17 September 2010 By Rick Rozoff On September 15 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates and Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov
signed a memorandum of understanding on military
cooperation in Washington, D.C. The two defense chiefs also issued a joint
declaration committing their respective states to
establishing a defense working group which will meet
annually. According to a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign
Ministry, the two officials discussed what is
euphemistically referred to as missile defense and
ratification of the updated Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty (START) agreement. In addition, “The parties
also plan[ned] to focus on some problems of regional
security, including the situation in Afghanistan,
Central Asia and the Caucasus,” according to Itar-Tass. The mainstream media in both countries will
doubtlessly herald the news as further confirmation of
warmer ties between the nations after the current U.S.
administration succeeded that of George W. Bush in the
tiresome seesaw of Republican-Democratic rotations
that have gone on since 1852 with little enough
substantive difference in foreign policy. Obligatory and unimaginative references to a
largely rhetorical “reset button” and similar cliche-mongering
will be rife. All’s now right with the world whether or not God’s
in his Heaven, and the unfortunate contretemps that
set in after then-Russian president Vladimir Putin
dared to speak the truth about contemporary world
affairs at the Munich Security Conference three years
ago and the five-day war between Washington’s client
in Georgia and Russia of a year later has been
relegated to the realm of the regrettable past. Official Moscow is permitting the transit of
non-lethal cargo across Russian territory for NATO’s
war in Afghanistan – evidently without any sense of
historical irony – and there is talk of reactivating
the NATO-Russia Council after the suspension of its
work following the 2008 Caucasus war. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will tout his
role in recalibrating relations with the world’s sole
military superpower and expect to harvest
corresponding political rewards for himself and his
United Russia party. Russia’s experience with military cooperation
pacts, from that with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France in
1807 to that of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1939, might
have taught it a lesson or two. But history is long
and memory is short. While Gates and Serdyukov discussed South and
Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Pentagon, in its
own right and through the global military bloc it
controls, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, has
been doing more than talking. Reports persist of the U.S. planning to set up new
military training sites in the former Soviet Central
Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, in
addition to the Pentagon and NATO continuing to
transit an estimated 50,000 troops a month through
Kyrgyzstan for the war in Afghanistan and NATO running
operations from an air base in the Tajik capital. American troops and those of its British ally
wrapped up ten days of 2010 Steppe Eagle military
exercises in Kazakhstan, the one Central Asian nation
that borders Russia. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are members
of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO),
a post-Soviet defense alliance led by Russia which
also includes Belarus, Armenia and Uzbekistan.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan are the
only nations outside of Europe to have been granted a
NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan. On September 11 of this year the CSTO’s main rival
in post-Soviet space, NATO, began disaster simulation
exercises in Armenia under the auspices of the
Alliance’s Partnership for Peace program, one that
includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. That is, all
former Soviet republics except for Russia and Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania, the last three full NATO members
since 2004. The Armenia 2010 exercise includes troops from 15
Partnership for Peace and Mediterranean Dialogue NATO
partners. The Mediterranean Dialogue consists of
Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco
and Tunisia. Five warships with the Standing NATO
Maritime Group 2 docked in Morocco on September 16 to
“allow NATO forces to develop cooperation with civil
and military (Moroccan) authorities,” according to a
statement by the North Atlantic military alliance. Russia and Armenia signed an agreement on August 20
to extend the lease on a Russian military base in the
South Caucasus country until 2044. But leases are
frequently broken. Last December Armenia approved a request from NATO
to deploy its troops to serve under the bloc in its
war in Afghanistan, the first and to date only CSTO
member state to do so. Its two neighbors in the South
Caucasus, Azerbaijan and Georgia, have over a thousand
troops assigned to NATO in the Afghan theater of war. This week Robert Simmons, the NATO Secretary
General’s Special Representative for the Caucasus and
Central Asia, was in the Armenian capital as the
Armenia 2010 exercise was underway. Simmons’ post was created at the 2004 Istanbul
summit of the North Atlantic military bloc, one which
registered the largest single expansion in NATO’s
61-year history with seven new members – Bulgaria,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and
Slovakia – inducted, and the launching of the Istanbul
Cooperation Initiative to elevate the six-nation
Mediterranean Dialogue to the level of the Partnership
for Peace (the recruiting mechanism for NATO’s 12
newest members) and to build military partnerships
with the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council:
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. The last-named is the first
Persian Gulf state to provide NATO with troops for
Afghanistan. The year before Simmons, an American, was appointed
Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO for
Security Cooperation and Partnership, where he
concentrates on the former Yugoslavia and the western
portion of the former USSR, a position he holds in
addition to that for the Caucasus and Central Asia.
His agenda is to expand NATO influence and presence
from the Balkans to China’s western border. While in Yerevan, he discussed further
implementation of the country’s Individual Partnership
Action Plan, invited Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan
to attend this year’s NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal
for discussions on the military alliance’s first 21st
century Strategic Concept, and broached the subject of
deploying NATO forces as putative peacekeepers for the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and
Azerbaijan. The U.S. and its NATO partners have long
entertained plans to “internationalize” the Karabakh
dispute after the earlier Yugoslav model. Earlier this month the president of the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly, John Tanner, pledged to raise
the Nagorno-Karabakh issue at the Assembly’s autumn
session. Several Azerbaijani and Armenian soldiers
have been killed in fighting in the last three weeks. This month Azerbaijani troops have been involved in
NATO training exercises in Germany, Ukraine and
Montenegro. Earlier this month Simmons continued efforts to
bring Uzbekistan back into NATO’s and the Pentagon’s
fold after the country expelled U.S. military forces
five years ago following a deadly uprising in Andijan.
German NATO troops have remained near the city of
Termez and the Uzbek government has reached an
agreement with NATO for the transit of supplies as
part of the Northern Distribution Network for the
Afghan war. In a message on the nation’s independence day,
Simmons praised Uzbekistan for the use of an air base,
the transit of NATO supplies and its recently
intensified efforts toward NATO integration under
Partnership for Peace provisions. Ten days later it was announced that Uzbekistan
would not participate in the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization’s Peace Mission-2010 exercises in
Kazakhstan with fellow members Russia, China,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Last week Georgian officials revealed that NATO
will open a permanent mission in their country later
this month, “another step in deepening the integration
of Georgia into NATO” according to the chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee, Akaki Minashvili. Until
now the Alliance has been represented by a liaison
officer in the Georgian Defense Ministry. Shortly
after the five-day war between Georgia and Russia in
August of 2008 – which began with a Georgian assault
against South Ossetia a week after NATO exercises in
Georgia with 1,000 U.S. Marines ended and with
American troops and equipment still in the country –
NATO granted Georgia an unprecedented Annual National
Program and Washington crafted the United
States-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership. This September 8 Frank Boland, director of NATO’s
Defense Policy and Planning Department, arrived in
Georgia to join a group of NATO experts to evaluate
the country’s implementation of obligations under the
Partnership for Peace Planning and Review Process and
the Annual National Program. The delegation met with
officials of the defense, interior and finance
ministries and the National Security Council,
including Deputy Defense Minister Nodar Kharshiladze
and other defense and military officials as well as
military attaches of NATO nations and representatives
of member states’ embassies. On August 30 Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
was quoted in the Russian newspaper Kommersant warning
that the U.S, is still rearming Georgia, stating,
“further rearmament of Georgia is underway. Why?
That’s real; we see that. There would have been no
aggression and bloodshed if not for the rearmament of
Georgia two years ago; we had been telling this to our
partners, including to our European friends; and
everyone kept silence; and how did it all end? It led
up to the war. This rearmament continues today.” Last week former Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice visited Georgia to attend a “symposium dedicated
to discussion of the issues [relating to] global
challenges.” On September 13 Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili spoke at a military base in the city of
Kutaisi where a NATO Square was inaugurated during
last October’s NATO Days events in the country. Days
after Georgia lost its first soldier in Afghanistan,
the U.S.-educated leader stated that the nearly 1,000
troops he has provided to NATO for the war were
gaining “combat experience” and were becoming “further
integrated with its Western allies.” According to the
Civil Georgia website, he asked “can we say no to a
war school? This is an opportunity to become
integrated to the world’s best armies, to see the most
advanced (military) equipment and achievements.” When Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia on August
7-8 of 2008, 2,000 Georgian troops were in Iraq – the
third largest contingent after those of the U.S. and
Britain – receiving war zone experience, and they were
flown home on U.S. military transport planes for the
war with Russia. The Georgian soldier killed in
Afghanistan had earlier served in Iraq. In all three
of the nation’s soldiers were killed in Iraq and 19
were wounded. Like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, Georgia borders
southern Russia and like the two other nations has an
advanced NATO integration program; in fact two, an
Individual Partnership Action Plan and an Annual
National Program. On the eastern sector of Russia’s southern flank,
last month U.S. Pacific Command led the latest of
annual Khaan Quest military exercises conducted since
2003 to train Mongolian troops for deployments to,
first, Iraq, and lately Afghanistan. This year’s war
games included forces from the U.S.’s NATO allies
Canada, France and Germany and Asian nations India,
Japan, Singapore and South Korea, all of whom except
for India – officially – have provided troops for or
in other manners assisted the war effort in
Afghanistan. Along with the Pentagon’s recent deployment of a
Patriot missile battery and over 100 troops to eastern
Poland, 35 miles from Russian territory, to be
followed by the stationing of a land-based version of
Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles and radar
in Romania and Bulgaria across the Black Sea from
Russia, NATO has expanded and modernized the
Soviet-era Amari Air Base in Estonia which will now be
able to accommodate 16 NATO fighters, 20 transport
planes and 2,000 military personnel daily. The base
will complement one in Lithuania, the Siauliai Air
Base, used by NATO aircraft to patrol Baltic airspace
since Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia joined NATO in
2004. The four-month rotation started on September 1 is
being conducted by the U.S. with F-15C Eagle
warplanes. The U.S. led the 12-nation, two-week Sea Breeze
2010 Partnership for Peace maritime exercise in
Ukraine’s Crimea in July, the largest maneuvers in the
Black Sea this year with 20 ships, 13 aircraft and
over 1,600 troops from Azerbaijan, Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Moldova, Sweden,
Turkey, Ukraine and U.S. On September 14 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
warned against a NATO build-up to Russia’s north, in
the Arctic Ocean, and the following day Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov stated, “We do not see what
benefit NATO can bring to the Arctic….I do not think
NATO would be acting properly if it took upon itself
the right to decide who should solve problems in the
Arctic.” When Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who has a
doctorate degree in Russian studies from Georgetown
University, met with his opposite number this week,
Defense Minister Serdyukov would not have been out of
line asking his counterpart to genuinely push the
reset button and cease U.S. and NATO military
encroachment on his nation from almost every
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