Kyrgyzstan: Strange Days on the Eurasian Frontier (2010)

Kyrgyzstan as a Geopolitical Pivot in Great Power Rivalries: Washington, Moscow, Beijing and the Geopolitics of Central Asia

By F. William Engdahl
Originally published in four parts by Global Research and engdahl.oilgeopolitics
May 25, May 26, May 28, and June 4, 2010
Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics

Part I: Kyrgyzstan as a Geopolitical Pivot

The remote Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan is what Britain’s Halford Mackinder might call a geopolitical ‘pivot’—a land that, owing to its geographical characteristics, holds a pivotal position in Great Power rivalries.

click to enlarge

Today the tiny remote country is being shaken by what appears to be an extremely well-planned popular uprising to topple US-backed president Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Preliminary analysts suggested that Moscow had more than a passing interest in promoting regime change there and that the events unfolding might be Moscow’s attempt to stage its own ‘reverse’ version of Washington’s ‘Color Revolutions’ -- Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003 or Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, as well as the 2005 Tulip Revolution that brought the pro-US Bakiyev to power. In the midst of this ongoing power shift in Kyrgyzstan, however, who is doing what to whom, is far from clear.

At the very least, what is playing out has huge strategic implications for military security throughout the Eurasian Heartland -- from China to Russia and beyond. It therefore has staggering implications for the future of the United States in Afghanistan and Central Asia and by extension in all Eurasia.

Political tinderbox

Kurmanbek Bakiyev

The protests against the US-backed Bakiyev began in March over allegations of extreme corruption on the part of the President and his family members. In 2009, Bakiyev began amending an article in the country’s constitution regulating presidential succession in case of death or unexpected resignation, a move widely seen as an attempt to introduce a "dynastical system" of power transfer in the country, one factor which fuelled the recent nationwide protests in Kyrgyzstan. He placed his son and other relatives in key posts where they raked in huge sums for the US airbase rights at Manas – reportedly as much as $80 million a year -- and other enterprises. [1]

Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia with more than 40% living below the official poverty line. Bakiyev named his son, Maxim -- who also managed to find time and funds to buy part ownership of a UK football club -- to be head of the country’s Central Agency for Development, Investment and Innovation, where he gained control over the country’s richest assets, including the Kumtor gold mine.[2]

Late in 2009 Bakiyev sharply hiked taxes on small and medium businesses and early this year imposed new taxes on telecoms. He privatized the country’s largest electricity company and in January the private company, rumored to have been sold to friends of the family for less than 3% of its estimated worth, doubled electricity prices. The price of heating gas was raised by up to 1000%. Kyrgyzstan’s winters are extremely cold.

Maxim Bakiyev

The opposition charged that Maxim Bakiyev had arranged a sweetheart privatisation of the state telecom to a friend domiciled in an offshore company in the Canary Islands. In short, popular rage against Bakiyev and company existed for good reason. The key issue was how efficiently that rage was channelled and by whom.

The protests erupted following the decision by the government in March to dramatically raise prices of energy and telecommunications by fourfold and more, in an extremely poor country. During early March protests, Otunbayeva was named spokesperson for a united front of all opposition groups. She appealed at that time to the US government to take a more active interest in Kyrgyzstan’s Bakiyev regime and its lack of democratic standards, obviously with no result.[3]

According to informed Russian sources, at that point Roza Otunbayeva spoke with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to discuss the deteriorating situation. Immediately on its formation of an Interim Government under Otunbayeva, Moscow was the first to recognize the acting government and made an offer of $300 million in immediate stabilization aid, transferring a portion of a 2009 Russian loan of $2.15 billion that was promised Bakiyev’s regime for construction of a hydropower plant on the Naryn river.

The $2.15 billion was originally announced just after Bakiyev declared he would close the US base at Manas, a decision that American dollars managed to reverse some weeks later. Clearly in Moscow’s eyes, the Russian aid and Bakiyev’s announced closing of the US base at Manas were linked.

The latest $300 million tranche of the pledged $2.15 billion from Moscow, re-opened after the ouster of Bakiyev, will reportedly go directly to the Kyrgyz National Bank.[4]

According to a report in Moscow’s RIA Novosti, ousted Prime Minister, Daniyar Usenov, told Russia’s ambassador in Bishkek that Russian media outlets, which enjoy a major influence within the former Soviet state—whose official language is still Russian—had been biased against the Bakiyev-Usenov government. [5]

Bakiyev government security forces, reportedly including Special Forces sharpshooters on rooftops, killed some 81 opposition demonstrators, leading to a dramatic escalation of the protests in the first week of April.

Above images from protests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, April 7, 2010

What is remarkable about the events and suggests that there is more going on behind the curtains, is the fact that the full-blown popular uprising exploded onto the scene with little pre-warning in the international media.

There had been protest demonstrations repeatedly since Bakiyev took control in the Washington-financed 2005 Tulip Revolution. [6] That Washington-financed regime change of 2005 had involved the usual list of US NGO’s including Freedom House, The Albert Einstein Institution, The National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.[7] None of the previous protests until this April, however, had the obvious thoroughness and sophistication of the latest one. Events seem to have caught everyone by surprise, not the least the corrupt Bakiyev family and his Washington backers.

The smoothness with which allegiance of the army, police and border security was gained within the first hours of protest suggests very sophisticated pre-planning and masterful coordination. Not clear at this point is whether that came from operatives from abroad, and if so, whether from Russia’s FSB or CIA or whomever.

On April 7, as Bakiyev was losing control, he reportedly rushed to the Americans, but as they saw the blood on the streets caused by Bakiyev’s sharpshooters and the growing fury of the crowds against the government, they reportedly whisked the President and his family to his hometown of Osh, apparently hoping to bring him back after events had calmed.[8] That never happened.

Following the resignation of his entire government, including the heads of the army and national police and border guard, Bakiyev resigned on April 16 and fled to neighboring Kazakhstan. At latest report he is holed up in Belarus, having reportedly gained entry by bringing with him over $200 million for cash-strapped Belarus President Lukashenko.[9]

Kyrgyzstan’s new, interim opposition government, under the nominal leadership of former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva, has declared it wants to set up an international investigation into alleged crimes committed by Bakiyev. Criminal charges have already been filed against him, his sons and brother and other relatives.

Bakiyev had little choice but to flee. The army and police had already sided with the Otunbayeva opposition days before he fled, in an indication that the events were at the very least extremely well planned by at least some parts of the opposition.

A geographical pivot

Ferghana Valley

Kyrgyzstan today plays the role of a geographical pivot. The land-locked country shares a border with China’s Xinjiang Province, a highly strategic point for Beijing. One of the smallest of the Central Asian states, it is also bordered to its north by oil-rich Kazakhstan, on the West by Uzbekistan and on the South by Tajikistan. Moreover, Kyrgyzstan overlaps the politically explosive resource-rich area known as the Ferghana Valley, a multinational ethnic and political friction zone located also in Uzbekistan and Tajikstan. 

Above photos depicting aspects of the Ferghana Valley

The country itself is highly mountainous, with the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains taking some 65% of all land area. Approximately 90% of the country is more than 1500 meters above sea level.

In terms of natural resources -- other than agriculture ,which comprises a third of GDP – Kyrgyzstan has gold, uranium, coal and oil. In 1997 the Kumtor Gold Mine opened one of the largest gold deposits in the world.

Until recently the state agency, Kyrgyzaltyn, owned all the mines and operated many of them as joint ventures with foreign companies. The Kumtor Gold Mine, near the border of China, is 100% owned by Canada’s Centerra Gold Inc. Until the ouster of President Bakiyev, his son, Maxim, head of the State Development Fund, ran Kyrgyzaltyn which is also the largest shareholder of Centerra Gold, the Canadian company that today owns Kumtor.

Aleksei Eliseev

Significantly, even though he has not been formally elected by Kyrgz voters, Centerra in Toronto, perhaps with a nudge from the US State Department, has already announced it has named Maxim Bakiyev’s “replacement,” as head of Kyrgyzaltyn, Aleksei Eliseev, Deputy Director of the Kyrgyz State Development Agency, to the Board of Directors of Centerra.[10]

Kyrgyzstan also has significant reserves of uranium and antimony. Kyrgyzstan also has considerable remaining deposits of coal of an estimated at 2.5 billion tons, especially in the Kara–Keche deposit in northern Kyrgyzstan.

However, even more pivotal than the mineral riches is the major US Air Force base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, opened within three months of  the US declaration of a global ‘War on Terror’ in September 2001. Shortly thereafter, Russia established its own military airbase not far from Manas. Kyrgyzstan today is the only country that hosts both Russian and American military bases, an uneasy state of affairs to put it mildly.

In sum, Kyrgyzstan, sitting in the center of the world’s most strategic landmass, Central Asia, is a geopolitical prize coveted by many.

Washington walks on political eggshells

The US State Department had tried to get Bakiyev to hold on in apparent hopes they could disperse the protestors, quell the street riots and keep their Tulip man in power. Hillary Clinton initially called on the Parliamentary opposition – government ministers who objected to Bakiyev’s corruption and nepotism -- to “negotiate” and “develop a dialogue” with the US-financed Bakiyev Presidency. The State Department then issued statements that the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was still functioning, despite reports that his entire administration had resigned.[11]

On April 7, during the peak of the drama when the outcome was still unclear, US Assistant Secretary of State P. J. Crowley told reporters, “We want to see Kyrgyzstan evolve, just as we do other countries in…the region. But, that said, there is a sitting government. We work closely with that government. We are allied with that government in terms of its support, you know, for international operations in…Afghanistan.” [12]  George Orwell would have admired the exercise in diplomatic doublespeak.

On April 15, when it was clear Bakiyev had little support within the country, the US State Department declared that it will side with neither the country's ousted president nor the Parliamentary opposition. In a statement indicating Washington is walking on eggshells hoping not to crack any, especially affecting its Manas airbase rights, State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley declared, “We want to see the situation resolved peacefully. And we're not taking sides.”[13] Since then, after talks with Foreign Minister Otunbayeva and her associates, the State Department and Obama have warmly backed the new political reality.

Otunbayeva, a leading Communist Party member during the Soviet days, had served as the first Kyrgyz ambassador to the United States in the post-Soviet era, and later as a special assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The interim government headed by Otunbayeva says they are going to write a new constitution within six months and prepare for a democratic election in the country. The opposition claims to be in control of the situation in Kyrgyztan though riots and looting outside Bishkek are still being reported.[14]

Whose coup?

While there is much speculation about an on-the-ground role by Russian intelligence in the ‘anti-tulip revolution,’ we must leave that as an open question.

In comments during his Washington visit on April 14, a week into the upheaval, Russia’s Medvedev expressed concern about the stability of the country: “The risk of Kyrgyzstan's breakdown into two parts - north and south - really exists. This is why our task is to help our Kyrgyz partners to find the mildest way out of this situation." He outlined a worst-case scenario where an unstable Kyrgyz government could be left powerless as extremists flood into the country, creating a second Afghanistan.[15]

US White House Adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, speaking from the Prague arms control talks, referring to the unfolding events in Kyrgyzstan, stated, “This is not some anti-American coup. That we know for sure; and this is not a sponsored-by-the-Russians coup.” [16]

At least nominally, Washington might well have reason to believe they can “work” with the new Interim Kyrgyz leaders.

Roza Otunbayeva and....?

Roza Otunbayeva is well known in Washington since she served there as Ambassador during the 1990’s.

Her Number Two in the Interim Government, former Parliament Speaker and a key figure in Washington’s 2005 Tulip Revolution that brought Bakiyev to power, Omurbek Tekebayev, was brought to Washington back then by the State Department for one of their “visitors programs” -- where emerging foreign political figures are presumably taught the beauties of the American way of life.

Tekebayev spoke openly at the time of that experience: “I found that the Americans know how to choose people, know how to make an accurate evaluation of what is happening and prognosticate the future development and political changes.” [17]

Thus there is evidence that the latest events in Kyrgyzstan could have been backed by Moscow as a “reverse” Color Revolution, one executed to control growing US military presence in Central Asia. And there is evidence it may also have been a second US-backed regime change, perhaps after the Obama Administration became alarmed that its man, Bakiyev, was getting too economically close to Beijing. The third and least likely version is that the events were executed by a rag-tag disorganized domestic opposition that never before managed to rally more than a few thousands to the streets to protest Bakiyev policies in the past five years. 

Clear at this point is that both Moscow and Washington are going to considerable lengths to show some minimal unity on the emerging events in the country.

Kanat Saudabayev, head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), on April 15 said the safe exit of Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev from Kyrgyzstan was the result of joint efforts by Obama and Russian President Medvedev. [18]

Clearly both Washington and Moscow eagerly want to have a strong presence in whatever government emerges from the strife-torn Central Asian country of five million people. What is less well known but equally clear, is the vital stake China has in stable relations with Kyrgyzstan, a neighbor with whom it shares a long border. Most interesting from here is where events will go in the forlorn but geopolitically strategic country.

Manas Airbase future?

One of the most pressing questions for Washington is the future of the vital US airbase at Manas near the capitol, Bishkek. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed the “important role Kyrgyzstan plays in hosting the Transit Center at the Manas Airport,” according to an official State Department statement of April 11. She left little doubt what Washington’s priority is in the country. It’s not democracy nor is it economic development.[19]

Following the Washington declaration of the War on Terror in September 2001, the Pentagon got basing rights in several strategic Central Asian countries, ostensibly to help wage the war against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In addition to basing rights in Uzbekistan, Washington got the Manas concession in Kyrgyzstan as well.

Most extensive of course has been the US military presence in Afghanistan. In one of his first acts as President, Obama authorized the ‘surge’ -- adding some 30,000 troops and approving construction of another 8 new ‘temporary’ US bases in Afghanistan, bringing the total bases there to an astonishing 22, including the huge airbases at Bagram and Kandahar.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has refused to put a time limit on the duration of the US military presence in Afghanistan. That is not because of the Taliban, but clearly rather the long-term Washington strategy of spreading the ‘war on terror’ across all Central Asia including into the strategically vital Ferghana Valley bordering Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This is where the latest events in Kyrgyzstan become geopolitically more than interesting for Russia, for China and for Washington.

C-130 Hercules at Manas Air Base, February 13, 2009

On April 14, Gates told the press that he was confident the US would retain rights to use Manas for what the Pentagon calls its Northern Distribution Network, flying supplies into the Afghanistan war theatre.[20] Just days before, interim government figures in Bishkek had indicated US rights to Manas were high on the list to be cancelled.

During a meeting with Russia’s Medvedev, President Obama agreed that the Kyrgyz events were definitely not a Russian counter coup. He extended immediate US recognition of the Interim regime of Roza Otunbayeva.

The question at this point is what role Kyrgyzstan will play in the high drama geopolitical chess game for control of Central Asia, and with it, control of the Eurasian Heartland as British geopolitician Halford Mackinder termed it. The key major actors outside Kyrgyzstan in this geopolitical high-stakes chess game across Central Asia are China, Russia, and the United States. In the next part we examine the geopolitical interest of China regarding fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization member Kyrgyzstan.

Part II: China and the Future of Kyrgyzstan

China’s growing economic ties to the cash-strapped regime of former Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev was a major reason Washington decided to dump its erstwhile ally Akayev after almost a decade of support. In June 2001 China, along with Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, signed the Declaration creating the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Three days later Beijing announced a large grant to Kyrgyzstan for military equipment.[21]

The heads of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan meet in Shanghai, June 14, 2001, a mere three months before 9/11.  The six leaders issued a joint statement that announced Uzbekistan’s participation into the "Shanghai Five", formalizing the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

After 11 September 2001, the Pentagon began what has been called the greatest shake-up in America's overseas military deployments since the end of the Second World War. The goal was to position US forces along an 'arc of instability' going through the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia and southern Asia. [22]

Eurasia and the so-called Arc of Instability: the "arc" concept has been used under different names by geo-strategists for at least the last hundred years.  For example, the above image highlights the "rimland" concept, developed in the 1930s by Nicholas John Spykman as an updated version of Halford Mackinder's 1904 formulation of an "inner" or "marginal crescent."  The keen observer will also notice the resemblance between Spykman's "rimland" concept (above) and the US's Cold War-era Soviet "containment" policy.  Obviously this is no coincidence.  The "arc" or "rimland" merely denotes the territorial space between areas fully-controlled by the dominant naval powers, like the United Kingdom and the United States, and that controlled by the dominant land powers, like Russia and China.  Toward the northern edge of the "arc" lies the battleground states, most of them mountainous, as well as ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous.  These features make them comparatively weak and, for hundreds of years, have left them susceptible to manipulation by outside forces.  It is through this lens that we should view the Balkan destabilization during the 1990s; the current Caucasus destabilization; as well as the huge military deployment into Central Asia (since before 9/11): Afghanistan, Pakistan, and countries in the former Soviet space.  The question here is, as always, which international power will dominate the destiny of these states?     

Akayev at the time offered to lease to the Pentagon its largest military base in the region at Manas. China, which shares a border with Kyrgyzstan was alarmed and, together with Russia, steered the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to oppose it, and to call for ending US military bases in Central Asia.

According to the Wall Street Journal, China was also engaged in secret negotiations for its own base in Kyrgyzstan and for border changes that ignited a political storm against Akayev in March 2002.

The Journal’s Philip Shishkin noted, “Akayev's moves to align Kyrgyzstan with China through ‘Silk Road diplomacy’ and suppression of the Uighur guerrillas -- explained mainly by his desperate need of finances to stem the tail-spinning domestic economy -- upset Washington, which saw Beijing as a thorn in its strategic expansion agenda.” [23]

Shishkin added, “The American perspective on this dangerous development went as follows: ‘Given the 1,100-kilometer border between Kyrgyzstan and China - and Washington's already considerable foothold in nearby Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - the fall of the China-friendly government of disgraced president Askar Akayev would be no small victory for the 'containment policy.’” [24]

At that point Washington launched massive financing via the National Endowment for Democracy and used the resources of the Albert Einstein Institute and Freedom House as well as the State Department and IMF to topple the now-unreliable Akayev regime in the 2005 Tulip Revolution.[25]

Understandably, one of the major interested parties in the political future of Kyrgyzstan today is China. Kyrgyzstan shares a 530 mile border with China, straddling the politically sensitive Xinjiang Province.

Xinjiang Province: "instability" in western China

Xinjiang Province is where riots in July 2009 by ethnic Uighurs were supported by the US-financed World Uighur Congress of millionaire “ex-laundress” Rebiya Kadeer, and by Washington’s regime-changing NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy.

Xinjiang, also bordering the sensitive Chinese Tibet Autonomous Region, is a vital crossroads for energy pipelines into China from Kazakhstan and ultimately Russia, and is home to major domestic Chinese oil production.[26]

The borders between Kyrgyzstan and China’s Xinjiang are porous, and the flow of people between Xinjiang in China and Kyrgyzstan is considerable. There are an estimated 30,000 Chinese nationals, including Uighurs, living in Kyrgyzstan. Almost 100,000 ethnic Kyrgyz live in Xinjiang.

US-backed Uighurs opposite Chinese troops

In short, US military outposts in Kyrgyzstan have far more significance to Chinese national security than the mere resupply of the Afghan war theatre. It is an ideal breeding ground for US intelligence agencies and for the Pentagon to run covert destabilizing operations into China’s strategically vital and politically fragile Xinjiang. The flow of people back and forth between the two countries provides excellent cover for US-run espionage and possible sabotage. [27]

According to retired Indian Ambassador, K. Gajendra Singh, now heading the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies in New Delhi, the Bakiyev regime permitted the US military to use its facilities at Manas Airbase, including highly sophisticated electronic devices, among other purposes, to also monitor key Chinese missile and military sites in Xinjiang. [28]

Further adding to concerns in Beijing over US actions inside Kyrgyzstan is the Pentagon’s new Northern Distribution Network (NDN), created ostensibly to supply the Afghanistan war.

The NDN runs through Tajikstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Many in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization region suspect that the NDN will be used by the Pentagon to encourage spread attacks by groups like the ‘Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan’ or the ‘Islamic Jihad Union’ and the murky Hizb ut-Tahrir movement – all of which are clustered within the Ferghana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. [29]

The Black Sea/Caspian Sea segment of the Northern Distribution Network (click to enlarge)

Beijing is no passive observer in the Kyrgyzstan events. It will clearly play its strongest card, the economic one, to secure closer and far more friendly relations with any new Kyrgyz government.

At the June 2009 meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Ekaterinburg Russia, China’s President Hu Jintao pledged a fund of $10 billion in future aid to the Central Asian member nations of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Nothing Washington has promised to Kyrgyzstan comes even close to those sums.

In one of its first statements, the provisional Kyrgyz Deputy Head, Omurbek Tekebayev, told Russian media that they regarded China among the country’s strategic partners: “The foreign policy will change…Russia, Kazakhstan and other neighbors including China will remain our strategic partners.” [30]

China's ambitious rail project...will it succeed?

One project that that Chinese strategic partner is likely to accelerate in order to weld a closer strategic partnership with its Kyrgyz neighbor is Beijing’s announced plan to build a vast high-speed Eurasian rail grid.

China’s Ministry of Railways has unveiled one of the world’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. The rail link will connect Xinjiang via Kyrgyzstan, ultimately to Germany and even on to London by 2025.

China’s plans include linking the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway into the Eurasian high-speed rail corridor.

Was the Berlin-Baghdad railway ever finished?

China is also building twelve new highways to economically tie Kyrgyzstan and its neighbors by modern roadways with Xinjiang. At some point US militarization of Kyrgyzstan becomes a Chinese national security threat. An economic counter move by China to increase its presence in the country is now clearly on the table. [31]

As further indication of Beijing’s concern to have stability in its neighborhood, China has recently stepped up its economic activities in Afghanistan.

As friction increases between Afghan President Karzai and the Obama Administration, relations are clearly warming with Karzai and Beijing. On March 24, Hamid Karzai and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed new economic agreements in Beijing on trade and investment, while agreeing to strengthen triangular cooperation with Pakistan, which traditionally has had close ties to China.

The March 24 agreements reportedly cover China’s investments in Afghanistan’s hydroelectric, mining, railway, construction, and energy projects.

China is already the largest investor in the Afghan economy. Its Metallurgical Group Corporation won a bid in 2007 to invest $3.5 billion in Afghanistan’s Aynak copper mine –one of the largest in the world. [32]

British agent, T.E. Lawrence, the so-called Lawrence of Arabia, blew up another competitor railway system (the Hejaz Railway, which once ran from Damascus to Medina), underscoring the significance of railway projects to geopolitical motives and empire building. The railway was built to provide a transportation route for the "hajj" (a holy pilgrimage to Mecca).  It unified populations from the Muslim Caliphate in Istanbul with the holy sites of the Arabian peninsula. It has never been rebuilt.

And another prize plum is the possibility for Chinese companies to develop Afghanistan’s estimated 1.6 billion barrels of oil and 440 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas, as well as large deposits of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, iron ore and gold. [33]

For China, both Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of its key transportation and trade links to Iran. Beijing has completed a port at Gwadar in Pakistan, allowing it to import 60 percent of its oil coming from the Middle East. China now plans to connect the Gwadar Port with Xinjiang through Afghanistan to secure a more efficient delivery of energy resources to fuel its booming economy. Stability in Kyrgyzstan is essential to China in this broader context. [34]

In our next part we examine the essential geopolitical importance of Kyrgyzstan for Russia, the second geopolitical player in the new three-dimensional chess game for control of Eurasia’s land space and its economic and political future.

Part III: Russia and the Future of Kyrgyzstan

Soviet Kyrgyz stamp

What happens in Kyrgyzstan is clearly also of utmost strategic importance to Moscow. The fact that Russia has been swift to establish recognition of the new provisional government in Bishkek and to extend financial aid clearly signal the importance of politics in that country for Moscow. Not only was Kyrgyzstan an integral part of the Soviet Union before 1991, it remains a key geographic region. Whether friendly to Moscow or hostile, Kyrgyzstan can be of immense help in stabilizing the Central Asian periphery of Russia, or in destabilizing it.

Clearly the Medvedev-Putin regime is creatively using every level -- from energy pipeline deals with the state-owned Gazprom, to military trade -- to rollback the threatening NATO encirclement that reached its peak in 2004-2005 with Washington’s ‘Color Revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine and finally Kyrgyzstan, the Tulip Revolution that brought strongman Bakiyev into power.

As noted in a previous article, Ukraine Geopolitics and the US-NATO Military Agenda: Tectonic Shift in Heartland Power,[35] the outcome of Ukraine’s presidential elections earlier this year was a significant positive development from the standpoint of Moscow’s military security. The threat of Ukraine’s joining NATO is now off the table, as well as threats to further disrupt Russia’s gas pipelines that pass through Ukraine to Germany and other parts of western Europe, a residue of the Soviet era of economic integration.

Belarus, Kazakhstan & Russia create Customs Union

In January Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan all signed a Customs Union agreement. Belarus is a vital partner to Russia on her western border with Ukraine and Poland. Kazakhstan is a pivotal former Soviet state between Kyrgyzstan and Russia, and source of major energy supply to China as location of vast oil and other resources. It is also the world’s largest uranium miner.

The creation of a neutral regime in Kyrgyzstan friendly to both Kazakhstan and Russia would open up a major zone of potential economic development for Russia, as well as helping to stabilize the volatile Ferghana Valley, the agriculturally rich population center of Central Asia bordering Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Central Asia.

On April 19, according to Moscow’s RIA Novosti, Kyrgyzstan’s First Deputy Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev said after meeting with Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov that his country wants to join the Russian-led customs union. He stated, "We have a common past with Kazakhstan and Russia and obviously our future will be with them in a common economic space and a common customs space." Atambayev also said Russia and Kazakhstan were not behind the recent events in Kyrgyzstan. "Russia and Kazakhstan are not involved in any intrigues, they just want to help [Kyrgyzstan]," he said. [36]

For Moscow, having a pro-Moscow or even a rigorously neutral Bishkek constitutes a major repositioning on the Eurasian chessboard. As of this writing, the situation remains unstable from all accounts, and Russian President Medvedev has sounded a note of caution during an important press conference with Uzbek President Islam Karimov in Moscow. "Russia has given humanitarian aid to Kyrgyzstan, but full-fledged economic cooperation is possible only after the institutions of state are restored," Medvedev said. [37]

Uzbekistan warms to Moscow

One significant apparent gain for Moscow following the turmoil in Kyrgyzstan is a clear warming of previously uneasy relations between Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov and the Moscow regime.

Uzbek's Karimov (center) and Russia's Medvedev (R)

On April 20 Karimov flew to Moscow to hold talks with Medvedev and told the Russian press that the two sides had set aside various disputes and shared a common concern about the danger of the instability in Kyrgyzstan spreading. If the Kyrgyz unrest spins out of control, Karimov reportedly fears Uzbekistan might be next. [38] Just weeks before the ouster of Bakiyev in April, US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke had paid a visit to Karimov in Uzbekistan as part of a careful US attempt to woo him back into the US camp. That seems now to have gotten a significant setback. [39]

Putin & former president Akayev, Kant, 2003

Since 2003 Russia has enjoyed its own military basing rights at Kant airbase near Bishkek. It was the first established by Russia outside its borders since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In addition to the airbase, Moscow also has a strategic base at the eastern end of Lake Issyk-Kul where Russia tests submarine and torpedo technology including the super-cavitating VA-111 Shkval torpedo designed originally to sink US aircraft carriers, traveling at a speed of more than 200 knots. Russia signed an indefinite lease for the base in March 2008 for an annual lease of $4.5 million.[40]

Russia’s 2003 airbase agreement with Kyrgyzstan was one reason Washington initiated its Tulip Revolution in order to bring in the Washington-friendly Bakiyev regime in 2005.

Some observers were initially convinced that the new transitional government of Roza Otunbayeva would move to cancel US basing rights at Manas on the urgings of Russia. Surprisingly, however, Otunbayeva appears to have reversed an initial commitment and has stated that the base will remain open to the US Central Command, and there has so far been little reaction in Moscow.

Gen. Petraeus: PR in Kyrgyzstan

Russian sources close to the government report that Moscow is considering whether it might gain more by letting Manas airbase continue to supply the US war effort in Afghanistan for the next couple of years. In exchange, Moscow would step up recent demands on Washington to stop opium flows from Afghanistan into Russia.[41] “The airbase will not be closed,” this source stated, “but will be used as a lever to influence Americans about narcotics, among other things. In a few months the yearly contract [for Manas] ends, and it is an occasion to put some conditions to them.” [42]

In October 2009 then-Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev disbanded the country’s Drug Control Agency that had been responsible for intercepting illegal drugs transiting from Afghanistan to Russia. Reports are that Bakiyev’s brother thereby consolidated control over Afghan drug flows through the country.[43] Whether that played a role in Moscow moves to unseat Bakiyev this Spring is not clear.

Whatever the actual thinking in Moscow about Manas as a bargaining chip, both China and Russia having clear strategic interests in a stable and friendly Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, with the three countries along with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan all founding members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization  -- the emerging Eurasian economic and military cooperation organization -- the significant gains for Russia from closer cooperation with Kyrgyzstan lead some to call it Moscow’s ‘rollback’ of Washington’s encroachment into the Eurasian space.[44] How that develops in the months ahead remains to be seen.

What then are the stakes now for Washington’s Central Asia and Eurasia strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance? This we examine in Part IV. The answer is: everything.

Part IV: Washington and the Kyrgyz Future--Securing the Pivot

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a prime strategic objective of the Pentagon and of US intelligence has been to deeply penetrate the former Soviet states of Central Asia. The Pentagon pressed for increasing US military presence in the region and succeeded in seducing four of the five central Asian states, including Kyrgyzstan, into NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1994.

Mujahideen gather outside the Soviet garrison in Shigal Tarna, Afghanistan, and prepare for a mortar attack.

The US tactics for gaining strategic presence in Central Asia have included use of US-trained radical Islamic militants, including Osama bin Laden and CIA-trained Afghani Mujahideen, even well before the fall of the USSR. They were deployed to fuel the destabilization of the Soviet Union itself. The CIA instigated the 1980s Mujahideen guerrilla insurgency in Afghanistan, code-named Operation Cyclone [see video below] [45], to drain over-stretched Soviet resources [46]. It was the largest and most costly operation in CIA history to that point. Pakistani veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid described the intimate relation of the Mujahideen and the CIA during the period Osama bin Laden was trained by them:

“With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.” [47]

The Mujahideen-CIA model that proved so successful in Afghanistan against the Soviet Red Army was expanded to include US-trained jihadist Mujahideen networks that were infiltrated into Russia’s Chechnya province during the 1990s. Given the region’s fiercely independent Sunni Muslim population and vital Soviet-era oil pipeline, the Second Chechen War [48] created yet more destabilizing unrest for the faltering Russian state during the Yeltsin era [49].

Long-term Pentagon Plan for Central Asia

In 2003, Ariel Cohen — Russia expert and Pentagon consultant from the defense industry-financed Heritage Foundation [50] — testified to the US Senate: “Since the fall of 2001, the US projected elements of air power and special forces into Central Asia…” [51].

Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen (right)

Cohen confirmed that Pentagon activity in the former Soviet states of Central Asia — including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan — had actually begun well before the War on Terror was declared in September 2001: “General Anthony Zinni, then-CINC [Commander-in-Chief] of the Central Command, which is geographically in charge of Central Asia, started these contacts in the mid- and late 1990s…Off the record, Pentagon officials have said that while the US has not requested permanent basing rights in the region, its presence will be open-ended,” he told the Senate [52].

Cohen, a specialist on Central Asia as well as on Russia, went on to reveal the true Washington game in Central Asia:  

“US policy makers and officials have suggested different avenues of rationalization for the current and future presence. They named protecting energy resources and pipelines; deterring the resurrection of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia; preventing Russian and/or Chinese hegemony; facilitating democratization and market reforms; and using Central Asia as a re-supply depot for possible action in Afghanistan, as preferred rationale for US presence. Moreover, Central Asia was mentioned as a launching pad in the future operations against Iraq and Iran” [53].

In short, the Pentagon agenda for Central Asia is a long-term strategy of step-wise occupation and militarization of the entire region. Conveniently for the Pentagon, the instability and anti-Americanism created by US occupation and bombings of innocent civilians across Pakistan and Afghanistan also serves to supply a perfect pretext to expand the US militarization of all Central Asia. It’s being done under the deceptive rubric of the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ‘Peace Keeping’ mission.

The turmoil and instability US or related military actions create are then used to justify the military “peace keeping.” That’s the dirty little secret of what today are termed PKOs or Peace Keeping Operations, whether by NATO directly as in Afghanistan or in Kosovo, or by the UN in oil-rich Haiti since 2004, or oil-rich Darfur in Sudan since 2007, or the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1999.

Cohen’s testimony was given almost seven years ago, in October 2003, as the Bush Administration was barely six months into its invasion and, evidently, permanent occupation of Iraq. One might ask the Japanese or Germans how difficult it is to get rid of an American military basing once it is established. The US strategy for Central Asia has little to do, it seems, with any recent Taliban regrouping or resurgence. It was planned long ago. It has to do with what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance—total control of all land, sea and air.

In April 2009, General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command — which incorporates not only Afghanistan and Pakistan but Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and other former states of the Soviet Central Asia — told another US Senate hearing: “Though Central Asia has received relatively less attention than other sub-regions in the AOR (Central Command’s Area of Responsibility-w.e.), the US maintains a strong interest in establishing long-term, cooperative relationships with the Central Asian countries and other major regional powers to create a positive security environment [54].

Petraeus then went on to identify the real focus of Pentagon and US interest in the region:

“Central Asia constitutes a pivotal location on the Eurasian continent between Russia, China, and South Asia; it thus serves as a major transit route for regional and international commerce and for supplies supporting Coalition efforts in Afghanistan” [55]. [Emphasis added by the author.]

Petraeus’ remarks were, if anything, an understatement of the actual strategic interest of Washington and the Pentagon in this region. Central Asia today is at the heart of the Pentagon’s global strategy — as it was for the British Empire a century before. As Central Asia goes, so goes the empire—the American Century — or what George H.W. Bush proclaimed triumphantly in 1990 on the collapse of the Soviet Union as, ‘The New World Order.’

Revealingly, Petraeus adopted the term used by Britain’s Sir Halford Mackinder, the father of Geopolitics, when he described Central Asia as a ‘pivot’ for US interests on the Eurasian Continent. The US military command clearly is also well-schooled in the levers of geopolitical power in Eurasia as were the British a century earlier [56].

Washington’s interest in Kyrgyzstan is comprehensible only when we consider it in the context of this Great Game – the Pentagon’s Eurasian geopolitical strategy to militarize the Pivot Area, or
Heartland, as Mackinder later named it.

Spreading a cancer across Central Asia

The current phase of this undeclared Pentagon irregular war clearly involves a carefully orchestrated strategy of deliberately spreading the war and fomenting various insurgencies across all of Central Asia — from Afghanistan as the core, over the border to Pakistan and Iran, into Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and ultimately into Russia and China via the unstable Xinjiang province bordering Kyrgyzstan.

The tactics used to spread the US-backed militarization include igniting local tribal insurgencies by deliberately perpetrating civilian and other atrocities, terrorizing local populations and encouraging desperate acts of resistance—in brief, a policy of deliberately committing war crimes as official policy.

It’s not that the Pentagon is averse to exposing its manpower to direct fire, nor that pilotless drone bombings are more precise or humane. The strategy is one of deliberately spreading insurgencies and inciting armed responses to atrocities, illegal and inhumane American and NATO actions. That provides the pretext to expand the NATO presence even further, under the rubric of the ‘war on terror.’ By such tactics, they create a war that can never be “won,” and thereby create a pretext for permanent US and NATO presence.

By this time it is becoming clear to most intelligent observers that the US-declared ‘War on Terror’ is a farce. It’s a farce however with a diabolical aim, a means to provide justification for Washington to militarize new conflict regions, step-by-step, as the Pentagon spreads its reach across the globe under its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance.

Radical jihadist Islam, through the propaganda offensive launched after September 11, 2001, has also successfully replaced the bogeyman of Soviet Communism in the eyes of most unwitting Americans. Through this elaborate and cynical ideological deception, they are persuaded to send their sons and daughters to die for the noble cause of ‘winning the war on terror.’

Since the Obama Administration took office in January 2009, the US war has been spread across the border, inch-by-inch, village-by-village, corpse by corpse, into Pakistani territory with little more than feeble public protest from Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Pakistani President Zardari: "Mr. Ten Percent"

Zardari was the husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto. According to a US Senate investigation Zardari personally took up to $1.5 billion of state funds as Development Minister when his wife was Prime Minister in the 1990’s, earning the nickname “Mr Ten Percent” a reference to his demanded payoff for facilitating development contracts. He reportedly smuggled the funds out of his country illegally into private hidden accounts at Citibank in Switzerland and Dubai. At the time US authorities conveniently blocked investigation.

Today Zardari appears to be resigned to the US military presence in his country. Perhaps that’s because Washington could easily blackmail him by revealing the details of his Citibank business from the past [57].

Khalilzad: Afghani-American power broker

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghani-American neo-conservative who had been one of the architects of the Afghan war in the Bush Administration, is said to have hand-picked his old friend, Hamid Karzai, to be the US-anointed puppet President in Afghanistan. Khalilzad also played a key role in the covert US backing of Zardari as Pakistani President in 2008 once Musharaff apparently became less reliable for some in Washington [58].

Conveniently enough for the Pentagon agenda, as President, Zardari has managed to foot drag on measures internally to establish a national counter terrorism agency [59]. Almost ten years into the US-initiated ‘War on Terror’ in which Pakistan has played a central role, the country still lacks an effective counter-terror strategy. Zardari recently called on Dennis Blair, Barack Obama’s Director of US National Intelligence, to “help” [60].

The gradual spreading of the US-led war into Pakistani territory via CIA drone strikes on innocent civilians and others, under the rubric of fighting Taliban terrorists, has already resulted in the US designating an AfPak Theater of the war, a subtle linguistic means of creating acceptance of the fact that the active war has now successfully spread to Pakistan.

The next phase of spreading the war across Eurasia will involve Kyrgyzstan and the neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan around the Ferghana Valley as the pivot for spreading conflict and with it, US and NATO military control ultimately to all Central Asia, the reason the US military presence there is of such strategic importance.

Spreading War via NDN

The US creation of agreements with the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan for the northern supply route to Afghanistan is essential to this strategy. The new route is named the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), an innocuous-sounding cover for much more.

To enable the spread of Pentagon and NATO military presence — via the euphemistically-named International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — across highly strategic parts of the Central Asian landmass, the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is key. And the US presence in Kyrgyzstan is a key to the NDN.

The NDN involves a series of logistical arrangements connecting Baltic and Caspian ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

In addition to this vast NDN network, Iran and China are also being considered by Washington as possible transit states in an effort to open those critical countries to Pentagon logistics and likely more.

The NDN provides Washington with a dream too good to be true—a mechanism, costing just a few millions of dollars of transit fees, through which to penetrate deep into the entire Eurasian land space. The flow of war material and troops via the burgeoning NDN will be huge. As US presence in Afghanistan under the Obama ‘surge’ increases, the anticipated demand for non-military supplies in 2010-2011 is estimated to be 200-300% more than in 2008 [61].

Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, toured the key countries in Central Asia in February this year to firm up the US ties to the Central Asian NDN countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan [62].

Feb. 2010: Holbrooke arrives at Manas

During his tour of Kyrgyzstan, Holbrooke had reportedly intended to have a secret meeting at Manas Airbase with members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an organization officially declared a “foreign terrorist organization” by Holbrooke’s State Department back in 2002 [63].

The Holbrooke meeting at Manas reportedly was meant to discuss operations to launch guerrilla sabotage of the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan-China (TUKC) gas pipeline that recently began operations [64]. If true, that would indicate the true geopolitical aim of the US base at Manas and around Kyrgyzstan — to sabotage Chinese and Eurasian vital energy pipeline flows under the cover of ‘terrorist’ attacks. These are classic ‘false flag’ operations, where true instigators hide behind false instigators [65].

Paul Quinn-Judge, Central Asia director of the non-profit International Crisis Group, told Time recently that stepped-up US military-related shipping through Kyrgyzstan and the Central Asia region will lead to attacks on convoys by insurgent groups including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Islamic Jihad Union. “The problem with the Northern Distribution Network is obvious. It turns Central Asia into a part of the theater of war,” he emphasized [66] .

Significantly, in March 2009, US President Barack Obama had announced provision of $5.5 million to the Bakiyev regime for constructing a “counter-terrorism“ training center in southern Kyrgyzstan, giving the Pentagon its second major military foothold in the country and a major staging area from which to spread the war.

The Pentagon and CIA’s use of Islamic militants as elements of its covert foreign policy is a fact. The same military that ‘trains’ the terrorists also trains the ‘anti-terrorists.’ This seems a bizarre contradiction in policy only when we fail to grasp the essence of US and British-developed methods of warfare employed actively since the early 1950s.

Low Intensity Warfare and PKO

The method was originally termed Low Intensity Warfare by the British Army officer, Frank Kitson, who developed and refined the method for control of subject areas in Malaysia, in Kenya during the Mau Mau freedom struggles of the 1950s, and later for the British Army in Northern Ireland.

Frank Kitson

‘Low Intensity Warfare’ as Kitson termed it [67], involves use of deception, of infiltration by double agents, provocateurs, and use of defectors into legitimate popular movements such as those struggling for colonial independence after 1945.

The method is sometimes referred to as ‘Gang/Counter-Gang.’ The essence is that the orchestrating intelligence agency or military occupying force, whether the British Army in Kenya or the CIA in Afghanistan, actually controls the actions of both sides in an internal conflict, creating small civil wars or gang wars with the aim of dividing the overall legitimate movement and creating the pretext for bringing in outside military forces for what the US now has deceptively named “Peace-Keeping Operations” or PKO [68].

In his advanced course on American Military Intervention Since Vietnam, Grant Hammond of the US Air War College refers openly to Low Intensity Conflict, aka Peace Keeping Operations as, “war by another name” [69].

After shooting and killing Iraqi police and civilians in Basra, two British agents (disguised as suicide bombers from the Mehdi Army) were caught while driving a car loaded with explosives, September 19, 2005

Indeed, according to a variety of reports from Iraq after the 2003 US invasion of Afghanistan, US and British Special Forces have reportedly covertly armed the so-called insurgents against the US-backed regimes in Iraq or Afghanistan. This includes arming the Taliban at the same time it has been pouring millions into arming local ‘anti-Taliban’ fighters [70]. If true, it would fit the textbook low-intensity warfare methods of Kitson to a T.

These Special Forces who are arming ‘insurgents’ include, most critically, private mercenaries or military contractors such as Blackwater (recently renamed Xe after its public exposure for brazenly murdering civilians in Iraq).

Training the police…

Central to the strategy of spreading the Low Intensity Warfare across Central Asia from Afghanistan, is the recent US program to ‘train’ Afghan police, allegedly to enforce order. According to a recent Afghan poll, less than 20 percent of the population in the eastern and southern provinces trusted the US-trained police. One taxi driver remarked, “Forget about the Taliban; it is the police we worry about” [71].

Jeremy Kuzmarov, an American historian who has written extensively on the US military, has closely analyzed the deliberate pattern of US training of domestic police over the course of more than a century. He sees such training, seemingly innocuous and routine, as an essential means by which the United States creates a loyal internal security apparatus of client regimes, fortifying their power and repressing the political opposition. He notes,

 “As the US expands the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration has placed a premium on police training programs. The stated aim is to provide security to the population so as to enable local forces to gradually take over from the military in completing the pacification process. A similar strategy has been pursued by the United States in Iraq. In both, American-backed forces have been implicated in sectarian violence, death squad activity and torture. At the same time, the weaponry and equipment that the U.S. provided has frequently found its way into the hands of insurgents, many of whom have infiltrated the state security apparatus, contributing to the long-drawn out nature of both conflicts.” [72]

The last point is the most essential—repression is a central weapon of US Low Intensity or irregular warfare, in addition to being an instrument for exercising state power. In Afghanistan repression serves to spread the war and domestic resistance to what the population legitimately sees as an intolerable US occupation force. That spreading resistance in turn serves to justify such expanded war operations as Obama’s ‘surge.’ It becomes a self-feeding process of spreading conflict, a US aim in Central Asia since the end of the Soviet Union.

Despised and feared, the Afghan national police have been operated by ethnic warlords paid by the CIA, says Kuzmarov. They routinely do shakedowns at random checkpoints, shooting and killing unarmed demonstrators, stealing local farmers’ land, terrorizing the civilian population while making house-to-house raids in US and Afghan military-assisted sweep operations. “These kinds of abuses fit with a larger historical pattern, and are a product of the ethnic antagonisms and social polarizations bred by the United States intervention, and the mobilization of police for military and political ends.” he stresses [73]. The CIA’s Operation Phoenix in Vietnam comes at once to mind.

A dubious Community Defense Initiative

The US Commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has also earmarked $1.3 billion over the past few months to fund local ‘anti-Taliban’ militias in fourteen areas across Afghanistan. The top-secret program is so secret that McChrystal refuses to disclose details to his NATO allies, even though McChrystal is head of NATO operations in Afghanistan. And who is to say that armed attacks against NATO forces by one or another of these US-funded ‘anti-Taliban’ gangs is ‘Taliban’ or ‘anti-Taliban?’ The Pentagon press office and its various embedded journalists will, no doubt, be the ones to say [74].

Reportedly the program, euphemistically dubbed the innocent-sounding Community Defense Initiative, is controlled by a newly created Special Forces Group that reports directly to McChrystal as head of US forces in Afghanistan. Revealing is that, despite the fact that McChrystal is also commander of the NATO mission in Afghanistan — officially, the International Security Assistance Force — other NATO members are kept entirely out of this particular operation of his US arming of local militias in the Community Defense Initiative [75].

Perhaps one reason the US Command is so secretive towards its supposed NATO allies about the operation is the fact that there is strong opposition within other NATO member states to the idea of arming local militias.

General Stanley McCrystal

McChrystal reportedly has outsourced the creation of his local militia operations entirely through Arif Noorzai, a highly controversial politician from Helmand province, coincidentally the largest opium producing region in the world. Arif Noorzai is widely distrusted, to put it mildly. This funding and arming of local Afghan groups seems to be an integral part of the Petraeus ‘surge’ strategy.
On May 19, the Pentagon press services reported that ‘insurgents’ had launched a bold assault on the massive US military fortress at Baghram Air Field in Afghanistan, using rockets, grenades and small arms fire. Seven US servicemen were reported wounded and numerous insurgents killed. The previous day a group of suicide bombers had attacked a US military convoy in Kabul killing eighteen including five US servicemen. The US military also reported that the Taliban claimed credit [76] .

Community Defense Initiative gathering

Those are the reported surface facts. What is not at all clear is whether the ‘insurgents’ were in fact some of the thousands of freshly-armed locals recruited by Arif Noorzai in the loosely-supervised Community Defense Initiative, or Afghanis genuinely resisting US military assaults and atrocities. Also not at all clear is whether the Taliban claim of masterminding the attacks was just political opportunism on their part, a ploy to make them appear stronger than they are in the eyes of other Afghanis.

The Pentagon is well known to use private contractors in Afghanistan and elsewhere to do what under law the US Armed Forces are prohibited from doing—the privatization of warfare, if you will. Recent exposures in the New York Times have detailed secret and illegal Pentagon use of private military contractors under Lockheed Corporation — with names such as ‘Strategic Influence Alternatives’ (sic) or ‘American International Security Corporation’ —to carry out secret operations in eastern Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan. One such network employing American, Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries is reportedly supervised by former high-ranking CIA veteran Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a CIA ‘counter-terror’ expert who played a key role in the CIA’s 1980s drug-running Nicaraguan Contras operations [77].

Arming local Afghan militias, deploying private military mercenary companies not bound by Geneva Conventions on warfare or any Afghani laws, comprised of Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries directed by veteran US intelligence officials—this is all a recipe with a colossal potential to spread wars and conflict like a wild brushfire. The record of the US military commands in Iraq, as well as now in Afghanistan, suggests this is in fact their intent—Low Intensity Operations as a method of expanding the war, all under the deceptive umbrella of the NATO ‘Peace Keeping Operation.’

NDN is the Key

The states now involved in the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) include: NATO member and former Soviet Union state Latvia; US-dominated oil producer Azerbaijan; US puppet state Georgia; Kazakhstan; Russia; Tajikistan; and Uzbekistan. In its finest Orwellian Pentagon linguistics, the US war bases have been deceptively renamed ‘transit centers.’ They are still US military bases despite the nominal change.

Supply route into Central Asia (click to enlarge)

Russia’s role in the NDN is complex. Moscow facilitated the establishment of the rail line that constitutes a major transportation route within the NDN from Latvia down to the Uzbek-Afghan border. The Putin government also worked with the Obama administration, agreeing to over-flights of lethal materials. Russian companies that have been struggling during the global economic crisis to stay afloat suddenly benefit from Pentagon logistics contracts that give them tens of millions of sorely-needed dollars. At the same time, however, Moscow tried to convince the Bakiev government in Kyrgyzstan to deny the US military further access to the Manas air base [78] In this, Moscow was unsuccessful.

Additionally the NDN gives Washington an increasing lever over the under-developed and economically troubled economies of Central Asia. Transit agreements made with local carriers provide new economic ties to Washington and weaken ties to Russia in many cases or build an interest lobby within Russia to continue NATO cooperation. It does not take much imagination to see the potential of the NDN to create a counter pole to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in the region’s economy. Russian companies alone garner over $1 billion a year in badly needed revenue for hauling Pentagon supplies across Russia via the NDN [79].

If the US succeeds in this mission of militarizing Central Asia outwards from Afghanistan, it will have achieved a ‘checkmate’ — in effect, blocking any combination of nations on earth from opposing the Pentagon agenda of Full Spectrum Dominance. The ability of the nations of South America — from Venezuela to Bolivia to Cuba or Brazil — to follow an economic and political course independent of the dictates of Washington will be dashed. The ability of China to build a regional Asian economic zone of stability independent of the collapsing dollar will be gone. Russia will be broken into feuding pieces as tribal and ethnic and religious wars spread across the states of the former Soviet Union in the manner of a new Thirty Years’ War. Hence the stakes for Washington in the seemingly remote events in Kyrgyzstan are of staggering geopolitical importance.

NDN and Kyrgyzstan’s Batken ‘Anti-Terror’ center

In this context, the Obama Administration’s new anti-terror training center at Batken in Kyrgyzstan which will train the “Scorpion” Special Forces units for “drug-interdiction and anti-terrorist operations,” takes on strategic importance for future US Grand Strategy in the heart of Central Asia, and for a future control lever over all Eurasia from Russia and Kazakhstan to China itself.

Batken is the axis or pivot point for American operations in central Eurasia.

On March 17, 2010, the Kyrgyz Defense Ministry of the now-deposed Bakiyev government issued a statement that construction of the anti-terrorist training center in the Batken Oblast was, “the bilateral Kyrgyz-American relations project against international terrorism and religious extremism, transnational organized crime, prevention of drug smuggling, not oriented against third countries and does not conflict with national obligations under CSTO and other international organizations” [80].

Unnamed sources in the Defense Ministry of Kyrgyzstan have said that the US-trained Kyrgyz ‘anti-terror’ soldiers will be involved in the possible ‘local conflicts’ — and specifically in conflicts with Uzbekistan — a very convenient pretext to spread the US-orchestrated conflict to the strategic Ferghana Valley.

The Kyrgyz Defense Ministry added that construction of the US training camp in the Batken Oblast was but “one of many joint projects of Kyrgyzstan and USA” in the military area, while “cooperation on military-technical matters has been implemented under the Pentagon’s FMF (Foreign Military Financing) program since 1996″ [81].

Some military analysts in China and in Russia, with whom the author has spoken privately, believe that involving US-trained local soldiers in local conflicts serves the intent of the US Central Command — to justify and spread NATO and US presence across the strategic corridors of Central Asia, positioning the US militarily to control future energy and political developments from Russia to China and across Eurasia.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on right

Eurasia is the vast region identified by US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as containing the only group of nations that could pose a challenge to America’s global hegemony.
Brzezinski, the protege of David Rockefeller and a student of British geopolitician Mackinder, wrote in 1997:

“America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy…With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design…That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” [82]

Brzezinski added, in his most revealing book,

“The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role“ [83].

In this context the following actions assume a larger significance:

• In January 2009 the Commander of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, announced that transit agreements had been signed with Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

• In March the Uzbek government allowed US soldiers to be transferred to Afghanistan via the German base at Termez in German Luftwaffe planes.

• In May 2009 a US supply hub at the Uzbek airport of Navoi was created, using a South Korean transport firm as proxy.

• In June 2009, it was announced that the lease agreement for the US base at Manas in Kyrgyzstan would be extended after earlier announcements that the Americans would have to leave in August.

• And finally in July 2009 it became public knowledge that the US Air Force was running a small refueling and resupply operation at an unspecified location in Turkmenistan [84].

Pentagon planners began work on their Northern Distribution Network as early as 2006, when news of any Taliban insurgency was barely audible and the US military campaign was at a very low level. Significantly, as the US military presence in Afghanistan has since increased, the armed insurgency has also inevitably increased. As noted, that is more than coincidence. Gradually, stage by stage, US officials began making deals for rights of passage, crucially with Russia and other nations around Afghanistan.

Largely unnoticed, these bilateral accords finally took shape as a whole by mid-2008 in what the US military dubbed the Northern Distribution Network. A brief look at a satellite map provided by Google and by the NOAA in Washington makes the significance of the NDN clearer.

The NDN begins at one of two “western hubs” in Latvia or Georgia. From these secure starting points, the military cargo is transported by a combination of trains, trucks and ferries across Russian territory and the adjacent former-Soviet countries of Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan and Tajikistan or via Uzbekistan into Afghanistan. The publicly stated reason for the NDN routes is to insure safe supply routes to Afghanistan independent of Pakistan [85].

Port in Riga, Latvia

Ironically, the most important NDN route begins in NATO member Latvia’s Baltic all-weather port of Riga where US-chartered container ships offload their cargo onto Russian trains that go south through Russia around the Caspian Sea through Kazakhstan and across Uzbekistan into north Afghanistan. The Russian train-lines were built to supply Russia’s own war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and today Moscow’s cooperation is making them available for use by the US and NATO in their own Afghan campaign [86].

Black Sea port of Poti, Georgia

Another NDN route goes from Georgia, bypassing Russia from the Black Sea port of Poti, to Baku in Azerbaijan where military goods are loaded onto ferries crossing the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan to be trucked to Uzbekistan and on to Afghanistan, presently accounting for one third of the total shipping via NDN. And a third NDN route bypasses Uzbekistan entirely and goes from Kazakhstan via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan [87].

From this geographically central point it becomes clear that Kyrgyzstan is shaping up to become the next theater of war in the Pentagon’s Central Asia strategy, or as General Petraeus called it, the pivot of the Pentagon strategy. As Central Asia expert, Peter Chamberlain describes it:

“The recent sudden realignment of Taliban and Pakistani interests (represented in the string of Taliban “arrests”) is intended to provide the US and NATO with an excuse to open this new front in their terror war, by shifting the emphasis to protecting the new Northern Distribution Network (NDN) that parallels anticipated pipeline routes to the irresistible underground wealth that waits to be pumped from underneath the fertile Caspian basin soil. This attempted realignment on interior Asia was only made possible because American and Pakistani leaders decided to take advantage of Pakistan’s continued friendly relations with the Taliban, instead of working at cross-purposes with each other.” [88]

Opium in the Central Asian War

Poppy seedpod is cut to extract opium sap

The ‘glue’ that clearly holds the entire US Low Intensity Warfare strategy across Central Asia together is opium.

As was the case with the British and the US merchant companies, backed by their governments in the notorious Opium Wars in China beginning the 1840s, opium plays an essential role in the US strategy for control over Central Asia today.

Washington investigative writer Wayne Madsen (of the Wayne Madsen Report) describes the role of opium in the 2001 US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan: “WMR has learned from a Delta Force veteran that when units of the elite military force were sent into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, their first order from the CIA was to protect Afghan poppy fields. WMR’s FBI sources confirmed that Afghanistan has replaced Khun Sa’s poppy production operations in Burma’s ‘Golden Triangle’ as the main source of opium and heroin for the CIA’s narcotics trade.” [89]

In this decades-long CIA and Pentagon effort to train and infiltrate operatives masquerading as Islamic terrorists into Central Asia – particularly in the region from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan surrounding the uranium-rich Ferghana Valley — a major player is the CIA-funded Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU, which has also been active across the border into Kyrgyzstan and throughout the Ferghana Valley, now funds itself with the lucrative opium traffic.

According to Interpol, the IMU is deeply involved in the Afghan heroin trade into and within Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and all across Central Asia. In US Congressional testimony, Ralf Mutschke, a senior Interpol anti-narcotics specialist declared, “Despite the political and ideological agenda of the IMU, this movement is not exclusively terrorist in nature, rather more of a hybrid organization in which criminal interests often take priority over ‘political’ goals. IMU leaders have a vested interest in ongoing unrest and instability in their area in order to secure the routes they use for the transportation of drugs. [90]”

Central Asia analyst Peter Chamberlain points to evidence that the IMU is a drug gang, created in all likelihood by the CIA:

US-sponsored children's textbook

“There is every reason to believe that the IMU itself is a CIA creation. According to the definitive history on this topic, given by author Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, ‘CIA Director William Casey, in a move exceeding his authority, decided to extend destabilizing propaganda measures inside the borders of the Soviet Union. To this end, the CIA promoted the Muslim religion in Uzbekistan, by CIA commissioning a translation of the Qu’ran into Uzbek by an Uzbek exile living in Germany, and then commissioning Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to deliver 5,000 copies…From the very beginning, before the Soviets even invaded, the Afghan revolution was manufactured by a coalition of foreign powers led by the CIA. Even the political form of Wahabi “Islam” which was taught to combatants in local madrassas, using American-created “Islamic” textbooks from the University of Nebraska, was really a deviation from true Islam that incorporated behavioral modification techniques.” [91]

Chamberlain adds,

“If the CIA did, in fact, supply the corrupted Islamic jihadi textbooks to the madrassas where IMU foot soldiers were indoctrinated in Uzbekistan, then it follows that whatever arose from them is also a product of the CIA…American military and drug-interdiction missions in hot pursuit of IMU terrorists and drug-dealers provide cover for Special Forces operatives, who scout-out local leadership for further development, or termination…The Partnership for Peace programs open the door for an influx of thousands of American and NATO trainers, giving them bases for operations for ‘direct-action’ missions, while it transfers tons of surplus military equipment to oil rich customers and sets the stage for joint military war games. [92].

US Ambassador and Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke announced in June 2009 that the US Afghan opium eradication campaign would be abandoned in favor of what the Pentagon calls a campaign of “interdiction.” In a press comment Holbrooke told AP that Washington was phasing out opium eradication in Afghanistan [93].

It has also been reported in the New York Times that the brother of US-installed Afghan President Karzai, Ahmed Wali, is a CIA asset on their payroll the past eight years, and that Wali is the drug warlord of Helmland Province. Among the things the CIA reportedly pays Ahmed Wali Karzai for is recruiting “an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home”. [94]

That makes the Afghan drug trade under the CIA alarmingly similar to their role in the Southeast Asian opium trade during the Vietnam War. The conclusion is overwhelming that neither case was an ‘oversight’ in pursuit of other, more military, goals, but rather an integral, central part of Washington’s strategy.

Opium fields in Afghanistan: harvesting and trade which has been protected and expanded by the NATO operation.

Ahmed Wali has reportedly used his drug proceeds to fund state terror operations, including the intimidation of opponents in the rigged election of 2009. Karzai’s 2007 appointment as anti-corruption chief, Izzatullah Wasifi, meanwhile, spent four years in a Nevada prison for trying to sell heroin to an undercover police officer [95]. Clearly the logic was something like, ‘it takes a heroin dealer to catch one.’

Karzai’s Helmand is no small part of the opium fields of Afghanistan. It represents the greatest concentration of opium production on the planet, producing some 40% of the world’s illicit opium, according to expert US researcher and author John W. McCoy, who has tracked the role of the US intelligence in Asian drug trafficking since the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. In Helmand some 103,000 hectares of opium were cultivated in 2008 – two thirds of all opium in Afghanistan.

McCoy points out that during the CIA-backed Mujahideen guerrilla warfare against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA used drug money —earned by the lucrative opium crops that were planted and harvested by the Mujahideen — to finance the covert war, a war made popular by Hollywood’s Tom Hanks as ‘Charlie Wilson’s War.’ McCoy stresses that during the 1980’s, “the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region.”

To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, McCoy adds,

“The CIA successfully mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban’s opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar.” [96]

It’s a matter of established fact that at the time the US military drove the Afghan Taliban government into exile in late 2001, opium production under Taliban rule had been dramatically reduced. It is also a matter of established fact, and of UN Office on Drugs and Crime record, that in the period since the US-led NATO forces have occupied Afghanistan, the opium harvest has not only recovered, it has rebounded to its highest level in history [97], along with a staggering parallel rise in Afghanistan’s opium production.

The Taliban in 2000 had completely banned the crop. Since the US took control of the country militarily, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the Afghan opium harvest went from just 185 tons grown on less than eight thousand hectares of land in 2001 to 8,200 tons over 193,000 hectares in 2007. That translates into a forty-four-fold rise in opium harvest during eight years of US military occupation of Afghanistan [98].

In 2008 US and UN authorities made much of the headline that acreages of opium poppy plantings were down some 19% from 2007, downplaying the fact that harvest yields at the same time improved by some 15% to keep Afghanistan the world’s largest source of opium for heroin, with no other place even close [99].

For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has accounted for as much as 50% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and supplies the base for over 93% of the world’s heroin supply [100]. It is incorrect to say that under the US military occupation since 2001 Afghanistan’s economy has not grown. GDP had risen by an impressive 66%, all due to the booming, US-protected opium industry controlled by Washington’s hand-picked Karzai regime [101].

The head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan’s current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan’s farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance “to the drug mafia” [102].

In a March 2010 meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Agency (FSKN) Victor Ivanov said, “Afghan opiates led to the death of 1 million people by overdose in the last 10 years, and that is United Nations data. Is that not a threat to world peace and security?” [103]

NATO has formally refused an appeal made by Russia for eradication of opium fields in Afghanistan. The reason? NATO (the US Command) claims eradication would destroy the “sole source of income in the region.” The criminal absurdity of the Afghan mission of NATO is summed up in that simple statement.

At a recent meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, Ivanov called on NATO forces in their stated mission of “normalizing the situation in Afghanistan” to include “the elimination of drug production” [104].

NATO spokesman James Appathurai

NATO spokesman James Appathurai voiced “understanding” for Russian concerns [105], given the country’s estimated 200,000 heroin and morphine addicts and the tens of thousands dying each year as a result of their addiction. Significantly, since the US occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 a major destination of Afghanistan’s revitalized opium industry has been Russia where the drugs are creating major social and economic problems.

The NATO official then said that the Afghan drug problem had to be handled “carefully” in an effort to avoid “alienating” local residents. In a masterpiece of NATO doublespeak, Appathurai stated, “We share the view that it has to be tackled. But there is a slight difference of views. We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only source of income for people who live in the second poorest country in the world without being able to provide them an alternative. That is simply not possible” [106].

US Military as Opium Exporter?

Opium would be the ideal glue for the US wars in Central Asia. It finances ‘insurgencies’ such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Up to 10% of the population of Afghanistan — including the brother of the President and perhaps even the President — live off the proceeds of the opium trade.

Moreover, creating opium and heroin addiction among the tribes and groups of the Central Asian region, as the British learned well during their 1840s Opium Wars in China, is an ideal way to subvert a country, creating both passivity as well as lawlessness and chaos that, in turn, can be used to justify an expanded NATO ‘peace keeping’ presence.

Using Kyrgyzstan migrations to flood China’s Xinjiang and other provinces with opium would be one obvious strategy for Pentagon strategists to quietly ‘encourage.’ Already, Russian society is being devastated by a plague of cheap Afghan heroin, creating large populations of addicts, as well as crime and lawlessness.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Holbrooke and various Pentagon Central Command spokesmen claim that Afghan tribesmen or Uzbeks or Tajiks are carting the opium on the backs of mules across treacherous land passes to Russia and other destinations. However, the reality seems to be quite different. It appears that the opium is being transported by means of the most modern military transport available.

The most explosive aspect of the story of US so-called ‘benign neglect’ of the growth of the Afghan opium harvest are the reports that the opium and refined heroin are transported by US military transport — from sites such as the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan— concealed and protected under national security secrecy.

Cargo planes at Manas air base

Such use of US military transport, if true, would provide the perfect cover as US military aircraft are ‘off limits’ and no one is allowed near them or to search their contents. It would represent a large-scale repeat of the CIA’s Air America flights of heroin during the Vietnam War in the 1960’s [107].

The charge is made by a knowledgeable intelligence source from the region— General Hamid Gul, the retired former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services (ISI) and Director-General of its military intelligence during the Afghan Mujahideen wars of the late 1980s.

“Abdul Wali Karzai is the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan,” Gul stated bluntly in an August 2009 interview. He says that the drug lords are also involved in arms trafficking, which is “a flourishing trade” in Afghanistan. “But what is most disturbing from my point of view is that the military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being used. You said very rightly that the drug routes are northward through the Central Asia republics and through some of the Russian territory, and then into Europe and beyond. But some of it is going directly. That is by the military aircraft” [108].

Gul headed the Pakistan’s ISI from 1987 through 1989 during the peak of the Mujahideen insurgency and worked closely then with the CIA. He has since been forbidden entry into both the USA and the UK, because, he says, he is too outspoken about the true US and British agenda for the region, which he believes also includes the systematic destruction of Pakistan as a nation [109].

Hamid Gul

Gul’s charge that US military aircraft are being used to secretly transport Afghan opium and heroin through the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, as well as via the various routes of the Northern Distribution Network, has also been anecdotally corroborated by Afghani Tadjik sources, and by US military personnel speaking off-record, as well as by Russian reports [110].

This special role of the US base at Manas, in conjunction with the latest US moves to establish a “drug interdiction and anti-terror” training base at Batken in southwest Kyrgyzstan, bordering the volatile Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan, would fit nicely with the announcement by US Special Afghan Envoy Holbrooke that the new US policy on Afghan opium will be one of selective ‘interdiction,’ and not of eradication. Conveniently, the new Pentagon policy also leaves 93% of world opium untouched by US ‘eradicators’ and available for refining into heroin for sale on the markets of China, Uzbekistan, Russia and beyond, a form of new Opium War.

US mainstream media report that the Taliban is in control of the opium trade. However, According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Anti-Government Elements (or AGEs), which include but are not limited to the Taliban, account for just 2% of what the UN estimated was a $3.4 billion annual drug revenue. That figure is backed up even by the US CIA and the DIA who estimate that the Taliban receives a meager $70 million a year from the drugs trade. The real volumes of heroin and raw opium in Afghanistan are controlled by warlords linked to the Karzai machine.

The latest US strategy for dealing with the Afghan drug ‘problem’ is also carefully crafted. It puts drug traffickers with known ties to ‘insurgents’ on a list to be eliminated—i.e. killed. It excludes the vast majority of Afghan drug lords who garner some 98% of total opium and heroin revenues and who work with the drug-sotted Karzai family and Karzai’s corrupt regime.

In effect, as one analyst put it, the United States military ”would be assisting to eliminate the competition for drug lords allied with occupying forces or the Afghan government and helping them to further corner the market” [111].

Craig Murray, UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan until 2004, claims that convoys under General Rashid Dostum — who was reappointed in 2009 as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan National Army by President Hamid Karzai — would truck the drugs over the border.

According to Ambassador Murray, Dostum is a key figure running the Afghan heroin trade from his home near Mazar e Sharif. He was brought back from exile by Karzai, with US approval, for the recent elections where he duly delivered “100%” of the votes in key districts for Karzai. The Pentagon now proposes to supply weapons on a massive scale to Dostum’s private (drug) militia, ostensibly to “fight the Taliban.” That, despite the fact that Dostum remains nominal Army Chief of Staff, and despite the fact that Washington knows about his role in the Afghan heroin trade [112].

And President Karzai’s own brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, long on the CIA Payroll according to the New York Times [113], has been accused of being a major drug lord, making for a nice circle around the US-backed Karzai government [114].

Murray further emphasizes that Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with NATO troops….The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government. When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons”. [115].

Conclusion

A careful look at the map of Central Asia makes clear why Afghanistan is central to US Pentagon efforts to destabilize and militarize all of Central Asia and to threaten simultaneously China, Russia, Iran and the other neighboring countries — notably, all members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Drugs proliferation and anti-drug interdictions, terror and anti-terror operations, deliberate local police brutality and control of Eurasia’s existing and future energy pipelines — all are ingredients of the US-run NATO operations radiating out of Afghanistan.

Kyrgyzstan plays a ‘pivot’ role now in the expansion of that war across all of Central Asia. Moscow knows this; Beijing knows this. The stakes for Washington’s Great Game in Kyrgyzstan and across Central Asia are nothing less than the ultimate survival of the American Full Spectrum Dominance goal of total global military hegemony.

Like the US war in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan is deliberately designed by Washington to be another ‘no-win war.’

The ‘failure’ of the Afghan war is being engineered to justify a spillover into Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the Ferghana valley and from there across Central Asia. Before the popular protests in March this year drove the Bakiyev gang into exile, Washington was well on its way to broadening the war by means of the agreements with Bakiyev to build up ‘anti-terror’ training bases in the country. From there, control of the Eurasian land space from Xinjiang into Kazakhstan and Russia would be just a matter of time, given the spread of the opium drug routes.

This time, unlike the early 1970s, the stakes for American hegemony are vastly higher. The role of Kyrgyzstan’s interim provisional government, the role of Moscow and of Beijing as well as Iran and Uzbekistan will be decisive in one of the world’s most intensive centers of conflict.

Notes Part I

[1] RIA Novosti, Russia's Medvedev blames Kyrgyz authorities for unrests, says civil war risk high, April 14, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/exsoviet/20100414/158570646.html 

[2] John C.K. Daly, op. cit.

[3] Leila Saralayeva, Kyrgyz opposition protests rising utility tariffs, AP, March 17, 2010, accessed in http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2010/03/17/thousands-of-kyrgyz-demonstrators-protest-utility-tariffs-hike-and-political-oppression-23948/

[4] RIA Novosti, Russia throws weight behind provisional Kyrgyz govt., April 8, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/exsoviet/20100408/158480874.html. Well-informed former Indian Ambasador, K. Gajendra Singh in an article published in Russia’s RIA Novosti also states that Putin had spoken with Otunbayeva twice since the protests began on April 7 and that she had also visited Moscow in January and March of this year. (K. G. Singh, Geopolitical battle in Kyrgyzstan over US military Lilypond in central Asia, Ria Novosti, 13 April 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/valdai_foreign_media/20100413/158555369.html).

[5] RIA Novosti, Kyrgyz prime minister protests Russian media reporting of riots, April 7, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/world/20100407/158462398.html

[6] Richard Spencer, Quiet American behind tulip revolution, London, The Daily Telegraph, April 2, 2005, accessed in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kyrgyzstan/1486983/Quiet-American-behind-tulip-revolution.html 

[7] Philip Shishkin, In Putin's Backyard, Democracy Stirs -- With US Help, The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2005.

[8] Kyrgyzstan National Security Service ‘source’, Specially for War and Peace.ru, April 10, 2010, translated from Russian for the author from www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/46021/

[9] Report from Russian political blog War and Peace.Ru. accessed in www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/46417/ 

[10] Centerra Gold website, Toronto, Canada, accessed in http://www.centerragold.com/about/management/

[11] David Gollust, US Urges Dialogue in Kyrgyzstan, 7 April, 2010, Voice of America, accessed in http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/US-Urges-Dialogue-in-Kyrgyzstan-90120737.html

[12] P.J. Crowley, comments to press regarding events in Kyrgyzstan, April 7, 2010, cited in John C.K. Daly, The Truth Behind the Recent Unrest in Kyrgyzstan, www.oilprice.com.

[13] AFP, US 'not taking sides' in Kyrgyzstan political turmoil, April 15, 2010, accessed in http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20100415-210389.html

[14] Hamsayeh.net, New Interim Kyrgyz Government to Shut Down the US Airbase at Manas, April 9, 2010, accessed in http://www.hamsayeh.net/hamsayehnet_iran-international%20news1114.htm

[15] Karasiwo, Nuclear deals and Kyrgyz fears – Medvedev in Washington, April 14, 2010, accessed in http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5610284-nuclear-deals-and-kyrgyz-fears-medvedev-in-washington

[16] Maria Golovnina and Dmitry Solovyov, Kyrgyzstan’s new leaders say they had help from Russia, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 8, 2010, accessed in http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/kyrgyzstans-new-leaders-say-they-had-help-from-russia/article1527239/ 

[17] Sreeram Chaulia, Democratisation, NGOs and ‘colour revolutions’, 19 January 2006 accessed in http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/colour_revolutions_3196.jsp

[18] BNO News, OSCE says Kyrgyzstan President Bakiyev’s departure is the result of joint efforts with Obama, Medvedev, April 15, 2010, accessed in http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world/osce-says-kyrgyzstan-president-bakiyevs-departure-is-the-result-of-joint-efforts-with-obama-medvedev_100348625.html

[19] Philip Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State, US Clinton Urges Peaceful Resolution of Kyrgyz Situation, 11 April, 2010, cited in RIA Novosti, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/world/20100411/158517788.html

[20] Donna Miles, Gates expresses confidence in continued Manas access, American Forces Press Service, April 14, 2010, accessed in http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123199625

Notes Part II

[21] John C. K. Daly, Sino-Kyrgyz relations after the Tulip Revolution, Washington, The Jamestown Foundation, China Brief, June 7, 2005 accessed in http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HO72dbRF7HkJ:www.asianresearch.org/articles/2614.html+behind+tulip+revolution&cd=26&hl=en&ct=clnk

[22] Philip Shishkin, In Putin's Backyard, Democracy Stirs – With U.S. Help, The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2005.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] F. William Engdahl, Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China, July 11, 2009, Global Research, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14327

[27] K. Gajendra Singh, Geopolitical Battle in Kyrgyzstan over US Military Lilypond in Central Asia, New Delhi, April 11, 2010, accessed in http://tarafits.blogspot.com/

[28] Ibid.

[29] Cornelius Graubner, Implications of the Northern Distribution Network in Central Asia,  Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, Johns Hopkins University, September 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5169

[30] John C.K. Daly, op. cit.

[31] Roman Muzalevsky, The Implications of China’s High-Speed Eurasian Railway Strategy for Central Asia, Eurasian Daily Monitor, Vol. 7, issue 64, April 2, 2010.

[32] Afghanistan Ministry of Mines, Aynak Copper Project is Inaugurated in a Glorious Ceremony, July 9, 2009, accessed in http://mom.gov.af/index.php?page_id=87

[33] Roman Muzalevsky, The Economic Underpinnings of China’s Regional Security Strategy in Afghanistan, Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 7 Issue 75, April 19, 2010, accessed in http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[swords]=8fd5893941d69d0be3f378576261ae3e&tx_ttnews[any_of_the_words]=afghanistan&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=36285&tx_ttnews[backPid]=7&cHash=436692a068

[34] Ibid.

Notes Part III

[35] F. William Engdahl, Ukraine Geopolitics and the US-NATO Military Agenda: Tectonic Shift in Heartland Power, Global Research, March 16, 2010, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18128
[36] ASTANA, Kyrgyzstan wants to join Russian-led post-Soviet customs union, April 19, 2010, Moscow, RIA Novosti.
[37] RIA Novosti, Kyrgyzstan must restore state institutions – Medvedev, Moscow, April 20, 2010.
[38] Alexander Osipovich, Uzbekistan: Spooked by Kyrgyz unrest, Karimov warms to Russia, Moscow, April 21, 2010, RIA Novosti.
[39] Dawn, US not to use Uzbek base, says Holbrooke, Astana, February 21, 2010, accessed in http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/07-us-not-to-use-uzbek-base-says-holbrooke-ha-01
[40] John C. K. Daly, op. cit.
[41]  ‘Epiphanes,’ Russian blog comments from former FSB officer on Kyrgyzstan events,  April 8, 2010, writing in http://www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/46021/  
[42] Kyrgyzstan National Security Service ‘source’ writing in http://www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/46021/  [43] Erica Marat, Kyrgyzstan Relaxes Control over Drug Trafficking, Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol.7, Issue 24, February 4, 2010.
[44] K. Gajendra Singh, op. cit.

Notes Part IV

[45] Edouardo Real, Zbigniew Brzezinski: Defeated by his Success, January 30, 2008, accessed in
http://dangeroustravel.blogspot.com/2008/01/defeated-by-his-success.html
[46] Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, New York Council on Foreign Relations, November-December 1999, p.31.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Lorenzo Vidino, How Chechnya Became a Breeding Ground for Terror, Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2005, Philadelphia, accessed in http://www.meforum.org/744/how-chechnya-became-a-breeding-ground for-terror
[49] Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden?, Global Research, September 12, 2001, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
[50] Heritage Foundation, Washington D.C., 2006 Annual Report lists defense giants McDonnell Douglas and Boeing as well as oil companies Chevron and ExxonMobil as funders. See Source Watch: Heritage Foundation, accessed in http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heritage_Foundation
[51] Ariel Cohen, Radical Islam and US Interests in Central Asia, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Middle East and Central Asia, Committee on International Relations, US House of Representatives, October 29, 2003, accessed in http://www.heritage.org/Research/Testimony/Radical-Islam-and-US-Interests in-Central-Asia
[52] Ibid.
[53] Ibid.
[54] General David H. Petraeus, US Army, Commander US Central Command, Statement to Senate Armed Services Committee on the Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategic Posture Review and the Posture of US Central Command, April 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.centcom.mil/en/countries/aor/kazakhstan/
[55] Ibid.
[56] Halford J. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History, London, Royal Geographic Society, 1904. Mackinder’s Pivot Area was what later essentially became the Soviet Union, including Central Asia, plus Afghanistan.
[57] US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Minority Staff Report for Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money Laundering: A Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities; (2) Asif Ali Zardari Case History, Washington D.C., November 9, 1999, accessed in http://hsgac.senate.gov/110999_report.htm
[58] Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti, U.N. Envoy’s Ties to Pakistani Are Questioned, The New York Times, August 25, 2008.
[59] Syed Ifran Raza, Minister criticized over anti-terror authority, Dawn, Karachi, 12 December, 2009, accessed in http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-contentlibrary/dawn/news/pakistan/13+pm+sets+up+counter+terrorism+authority-za-09
[60] Dawn, Zardari calls for counter-terror strategy, Karachi, March 16, 2010, accessed in http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-zardari-calls-for-counter-terror-strategy-ss-05
[61] Thomas M. Sanderson and Andrew C. Kutchins, The Northern Distribution Network and Afghanistan: Geopolitical Challenges and Opportunities, Washington, CSIS, A Report of the CSIS Transnational Threats Project and the Russia and Eurasia Program, January 2010, accessed in http://csis.org/publication/northerndistribution-network-and-afghanistan
[62] Dawn, US not to use Uzbek base, says Holbrooke, Astana, 21 February 2010, accessed in
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/07-us-not-to-use-uzbekbase-says-holbrooke-ha-01
[63] Richard Boucher, Re-designation of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Washington D.C., September 25, 2002, United States Department of State.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2002/13708.htm
[64] Wayne Madsen, quoted in Peter Chamberlain, America’s ‘Islamists’ Go Where Oilmen Fear to Tread, News Central Asia, March 24, 2010, accessed in http://www.newscentralasia.net/moreNews.php?nID=586
[65] Ibid.
[66] Mark Thompson, Moving Troops to Afghanistan Harder Than Getting Them, Time, New York, October 14, 2009, accessed in http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1930097,00.html.
[67] Frank E. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, London, 1971, Faber and Faber.
[68] C.M. Olsson and E.P. Guittet, Counter Insurgency, Low Intensity Conflict and Peace Operations: A Genealogy of the Transformations of Warfare, March 5, 2005 paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, available from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p71242_index.html
[69] Grant T. Hammond, Low-intensity Conflict: War by another name, London, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol.1, Issue 3, December 1990, pp. 226-238.
[70] Jon Boone, US pours millions into anti-Taliban militias in Afghanistan, November 22, 2009, The Guardian, London.
[71] Jeremy Kuzmarov, American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11-1-10, March 15, 2010.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Rahim Faiez, US: Insurgents attack Bagram Air Field, Associated Press, May 19, 2010.
[77] Mark Mazzetti, US Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts, The New York Times, May 15, 2010.
[78] Ibid.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Central Asia News, Kyrgyz Defense Ministry: The training center in Batken is not oriented against third countries, Ferghana.ru, March 18, 2010, accessed in http://enews.ferghana.ru/news.php?id=1625
[81] Ibid.
[82] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York, Basic Books, 1998, pp. 194-198.
[83] Ibid.
[84] Cornelius Graubner, Implications of the Northern Distribution Network in Central Asia, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, Johns Hopkins University, September 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5169
[85] Bill Marmon, New Supply ‘Front’ for Afghan War Runs Across Russia, Georgia and the ‘Stans, March 21, 2010, accessed in http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/the-northern-distribution-network-ndnrail-and-road-routes/
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Peter Chamberlain, America’s ‘Islamists’ Go Where Oilmen Fear to Tread, News Central Asia, March 24, 2010,
accessed in http://www.newscentralasia.net/moreNews.php?nID=586
[89] Wayne Madsen, CIA Involvement With Drug Trade Resulted In Death Threats Against US
Senator, accessed in http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/409382502/madsendeconcini
[90] Ralf Mutschke, Threat Posed by the Convergence of Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Terrorism, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, US House of Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, US Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., December 13, 2000.
[91] Peter Chamberlain, op. cit.
[92] Ibid.
[93] Richard Holbrooke, quoted in US to shift approach to Afghanistan drug trade
The focus will move from opium eradication to fighting trafficking and promoting alternate crops, US envoy Richard Holbrooke says, Associated Press, June 28, 2009, accessed in http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/28/world/fg-afghan-drugs28
[94] Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazetti and James Risen, Brother of Afghan Leader Said to be Paid by CIA, The New York Times, October 27, 2009.
[95] Jeremy Kuzmarov, op. cit.
[96] Ibid.
[97] United Nations office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report: 2009, accessed in
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/WDR-2009.html
[98] Ibid.
[99] Ibid.
[100] Alfred W. McCoy, op. cit.
[101] Craig Murray, Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time, London, Daily Mail, July 21, 2007, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469983/Britain-protecting-biggest-heroin-croptime.html#ixzz0oTXeKNGO
[102] Ibid.
[103] Andrei Fedyashin, Russia and NATO divided over Afghan opium, March 25, 2010, RIA Novosti.
[104] RIA Novosti, Russian official mocks NATO concern for Afghan poppy growers, Moscow, March 25, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100325/158310030.html
[105] Ibid.
[106] Ibid.
[107] Jeremy R. Hammond, Ex-ISI Chief Says Purpose of New Afghan Intelligence Agency RAMA Is ‘to destabilize Pakistan,’ Foreign Policy Journal, August 12, 2009, accessed in
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/08/12/ex-isi-chief-says-purpose-of-new-afghan-intelligence-agencyrama-is-%E2%80%98to-destabilize-pakistan%E2%80%99/
[108] Ibid.
[109] Ibid.
[110] Various off-record conversations with the author over the course of April and May 2010.
[111] Ibid.
[112] Craig Murray, On Missiles and Missile Defense, September 23, 2009, accessed in
www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/09/on_missiles_and.html
[113] Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, James Risen, Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by CIA, The New York Times, October 27, 2009.
[114] Craig Murray, US Supported Afghan Government Warlords Control World Heroin Trade, August 13, 2009, accessed in http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/08/us_supported_af.html
[115] Craig Murray, Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time, London, Daily Mail, July 21, 2007, accessed in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469983/Britain-protecting-biggest-heroin-croptime.html#ixzz0oTXeKNGO