4 January 2010 By Rick Rozoff The first of
33,000 more U.S. troops have arrived in Afghanistan
for a Christmas surge and they will soon be joined by
as many as 10,000 additional non-American troops
serving under NATO in the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF). Washington will have over
100,000 uniformed personnel and tens of thousands of
new military contractors in the South Asian war zone,
and with more than 50,000 other NATO and NATO partner
forces present total troop strength will exceed
150,000. Except for a modest amount of troops assigned to
the NATO Training Mission – Iraq in Baghdad, the U.S.
with its 120,000 troops is now largely alone in that
country. NATO, especially new NATO, member and
candidate states were ordered to transfer their forces
from Iraq to Afghanistan starting approximately a year
ago and are now redeploying soldiers from missions in
Kosovo, Lebanon and Chad to the same destination. The
Afghan battlefront, then, currently has the largest
amount of military forces stationed in any war zone in
the world. [1] Troops from NATO countries stationed in Bosnia, the
Central African Republic, Chad, Lebanon and off the
coast of Somalia are currently assigned to European
Union missions (European warships also participate in
NATO’s Ocean Shield naval interdiction in Somali
waters and the Gulf of Aden) and their transfer to the
South Asian war front indicates the virtual
interchangeability of armed units assigned to NATO and
the European Union. [2] Since the beginning of this year’s escalation of
the war in Afghanistan and into neighboring Pakistan,
Western public figures and media have dwelt frequently
and at length on the war being a – or the – test for
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ostensibly the
major watershed and crucible in its 60-year history. When the bloc, the world’s only military alliance,
invoked its Article 5 mutual assistance clause in
September of 2001 to support its leading member, the
U.S., in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan,
the Alliance was fresh on the heels of its first-ever
war: The 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in
early 1999, the first all-out military assault
targeting a European nation since Hitler’s and
Mussolini’s attacks and invasions of 1939-1941. By activating Article 5 – “The Parties agree that
an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe
or North America shall be considered an attack against
them all [and] will assist the Party or Parties so
attacked by taking forthwith” – NATO enlisted for its
first land war and its first war in Asia. It also exploited its effective war provision to
launch Operation Active Endeavor in early October of
2001, a comprehensive, airtight naval surveillance and
interdiction program throughout the entire
Mediterranean Sea that monitors all activity in NATO’s
new mare nostrum (our sea) and dominates all access
points into the world’s most important sea: The Strait
of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles Strait and the Suez
Canal, connecting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic
Ocean, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and thence to the
Indian Ocean, respectively. The U.S.-led military alliance gained control over
that vast stretch of strategic waterways by adopting
the American post-September 11, 2001 pretexts of
combating terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
The first was the rationale for invading Afghanistan,
the second for invading Iraq. Three years after the inauguration of Active
Endeavor, which continues with full force to this day,
the NATO summit in Turkey developed the Istanbul
Cooperation Initiative which upgraded military
partnerships with the members of the bloc’s
Mediterranean Dialogue – Algeria, Egypt, Israel,
Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – and targeted
the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council –
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates – for a similar relationship, one
modeled on the Partnership for Peace program that
prepared twelve Eastern European nations for accession
to full NATO membership over the last decade. [3] In ten years the military bloc has expanded from
its Cold War confines, North America and Western and
Southern Europe, into almost all of Eastern Europe
including former Warsaw Pact states and Soviet and
Yugoslav republics. The bipolar military division of
Europe symbolized by the Berlin Wall [4] that ended
twenty years ago has been replaced by a unilateral
expansion of the world’s sole military bloc toward
Russia’s western borders, from the Baltic to the Black
to the Adriatic Seas. From there it has extended its
reach through deployments and partnerships into the
South Caucasus, Northeastern and Central Africa, and
Central and South Asia. If Afghanistan is a trial or the test of NATO in
its sixtieth year, it is not so for the NATO of 1949
but of what leading Alliance officials and other
proponents in recent years have referred to as 21st
century NATO, expeditionary NATO, global NATO: The
first attempt in history to forge an international
military alliance. An international armed network with
the world’s self-proclaimed exclusive superpower and
its nuclear arsenal as its foundation and at its core.
The “asymmetric” war in Afghanistan now in its
ninth year is a seminal venture for NATO in several
respects. In addition to it signifying the bloc’s
first ground war and its first colonial excursion
outside the Euro-Atlantic world, the drawn-out and by
all indications indefinite campaign in South Asia is
laboratory and training camp, firing range and
convergence point for the U.S.’s consolidation of a
global military strike and occupation force first
tested in Kosovo in 1999 with 50,000 troops under NATO
command, then in Iraq after 2003 with tens of
thousands of troops from NATO, new NATO and NATO
candidate nations. [5] Washington and Brussels have now dragooned armed
contingents from fifty nations on five continents to
serve under one commander, General Stanley McChrystal,
head of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. New
contributing states include geographically remote and
otherwise diverse countries that include Colombia,
Bosnia, Georgia, Montenegro, Mongolia, Armenia and
South Korea. All except Mongolia either are or have
recently been the scenes of wars or at any moment may
be. As numerous statements by political and military
leaders of nations supplying troops to NATO for the
Afghan war have established, that battleground is an
ideal location and opportunity for gaining real-life
combat experience for application at home. The bulk of
countries in this category border Russia on the
latter’s northwestern and southwestern flanks. [6] The defense minister of Austria, one of only a
small number of European nations now yet a full NATO
member, recently lamented that American officials were
pressuring his country to provide more troops for
deployment to Afghanistan, having to remind readers of
one of his country’s newspapers that his is still a
sovereign state. As reported in Deutsche Welle,
“Austria and the United States are quarreling over
Austria’s troop levels in Afghanistan. The Austrian
government says it feels strong pressure from the US
to send more of its troops to the NATO mission.” The South Korean daily Dong-A Ilbo wrote on
December 21 that “NATO has invited for the first time
a Korean military delegation to a meeting next year of
countries sending troops to Afghanistan. “The dispatch of Korean troops scheduled for July
will likely help expedite far-reaching military
cooperation between Korea and NATO.” The source added
that with the advent of the new Lee Myung-bak
government in Seoul “As Korea actively participates in
international security cooperation, including its
decision to send troops to Afghanistan and fully join
the Proliferation Security Initiative, NATO’s
assessment of Korea is changing.” The Proliferation
Security Initiative (PSI) is a another mechanism,
linked with the U.S. thousand-ship navy project as
well as NATO’s Operation Active Endeavor, to enmesh
more and more nations around the world into an
international military network run from Washington.
[7] South Korea is already what is identified by NATO
as a Contact Country partner, the others being Japan,
Australia and New Zealand, serving as the foundation
stones for a rapidly emerging “Asian NATO” that
includes Singapore and Mongolia – both of whom have or
will have troops serving under NATO for the first
time, in Afghanistan – as well as the Philippines,
Thailand, Brunei and future prospects like India,
Bangladesh and Cambodia and the five former Soviet
republics in Central Asia as well as Afghanistan and
Pakistan. [8] While advancing eastward, the North Atlantic bloc
has also moved south and has begun to formally
penetrate Africa, with an air transport mission to the
Darfur region of Sudan in 2005 and naval deployments
off Somalia in the Horn of Africa beginning in 2007. Washington’s mainstay military ally in South and
all of Latin America, Colombia, in addition to turning
over seven military bases to the Pentagon in a move
that could ignite a war with its neighbors Venezuela
and Ecuador, is sending a company of battle-hardened
U.S.-trained combat troops to Afghanistan for NATO’s
ISAF mission. They will bring their own wartime
experience to bear in the South Asian nation and will
return home, like their Georgian and South Korean
military counterparts, also trained by the U.S.,
better prepared for armed conflict against neighboring
states. In addition to Britain, France and the Netherlands
being obligated to lend their colonial possessions in
Latin America and off its coasts to their U.S. NATO
ally for use against Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of Our America (ALBA) members Bolivia, Cuba,
Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela (post-coup Honduras
is withdrawing), steps have been taken over the past
fifteen years to expand NATO ties with other Latin
American nations as well as Colombia. [9] In 1995 Chile and Argentina (under President Carlos
Menem) sent troops to serve under NATO in Bosnia, the
Alliance’s first military deployment outside a member
state’s territory. This week Chile agreed to prolong
the stationing of troops there – the mission since
having been transferred from NATO to the European
Union – with a government official stating, “We have
been able to see Chile together with the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization in a European country,
and the interaction of our armed forces with
first-level armies of the world.” [10] The war and war zone trajectory for NATO candidates
and partner states over the past fifteen years has
been from Bosnia to Kosovo to Macedonia to Iraq and
finally Afghanistan. Chilean armed forces, whoever
wins next month’s presidential run-off election, may
eventually be sent to Afghanistan. Solidifying ties with Chile, which is involved in
the current multinational dispute over claims in the
Antarctic, and with South Africa, where NATO warships
and have docked and conducted naval exercises over the
past two years, in addition to Australia which has the
largest non-member troop contingent serving under NATO
in Afghanistan, the Alliance is positioning itself for
the scramble at the southern end of the planet [11] as
it is for that at the top of the world. [12] Two months before the dismantling of the Berlin
Wall and the effective end of the Cold War, the
triennial summit of the Non-Aligned Movement was held
in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Present were the
representatives of 108 nations that defined themselves
as militarily non-aligned. Twenty years later, and with over twenty more
countries in the world after the disintegration of the
Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia itself and
the independence of East Timor, the pressure to join
in military agreements, partnerships, deployments,
exercises and base hosting with the U.S. and NATO is
more intense than during the Cold War. The newly activated U.S. Africa Command alone
targets 53 nations for individual and collective
partnerships with the Pentagon. The war in Afghanistan
is the broadest global touchstone to date in this
militarization of the world. Washington is pressuring
all and sundry to contribute with troops, logistics
and funds and is employing the war to build up
bilateral military ties and weapons and warfighting
interoperability with nations throughout the world. The first decade of the new millennium has been one
of war, starting in earnest in Afghanistan, and the
expansion of American bases and troops into Eastern
Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, and
Central and South Asia. Areas that until now had been
spared the Pentagon’s permanent presence. 1) U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In
Afghanistan’s History http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/u-s-nato-poised-for-most-massive-war-in-afghanistans-history 2) EU, NATO, US: 21st Century Alliance For Global
Domination http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/eu-nato-us-21st-century-alliance-for-global-domination 3) NATO In Persian Gulf: From Third World War To
Istanbul http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/nato-in-persian-gulf-from-third-world-war-to-istanbul 4) 1989-2009: Moving The Berlin Wall To Russia’s
Borders http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/1989-2009-berlin-wall-moves-to-russian-border 5) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global
Army http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army 6) Afghan War: NATO Trains Finland, Sweden For
Conflict With Russia http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-trains-finland-sweden-for-conflict-with-russia 7) Proliferation Security Initiative And U.S.
1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/proliferation-security-initiative-and-us-1000-ship-navy-control-of-worlds-oceans-prelude-to-war 8) Global Military Bloc: NATO’s Drive Into Asia http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/global-military-bloc-natos-drive-into-asia U.S. Expands Asian NATO Against China, Russia http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/u-s-expands-asian-nato-against-china-russia 9) Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War:
Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/stop-nato 10) Xinhua News Agency, December 22, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/nato-of-the-south-chile-south-africa-australia-antarctica 12) NATO’s, Pentagon’s New Strategic Battleground:
The Arctic http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/natos-pentagons-new-strategic-battleground-the-arctic Comments 💬 التعليقات |