Afghanistan

The U.S. initially sought to use Uzbekistan territory to conduct air strikes and land operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, balked. That's according to the documents that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has declassified and posted on the internet. In a memo (pdf) written by Rumsfeld on October 5, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, he reported that:

The GOU [Government of Uzbekistan] had opened its airspace for U.S. military aircraft for whatever purpose. It had agreed to [REDACTED]. It had opened one base for U.S. military aircraft and personnel to carry out search and rescue operations. What Uzbekistan had not agreed to was any use of Uzbekistan's territory by U.S. troops to conduct "land operations." For this reason, the request the United States had made to mount [REDACTED] could not be accommodated. Furthermore, no airstrikes could be carried out by U.S. forces from Uzbekistan's territory. At this point, Karimov said twice quite emphatically that the latter questions were "not ripe" now for agreement.

Well, those are a couple of tantalizing redactions, aren't they?

Rumsfeld also says that Karimov was eager to help the U.S. militarily, because he was concerned about the influence of both Russia and of radical Islamist movements in Uzbekistan. But he wasn't eager for it to be public:

Karimov said that it would be impossible for U.S. military operations in Uzbekistan to be kept confidential. However, he asked that we attempt to hold our discussions in confidence.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has offered to send more troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 950 or so soldiers that are already there. Reports Civil.ge:

"We've offered to send more troops and for the months to come some more troops will follow from Georgia and we are willing to consider increase of our assistance in order to help the Afghan people achieve a sustainable peace and to prevent terrorists from again using that country as a base," he said.

In case the subtext -- that Georgia is doing this to curry favor with the West -- wasn't clear enough, Saakashvili spelled it out:

"For Georgia, a country of just 4.7 millions souls, whose territory is still partly occupied, such an effort underscores our determination to be a provider—and not just a consumer—of international security," he said.

He did not apparently give any other details, like how many and what kind of soldiers, and when they might go. Saakashvili was speaking at the Munich Security Conference, and Messenger.ge notices another interesting statement in his speech: “I came here to deliver one simple message: ignoring the ongoing military build-ups fuelled by well-known foreign hands can lead to future disasters." He did not, apparently, mention his sustained efforts to create a military build-up in his own country, fueled by the best known foreign hand of all, the U.S.

Messenger also quotes a Georgian military analyst who is not impressed with the proposal:

The ambitious goal of creating a "new Silk Road" on the basis of military supply lines through Central Asia appears to be continuing to make progress with the U.S. government. S. Frederick Starr, the head of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington and one of the more tireless proponents of this idea, has released a new report (pdf) on the subject, and reports that CENTCOM and the State Department are coordinating a plan:

Over the previous year the “Afghan Futures Working Group” at the U.S. Army’s Central Command (Centcom) in Tampa had been analyzing all the several dozen road and transport projects that the U.S. government had undertaken since 2002. This “mapping and gapping” exercise had as its goal to identify what had been accomplished and what remained to be done, in order of priority. To the surprise of no one, the Working Group found a disorganized series of projects lacking general leadership and coordination. The findings of this study, prepared under General James N. Mattis, Centcom’s energetic Commander, have now been shared with the State Department, which will present them at ministry-level trilateral meetings between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States on February 22-24.

U.S. European Command (EUCOM) also has been involved, holding its own conference in November 2010:

At this conference Admiral [James] Stavridis, now head of the U.S. European Command, again affirmed the view that ”we will not deliver security in Afghanistan solely from the barrel of a gun,” and endorsed the Modern Silk Road strategy for being comprehensive in scope and “a combination of international, interagency and private/public [initiatives]…We in the military are there to support [the Afghans] as we execute this comprehensive approach. That's what we’re trying to accomplish with this Silk Road oncept.”

Someone alert Thomas Friedman -- or maybe Mullah Omar: As readers of this blog probably know, Orthodox Christmas was last week, and Georgian and American soldiers got to celebrate it in Delaram, Afghanistan, where the Georgians are based as part of the international coalition. The video report below, by a U.S. Marine Corps media team, shows a remarkably well provisioned Georgian "church" inside what appears to be a U.S. military tent, complete with icons, candles, incense and an impressively bearded priest:

What does NATO expansion have to do with the war in Afghanistan? Quite a bit, according to an article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. In it C.J. Chivers discusses the "arms cascade," by which small arms make their way from richer countries to poorer ones, and rebel groups. The process is familiar to anyone who's pondered the history of a city bus in, say, Kazakhstan, that has stickers on the inside in Norwegian and Hungarian. As with public transportation, countries that upgrade their military equipment sell their secondhand equipment to countries lower down on the geoeconomic food chain. But the arms trade, of course, is a lot more secretive and carries a lot more potential for mayhem.

And in the case of the arms cascade, the causes are as much political as economic. In particular, ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries that are joining NATO get rid of their Soviet/Russian equipment as they buy Western equipment. Those surplus arms have created a glut in the worldwide market:

While human rights advocates in the U.S. have been warning about U.S. cooperation with Uzbekistan over the Northern Distribution Network since the NDN was set up last year, these discussions have been going on much longer in Germany. The German military has used a facility in Termez, on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, since 2002, as a rear supply base for their NATO troops in northern Afghanistan. But that could be ending. Last week, Germany's foreign minister said his country would start withdrawing troops next year.

Back in 2006, Der Spiegel reported on Germany's involvement in Uzbekistan, and the tension that created between Germany's devotion to human rights and its military strategy:

[H]ow many million Euros should Germany invest in a corrupt country, knowing full well that the population hardly ever benefits from the money? And is it acceptable that the commander of the German air force squadron is even barring German journalists from entering the base -- in response to "discreet pressure from the Uzbeks," as military officials in Potsdam in charge of the Uzbekistan mission coyly explain? Is it acceptable that in banning the journalists, the German military is exempting a mission from public scrutiny that is subject to parliamentary supervision at home?

Berlin's dialogue with the regime in Tashkent is "as immoral as its dialogue once was with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Serbian butcher Slobodan Milosevic or Iraqi criminal Saddam Hussein," says Uzbek journalist Galima Bukharbayeva, who fled to the West after barely escaping Andijan with her life.

Is China giving the Taliban military aid? That's what a British military officer has told Aviation Week:

Chinese advisers are believed to be working with Afghan Taliban groups who are now in combat with NATO forces, prompting concerns that China might become the conduit for shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, improved communications and additional small arms to the fundamentalist Muslim fighters.

A British military official contends that Chinese specialists have been seen training Taliban fighters in the use of infrared-guided surface-to-air missiles.

If true, this would be pretty rich, given that the U.S.'s main hardware aid to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in the 1980s was the same sort of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

Another source, this one from the U.S., says that Chinese contact with the Taliban is relatively benign, mainly oriented toward intelligence gathering for use in China's fight against its own restive Muslims on Afghanistan's border, the Uighurs:

Army officials told Aviation Week of an unsuccessful, multi-manpad attack against a U.S. helicopter in Iraq last year, but a senior intelligence official expressed doubt that Chinese aid to the Taliban has included weaponry. But he acknowledges that Chinese activities most certainly include intelligence gathering that could be of use in China’s own internal conflicts with its restive Muslim populations. That analysis could project U.S. hopes, whether well-founded or not, that China will not become involved in weapons trade to insurgent groups.

If -- and it’s a big if -- the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline moves from being a figment of inter-governmental imagination to being an actuality of pipe full of actual gas, Kabul stands to make a mint.

Turkmenistan stands to make a lot of money too, but not as much as it would like.

In 2008, Ashgabat was looking for $457 per ton of gas. Sources quoted by The Economic Times, an Indian business paper, however, suggested on December 13 that Ashgabat would sell gas for TAPI at a rate of $272 per thousand cubic meters (tcm). (By contrast, the rate Turkmenistan agreed for China was only $195 per tcm.)

Delhi should expect to pay $362 per tcm by the time charges and transit fees to Afghanistan and Pakistan are factored in, however. Turkmenistan wants to sell 33 billion cubic of meters of gas to India and Pakistan. Afghanistan wants to rake in transit fees ranging from a $1 billion to $1.4 billion annually. Pakistan and India want to keep gas prices for their ever growing number of consumers low and 33 billion cubic meters should just about do it.

But is the promise of $1.4 billion in transit fees enough to bring stability to southern Afghanistan, the persistently volatile area, through which the pipeline must pass? Some Afghan observers say it might be.

Others say the TAPI is just another flammable item in an explosive region.

“The situation in southern Afghanistan is no more stable now as it was when Bridas and UNOCAL were duking it out for control of the pipeline,” Candace Rondeaux, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst in Kabul, told EurasiaNet.

“Internally, of course, no one can say for certain how to stabilize Nimroz, Helmand, and Kandahar enough that work could begin on such an

As more of the agenda emerges for NATO summit that will take place two weeks from now in Lisbon, it's highlighting how much, two decades after the end of the Cold War, NATO is still focused on its eastern flank.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was in Moscow yesterday and met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Few details of their talks have been released, but they did of course discuss the proposed NATO missile defense plan and what role Russia might play in it. Before the talks, Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was skeptical:

"If it is simply a US system built on European soil with European money and without any guarantees that will not be targeted against Russia, that is unacceptable to us," he said. "We hope that some cards will be opened before the document is officially made public."

But Lavrov, after the meeting, was somewhat more optimistic:

"We are willing to take part in such a joint system and a joint analysis... Of course, on an equal basis and aimed against joint threats," Lavrov said.

While in Moscow, Rasmussen told the BBC that Russian participation in counterdrug raids in Afghanistan would continue, despite protests by the Afghanistan government.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that coalition commanders in Afghanistan are hoping to use the NATO summit to firm up European support for, and participation in, the war in Afghanistan, in particular trying to keep countries like Italy and France from pulling out altogether:

Ever since the U.S. started using the Northern Distribution Network to ship military cargo to Afghanistan through Central Asia rather than Pakistan, we've speculated on whether the NDN would be subject to attacks by Taliban-aligned groups. Avoiding the regular convoy attacks in Pakistan was, after all, the reason the NDN was created, so it would stand to reason that the same people interested in attacking convoys in Pakistan would think it was a good idea to do so on the NDN.

And according to the German general in charge of NATO operations in nine northern Afghan provinces, that's starting to happen. Violence is surging in northern Afghanistan, and he says it's because of the NDN:

"It's clear that the insurgents concentrate their efforts on those areas where they can hope to reach a significant impact," explained Maj. Gen. Hans-Werner Fritz, the German commander of 11,000 coalition troops across Afghanistan's nine northern provinces. "The northern part could become the game-changer for all of Afghanistan."

Baghlan is of strategic importance, Gen. Fritz added, because most supplies from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan pass through, including most of the coalition's fuel. The power line from Uzbekistan, the main source of Kabul's electricity, also runs through here.

There are surely many reasons that violence in northern Afghanistan is increasing, but assume this is one. Does that mean that violence from Afghanistan could then spill over further up the NDN, into Central Asia? Seems unlikely. To say that Uzbekistan's government has a handle on its security situation would be an understatement. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia would seem to be also difficult terrain for Islamist terrorists. So for better or worse, the U.S. and NATO will likely be fighting new front this just in Afghanistan.