Georgia's speaker of parliament visited Georgian troops in Afghanistan and says that Georgia's military presence in that country is "protection" against Russia. From Rustavi 2 (via BBC Monitoring):
"Our soldiers' service there provides us with certain protection from Russia using Georgia's connection with terrorism as a pretext," Bakradze said. "The main goal of our servicemen there is the protection of Georgia's interests," he added, and recalled the recent blasts in the Moscow underground, stressing that there was an attempt to track the Georgian trace in them, which Russia could use as a pretext to resort to yet another "aggression" against Georgia.
"Therefore, it is very important to make sure that such accusations find no foundation and support in the international community, and the main argument by all our friends against Russia when it started linking Georgians to terrorism, the main argument was that Georgia is part of the anti-terrorism operation in Afghanistan, and fights against Taliban in Afghanistan," he said.
This seems so naive that I can't believe that either he would say it or, given that it was probably for domestic consumption, that any Georgian listening would believe it. But maybe I'm missing something. Any ideas?
Under the headline "A Kyrgyz interim leader says US base unjustified," the Associated Press has a story suggesting that the U.S.'s air base in Kyrgyzstan, Manas, may be imperiled:
Azymbek Beknazarov — a deputy head of the interim government that came to power last week after a bloody uprising — told the AP that Washington compromised its position on promoting democracy in Kyrgyzstan so as not to put the strategic Manas transit center under threat of closure.
"All the Americans care about is that the military base stays," Beknazarov said. "They forgot about freedom, about democratic values. They forgot about Kyrgyzstan — they are only looking at their military base."
"In my opinion, the Manas center's presence is not justified," he said.
Now, it's hard to know what to make of that. The whole import of his quote turns on one word: "unjustified," which isn't really the clearest word you might use. In addition, we don't know much about the context of the quote, or his role in the government. Still, suggests that perhaps there is at least some internal debate among the leaders of Kyrgyzstan about what to do with Manas.
When a crisis erupts in some previously obscure part of the world, we typically see a profusion of instant "experts" in the media to help "analyze" the situation with frequently banal, and occasionally hilarious, results.
Bob Brown is a former state Senate leader from Montana, who made a trip in the mid-1990s to Kyrgyzstan, and he gives the readers of northwest Montana's Daily Inter Lake his take on the situation in Kyrgyzstan and with the Manas Air Base:
“I think the Russians are pretty enthusiastic about what is going on in Kyrgyzstan, and there is pretty good evidence they’re behind a lot of this stuff,” he said.
He suspects that the Kyrgyz people “are not sophisticated enough” to operate the base and that Russia would jump at the chance to take control of Manas.
As we've discussed here before, the U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan is likely to stay, but the terms might change. Kyrgyzstan's new government has said it wants to review the terms, but the U.S. might be doing the same. Reports the Washington Post:
A House panel conducting a preliminary investigation into U.S. contracting in Afghanistanhas turned its focus on what its chairman called Tuesday the "unexplained relationships" between the families of two Kyrgyzstan presidents and fuel supplies to a key U.S. air base there.
"Two overthrows of the government there have been linked to corrupt dealings at Manas air base," said Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), chairman of the national security subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "That's what we are looking into."
Should be juicy stuff. Will try to keep you posted...
It's unclear what role public opinion plays in Kyrgyzstan's foreign policy -- I think very little -- but to the extent that it does, and if there does turn out to be a showdown over Manas between the U.S. and Russia, it's clear which side the people of Kyrgyzstan would choose. According to a Gallup poll (nearly two years old, but I'm not sure why much would have changed), Kyrgyzstanis who believe it is "more important to have a close relationship with the USA even if it might hurt relationships with Russia" totaled a mere three percent. And those who said that it was "more important to have a close relationship with Russia even if it might hurt relationships with USA": 63 percent. (About 22 percent said it was important to have close relations with both.)
Several other countries of the region were polled on the same question, and the results should be pretty sobering to U.S. policymakers: In every single country, more people believed it was important to have good relations with Russia than with the U.S. That includes Georgia, though there the proportions are closest (28 percent with Russia, 24 percent with the US, and this was before the war so presumably there has been some movement there). And the proportions of people who say their country should favor relations with the U.S. are vanishingly small in a lot of the countries: four percent in Armenia, two percent in Uzbekistan, one percent in Tajikistan, three percent in Kazakhstan.
On Monday, the US Embassy in Bishkek put out a press release saying that "The Transit Center at Manas has resumed normal operations. Refueling operations continue as usual and the transit of troops has resumed."
The biggest announcement out of yesterday's meeting between Presidents Obama and Nazarbayev was that Kazakhstan would allow overflight rights of planes going over the North Pole, then south over Russia and then through Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan/Tajikistan. I spoke to Andrew Kuchins, a CSIS scholar who has interviewed many American, Russian and Uzbek officials about the Northern Distribution Network for a CSIS project. He pointed out that Pentagon officials were never especially interested in this polar route, that it was originally proposed by the Russians as a concrete "deliverable" that Obama and Medvedev could announce during their meeting in Moscow last July. The Pentagon would rather get permission to transit lethal cargo over its existing routes.
And yet, negotiating that extra route shortly became the top priority in the U.S.'s relationship with Kazakhstan; as one State Department official told me, "the NDN trumps everything." And it was the main achievement of the one-to-one between Obama and Nazarbayev.
My takeaway: There is an interesting behind-the-scenes story to tell about how an afterthought at the Pentagon became the top priority at the White House...
Among the many reams and terabytes of "analysis" of what Russia is up to in Kyrgyzstan and what the fate of the Manas air base there might be as a result, it's an unspoken assumption that the Russians want the Americans out, overlooking the fact that (as Russians of course know as well as anyone) the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and by extension Kyrgyzstan, may actually be weakening the U.S. So this strikes me as particularly perceptive:
Putin is playing a much more complex game than is commonly understood. Consider the following facts:
Russia is selling us air transit rights over Russia to Kabul.
Russia is selling us freight service for mass supply movements from Baltic ports through the Russian, Kazakh, and Uzbek railway networks to the Afghan border.
Russia is selling us air transport services using their Antonov cargo planes, with Russian and other post-Soviet crews — again, to Kabul.
Putin is backing Afghan President Karzai and some warlords, as well.
The lesson to draw from these facts is this: Putin’s game is to run up the cost of the Afghan war for the US, not to drive us out. His ideal scenario is an American “forever war” in the Hindu Kush — one in which we need his cooperation to keep up the fight.
Iran's English-language state-run station Press TV has quite a scoop:
Kyrgyzstan's new leaders have said they intend to remove a US military base, which currently serves as the premier air mobility hub for the US-led forces in Afghanistan, from their soil.
What is the source of this news? It's not clear, as there are no direct quotes, and Kyrgyzstan's new leader, Roza Otunbayeva, has already been on the record saying that nothing would happen to Manas.
It also seems wise to use a bit of skepticism when considering this report from Uzbekistan, from the Uzbek-language Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran External Service, via BBC Monitoring:
Dust containing uranium penetrates into human blood, causing cancer. The dust with uranium containment has been frequent here, in Termiz since 2001 when the US-led military operations against the Taleban started in Afghanistan.
Of late, cases of illnesses with various types of cancer, especially, lung cancer, has increased in Termiz.
Though this phenomenon has officially been acknowledged, the problem itself should be studied thoroughly.
I regularly follow Press TV, and I hadn't previously seen much indication of trying to stir up anti-American rumors in Central Asia. Did this start with the whole Jundullah/Manas thing? Will be interesting to see if this continues.
There has been some speculation that Russia might be maneuvering, behind the scenes, to get Kyrgyzstan's new leaders to shut down the Manas Air Base. This analysis from RFE/RL calls attention to a visit that a Kyrgyz opposition leader made to Moscow just before the demonstrations, where Vladimir Putin expressed support for the opposition. The country's new interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, made her first phone call to Putin. And a senior unnamed Russian official told Reuters:
"In Kyrgyzstan, there should be only one base -- Russian. He said Bakiyev had failed to fulfill a promise to close the U.S. base."
Later in the RFE/RL piece, Alexander Cooley (him again) points out that it is totally reasonable for Otunbayeva to make her first call to Moscow:
Central Asia observers aren't surprised by the new Kyrgyz leadership's courting of Russia. Columbia University professor Alexander Cooley, who wrote a book about the Manas air-base dispute, says relations between Bakiev and the Kremlin had deteriorated so much, Otunbaeva's first order of business was "to make nice" with Moscow.
"It's not surprising that the first public phone call she makes is with Putin," Cooley says. "She doesn't do a CNN appearance, she doesn't call Obama."
