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A Really Rough Stretch for Pax Americana
By Jim Lobe
26/08/08 "IPS" -- - WASHINGTON - Whatever hopes the George W
Bush administration may have had for using its post-September
11, 2001, "war on terror" to impose a new Pax Americana on
Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the
Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, they appear to have gone up in
flames - in some cases, literally - over the past two weeks.
Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most
emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial
parts of Georgia after Washington's favorite Caucasian,
President Mikheil Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive
against secessionist South Ossetians.
Bloody attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan also underlined the
seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in
both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly
beleaguered and befuddled US-backed governments.
And while US negotiators appear to have made progress in
hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that
will permit US combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for
another year and a half, signs that the Shi'ite-dominated
government of President Nuri al-Maliki may be preparing to move
forcefully against the US-backed, predominantly Sunni
"Awakening" movement has raised the specter of renewed sectarian
civil war.
Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace
agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the
time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears
to have vanished, while efforts at mobilizing greater
international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze
its uranium enrichment program - the administration's top
priority before the Georgia crisis - have stalled indefinitely,
overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighborhood.
"The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,"
noted a statement released on Friday by the National Security
Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking
officials critical of the Bush administration's more-aggressive
policies. Prominent New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued
that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled "the
end of the Pax Americana - the era in which the United States
more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military
force".
Indeed, Russia's intervention in what it used to call its ''near
abroad'' was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight's
developments, both because of its unprecedented use of
overwhelming military force against a US ally heavily promoted
by Washington for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) and because of the geo-strategic
implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic
alliance and US hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy
resources could be safely transported to the West without
transiting either Russia or Iran.
While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC)
pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline
further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it
could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain
to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now
may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the
Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to
Washington's regional ambitions.
Russia's move also raised new questions about its willingness to
tolerate the continued use by the US and other NATO countries of
key air bases and other military facilities in the southern part
of the former Soviet Union, notably Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan,
over which Moscow maintains substantial influence.
As with Georgia, where the US significantly escalated its
military presence by sending - over Russian protests - 200
Special Forces troops in early 2002, Washington first acquired
access to these bases under the pretext of its post-9/11
''global war on terrorism''. But, while clearly important to its
subsequent operations on Afghanistan, they were also seen as key
building blocks - or ''lily pads'' - in the construction of a
permanent military infrastructure that could both contain a
resurgent Russia or an emergent China and help establish US
hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and the
Caspian region in what its architects hoped would be a ''New
American Century'.'
As suggested by former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani
this week, Washington and, to some extent, NATO behind it, ''has
intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant
countries. They are no longer dormant ... ''
Indeed, still badly bogged down in Iraq, where despite the
much-reduced level of sectarian violence political
reconciliation remains elusive to say the least, the US and its
overly deferential NATO allies now face unprecedented challenges
in Afghanistan not entirely unfamiliar to the Soviets 20 years
ago.
''The news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming,'' warned
Thursday's lead editorial in the New York Times, which noted the
killings of 10 French paratroopers near Kabul in an ambush
earlier in the week - the single worst combat death toll for
NATO forces in the war there - as well as the coordinated
assault by suicide bombers on one of the biggest US military
bases there as indications of an increasingly dire situation. In
the past three months, more US soldiers have been killed in
Afghanistan than in Iraq.
''Afghanistan badly needs reinforcements. Badly,'' wrote retired
Colonel Pat Lang, a former top Middle East and South Asia expert
at the Defense Intelligence Agency on his blog this week.
''Afghanistan badly needs a serious infrastructure and economic
development program. Badly.''
Of course, the Taliban's resurgence has in no small part been
due to the safe haven it has been provided next door in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Pakistan's own
Taliban, which also hosts a rejuvenating al-Qaeda, has not only
tightened its hold on the region in recent months but extended
it into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Last week, it retaliated in spectacular fashion to airborne
attacks on its forces by the US-backed military in Bajaur close
to the Khyber Pass - the most important supply route for NATO
forces in Afghanistan - by carrying out suicide bombings at a
heavily guarded munitions factory that killed nearly 70 people
near Islamabad.
Analysts here are especially worried that, having achieved the
resignation last week of US-backed former president General
Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government will likely tear
itself apart over the succession and the growing economic crisis
and thus prove completely ineffective in dealing with
Washington's top priority - confronting and defeating the
Taliban in a major counter-insurgency effort for which the army,
long focused on the conventional threat posed by India, has
shown no interest at all.
Indeed, the current leadership vacuum in Islamabad has greatly
compounded concern here that the army's intelligence service,
ISI, which Washington believes played a role in last month's
deadly Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, could
broaden its anti-Indian efforts. This is especially so now that
Indian Kashmir is once again heating up, ensuring a sharp
escalation in the two nuclear-armed countries' decades-long
rivalry and threatening in yet another way the post-Cold War Pax
Americana.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be
read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Copyright Inter Press Service
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