The alleged bomb from an Abkhazia-originated Russian terror plot.
Georgia's Interior Ministry says it stopped a terror plot, hatched by Russian security forces in South Ossetia, to set off a bomb in Tbilisi's NATO liaison office. According to their account, it doesn't seem that NATO was a target per se, but that the suspect, one Badri Gogiashvili, was told to bomb whatever international building he could find:
According to the testimony of Gogiashvili, he was ordered by Aleksei Sokolov, deputy head of Russian FSB Border Troops stationed in Akhalgori, Vladimer Pukhaev, head of Akhalgori Militia Division, and Vova Kibilov, employee of Akhalgori Militia, to find the buildings in Tbilisi with flags of either European Union, United States, or any international organization. From the data collected by Badri Gogiashvili, the mentioned persons chose the building where NATO Liaison Office is located. They ordered Badri Gogiashvili to detonate the bomb near the NATO Liaison Office Gogiashvili was promised USD 2000 for this terrorist act.
South Ossetian officials, meanwhile, deny the claim and say that the alleged ringleader Pukhaev doesn't even exist. Vyacheslav Sedov, head of the South Ossetian government press service, says the allegations are an attempt to involve NATO in the ongoing conflict between Tbilisi and Tskhinvali:
Georgia appears to be planning to add at least 625 additional soldiers to the 925 it already has in Afghanistan, according to a statement from the White House. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili yesterday in Rome, and according to the official White House account of the meeting, "The Vice President expressed his appreciation to President Saakashvili for Georgia's significant new contribution of forces to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, which will make Georgia the largest non-NATO contributor to ISAF."
Civil.ge does the math, and finds that the top current non-NATO contributor is Australia, with 1,550 troops. So that presumably means that Georgia is planning to top that:
It means that Georgia, which currently has 925 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them stationed in Helmand province, has to send additional more than 625 servicemen to exceed Australian troop number and to become the largest non-NATO contributor to the ISAF mission.
There's really not much to be said about Saakashvili's devotion to the West and its security organizations that hasn't already been said. But in a terrific analysis of the U.S.-Russia reset in The Nation, Stephen Cohen provides some useful context. In particular, he notes the blatant hypocrisy in Biden and Saakashvili's respective description of the "sphere of influence" in Georgia:
When Kyrgyzstan announced that NATO would be refurbishing border posts and arms depots in the Central Asian country, many observers (including this blog) took it as a sign of President Roza Otunbayeva's decision to move the country decisively toward the west and away from Russia. But in an interview with state radio on May 16, transcribed and translated by BBC Monitoring, she took great pains to disabuse listeners of that notion. She highlights NATO's cooperation with Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to portray Kyrgyzstan's cooperation as nothing special. I'll quote at length because the vehemence of her statement seems telling. The questioner asked a very bland question about the possibility of a NATO liaison office opening in Bishkek:
Kazakhstan apparently has decided to send a contingent of troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, several news agencies have reported. From Reuters:
An unspecified number of Kazakh soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan on six-month missions with the International Security Assistance Force, in line with a bill passed by the lower house of parliament. The document did not say when the first Kazakh contingent would be going.
The government of Kazakhstan appears to not be trying to make a big splash with the news. The parliament's press service mentions the news only at the bottom of a very long account of yesterday's doings in the lower house of parliament (in Russian):
And today, the Chamber heard the report of the Vice-Minister of Defense Aset Kurmangaliyeva with Majlis member Ualikhan Kalizhanova, and voted to adopt the draft of the law "On Ratification of the Agreement in the form of an exchange of notes between Kazakhstan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to participate in the activities of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan." The bill was approved.
It would be worthwhile to know whether the soldiers being sent are those of the U.S.-backed KAZBRIG peacekeeping brigade. KAZBRIG has gotten off to a slower start than intended, so this would be a sign that at least some small part of the brigade is ready for overseas deployment.
NATO has apparently agreed to help Kyrgyzstan renovate its border posts and arms depots, after a NATO official traveled to Bishkek and met with President Roza Otunbayeva. From Reuters:
"The president stated that the technical standard of border posts was insufficient and appealed to NATO's leadership to provide support in this respect," Otunbayeva's press service said in a statement after the meeting.
It said Appathurai "expressed NATO's readiness to assist in conducting a major overhaul of depots holding rocket and artillery weapons of the Kyrgyz Republic's Defense Ministry, with particular emphasis on the southern region of the country."
It gave no further detail.
There also appears to be no word from NATO.
In March, Otunbayeva visited Brussels and asked NATO for counterterrorism help, but didn't specify much about what that would entail.
Aside from the technical help that NATO will provide, this seems to be further evidence that Otunbayeva seems to be trying, gently, to orient Kyrgyzstan away from Russia, or at least adding some strategic counterbalance. Remember when everyone was convinced last year that the unrest that led to Otunbayeva assuming the presidency was engineered by Russia? If so, Moscow has to have some buyer's remorse.
It's the conventional wisdom that Turkey's Islamist Justice and Development Party is leading it "eastward," i.e. away from NATO and its traditional (for the last century, anyway) defense alliance with the West and into the arms of Iran, China and other "eastern" countries. But that's not a correct reading of Turkey today, according to a poll flagged by the Wall Street Journal's Emerging Europe blog.
The poll notes that the unpopularity of NATO in Turkey has been driven not by the AKP, but by nationalists. The poll asked Turks whether NATO is "still essential" or "no longer essential" to Turkey's security. And it found that supporters of the AKP were in fact less likely to say that NATO is "no longer essential" than supporters of the nationalist Nationalist Movement Party and -- possibly more remarkably -- the Kemalist Republican People's Party. And while NATO has become less popular over the past five years among all political groups, it's become much less popular among nationalists than among other Turks.
The Journal suggests that it's nationalists who are in fact pushing the AKP prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a more anti-NATO posture:
That’s a finding more surprising to foreigners than to Turks, who have long watched nationalist leaders attack the ruling AK Party for selling out the country to foreign, and in particular U.S., interests.
Georgia's government believes it's never too early to teach the youth about the importance of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture, and has been opening up "NATO Corners" in schools across the country. The corners are "mini-libraries" that include "informational materials on NATO, Georgia’s relations with NATO and other international organizations, papers on international politics, etc." There are even NATO-themed comic books, and a cartoon, “Ani and Rati’s Wonderful Journey to NATO." (Sadly, YouTube does not appear to have the cartoon.) The centers are sponsored by various NATO member embassies.
But Georgia apparently has gone one step too far with its latest NATO Corner, in a school in Ergneti, on the de facto border with South Ossetia, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a stern statement:
“The choice of the settlement of Ergneti for carrying out the propaganda action was not accidental obviously, after all this is the venue for regular meetings within the framework of the mechanism on incidents prevention and response on the South Ossetian-Georgian border which Russian border guards and representatives of the EU Observer Mission also participate in.
“The Georgian side’s intention is clear - to try to get the North-Atlantic Alliance involved this or that way in settling the much talked-about “problems of territorial integrity of Georgia”. At that, as a matter of fact, for some reasons they forget to inquire about the opinion of neighboring states – the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia”, Russian MFA Spokesman adds.
Kyrgyzstan's president Roza Otunbayeva visited Brussels this week and met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And Otunbayeva said she was asking for help from NATO in dealing with terror threats coming from Afghanistan. From her press conference with Rasmussen:
And first of all, I would stress on the issues of the neighbouring Afghanistan and I must tell you that my serious of worries about the borders; borders with Tajikistan and then with Afghanistan. This is a concern which we have. And so we must strengthen our border troops, and I talked with the Secretary General about this matter.
We faced terroristic acts last... late last year, of last year, and this is new chapter on terroristic work which we want to learn and really to develop among the people and also with the ministries relevant. This is what we want very much to learn from NATO.
And certainly we are talking about this partnership program, Secretary General, this acronyms which you mentioned, a purpose(?) under way, and the progress between Kyrgyzstan and NATO and we want to have a real progress. We talked about this, and I hope that in our development between NATO and Kyrgyzstan we reach concrete results of this year and we're looking forward to strengthen our security forces with the NATO assistance and we want to learn from this Alliance of free societies, democratic countries, how to make safe our country.
Both the U.S. and Russia have talked about setting up anti-terror training facilities in southern Kyrgyzstan, but nothing has yet come of either of those.
NATO's General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen was ready to propose new cooperation between NATO and the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) -- until the U.S. intervened to thwart Rasmussen's initiative. That's the suggestion of a U.S. State Department cable, released by WikiLeaks via the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
The cable, from September 10, 2009, is apparently the result of an inside source at Rasmussen's office who was feeding the U.S. intelligence. The source said that at an upcoming speech in Brussels, Rasmussen was to propose formal engagement with the CSTO. The U.S., however, argued that doing so would legitimize "a waning organization" that "has proven ineffective in most areas of activity." And it would strengthen Russia's hold over Central Asia, the State Department argued:
NATO Secretary General Rasmussen may be planning to take improved NATO-Russia relations to a new level by proposing that NATO engage with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The SecGen recently indicated that he has an "open mind" to such a course of action, has been in contact with the head of the CSTO, and plans to make a speech on NATO-Russia relations that would go beyond most Allies comfort zones....
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.)
