Russian's Interests in Afghanistan.

The rapprochement of Russia with NATO and the USA reflects the both the interest Russia has in preventing the spread of Islamist groups in Central Asia should Afghanistan become destabilised by the victory of the Taliban and the inroads China and Iran have been making in that mineral rich land.

Contrary to what is thought, Afghanistan has $900bn of hard mineral reserves discovered by US geologists back in 2007. The ostensible reason for US/NATO involvement in Afghanistan has never lain primarily in bringing democracy and women's lib to a benighted land but in the New Great Game in Central Asia.

Though considered a democracy, Afghanistan is dominated by fickle elites who have proved amenable to being bankrolled by those willing to buy influence there and with China and Iran aiming to gain influence, Russia has been concerned that it would be excluded.

Russia , as Anatol Lieven has pointed out has always had a fear of China which during the Bush II years in was prepared to overlook through joining China in joint military manoeuvres via the SCO in 2001. In this Orwellian world there are only permanent interests dictating the current realpolitik alliances.

In the elites at least this is not atavistic fear of swamping, but rather a cool calculation that if China continues to grow while Russia (relatively) stagnates, then in the end Russia will naturally become little more than a provider of raw materials to China, and, in consequence, even a form of Chinese dependency.

Now Russia was not party to the construction of the TAPI pipeline was given the financial backing by the Asian Development Bank in 2008 but most of its financial backers who made up the bulk of the investment were NATO states intent on fulfilling this geopolitical ambition of blocking off Iran's rival IPI scheme.

Russia whilst prepared to work with China has proved willing to play the interests of China and NATO off against one another to maintain its status and interests in Central Asia. Russia can do that in exchange for quietly dropping plans to expand NATO into Ukraine and Georgia ( for now )

By assisting NATO in training helicopter pilots, selling aircraft to Poland and allowing arms and ammunition to be transported through Russian territory as an alternative to a Pakistani route which has come under repeated Taliban attack, the stakes in the New Great Game are clear.

NATO powers and the USA have continually had the construction of TAPI as a major war aim. By blocking the rival IPI pipeline, the West can continue to encircle and isolate Iran which has next to Russia the second largest natural gas reserves in the world.

What such alliances of convenience demonstrate is that the rhetoric of "A New Cold War " is a propaganda myth stoked up by those like Edward Lucas are inherently flawed. Afghanistan was always part of the jigsaw of geopolitics in Central Asia and with TAPI a large chunk of strategic and resource real estate.

Though TAPI was conceived of partly as one way for states such as Poland in particular to reduce its dependence upon Russia gas transit routes by diversifying supply elsewhere from landlocked gas republics such as Turkmenistan, Russia can now demand a stake in it.

As Central Asia Newswire carried the following bulletin recently, ( as did Radio Free Europe along the same lines ),

Friday, October 22, 2010 - Russia signaled during a meeting this week in Turkmenistan potential interest in working with member nations of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline.

The interest was expressed during a state visit in Ashgabat between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. The meeting, which ended Friday, focused heavily on energy issues.

“The issue of Gazprom’s participation in the TAPI pipeline was discussed during this visit,” the Reuters news agency on Friday reported Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin as saying. Sechin, who sat in on the talks, oversees the energy portfolio in the Russian Cabinet.

“Gazprom may participate in this project in any capacity – builder, designer, participant, etc.,” Sechin added.

Few in Britain are ever given the real reason for the War in Afghanistan or the reason why some 103 British troops have died in Helmand through which the TAPI pipeline is scheduled to run, Clearly, Russia does not want to take on that kind of burden on behalf of the USA but it wants to hedge its bets.

The more paranoid in the Pentagon could see this assistance as a sinister Kremlin ruse to get the USA more even bogged down in Afghanistan, but the reality is that Russia does have certain interests in not having Afghanistan implode in such a way as to trigger off ripple effects in its neighbours.

In The West, of course, there is seldom any mention of the TAPI pipeline or the New Great Game which is justified according to public diplomacy as being wholly about the "War on Terror", nation building, "humanitarian intervention" and enlightened self interest. The facts prove this not that convincing.

Russia and Afghanistan 2010.

Simon Tisdall's Guardian column represents the kind of line that supports the messianic "New Cold War" guff spouted by crude propagandists such as Edward Lucas. The very first line insinuates that Medvedev is merely a Cheka-KGB man in a suit.

Nato's Lisbon summit next month is in danger of becoming the stage for a triumphal procession by Russia's leather-jacketed president, Dmitry Medvedev. The mystery is what, exactly, Moscow has done to deserve this sudden burst of western camaraderie. It is hardly a new script: Russia comes in from the cold, again.

Actually, it is about the unmentionable aspect of post-Cold War reality-the fact that Russia is the largest gas producer in the world. According to the BP Statistical Review Of World Energy in 2007 , Russia has 26.3 % of the world total of natural gas reserves on the planet.

Germany was one of those nations even during the Cold War that supported after 1960 the policy of Ostpolitik because of the need for the gas that the Soviet Union had. The USA at the time opposed that but Cold Warriors have generally ignored that reality.

Moreover, one of the legacies of the bad diplomacy of the "New European " states such as Poland and the Baltic Republics in following a fanatical pro_US policy line against Russia is that Russia has decided to build the Nordstream pipeline which bypasses them entirely.

It's true that Medvedev appears to be about to douse Russia's previously combustible opposition to US missile defence plans. When the Bush administration first suggested the idea, co-opting Poland and the Czechs, Medvedev's patron and possible future nemesis, Vladimir Putin, was fit to be tied, as the Americans say.

Facts are entirely absent again. Medvedev is connected very much to Gazprom and Putin has also made the use of oil and gas to build up Russian national power the priority in the New Great Game for control over diminishing global supplies of fossil fuels and rising demand from powers such as China.

Russia wants to use gas and oil as a tool of diplomacy, something berated by those like Lucas despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq was based on precisely the same objective of controlling oil as a lever in global diplomacy and preserving US global hegemony.

Clever Barack Obama defused Moscow's objections by revising the Bush-Rumsfeld plan, switching missiles and platforms, and spinning it as an unthreatening European-Nato initiative with which the Russians were welcome to co-operate. This is what Medvedev now appears ready to do, albeit in a limited, vague sort of way – which is a significant victory for Obama.

In the long term , it is still part of the strategy to dominate Central Asia. To press the "reset button" implies not a fundamental change in that policy but in starting again in such a way that will be better this time. By detaching Russia from Iran, it is hoped that US interests in Central Asia can be advanced.

The opposition had little to do with Central Europe or revanchist ambitions there. Crude ideologues such as Lucas attempted to depict a resurrection of the Evil empire but it remains a messianic fantasy and propaganda. Tisdall follows that line.

Yet Obama's foreign policy advisor is Zbigniew Brzezinski who was one of the more hawkish of Cold Warriors who argued that the Russian response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia was that it was similar to Hitler's attack on the Czech Sudetenland.

The reason is that the conversion of Georgia into a US protectorate and ignoring the claims of the South Ossetians, who must accept the boundaries that Stalin created ( whilst listening to neoconservatives prating about the evil of Stalin ) has been crucially concerned with the BTC pipeline.

It's true, also, that the Russian army has not invaded anybody lately, which is an advance on the situation that confronted Georgia in 2008. Not invading other people's countries is certainly a policy the Nato allies would like to encourage – unless of course it is them doing the invading, in which case it's different.

Obviously, its just "different" because without reference to the Great Game for resources, it is impossible to view the conflict in Georgia, Iraq or Afghanistan as having anything to do with NATO and its new mission to protect the energy security interests of its constituent nations in precisely such places.

And Tisdall might have noticed by now that Georgia started the war against Russia in 2008 and the USA started the war against Iraq in 2003. The USA was not reacting to aggression but initiating it. In that sense it was "different".

So perhaps the feting of Medvedev is justified; perhaps the stars are finally aligned and Russia's anticipated agreement to do more to help the Nato effort in Afghanistan is an earnest sign of better things to come.

Russia has little interest in anarchy in Central Asia but with the main NATO objective being the construction of the TAPI pipeline, one which looks more endangered by the increasing involvement of China and Iran in domestic politics there, Russia is open to using that to upgrade its status.

As RFE/FL reported on October 22 2010,

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has said in Turkmenistan that the Gazprom gas giant could join in the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas-pipeline project.

Sechin, who is accompanying President Dmitry Medvedev on a visit to Turkmenistan, said Gazprom officials are in talks with Turkmenistan about possibly participating in building the nearly 1,700-kilometer pipeline that would carry some 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan, and then further to Fazilka, India.

Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov met with Medvedev today at the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi to discuss gas exports to Russia and the Caspian summit coming up in November.

The leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan are due to meet in Baku to discuss the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which sits on huge deposits of natural gas and oil.

Medvedev said the five littoral states were able to work out the details of use of these resources without the participation of any other countries.

"The Caspian Sea is our treasure and we are capable ourselves of resolving all problems and developing cooperation in the Caspian region," Medvedev said. "And it is the responsibility of the five nations themselves to develop the legal regime with regard to natural resources."

Comments from Sechin and Medvedev indicated Russia is not interested in purchasing more Turkmen gas than it is already this year.

A price dispute led Russia to reduce its imports of Turkmen gas from more than 40 bcm to about 11 bcm in 2010.

The truth of the Afghanistan War lies in the TAPI pipeline. All diplomatic and military initiatives are determined primarily by it and the changing fortunes of the main contending Great Powers.

"Russian's Push to the West"

Anatol Lieven wrote an interesting column for The National Interest ( Russia's Push to the West September 19, 2010 ) which offers more evidence why Edward Lucas' messianic 'New Cold War' ideology is so fundamentally wrong. At a conference in Valdai, Lieven reported that Russia wants better relations with the West and it in their mutual interests.

This new Russian thinking has four sources: Firstly, the Obama administration’s de facto shelving of NATO enlargement, which greatly reduces Russia’s fears of the West. Given Georgia’s behavior in 2008, the Ukrainian government’s withdrawal of the request for membership, the West’s fiscal woes, European opposition and America’s strategic overstretch, most Russian analysts with whom I spoke believe that the push for NATO expansion is unlikely to be seriously renewed even if the Republicans win the presidency in 2012.

The second reason has been the economic crisis of recent years, which has underlined Russia’s continued dependence on exports of energy and raw materials, and failure to achieve a breakthrough to a modern manufacturing economy. A very widespread view is that the only way that Russia can be shaken out of its present condition is much closer economic ties with the West.

This leads to the third reason, which has always been present in Russian thinking, but is increasingly rising to the surface of discussion: fear of China. In the elites at least this is not atavistic fear of swamping, but rather a cool calculation that if China continues to grow while Russia (relatively) stagnates, then in the end Russia will naturally become little more than a provider of raw materials to China, and, in consequence, even a form of Chinese dependency.

The interesting thing about this fear is that it partially unites Russian liberals and Russian statists. The liberals deeply fear the influence of China’s authoritarian political model on Russia. The statists have no great problem with this, and indeed have used the success of China’s authoritarian development as a rhetorical club with which to beat the liberals. On the other hand, they are devoted to the idea of Russia as a great power, and dread dependency on China as much as they do dependency on the United States.

In one respect, indeed, it may already be too late for one old Russian liberal dream, which cropped up occasionally at the Yaroslavl forum: that of Russia one day joining NATO. It is almost certainly an impossible dream, but it is still cherished. When this possibility came up at Valdai, a Chinese analyst present stated quietly that such a move “would be viewed with some concern in China.” He didn’t need to raise his voice.

Given Russian strategic weakness vis-à-vis China, especially in the Far East, no Russian in his senses could ignore such a warning. Incidentally, another small straw in the wind: This formidably intelligent and well-informed individual spoke fluent Russian—but not a word of English. He obviously felt no need to do so in order either to gain information or project influence.

Medvedev’s proposal for a new European security architecture is of course very different from NATO membership, and has in part a purely pragmatic motive, which (in a more limited form) should be fully shared by the West, and implemented as soon as possible. This is to put into place mechanisms which will prevent the eruption of more local crises like the Georgia war of 2008, with Russia and the West (especially the United States) drawn in on opposite sides.

When NATO expansion was a real possibility, Russia’s interest in preventing such conflicts was limited, since—as August 2008 showed—they could be very useful in frightening the West away from taking on responsibility for the security of these areas. Today, with enlargement moribund and relations with Washington good, for the time being at least, Moscow has no interest in further crises.

The danger is that such crises may nonetheless burst upon us unexpectedly without either side wanting them. If we are not prepared for this, the automatic tendency alas will be for Russia and the United States to back opposing sides on the ground, and react to each others actions without thinking of their own vital interests or discussing what to do quietly between themselves rather than by megaphone.

Russian History Reexamined.

Anatol Lieven has been one of the most sensible voices in the West on Russia in eschewing the messianic rhetoric about a "New Cold War" whilst seeing clearly how much Russian liberal condescension towards their own people is counter productive.

In The National Interest recently Lieven made a number of astute observations on Russia at the Valdai Club. After going down the White Sea Canal in a boat, Lieven mused

......( it was )constructed under Stalin in the 1930s by political prisoners at an appalling cost in human life and suffering, from cold, hunger and mass executions.

This and so many other mass atrocities committed under Stalin and Lenin are only to a very limited degree officially remembered or commemorated in the Russia of today, although Russians formed a majority of their victims.

This is a subject on which non-Russians have a limited moral right to speak except where their own fellow countrymen were among the mass of victims (as with Stalin’s mass murder of Polish prisoners at Katyn)—and even then, they must be very careful to acknowledge both that this was a crime of a Communist and not a Russian national state, and that innumerable Russians were also among the mass of victims.

As to Russia, the lack of public commemoration or accounting goes beyond Stalinism, even if the immense scale of Stalinism’s crimes make this the most serious issue in modern Russian history by far.

Thus the almost two million Russian dead of the First World War have also received no public memorial, even though nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past is very common in contemporary Russian cinema.

One of the problems in dealing with Russia's Soviet past is in disentangling the victory over Nazism by the USSR between 1941-1945 and the appalling crimes of Stalin on a domestic and international scale. That makes it difficult for Russian liberals to denounce Lenin and Stalin without appearing "unpatriotic".

The danger for Russian liberals, therefore, is that in denouncing the crimes committed under Lenin and Stalin they can easily appear to be—or actually be—condemning the entire Soviet period, for which many older Russians feel an element of nostalgia—not so much for imperial reasons but because it represented a secure life, or simply for the human reason that it was the country of their childhood and youth.

This in turn can encourage the liberals to do something which they are all too prone to do, which is to express open elitist contempt for ordinary Russians and for Russia itself as a country.

.....talking this way in public about your fellow citizens is no way to get elected—in Russia or the United States.

Since this approach naturally receives no hearing at all in conservative or “statist” circles, it also continues the catastrophic pattern of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century relationship between the liberal intelligentsia and the state, which contributed directly to the catastrophe of 1917 and the destruction of both by the revolution:basically, of two moral absolutisms shouting past each other’s ears.

Lieven offers none of the crude vilification that entirely trashes the history of Russia almost in its entirety by those like Edward Lucas. He realises that the only way to improve relations between Russia and the West and to promote liberal mores lies not in conflating Russia with the USSR.

As far as the Russian government is concerned, the most encouraging thing concerning its recent approach to history has been the full and open acknowledgment of the Soviet secret- police massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn on Stalin’s orders, which has led to a radical improvement in relations with Poland. This was made possible in part because both the Polish and Russian governments recognized that in the same forest are also buried thousands of Russian and other Soviet victims of the Soviet secret police. In other words, this became a joint denunciation of Stalinism, not a Polish denunciation of Russia.

It seems quite clear that Medvedev would wish to go faster and further than Putin in denouncing Communist crimes.

At our meeting with him, now–Prime Minister Putin snapped back quite aggressively when asked why Lenin is still in his mausoleum in Red Square, asking a British colleague why there is still a monument to Cromwell outside parliament in London. One of my British colleagues reacted quite huffily to this but I must say that being half Irish and remembering Cromwell’s crimes against Ireland (which today would undoubtedly be labeled genocide) I saw a good deal of truth in this—except of course that Cromwell ruled Britain 350 years ago, and not 90 years ago.

On the one hand, Putin’s response reflected an understandable but still often counter-productive Russian tendency to lash back at uncomfortable questions rather than taking them on board.

In this regard, Medvedev, whatever his other qualifications, is by far the better diplomat. However, Putin followed up with the sensible observation that “when the time comes, the Russian people will decide what to do about this. History is something that cannot be hurried.”

The difference between Putin and Medvedev is encouraging in this regard, because it reflects in part simply the fact that Medvedev is thirteen years younger.

It is a pity that Western discussion on Russia has been too dominated by those who correctly call for more open discussion of Soviet era crimes only to be pushing "New Cold War" propaganda tropes and expansionist NATO agenda in Georgia and NATO. Lieven's is a sane and decent voice.

Vaclav Havel on the Emerging Global "Atheist Civilisation".

At Forum 2000 in Prague the ex-President of the Czech republic and leading dissident under Communism, Vaclav Havel, has criticised what he terms the world's first atheistic civilisation. Havel stated in a speech,

"Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that marked the city limits took about fifteen minutes. Then came meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the selfsame journey takes a good forty minutes or more, and it is impossible to know whether I have left the city or not.

What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.

And in between all that – and this is something that bothers me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle or meaningful human settlement. Here and there, in a space that is so hard to define, one can find an architecturally beautiful or original building, but it is as solitary as the proverbial tomb – it is unconnected with anything else; it is not adjacent to anything or even remote from anything; it simply stands there.

In other words all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.

There is more to this than merely a dislike of the aesthetic blight that has overtaken the suburbs of Prague no less than other beautiful central European cities being mindlessly blighted by moronic starchitects, tacky new buildings that might as well just exist anywhere and create a sense of disenchantment and alienation.

The same story is as true in Krakow in Poland where rapacious property developers have been throwing up junkish "class" A office blocks in elegant Austro-Hungarian period streets and repellent hotels rammed as close as possible to the Wisla in the vicinity of the Wawel castle such as the trashy and glittering metallic Park Inn.

That in Prague and Krakow such architectural junk has been mercilessly plonked down in such a way as to destroy the deep sense of home is no doubt part of what Roger Scruton calls a "culture of repudiation", a belief in globalised styles that could just as well be anywhere other than where they are and induce a feeling of living in a ubiquitous nowhere land.

Havel has suggested that a sterile materialism which puts the egotistical all consuming self at the centre of things will end up eating away at civilisation from within, to literally consume up and devour Nature, a mere site for the satisfaction of immediate wants and immediate gratification.

This is one consequence of what he calls "the first atheist civilisation" in the sense not that absence of belief in God creates a consumerism as a palliative-the USA remains religious and grossly materialistic-but that the destruction of transcendental values is the result of the collapse of faith.

Havel's ethics comes from Kant and the notion that even if the existence of God cannot be assumed, people should live "as if" there is some higher power within man to choose to do good as opposed to that which despairs of anything beyond the claims of the self to "feel good" by consuming.

To only hold to that view of life is one that both neoliberal consumer capitalism and communism have in common: a crude utilitarian cult of use value that confuses people with things and holds to deterministic economic theories that material reality only determines consciousness.

Havel has some substantial points here. Within Europe the consequences of "me first" mentality has fashioned consumerism almost into the status of a religion. The USA has gone further and commodified religion through mega churches merged into shopping malls.

Faith implies the idea of trust as opposed to mere belief which clings to dogma through fear, something that Havel would see as common to both militant religious sectarianism and totalitarianism. The problem is that Havel's astute vision of consumer society contradict his support for US power and hegemony.

At this level Havel's support for neoconservative foreign policies such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 effectively support the spread of the cult of consumerism and utility all the more as it was essentially an oil grab designed to keep the US "way of life"-i.e. high octane consumerism-going.

Havel has proved unable to connect the propagation of shock therapy and the moral corruption caused by the IMF's neoliberal creed to the extension and propagation of US power globally. To pretend that the USA was idealistic in recent foreign policy ventures is itself a form of religious belief.

In some ways thinking George Bush II was interested in promoting an ethical foreign policy has something in common with those inter war intellectuals who projected their hopes and ideals on to the USSR under Stalin, a belief that a large power block was bringing Utopia and a desire to be onside with it.

Such neurosis in a time of imminent catastrophe and moral blindness is part of a quest for certainty just as it was after the two world wars in Europe. The oceanic feeling Freud described, the hunger for dissolving the individual self in an irresistible collective wave is as strong today than ever.

If Central European intellectuals such as Havel could see the disturbing continuities between Europe's dark past and the disintegration of civil society under neoliberal capitalism and energy hungry authoritarian power states, then his critique of an "atheist civilisation" would carry more weight.

For in an atomised society "Amusing Itself to Death" through trashy and voyeuristic TV, sado-masochistic talent shows and human rights as materialistic claim to satisfaction and pleasure, there is less and less scepticism of unjustified authority, propaganda soundbites and more desensitisation.

In this way consumerism and a crude cult of utility in which people are seen as mere instrumental means to an end ( e.g the human resources of sinister neoliberal marketspeak ) a new form of totalitarianism could emerge where people rush towards their own servitude when living standards dip.

For without any values other than "me first" and in a world beset by dangers of Islamism, there will be terrifying resource wars in which its either "us" or "them", one which has already started to emerge. Havel has diagnosed symptoms but has not looked too much at causes. This is a great missed opportunity.

Even so Havel was on the right track to assert in the wake of the economic crash of 2008 onwards, one that could still lead on to a double dip recession, that it was the result of material self gratification and greed. Even if economically it has had effects larger than he seems to think.

"I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell.