The U.S. can maintain its global primacy if it (among other things) plays Russia off China, India, Iran and Turkey off Russia and Turkey off Iran. That's the analysis of globe-spinner extraordinaire Robert Kaplan, along with his brother Stephen (apparently recently retired as a top CIA official).
The essay, America Primed, is in the new edition of The National Interest and doesn't deal too explicitly with the Caucasus or Central Asia. But it's all about how the U.S. (assisted by the "Anglosphere," other English-speaking countries like Canada, the U.K. and Australia) can maintain dominance on the Eurasian continent. And that requires American leadership to make sure that no other country -- in particular China, Russia or Iran -- gets too powerful. What does that entail, specifically?
For one, playing India off Russia (and "punishing" Pakistan):
Out of national pride, and because of its own tense relationships with China and Pakistan, India needs to remain officially nonaligned. But that will not stop New Delhi from accepting more help from the United States, especially as India now wants to wean itself off Russian arms and replace them with better quality American equipment. Washington should require no quid pro quo from India to make it even more powerful in the region; this is about more than public pronouncements and diplomatic atmospherics, this is about quietly delivering arms, transferring technology and supplying intelligence data to one nation to punish another for taking billions of American dollars without providing the crucial help we require in return.
Also, encouraging Turkey, even with an apparently growing Islamist orientation, to counterbalance Iran:
The "New Type Patrol Boat" at its inauguration, soon to be in the Turkmenistan Navy.
Turkmenistan has quietly made the first moves in its attempt to build a new navy, contracting with Turkish shipyard Dearsan for two new fast patrol boats.
Not too much has been published about the deal, but this article in Hurriyet says the contract is for 55 million Euros. Some details of the ship are available here: it has a displacement of 400 tons and a 40 mm gun made by Italian company Oto Melara.
Neither Dearsan nor Turkmenistan seem to have done anything to publicize this news, which suggests it's going to continue to be difficult to keep up with Turkmenistan's military modernization. But it appears it's serious.
Given the pushback that Turkey has been giving to NATO missile defense plans, some Republican U.S. senators have come up with an alternate location for a missile defense site: Georgia. If you recall, Turkey is the proposed site of a missile defense system for NATO, but Turkey was trying to impose some conditions on that participation, in particular not naming any country in particular as the target of the shield, and sharing information with Israel. It's the latter condition that the senators especially object to in a letter (pdf) to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as reported by ForeignPolicy.com's The Cable blog. Georgia, they said, would give NATO no such static:
We believe that the Republic of Georgia's geographic location would make it an ideal site for a missile defense radar aimed at Iran, and would offer clear advantages for the protection of the United States from a long range missile as compared to Turkey, or other potential locations in southeastern Europe. What's more, the Republic of Georgia should be a significant partner for future defense cooperation with the U.S., whether as a future member of NATO or in another capacity; it is already one of our nation's most loyal allies in the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
(Note that implicitly, the senators also don't like Turkey's delicacy in refusing to explicitly name the target of the shield -- it's against Iran.)
Last month, Turkey announced that it was going to build an indigenous fighter jet by 2023, which raised the question: what's the point, given that it's already building fighter jets with the U.S., including the current F-16 and the next-generation F-35? Today's Zaman provides a possible answer: it's reconsidering its aerospace cooperation with the U.S. altogether:
Turkey is seriously reconsidering the myriad agreements it has signed with the US, as well as its participation in an international consortium for the procurement of new generation fighter jets, due to rising costs and persisting problems originating from the American side.
Turkey is now seeking new ways to sidestep difficulties in the procurement of F-16 fighter planes, which it has been jointly producing with the US since 1987, due to the delayed delivery by the US authorities of some of the plane’s parts and accessories. There have been serious doubts as to whether Turkey’s plan to purchase 100 F-35 fighter planes would ever materialize, as the country is thinking about withdrawing from the consortium following the hike in costs that resulted from other countries leaving from the consortium.
According to the story, the U.S. has reneged on several agreements with Turkey regarding F-16 production, and that Washington appears to be growing wary of Turkey's loyalty, for reasons including the joint China-Turkey air exercises last year.
That is apparently the claim of former top Turkish intelligence official Osman Nuri Gundes, who has published a memoir alleging that the Fethullah Gulen movement has been sheltering CIA agents in Central Asia since the 1990s. According to the Washington Post's SpyTalk blog, "in the 1990s, Gundes alleges, the movement "sheltered 130 CIA agents" at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone."
The Gulen movement already is a controversial one in Central Asia, with governments cracking down to varying degrees because of the group's alleged Islamist or pan-Turkic bent. And that's without allegations of being a CIA stalking horse.
SpyTalk's author, Jeff Stein, talked to a couple of former CIA officials involved with Central Asia and they poured cold water on the allegation:
Former CIA operative Robert Baer, chief of the agency’s Central Asia and Caucasus operations from 1995 through 1997, called the allegations bogus. "The CIA didn't have any ‘agents’ in Central Asia during my tenure,” he said.
It’s possible, Baer granted, that the CIA “turned around this ship after I left,” but only the spy agency could say for sure, and the CIA does not comment on operational sources and methods.
A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said Gundes’s “accounts are ringing no bells whatsoever.”
But that's what they would say, isn't it... Anyway, Sibel Edmonds, the FBI-translator-turned-whistleblower, says that account doesn't go far enough, and the Gulen movement is an extremist Islamist one -- and that the CIA is cooperating with them nevertheless:
Turkey is betting that Central Asia will be a growing market for its weapons manufacturers, with plans to set up an office in either Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan to promote Turkish defense exports, reports Today's Zaman:
Turkey has decided to take yet another step in increasing its defense industry exports by launching three more promotional offices in Europe, Central Asia and the Gulf.
According to information Today’s Zaman received from Defense Ministry sources, Turkey has intensified efforts to that end in the past couple of months. The sources, who wished to remain anonymous, said the country already received an offer from Qatar to establish an office inside the country’s General Staff headquarters, while the remaining two offices will be opened in Belgium and either Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan. The first such office was opened in Washington, D.C., last month and retired Air Marshal Maurice Lee McFann was brought as the head of the office in the US capital.
It's telling that Central Asia is included among the far larger defense markets of Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East, and suggests that Turkey foresees a lot of growth there. Turkey's straight defense exports to the region have thus far been pretty scanty, though it is lately setting up a lot of joint ventures with companies in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Turkmenistan, however, is a curious choice for the site of such an office. The Turkmenistan government doesn't announce much about their military procurement plans, but does Turkey know more than the rest of us?
Ambassador Huseyin Bichakli (Hüseyin Avni Bıçaklı), the Turkish envoy to Ashgabat, who was revealed by WikiLeaks to have reportedly served as a source to the U.S. Embassy about concerns of uranium transfer to Iran, appears to have been recalled to Ankara. Ambassador Sevki Mutevellioglu has been appointed as the new Turkish ambassador to Turkmenistan.
But what about all those foreign diplomatic sources the American ambassadors talked to? U.S. officials have denounced WikiLeaks for possibly exposing human rights activists reporting on such topics as torture, although no such figures are known to have suffered retaliation (yet). Meanwhile, many of the "Cablegate" sources are among U.S. foreign service officers' own colleagues in the international diplomatic corps, and some of them may be in hot water now.
Turkey is going to produce its first entirely indigenous fighter jet, to be fielded by 2023, the country's defense minister Vecdi Gönül announced this week. From Hurriyet Daily News:
Gönül told reporters after a meeting of the Defense Industry Executive Committee that the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries, Turkey's procurement agency, would start talks with Turkish Aerospace Industries, the country's main aerospace company, for a "conceptual design" of a fighter aircraft and a jet trainer to be built after the year 2020.
"This … effectively is a decision for the making of Turkey's first fighter aircraft," he said...
Minister Gönül said Turkey's newly designed fighter aircraft "would be a next-generation type, would replace the [U.S.-made] F-4Es and would function well with the F-16 and the F-35." He therefore confirmed that the new aircraft mostly would be meant for air-to-air fighting.
Unfortunately, Gönül did not explain why Turkey would do such a thing. It's already planning to buy about 100 F-35s, the next-generation U.S.-built fighter, and had been discussing with Eurofighter to buy some Typhoon jets, but not any more. Why would it make sense to build their own instead?
His rhetoric at the announcement of the fighter plan did suggest some national-pride motivation:
The minister said Turkey may cooperate with South Korea, but implied that this is a small possibility. "We can manufacture the new fighter aircraft with them, we don't rule this out. But the decision we have taken now calls for the production of a totally national and original aircraft," he said.
Three bakers in the Tarlabasi district of Istanbul had been working only with the light from the bakery oven for an hour before they got a new lightbulb.
Jonathan Lewis is a freelance photojournalist based in Istanbul.
What is really of national security interest to the U.S. in the Caucasus and Central Asia? One of the latest WikiLeaks cables purports to answer that question, identifying "critical infrastructure and key resources within their host country which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States."
There are surprisingly few such facilities in Eurasia. Unsurprisingly, most of them have to do with oil. Azerbaijan's offshore Sangchal oil and natural gas terminal, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Novorossiysk oil export terminal (which is in Russia but ships oil from Azerbaijan) are all on the list.
In Turkey, in addition to the BTC pipeline, the Bosphorus Straits is listed, and a handful of Turkish industrial machinery makers are on the list as well, including Durma, Baykal and Ermaksan. All seem to be involved in the making of sheet metal, occasioning us to wonder why Turkish sheet metal is so vital to U.S. security. (Any ideas?: email and I'll update the post.)
Another curious inclusion: the Khromtau Ferrochromium Complex, a chromite mine located in western Kazakhstan, near the city of Aqtobe. Kazakhstan is apparently the world's third-largest producer of chromite, which is used in making stainless steel and other alloys. (Chromite mines in South Africa and India, the world's two largest chomite manufacturers, also appear in the cable, so it doesn't seem like there is anything particularly unique about Kazakh chromite.)
