StrategyUnit

Jamestown Foundation’s Chechnya Weekly issue places the Nalchik Raid and the greater conflict in the Caucasus in Russia’s past imperial history. For anyone familiar with Russian history, this is not exactly news, but it helps bring some barring that Chechnya Conflict in and the Nalchik Raid is nothing new and should be expected.

Here’s what Jamestown’s Andrei Smirnov has to say:

The current Chechen policy of mobilizing other Caucasian nations in the struggle against Russia is not new. The Chechens have always tried to use this strategy to weaken the Russian offensive on Chechnya and strengthen their own forces.

In 1785, Sheikh Mansur, the leader of the first organized rebellion of the Chechens against Russian domination in the region, marched with his forces to Kabarda to persuade the locals to join him and spread the anti-Russian revolt to the western part of the North Caucasus. [This largely failed]

[Smirnov goes on to mention another attempted upraising in 1846 by Imam Shamil]
…
[Contemporary] Chechen commanders did not send squadrons of Chechen militants to other regions, but instead welcomed volunteers who wanted to help the Chechens fight against Russian troops.
…
Now, there is no longer any need for Basaev to deploy Chechen groups to attack outside of Chechnya. He can go individually to any of the neighboring republics and recruit as many local men as needed to conduct a large-scale operation. This ensures that Basaev does not have to divert his Chechen forces, which immobilize the best-trained Russian troops and who are stuck in a quagmire of endless guerilla war. The new tactic allows the insurgency to open new fronts without weakening their struggle in Chechnya itself. This is the worst scenario the Russian authorities could imagine.

Conclusion
The Importance of Historical Context
This first lesson from this article is that while Islamic terrorism of the Salafist/Wahhabi/Global Guerilla kind is new, the conflicts in Chechnya and the Caucasus are not. The Caucasus has always resisted Russian rule – whether it be an imperial, soviet or other incarnation of Russia. Indeed before Russia, Chechnya was busy resisting the Ottoman Turks. Thus even without the radical Islam element, we would expect some conflict against Russian rule.

Amy Chua in “World on Fire” argues that sudden transition to free-market democracy can spark ethnic hatred - she cite’s the ethnic riots againt the Chinese in Indonesia after Suharto’s fall. While she’s speaking of a very specific case, the greater macro level analysis is the renewing and eruption of ethnic hatred once the stability of the old and iron-fisted regime is gone. For Indonesia it was Suharto and for Russia it was the fall of USSR.

True there were Chechen revolts under the USSR, but back then the Soviets could act with ruthless abandon (mass deportation) - today, this has changed with a Russia constrained by new international norms and weakened by its deteriorating state.

From Chechen Upraising to Global Guerillas
As mentioned by Smirnov, compared to centuries past, the structure of the Caucasus insurgency has changed from mainly Chechen based forces to Chechen-led forces with volunteers from throughout the Caucasus region.

From there, it isn’t much a leap to begin to see leaders beyond Basaev and Chechens, bringing forth a fully decentralized insurgency. Without a doubt, John Robb’s Bazaar of Violence will appear in Russia in full form, if it hasn’t already.

Attempting to find a political solution in Chechnya was complex enough, doing the same from the entire Caucasus may prove impossible.

Related StrategyUnit Links:
- Guerilla War in Kabardino-Balkaria , Another Chechnya Erupts
- Green Revolution in Russia - Part II
- Nalchik Raid- Russian Civil War in the Caucasus

Still on light posting mode…but I think this should be noted in contrast to the Oil Drum’s recent discussion I noted on Saudi Oil.

From Reuters:

Russian oil output could peak at more than 510 million tonnes annually in 2010, or 10.2 million barrels per day (bpd), Russian Energy Minister Victor Khristenko said on Monday.

“It will reach a certain plateau of production within the time frame of 2010,” Khristenko told reporters. That plateau would be about 510 to 520 million tonnes a year, he said, or the equivalent of about 10.2 to 10.4 million bpd. In September, Russia produced 9.53 million bpd, which was a post-Soviet high, according to Energy Ministry data.

And let’s not forget that Russia currently is neck-and-neck with the Saudi’s on oil production:

Russia is chasing Saudi Arabia’s title as the world’s top crude oil producer. Saudi Arabia pumped 9.6 million bpd of crude oil in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But unlike the Middle East’s oil giant, which chooses not to pump at full capacity, Russia is keen to see production hit record highs. Saudi Arabia has surplus capacity of up to 1.4 million bpd, according to the EIA.

More oil worries to ponder on.

A couple of days ago, I posted “China - Enviormentalism as a National Security Issue“, which highlighted China’s growing pollution issue becoming more than just a purely enviormental issue, but also sparking domestic unrest and a potential source of conflict with its neighbouring states.

Last week’s Economist points to China’s attempt to address the issue of pollution by including the enviorment as one paremeter in assessing some of its civil servents and party leaders. Check out the article here: The Greening of China

AN ELABORATE points system that determines the careers of officials is often blamed for many of China’s problems. In their drive to meet targets for economic growth, local mandarins squander money, ride roughshod over citizens and ravish the environment. So now China is trying to devise and embed into its assessment of officials a way of calculating a “green GDP”—which allows for environmental costs in national accounts—to help mitigate some of these excesses.

President Hu Jintao first endorsed the idea in March 2004, in a speech about the need to foster a “scientific concept of development”, a slogan intended to suggest that in pursuing growth China should pay more heed to such issues as the environment and the depletion of natural resources. Last February, the government said that ten regions, including Beijing, were carrying out a pilot project in green GDP assessment.

While this is marked progress, China is attempting the impossible in trying to quanitfy the unquantifable: what is the financial cost incurred with the lost of some perculiar speices of tree frog, how you assess the financial cost of a lost forrest, etc. Such calculations would most likely end up being mired in bureaucratic squabbling.

Indeed, the Economist article itself ends in a rather sobering note:

China’s top leaders themselves may be getting cold feet. A draft of the national economic-development plan for the next five years, published this week, stresses the need for an “a resources-saving and environment-friendly society”. But it makes no mention of a green GDP.

My blogging has been on a very light schedule as I’ve got the cold. Its days like these I wish there some fellow contributors for this blog. That said, Here’s a list of what I think should be required reading for this weekend:

Tdaxp – a New Blog (new to me)
This is a new blog by a guy named Dan. Great blog with interesting, analytical and unique perspective on a host of issues. Just keep on scrolling.

Especially interesting to me are:

• The Future That Might Have Been
• The Failure of Global Guerrillaism: Democracies Withstand Economic Pain (Disclosure: I posted on the thread on Global Guerillas, 4GW v. 3GW)
• Speaker Hastert Attacks Oil Company Record Profits (Blog Network Attacks)

Hello Saudi Arabia, Hello Oil Peak!
Here’s something I found at NYT that is not receiving enough attention, but is discussed at the Oil Drum:

“a senior intelligence official, who insisted on remaining anonymous because he was not permitted to speak publicly on the issue, said that the Saudi plans to increase production by nearly 14 percent in the next four years were not enough to meet global demand. Even the Energy Information Administration recently scaled back its expectations of how much more oil the Saudis could pump in 20 years.”

Check out The Oil Drum’s coverage here. The Oil Drum also covers other news over doubts of Saudi Arabia’s Aramco on how much reserve and capacity remains in Saudi Arabia.

China is an Unstoppable Graduate Student Factory (or not?)
In “Anoint no economic superpower before its time”, Daniel Drezner has a very good roundup putting some doubt on the opinion that China’s is churning out far more and better engineering students than the US - helping lifting China to superpower level and eventually surpassing the U.S. and the West.

Daniel Drezner’s posting is a great follow-up to my previous post, “China the Roaring Economy - Or Maybe Not “, which points to some doubts on China’s consistently astronomical GDP growth figures.

I was just about to follow-up on my previous Russia and Eurasia post when CS Monitor (CSM) today published “Russia, China looking to form ‘NATO of the East’?” and opens with this foreboding paragraph:

Russia and China could take a step closer to forming a Eurasian military confederacy to rival NATO at a Moscow meeting of the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Wednesday, experts say.

(Source: Wikipedia. Blue = Member, Green = Observer)

Pretty scary stuff, eh? Its an enticing leading paragraph, but the truth is a little milder.

Brief History of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
The Shanghai Five, as it was originally called, was originally comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and founded in 1996; it was later renamed the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, when Uzbekistan joined in 1999. Originally established to counter Islamic terrorist threats located in the Western China and its neighboring countries, SCO has increasingly become a vehicle to:

• further China’s quest for securing oil resources;
• enhance its role as a major player in regional security;
• and, to a lesser extant, as a united Sino-Russian bloc against growing U.S. presence in the region.

(From an old paper of mine)
(more…)

In the simplistic view of things, there are the tree hugging hippies who care about the enviorment and “pansie” issues above all else with the opposite side you have the realist obssessed with state power.

But as one partial to the realist camp, I believe this sort of simplitic portrayal needs to be rejected. State power can be defined not only by the number of tanks and guns a country has nor oil, but the number of colleges, schools, hospital, energy conservation and, yes, the state of the enviorment. Case in point, check out Slate’s “As Green as a Neocon Why Iraq hawks are driving Priuses“.

There many reasons to support enviormentalist causes: 1) Less pollution => healthier people => healthier and more productive workforce + potential source of manpower 2) If we perform energy conservation instead of drilling Alaska’s ANWAR means less dependence on foreign oil and puttings some oil reserve (ANWAR) “in the bank”, for when we really need the oil. 3) Investing in alternative energy sources now, allows us to help withstand the coming oil shock that will also effect our enemies. And so on…

Then, there are the more practical concern like simply antagonizing the people of the state. See this Washington Post report back in June 2005:

[Up] to 20,000 peasants from the half-dozen villages that make up Huaxi township had responded to the alarm, participants recounted, and they were in no mood to bow to authority. For four years, they had been complaining that industrial pollution was poisoning the land, stunting the crops and fouling the water in their fertile valley surrounded by forested hills 120 miles south of Hangzhou. And now their protest — blocking the entrance to an industrial park — was being put down by force.
…
The confrontation was also a glimpse of a gathering force that could help shape the future of China: the power of spontaneous mass protest. Peasants and workers left behind by China’s economic boom increasingly have resorted to the kind of unrest that ignited in Huaxi. Their explosions of anger have become a potential source of instability and a threat to the party’s monopoly on power that has leaders in Beijing worried. By some accounts, there have been thousands of such protests a year, often met with force

In this week’s Jamestown Foundation China Brief, Nathan Nankivell covers a piece on the linkages of China’s pollution issue with local unrest and geopolitics:

[Economic Effect]

[Cost] of environmental destruction could, for example, begin to reverse the blistering rate of economic growth in China that is the foundation of CCP legitimacy. Estimates maintain that 7 percent annual growth is required to preserve social stability. Yet the costs of pollution are already taxing the economy between 8 and 12 percent of GDP per year [1]. As environmental problems mount, this percentage will increase, in turn reducing annual growth.

[Geopoltical Effects]

In addition to the concerns already mentioned, pollution, if linked to a specific issue like water shortage, could have important geopolitical ramifications. China’s northern plains, home to hundreds of millions, face acute water shortages. Growing demand, a decade of drought, inefficient delivery methods, and increasing water pollution have reduced per capita water holdings to critical levels. Although Beijing hopes to relieve some of the pressures via the North-South Water Diversion project, it requires tens of billions of dollars and its completion is, at best, still several years away and, at worst, impossible. Yet just to the north lies one of the most under-populated areas in Asia, the Russian Far East.

In an extreme situation, such as national water shortages, social unrest could generate widespread, coordinated action and political mobilization that would serve as a midwife to anti-CCP political challenges, create divisions within the Party over how to deal with the environment, or lead to a massive show of force… Though most violence would be directed toward dissident Chinese, a ripple effect would be felt in neighboring states through immigration, impediments to trade, and an increased military presence along the Chinese border. All of these situations would alter security assumptions in the region.

The United States faces its own issues with resources, enviormentalism and especially energy. While globalism and being a global player make it all but impossible for major states in pursue autarky (full indepedence, as in no dependence on other states, in economic issues), the more a state depends on resources for its growth the more vulnerable it is to shocks in the market - such as an oil shock. The continual and growing issue of water in the westerns states of the U.S. are also a source of contention, constraning the growth of cities and with it the growth of the economy.

Enviormentalism needs to broaden its focus beyond “saving the Earth” merely for its own sake or some concept of “saving for the future generation”, but rather direct and visible impact on the state in the long term - in the health of the people (workforce), economic security, energy security et cetera.

PS: On a darker note to be fair as I mentioned taking a realist position, a country could intentionally poison a weaker state through dumping waste in/directly on a weaker state or provoke a state in to conflict.

Rosa Parks helped spark the flame that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

The Washington Post looks - in memoriam

Back at San Francisco State University, I wrote and published a paper titled “In the Midst of the Swarm: Reconceptualizing the (Mislabeled) Global War on Terrorism” (April 2005), where I stated:

“For all of Moore’s cheering of a grand social movement of social justice from those from the liberal end of the spectrum, it is the Islamist global guerillas that have gained the spotlight in the creation of a global social movement.”

Moore is the guy who wrote “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”, championing anti-globalization crowd as being the Second Superpower.

Stopping by VodkaPundit today, I came across this mention of Mark Steyn’s article at the Telegraph:

Indeed, when you look at it that way, the biggest globalisation success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Disney, but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practised by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalised insurgency.

What’s the bigger threat? A globalisation that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalisation that exports the fiercest and unhealthiest aspects of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map - that, in the 21st century, America can be a 19th-century republic untroubled by the world’s pathogens because of its sheer distance from them.

Good to see this idea picking up more speed.

In any grand strategy discussion for the United States, EU, Russia - or any country for that matter - China is seen as the raising power (welcomed or not). Quarter after quarter comes news about its explosive GDP growth and the new buildings sprouting over coastal China, especially Shanghai, have been a testament to this.

But despite all this - people forget that China is not infallible. And while growing, we cant assume its stated spectacular growth is always on the mark - just because the officials say so. Just like most do not take for granted what China says about its defense spending, we should always been suspect about taking China’s self-reported GDP numbers for granted. There is of course real growth occurring, but the Chinese Government has an image to maintain to the world and its people and feels it can’t afford to show even a normal cyclical downturn.

From Simon World

Over at Econbrowser, James Hamilton points out to some interesting data bringing some interestingly scrutiny to that data:

Consider Simon’s graphs at the right. The first shows the levels of various Chinese GDP components, which might look reasonable at first blush. But when you subtract investment, net exports, and government spending from GDP, you arrive at what should be the sum of consumption spending plus inventory investment, represented by the magenta curve (which Simon helps the color-vocabulary-challenged to identify as “the line in the ugly colour”). Trouble is, this ugly magenta line clearly trends down, and that can’t remotely be explained by inventories. The implausible behavior is even more clear when plotted as growth rates as the red line in the second graph.

Read the entire post at Econbrowser…

Conclusion
Many on the “China as the new USSR” should take note that just like the threat and might of the USSR was sometimes overplayed (remember Kennedy during the election?), so is China sometimes played the same way. The point of the matter is simply this: the changes in China are far more complicated than can be placed in simple headlines proclaiming “The Raising Dragon” and the like.

Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Monitor and RFE/RL has a good roundup of the Nalchik raid. All of them supporting StrategyPage’s position of another guerilla war coming to Russia

Key quote from a Russian legislator:

“It was more like a mutiny, an attempt to seize power in the city, and we should label it properly.” Ilyukhin added that the Russian security agencies cannot guarantee that there won’t be a repetition of the Nalchik events somewhere else in the North Caucasus and that the situation in the region, in his opinion, has no military solution.

From the Duma Security Committee member Viktor Ilyukhi, after meeting with the Interior Minister, the Director of the FSB and others on Nalchik
(RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 9, No. 198, Part I, 20 October 2005)

Jamestown’s round-up confirms that Nalchik is part of a wider guerilla war, albeit still in its early stages, at least for Kabarindo-Balkaria:

(more…)

Update 01: See Dan Darling’s response here at Winds of Change.

As you can tell from my postings, I haven’t made much commentary regarding the situation in Iraq. This is chiefly because others (see the links on the right) already do a great job at analyzing the situation and the situation in Iraq is at many times too fluid and opaque for me to make heads or tails of it.

Here’s an example, which I pointed out in a comment at WoC, both from October 23, 2005.

This is a comment by Dan Darling, in a posting discussing the Iraqi Referendum:

I actually think that violence has been going down (at least from where it was when the insurgents started mounting attacks in a big way in April) for a longer period than that, particularly with regard to the number as well as the scope of mass casualty terrorist attacks in the country.
…
That said, a drop in violence is still a drop in violence, as is the fact that a lot of Sunnis are now engaged in the political process, even as an opposition force, rather than operating outside of it. As I think Eric has noted in the past, there are definite fault lines between the various insurgent groups, some of which are far more open to political participation than others.

And over at Global Guerillas, John Robb mentions, while discussing a recent halt in Iraqi oil exports:

On a side note, the US military’s inability to reverse neither the Iraqi insurgency’s tempo of operations nor its rate of innovation has created a stressed system that may result in a moral turning point. As one analyst suggested to me, it is only a matter of time now before Iraqi guerrillas overrun a US fire-base. The loss of life and drama from that event could cause a rapid collapse in our moral cohesion.

So, which is it? To be fair, Dan Darling mentions that the insurgents seem to shifting from targeting Iraqi civilians to U.S. military. Regardless, Dan Darling points to a drop of violence and possible political engagement with certain segments of the insurgents. John Robb blatantly states that the tempo of the insurgents haven’t decreased, that they have crippled Iraq’s oil operations and that it was only a matter of time before the insurgents overrun a U.S. firebase.

So, which is? Is it either/or? Or perhaps oddly, are the insurgents becoming more political open as their tempo of operation increasing? What is going on there in Iraq?

PS: From my understanding, Firebase (FB) is a temporary forward encampment providing artillery support.

I’ve been following the ICANN issue pretty closely but there’s not too much to say until the scheduled UN meeting next month. (Check out previous posting on this blog “Will the Internet Remain Truly Global“and Battle for the Internet - Update 1.)

But, I did come across a great article by Kenneth Cukier of the Economist in the November/December 2003 Foreign Affairs that is worth reading for a thorough overview of what is going happening regarding the UN and ICANN.

Here is a great excerpt of a historical comparison to the Cold War, US maneuverings and how the current US system, while should be continued for now, isn’t sustainable in the long term:

[The] very countries that most restrict the Internet within their borders are the ones calling loudest for greater control. As other countries sharpen their diplomatic knives for the final round of the summit in Tunis in November, the dispute is echoing an earlier battle at Unesco in the 1980s over the so-called New World Information and Communication Order, which led the United States and the United Kingdom to pull out of the organization. Then, it was the Soviet Union,its satellites, and the developing world that called for controlling media activities and funding the development of media resources in developing countries; today, some of those same nations seek power over the Internet, as well as financial aid to overcome the digital divide. (Emphais mine)

Washington’s new position shrewdly mixes a few carrots in along with the big stick. It formally acknowledges that countries have “sovereignty concerns” about their national two-letter address domains — a mealy-mouthed nod toward granting countries control over them, which is only appropriate. Although this will invite problems, such as with Taiwan’s “.tw,” these can be sidestepped — just as the allocation of telephone “country codes” to territories does not confer diplomatic recognition, neither does the allocation of country domains need to. Washington also supports the continued discussion of broader Internet governance issues in multiple forums, which could restrain the creation of a cumbersome and monolithic Global Internet Policy Council (which was among the UN working group’s proposals). It may also keep politicians from trespassing on ICANN’s more purely technical areas, which could harm the network.

Nevertheless, although the new U.S. position may be the least bad alternative in the short term, it will almost certainly be unsustainable over the longer term. For the moment, there is little other governments can do to rebel. Unless they feel their concerns are being addressed, however, they are likely to try to set up a parallel naming and addressing system to compete with ICANN-sanctioned domains. Technology abhors homogeneity; differing technical standards are the norm rather than the exception. The ongoing scuffle over the creation of Galileo, Europe’s challenge to Washington’s Global Positioning System, is one example; the battle over third-generation mobile-phone standards is another. The danger, however, is that two different addressing systems on the Internet may not interoperate perfectly. If it wants to preserve and extend the benefits the Internet currently brings, Washington will have to come up with some way of sharing control with other countries without jeopardizing the network’s stability or discouraging free speech and technical innovation.

Ultimately, what is playing out is a clash of perspectives. The U.S. government saw the creation of ICANN as the voluntary relinquishing of a critical source of power in the digital age; others saw it as a clever way for Washington to maintain its hegemony by placing Internet governance in the U.S. private sector. Foreign critics think a shift to multilateral intergovernmental control would mark a step toward enlightened global democracy; Washington thinks it would constitute a step back in time, toward state-regulated telecommunications. Whether and how these perspectives are bridged will determine the future of a global resource that nearly all of us have come to take for granted.

Read the whole thing (free for limited length of time) at the Foreign Affairs web site.

This is continuing with yesterday’s post “Great Game Revisited (again) and the Green Revolution“.

On the Caucasus
Any attention the U.S. press pays attention to the southern Russia is only limited to Afghanistan and more to Central Asia, with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. But not enough attention is paid to the deteriorating situation in the Caucasus and the dangerous consequences that it may represent.

As I’ve written in a recent post, the scale (over 200+), composition (local) and targets (security installations) of the Nalchik Raid in southern Russia represents a huge blow to Russia’s control over its troubled Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. Indeed, while Putin and the Russian elites fret over the Color Revolution (Orange, Tulip, Rose) that has reverberated throughout the former Soviet Space, a Green Revolution is increasingly destabilize southern Russia thanks partly to Russia’s own ineptness:

Accepting that post-Soviet revolutions are not organized from outside but driven by public anger against corrupt authoritarian regimes is all but impossible for Putin and his courtiers. It would inevitably lead to the conclusion that the street battles in Nalchik were not a terrorist attack but an outburst of accumulated rage caused by police brutality and officially sanctioned persecution of Muslims (Vremya novostei, October 14). (Jamestown Foundation, emphasis mine)

Drawing from the Nalchik Raid, Andrei Smirnov at Jamestown gravely stated regarding the state of security in the Caucasus:

The Nalchik attack showed that the rebels in the North Caucasus maintain sufficient military capabilities to attack and temporarily hold one of the largest cities in the North Caucasus and could have enough capability to seize control of a whole region in the near future. The attack on Nalchik sent a clear warning to Putin and his team that they are outgunned in the Caucasus. (Jamestown Foundation, empahsis mine)

To add to that, the Nalchik Raid demonstrates that the Islamofacist have the intiative. They can choose when and where to attack, putting the Russian security forces on the defensive.

The Kremlin and the local governments inaptness in the Caucasus combined with the situation in Chechnya Conflict risk spilling an arc of fire across the region - where the vacuum of Russian power and legitimacy would lead to the raise and spread of radical Islam, as a significant movement.

Once reaching a sizable movement any turn to suppress them violent by Russian forces would be seen, not only as harsh and repressive, but also taking on the same tinge of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. That would be the tipping point, where the Caucasus would be lost to everything, but the radical extremist.

It would lead to the creation of a region far worse than Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, closer to Russia (obviously), closer to Europe and closer to the enormous energy resources and pipeline infrastructure in the region and in close-by Central Asia.

Central Asia and the Caucasus share the pecular trait of being important geopolitical points, yet so little understood or cared about in the mainstream media. To do my part in remedying that, I’d like to point out to a great article on Central Asia (which more often gets some U.S. media coverage) and contrast that with recent events in the Caucasus (which rarely ever does).

On Central Asia
Tech Central Station has a new article by Ariel Cohen, of the Heritage Foundation, featuring the (tired) title “The Great Game Returns“, where he covers Condoleeza Rice’s imporant trip throughout Central Asia.

Central Asia is the important flash point for the United States, China and Russia (its former imperial power) for several reasons:

• Most hot on everyone’s mind is the resurgence of Islam and the threat of radicalization - of a reason known to embrace sufism and a distinct school of Islam
• Central Asia, while landlocked, has a enormous amount of natural gas resource and a good amount of oil. Kazakhstan alone is set on an ambitious path to exceed the production of the North Sea

Key points from Ariel Cohen:

[On the Purpose of the Condi Rice Trip]
The visit demonstrated Sec. Rice’s balancing act skills. On the one hand, she needs to propel further President Bush’s democratization agenda. But on the other, just like in the Middle East, the imperatives of the war on terrorism and U.S. energy security dictate a more Realpolitik approach.

The stakes are high. Afghanistan and Central Asia are where the rubber of President Bush’s democratization doctrine meets the rocky road of authoritarianism. What’s more, Central Asia is important as a major source of oil and gas. By 2015, the Caspian Sea basin, including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, will produce four million barrels a day — more than Kuwait and Iraq today combined. The region is also surrounded by the emerging giants, energy-starved India and China, and bordered by key Islamist states Iran and Pakistan.

[On the challenge from Russia and China]
In August SCO sent a strong message to its Central Asian members when they conducted unprecedented joint military maneuvers in the Far East. The new de-facto Moscow-Beijing bloc is aimed at U.S. “hegemony” as well as to American rhetoric of democracy.

In the meantime, Islamist radicals are spreading their tentacles in the impoverished and drug-ridden villages and slums of the region. Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global Sunni clandestine organization which aims to overthrow secular regimes and create a Califate, has made Uzbekistan its primary target. Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is allied with Al Qaeda and active in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border areas.

[Reason for the Special Rice Visit to Kazakhstan]
…
Kazakhstan may be a key to U.S. interests in the region. As Nazarbaev announced in his September speech to the parliament, in ten years his country may surpass Kuwait and Nigeria as an oil exporter, pumping over 2.5 million barrels a day.
…
One hopes that Sec. Rice also encouraged Mr. Nazarbaev to finally authorize construction of a pipeline connecting Kazakh oil fields to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which takes Caspian oil to the Mediterranean and global markets.

She could also praise and encouraged Kazakhstan to promote its unique model of peace and harmony among Muslims, Christians and Jews around the Islamic world. Finally, she could encourage Kazakhstan to sponsor the U.S. gaining observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, so that Washington can alleviate Beijing and Moscow’s fears as to its intentions in the heartland of Eurasia while continue playing an important role there.

I think its a great summary, but on Kazakhstan, I ‘d like to add one more thing to place Kazakhstan’s relationship with the U.S. in greater context: President Nazarbayev has almost alwaysed followed a multi-vectored foreign policy, trying to balance all the major powers in the region:

• Nazarbayev has sought good terms with Russia, its larger and power neighbor in the north and also the original homeland for a sizeable number of Russians in Kazakhstan
• At the same time, Nazarbayev has reached out to China. This year China and Kazakhstan completed the creation of a major pipeline expected to deliver a million bbl of oil per day to China. Before the Sino-Kazakh pipeline, Kazakhstan was wholely dependent on Russia for export of its oil. They are also looking to export Kazakhstan’s natural gas through China.

With Kazakhstan already playing well with Russia and China, naturally Kazakhstan needs to pay attention to the other player in Central Asia: the United States. Especially with the lost of Uzbekistan as a partner in Central Asia, U.S. is in dire need of finding other partners - although Kazakhstan would probably never reach the level of military cooperation with the U.S. that Uzbekistan once did.

And with all this in mind, we move on to the Caucaus…

On the Caucasus
Check back tomorrow…

It looks like Thomas Barnett’ s publisher is in full PR swing in anticipatian of his new book, “Blueprint for Action : A Future Worth Creating“.

I’ve mentioned Barnett in several of my papers and a posting here regarding “Open Source Warfare“.

Check out the United Press Article, with the humble title Military theory superstar unveils new book:

[Barnett] advocated re-structuring the military into two forces. The first, “leviathan,” would include the military’s nuclear arsenal and traditional war-fighting elements, and would be aimed at deterring other nations, as well as providing the capacity to rapidly intervene to change, shore-up or eliminate unstable regimes.

The second, more numerous, “systems administrator” force, would be focused on the post-war phase of such interventions — on counter-insurgency and nation-building.

In his new book, Barnett offers a detailed plan for putting his ideas into action, including a six-point program for transforming politically bankrupt states. “Bad states go in, better states come out,” he writes.

Thomas Barnett, noted writer and blogger who served in various areas in the DoD, shot off a rebuttle against John Robb’s Open Source Warfare article I mentioned last weekend in “Open Source War, Global Guerillas in Iraq“.

For those unfamilar with Barnett, he is famous for his article, now book , entitled “Pentagon’s New Map”, which interprets the world as caught between the Core and the Gap, with each at the opposite end of the pole of global connectivity; he uses a state’s level of connectivity as a measurement of how stable states and regions are with the evidence that the these “Gap” (low connectivity states) are those that are often in trouble.

Here’s Barnett’s response to John Robb:

Creating better rules is how we win. By doing so we attract good citizens and good states, slowly but surely. Killing symmetrically is gratifying, but ultimately pointless. Reformatting their world so that their cause dies is the real victory. Not a matter of making it like our own, but simply making it connective in a deep sense with the outside world, so that individuals can choose their level of connectivity no matter what the authorities say or do.

So I say, bet on numbers. Bet on bigger networks. Bet on growing the Core and, by doing so, restricting the enemy’s operating domain.

Information technology analogies are great, but they do not constitute tactics, much less strategy. The winning remains the same: kill their bad guys and replace bad governments with good. Don’t confuse the friction with the formatting. Don’t confuse skirmishes with campaigns. Don’t confuse their asymmetry with our disadvantage.

In the end, we win as we always do: with stuff. Capitalism bribes off its enemies with wealth. Worked in 1848 in Europe and it’s worked ever since.

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Introduction

Last week, we see yet another violent manifestation of Russia as a deteriorating state in the Nalchik Raid; Nalchik is the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, about 870 miles south of Moscow. Unlike in Beslan or the Moscow Threatre, this time it was a large force of 300 fighters concentrating their attack police stations and other government and security related facilities

As I wrote on “Eurasia” earlier, the Southern front was Russia’s soft underbelly with a growing EU/NATO in the Western front and a raising East in the Eastern Front (see map below). Proponents of the “Clash of Civilizations” would say this is another case of Islam’s bloody borders. This are unfortunately more complicated.

As reported by WSJ, “officials in Nalchik said almost all the rebels were from Kabardino-Balkaria.” The attacks were on symbols and instruments of state authority: the “three police stations, the headquarters of the local FSB (the former KGB), the interior ministry building, the offices of the city’s prison guards, a military unit guarding the airport and a counter-terrorism centre.” (link.)
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Everyone has this topic covered, so I decided to post this one picture from Iraq The Model’s web site:

“Father and son, post voting.”

Links to check out:
Winds Of Change - “The referendum: the beginning of the end”
Oxblog - “WaPo VS. NYT: WHAT HAPPENED TODAY IN IRAQ?”
Belmont Club: The End of th Beginning

One of my first few postings (here and here)were about a recent spat between the US control over ICANN and pressure from the EU and UN (most vocally Brazil, Iran, China and Saudi Arabia) to bring control of ICANN, with a further rounds of meetings planned for November at Tunis.

Here are three updates - including our first correction!

EU’s New Friends on the Internet - Iran, China and Saudi Arabia

While taking lead charge against the US, EU has continously stated they wanted to take a middle ground calling for multi-latera approach, but not meddling with the Internet’s free access (which many folks worry that Iran, Saudi Arabia etc want):

But EU negotiators are adamant that they reject calls for state control of internet content. “None of this is about content and that is a big difference between the EU position and the position of China and Brazil,” one negotiator said. (Link)

While the stated intentions of the EU maybe true, what would the EU really do if the say China (a major economic power) and Iran demanded some greater control and access over the Internet through the proposed UN body? Could the U.S., EU and the Anglosphere stand behind adamently against a country that proposes possible restrictions of the Internet? Or would they be deterred by charges of “Western Neo-Imperialism”?

And is it strange that the biggest proponent of the UN control are the less then free countries? The former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt recognizes, such a problem as mentioned in his blog: “It seems as if the European position has been hijacked by officials that have been driven by interests that should not be ours. We really can’t have a Europe that is applauded by China and Iran and Saudi Arabia on the future governance of the internet. Even those critical of the United States must see where such a position risks taking us.”

According to the WSJ, some European telecom companies are also a little worried about EU’s position:

However, some telecom companies have objected to the European Commission’s latest move. “I’ve been getting urgent calls from our members, and they are upset,” says Michael Bartholomew, director of the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, which represents 42 major companies in 35 countries. (”Europe Telecoms Object to EU Plan for Policing Web“)

EU Warns, “The Internet will break apart by November!” Not really
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As you can tell from my postings, John Robb at the Global Guerillas Blog is one of my favourite analyst when it comes to fourth generation war and views on the war in Iraq. Today, Robb writes an excellent op-ed in the New York Times on the nature of the adversaries in Iraq and why putting down the insurgency will be so difficult for the U.S. and the Iraqi Government.

In a few days, I’ll put my two-cents on the “El Salvadore” option that he mentions.

First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq’s relatively advanced communications and transportation grid - demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents’ homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency’s innovation cycles are faster than the American military’s slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

Second, there are few visible fault lines in the insurgency that can be exploited. Like software developers in the open-source community, the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement. This has been borne out by the relatively low levels of infighting we have seen between insurgent groups. As a result, the military is not going to find a way to chop off parts of the insurgency through political means - particularly if former Baathists are systematically excluded from participation in the new Iraqi state by the new Constitution.

Third, the United States can try to diminish the insurgency by letting it win. The disparate groups in an open-source effort are held together by a common goal. Once the goal is reached, the community often falls apart. In Iraq, the original goal for the insurgency was the withdrawal of the occupying forces. If foreign troops pull out quickly, the insurgency may fall apart. This is the same solution that was presented to Congress last month by our generals in Iraq, George Casey and John Abizaid.

Unfortunately, this solution arrived too late. There are signs that the insurgency’s goal is shifting from a withdrawal of the United States military to the collapse of the Iraqi government. So, even if American troops withdraw now, violence will probably continue to escalate.

What’s left? It’s possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.’s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state’s monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980’s and Colombia in the 1990’s. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq’s paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

Back in 2001, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt at RAND wrote a monograph entitled “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy” wrote on the future wave of conflict and organization around the concept of “Netwar”:

What distinguishes netwar as a form of conflict is the networked organizational structure of its practitioners—with many groups actually being leaderless— and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in swarming attacks. The concepts of cyberwar and netwar encompass a new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information revolution.

Indeed, Bill Clinton spoke in 1998 warning of “reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.” (Empahsis Mine, link here). Back then, Bill Clinton was speaking of Iraq as part of an “unholy axis” network.

But the network is everywhere, not just in Clinton’s Unholy Axis of Iraq, network-based warefare, the Seattle Protest, or in modern logistical chains (think Amazon.com, Dell or FedEx). It is in flash mobbing, online collobration software (writely), social networking web sites like del.icio.us, LinkedIn to more obsecure ones like Coastr (Beer Social Networking).

Today, the CounterTerror blog has two back-to-back articles relating the “network” to security issues:

1) North Korean Counterfeit Ring:

The leader of the gang, Sean Garland [is the leader of “the old style IRA”]. Allegedly, the profits from the illegal enterprise went back into the Official IRA. The indictment is the result of a long investigation through the Russian Mafia - one of the defendants is Russian, and Garland allegedly traveled to Russia, Belarus, and Poland often - and found the gang using false identities, dummy couriers, codewords, money laundering techniques, and secure communication methods. No North Koreans were named, but the indictment states that “North Korean nationals acting as ostensible government officials engaged in the worldwide transportation, delivery, and sale of quantities” of the $100 bills. Last month, the Washington Times reported on the arrest of a Taiwanese national who was involved in the counterfeiting scheme. (Emphasis Mine)

Official IRA, Russian Mafia, and Taiwanese National all invovled in a sophisticated international mony laundering/counterfeiting scheme with North Korea. Andd this links back to what is North Korea and the IRA doing with the money? What are they buying and where from?

2) Iraq: Insurgest, Terrorist and Organized Crime:

Hezbollah-style explosives are being used in Iraq by Zarqawi’s group, bringing new sophistication and lethality to many of the operations; cars stolen in the United States are turning up as vehicles used in suicide attacks in Iraq, shipped from the West Coast to Syria, then driven into Iraq; possible ties, now the subject of several investigations in Europe, of important leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, through leading European banks, to laundering large sums of drug money for radical Islamic groups. Much of this appears to be coordinated through activities in the tri-border area of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as Panama and Isla Margarita off the Venezuelan coast. (Empahsis Mine)

In Iraq, we are not only fighting insurgest and terrorist from former Baathist or neighbouring Arab fundamentalist, but also a stolen car/smuggling network in the West Coast of the USA, drug money from Islamist group with European Banks as conduits, and a network spaning five countries in Latin America.

The Network is Everywhere.

I strongly suggest reading John Robb’s “THE BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE IN IRAQ” and “THE BAZAAR’S OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM“. It is required reading in my book.

The threat of Islamofacism (using Christopher Hitckins’s term) is what appears on the new everyday. Most recently, we’ve seen the arrests in France over bombing plots against the Metro and the terror alert in New York City.

While the Public is fearful of the next Bali Bombing or Madrid Bombing, a truly global catastrophe would result from a disruption in the global energy infrastructure; Energy is Modernity’s Achilles Heel. Energy concerns have been growing over unease over dependence on Middle East oil and raising oil prices. But what should be the biggest concern is the threat of Peak Oil changing the geopolitical landscape and attacks on the oil infrastructure.

Bombings targeting the deaths of civilians are all tragic in the sense of the direct effect on human lives – but a major energy crunch could bring modernity to a halt and surely fuel (no pun intended) wars over energy resources. Indeed, Hurricane Katrina and Rita demonstrated the vulnerability of the U.S. oil infrastructure system – lost oil rigs, refineries offline, fuel shortages and scenes of cars running out of fuel as people attempt to evacuate.
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Ben Paarmann recently posted an excellent overview of the Eurasian Idea (specifically Dugin’s version) and its role in Russia today. I’d like to take Paarmann’s post further and provide some greater context for the Eurasian Idea, why its still important for Russia today, the different Eurasian flavors and attempt to provide points about where Russia must go. (Ambitious, I know!)

Eurasian Idea in Greater Context
The question “What is Russia?” is a question that continues to shadow Russia and its long history. Russia cannot continue to leave this question unanswered while it attempts to rebuild itself from its Soviet-past and as the state continues to deteriorate. Putin, as Paarmann mentions, has so far taken a pragmatic approach towards the East and West
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Recently Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch criticized the short comings of the term “Clash of Civilizations” to describe the “Global War on Terror”, offering the alternative view that “truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam”. (link)

I took a differing view on this at Jihadwatch here…and here is a rebuttal by a follow poster.

The term “Clash of Civilizations” and the “Global War on Terror” are short-sighted and misleading. I think Fitzgerald and I agree on that.

But, Fitzgerald and I differ when he states that the “truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam”.

Au contraire, I think its far more complicated than that…

Islam is being exploited as a vehicle for fighting what many see as their continuing oppression of Muslims by non-Muslims and/or oppressive governments. Look at Thailand, Philippines, Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine, Kosovo, Muslims in Eurrope and so on. Conflicts there can be easily seen (true or not) as a conflict between oppressed Muslims and non-Muslims or the government. Additionally, in Uzbekistan and elsewhere, Islam is seen as the alternative and solution to an otherwise corrupt and inept government system.

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Interestingly enough, around the same time I posted my concerns on the ICANN issue, WSJ posts an excellent opinion piece by the co-writters of “Who Rules the Net?” - follow the link here. Here’s what Thiere and Crew sums up nicely:

The Internet helps overcome artificial restrictions on trade and communications formerly imposed by oppressive or meddlesome governments. Allowing these governments to reassert control through a U.N. backdoor would be a disaster.

Indeed.

The Guardian has released a similar article “Breaking America’s grip on the net”, but showing a greater sense of urgency on the matter.

“Information wants to be free” was the mantra of the dot-com days, the days when Wired Magazine saw the Internet as the gateway to transcendence.

But now, the currently unfettered nature of the Internet is at stake. Through the creation of the Arpanet (precursor to the Internet) by the DoD, the U.S. has retained control of the Internet; today, its run by the Department of Commerce via ICAAN. This is now being challenged with the U.S. standing alone with no allies:

The European Union has backed an aggressive push by the United Nations to end US control of the internet and bring it under international law following concerns by countries like Iran that the Americans could pull the plug on them at any moment.
link

What is at stake are some of the key parts of globalization: the freedom of information and the blurring of borders. The Kantian Peace was never really about a Family of Democracies but unfettered trade links and now information is part of that link. The hope of globalization would be to increase these links, enhancing security and building a path to the fabled to the Kantian Peace.

Acquiescing control of the Internet to an international consortium would open the way for censorship by a U.N.-led consortium, which includes countries like China, Iran and Libya – hardly the light of liberty and freedom. Even member countries of the E.U. have their limitations on the freedom of speech.

Also at issue are types of business and applications that undermine the state monopoly on information – think the banning of VoIP and Skype to protect a government telco company.

If the U.S., E.U. and the U.N. fail to reach an agreement, we can see the beginning of the end of the Internet. The U.N. and go ahead and make its own ICANN giving way to an Internet that is fractured, no longer free and no longer global. Has the tower of Babel has befallen us again?

Welcome to Strategy Unit.

While there are many blogs covering the global issue of terrorism, I started this blog to attempt to deepen the discussion of international and domestic affairs beyond terrorism to the host of global, regional and domestic issues that effect in/directly issues of security. Indeed, the dimensions of a sovereign nation’s security are many: economic, resources, information (media, flow of information), defense, technological, cultural and so on. More humbly, this blog will help facilitate my own research and interests in this area.

As I follow the maxim “blog what you know about”, regionally this blog will mainly focus on the United States, Europe, the Former-Soviet Space and Southeast Asia.

Cheers!

DJPR