuba and United States), and one in Europe (Russia).
At the same time some non-state armed groups or rebel groups still produce home-made landmines such as improvised explosive devices.
China-Pakistan: China and Pakistan signed four memorandums of understanding in health, power generation and the construction of two major highways in Gilgit-Baltistan, The Associated Press of Pakistan reported 9 July.
According to the road construction agreements, China will construct the 165-kilometer (103-mile) Jaglot-Skardu road and the 135-kilometer (84-mile) Thakot-Sazin road. The projects will cost $965 million with 85 percent financing by China and 15 percent by Pakistan. The memorandums were signed after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari addressed the Pak-China Economic Cooperation Forum.
The significance of the road agreements is that the location of the roads is in the Himalayas, the most rugged regions of Pakistan that adjoin China. They will facilitate increased contacts to China. . It is unusual for there to be published in one week multiple new events about infrastructure projects in the same remote region of the Himalayas. It makes one suspect that the Chinese have found valuable mineral deposits about which they are not talking in public.
They also have a military dimension because they will improve the lines of communication in the far north of Pakistan which was the setting for the Kargil War in 1999.
Pakistan: Security. Several Chinese engineers working in Baluchistan survived an attempt on their lives when unidentified assailants fired two rockets at a five -star hotel in the provincial town, in a pre-dawn attack on Wednesday. According to reports, the Chinese engineers left the hotel elevator minutes before the attack, which damaged a portion of the hotel building.
The Chinese engineers had arrived in Gwadar recently and were reportedly working on an oil refinery. Official sources believe that they were the targets of the attack. Security officials and paramilitary forces cordoned off the area after the attack and began investigations against unidentified assailants.
Comment: Baluch hostility to foreigners is less interesting than that the Chinese are building an oil refinery in Gwadar, in western Pakistan. That provides the motive for building a railroad link to Xinjiang, China, or maybe a pipeline, if that is feasible.
China is developing lines of communication through Pakistan and Burma to complement oil pipelines in central Asia that will ensure crude supplies to China in the event of a crisis in Northeast or Southeast Asia in which US Naval forces would disrupt the maritime supply route through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.
Phi Beta Iota: The comparison between Chinese strategic thinking and US strategic thinking is instructive–they understand and practice both strategy and thinking, the US does not.
Prodded doubtless by forces above and behind the Oval Office, Obama has ousted General McChrystal in favor of General Petraeus, who now combines the post of CENTCOM theater commander with that of NATO commander in Afghanistan. This is a move deriving from the inherent fecklessness and incompetence of the Obama administration, especially from the imperialist point of view. Recent events have highlighted Obama’s total lack of executive ability, leaving him weakened as he faced the bizarre flap about some barrack-room gripes by McChrystal’s staff collected by a correspondent from Rolling Stone magazine. Because of Obama’s weakness, he felt obliged to react to the scuttlebutt peddled by Rolling Stone, when a stronger president could have dismissed it or ignored it. As Fletcher Pratt once wrote, Abraham Lincoln was capable of laughing an attempted coup d’état out of existence with an off-color joke. Obama is far too weak for that.
As for General McChrystal, he was critically weakened and made vulnerable to ouster by the total failure of his counterinsurgency strategy, with the Marja offensive faltering and the Kandahar offensive indefinitely delayed, even as NATO losses rise exponentially, President Karzai turns towards Tehran and Beijing, and many of the NATO coalition partners prepare to defect.
One effect of the sacking of McChrystal is likely to be the accelerated breakup of the US-led Afghan invasion coalition, which was already in bad shape before this incident. The Netherlands and Canada are leaving, the British and the Poles want to join them, and the Turks can hardly be enthusiastic. Who else will join them in the race for the exit door? NATO Secretary General Rasmussen, anticipating such a result, spoke out yesterday in favor of keeping McChrystal, who works for him as well as for Obama. More countries may now announce their departure even before the November NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
Another of McChrystal’s bosses, Afghan President Karzai, also made clear that he wanted McChrystal to stay. He will now use Obama’s flaunting of his wishes to accelerate his own playing of the China card in economic policy and the Iranian card in cultural and religious affairs. Afghanistan is likely to slip into the Chinese orbit.
India: Minister of State for Defense M. M. Pallam Raju on 7 July said India is concerned about China's plans to build a rail link with Pakistan through the Karakoram mountain range, The Times of India reported. He said India is planning to take countermeasures against the proposed link.
Comment: This is one of four strategically significant rail projects in Asia. All are important in the UN master plan for Asian railroads, but several stand out.
The first is the Chinese project to build a railroad line in Afghanistan that runs southward from the Oxus River to China's Aynak Copper Mine in Logar Province. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, copper deposit in the world. Eventually it could become the leading edge of mineral extraction projects that could transform Afghanistan a generation from now, if security conditions permit.
The second project is the Iranian railroad to Herat, in western Afghanistan. This is moving ahead slowly, but follows a hard road already built by the Iranians. It will tie relatively quiet Herat and western Afghanistan to the economic market area of Mashhad, Iran's second largest city, when completed.
The third rail project with strategic significance is in North Korea, which has two sub-projects that can complete the link of Europe by rail to Japan. Completion of these long delayed spurs depend on whether whoever runs anything in North Korea ever gets a sound grip on their own economic best interests and permit upgrades to the Chinese and to the Russian spurs that run across the Demilitarized Zone and link to the South Korean rail systems that terminate at Pusan. A ferry ride across the Tsushima Strait links to Japan railroads and Tokyo. London to Tokyo by rail is in sight, if the North Koreans would only decide to become prosperous.
The latest project is that announced for Pakistan. In the 1971 general war with India, only Chinese truck convoys through the Karakoram Mountains via the Khunjerab Pass kept Pakistan in the war for the two weeks it actually fought before suing for peace and losing East Pakistan.
The Khunjerab Pass is the highest elevation paved international border at 15,400 ft above sea level. The railroad would presumably follow the Karakoram Highway, which is the highest paved road in the world.
A rail link through those mountains and that pass would link Xinjiang, China, to Karachi and Gwadar – the Chinese built port in southwestern Pakistan on the Indian Ocean — via the Pakistani rail system. The throughput capacity would be exponentially larger than that achievable by truck convoys.
This railroad will create a new market system. No wonder India is concerned, economically and militarily. Pakistan really would become an extension of the new Chinese economic empire. All China needs to do is to complete railroads through Burma and link the Afghanistan line to Iran and it will have an Asian rail empire, within a generation, all the way to the English Channel without using the Trans-Siberian.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the kind of strategic analysis rooted in solid intellect that should characterize the entire US Intelligence Community, not one lone individual. Three big things appear to be looming on the horizon: free cellular around the planet, monetizing the transactions instead of the connections; low-cost rail (and eventually the Buckminster Fuller electrical grid) girding the globe; and finally, the up-ending of capitalism to focus on the needs–and wealth-creating capabilities–of the five billion poor. No one in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, or Toyko–or even New Delhi and Jakarta where they have the most to gain–is thinking about this. That is a crime against humanity, a moral and intellectual atrocity so horrendous as to call into question the legitimacy of every government.
You gotta love it when the War Party reveals its desperation to come up with yet another soundbyte to justify continuing the long Afghan War — a war becoming known to cynics in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac as the Great Afghan Cash Cow, because it is a golden cornucopia for so many, including, inter alia, the Pentagon, defense contractors, USAID, NGOs, Warlords, the family Karzai, and even the Taliban, which is helping to fund its anti-US operations by running a protection racket paid for by the US-funded trucking companies running supplies to the US forces in Afghanistan.
To wit: The Pentagon just entertained the booboisie with recycled old Russian reports of Afghanistan's supposed mineral wealth (the Saudi Arabia of lithium, for example), which the New York Times and Fox dutifully amplified as new news. Now, if the attached essay by Steve Levine is correct, we are about to be subjected to another recycling as well as a grand synthesis of old theories about turning Afghanistan in a “superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines, and energy pipelines for the entire Eurasian landmass.” And lying in echelon behind this assault on our senses is the romantic magnetism of a new Great Game, perhaps devolving ultimately into a never-ending competition between the US and Russia on the high ground of Eurasian Continent.
It is easy to poke fun at such grand strategic nonsense, and Levine does a good job of dissing the latest. But when these delusions are coupled with domestic politics, like …
the hysterical hype surrounding the FBI's allegations of a keystone-cops spy scandal where incompetent sleepers infiltrated the PTA meetings that fewer and fewer parents attend,
the now likely scuppering by Congress of a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia,
the likely torpedoing of the Obama-Medvedev rapprochement,
the increasing possibility of a congressional election debacle for the Democrats in 2010,
… it begins to look like the building blocks are falling into place for a return to political-economic normalcy in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a normalcy taking the form of a permanent new Cold War with Russia.
Blaming Obama for losing the un-winnable Afghan war and for either ineffectually attacking or being afraid to attack Iran should ice the cake in 2012, thus paving the way for a new burst of defense spending in the second decade of the 21st Century, accompanied by its handmaiden, the politics of fear, and funded by greater debt as well as a renewed assault on Social Security and Medicare.
So, don't be surprised by the sound champagne corks popping in the Hall of Mirrors.
The U.S. military is studying a plan to solve Afghanistan's problems by turning it into a superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines and energy pipelines connected to the entire Eurasian landmass. According to a piece in the National Journal by Sydney Freedberg, the proposal has the ear of Gen. David Petraeus, whose confirmation hearings to be the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan start today in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
