Wednesday, June 17, 2009

A New Cold War?

The media has barely mentioned that, even with Iran in turmoil, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is out of the country for an international meeting in Russia. They have not said what that meeting is about or who else is included in the meeting.

The meeting is at Yekaterinburg, and it is a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The nations of India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan have official observers.

The United States asked to attend the meeting and was told no.

What do those nations have in common? Well, in a word, Afghanistan. They are all bordering upon or very close to Afghanistan.

The organization was formed in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the American Afghan proxy war of 1978-1992, and went through several changes of form and members in subsequent years. The SCO added a military cooperation clause in the Fifth Summit meeting in 2005, by which time SCO members were becoming very concerned by the actions of the United states and its NATO allies. We had remained in Afghanistan as a military presence for several years, had begun building major bases, and were showing signs that we had no intention of leaving. From GlobalResearch.ca,

The United States and its NATO allies had launched three unprovoked wars in four years - Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 - as well as waging counterinsurgency and proxy conflicts and subversion campaigns in Colombia, Macedonia, Ivory Coast, Yemen, the Philippines, Liberia and elsewhere.

What alarmed SCO members as much as the preceding was the so-called Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in March of 2005 and what government authorities in Tashkent saw as a variation on the theme of regime change in Uzbekistan in May of that year, a month before the SCO summit.

In a declaration issued that year, 2005, the SCO stated,

"Considering the completion of the active military stage of antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan, the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization consider it necessary that respective members of the antiterrorist coalition set a final timeline for their temporary use of the above-mentioned objects of infrastructure and stay of their military contingent on the territories of the SCO member states."

A Chinese daily newspaper reiterated that statement thusly,

"The Declaration points out that the SCO member countries have the ability and responsibility to safeguard the security of the Central Asian region, and calls on Western countries to leave Central Asia. That is the most noticeable signal given by the Summit to the world."

It was as this point that members of this organization began demanding that we close our military bases in their nations and leave. Our media reported one or two of these, and represented them as having been “bribed” by Russia to take such action, but these demands carried much larger implication. These were not isolated incidents; the nations doing it were members of an organization, rather equivalent in nature to NATO, which was calling for us to leave the area and the statements by those nations, unreported in our media, reflected that fact.

In July, 2006 Uzbekistan demanded we close our base and leave, saying that they have provided the base "for the sole purpose of ousting Taliban rulers from Afghanistan" which had been achieved almost four years earlier.

That same month, Kyrgyzstan demanded that we leave that country.

Tajikistan, that same month said that "it is time for the United States and its allies to set a date to pull their conventional troops out of Central Asia as the situation in Afghanistan has stabilized," and cancelled permission to use a former Soviet base in its territory. Notice that this statement, like the one from Uzbekistan, not only demands that we leave their boundaries, but that we leave Central Asia altogether.

Both Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld attempted to obtain extensions of the use of these bases and failed. The United States and NATO held “show of force” exercises on Central Asia, and the SCO countered with similar exercises. The cancellation of the use of these bases, like the military exercises countering our “show of force,” were not isolated incidents, but were the concerted efforts of nations aligned in common interest against us. We have not even acknowledged that this organization exists.

Our leadership has a bad case of the vapors over a handful of maniacs in the wilds of the Hindu Kush, and have so over-reacted to that panic that we seem to have started a whole new Cold War.

No comments:

Post a Comment