RUSSELS (Sputnik) - NATO believes that "any steps" towards de-escalation are important, a NATO official said on Thursday, when commenting on the Russian Defence Ministry’s announcement on the conclusion of military drills in the country’s south.

Earlier in the day, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the completion of snap combat readiness checks in the southern and western military districts. He also ordered the general staff, the military districts' chiefs and the airborne forces to start returning the troops to the places of their permanent deployment starting Friday, conduct a detailed analysis and sum up the results of the checks.

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https://sputniknews.com/world/202104221082701877-nato-on-end-of-military-drills-in-southern-russia-steps-towards-de-escalation-important/

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by F. William Engdahl

The Biden Administration has announced an Afghanistan US troop withdrawal date of September, 11, 2021, symbolically exactly two decades after the game-changing 911 attacks in New York and Washington. However the Pentagon and White House are saying nothing about one of the main reasons the powers that be who control Washington have remained in Afghanistan since the fake chase after a former CIA contract employee named Osama bin Laden. 

What is clear is that the US Administration is not being straightforward with its plans for Afghanistan and the so-called pull-out. The previously agreed May 1 date versus September 11 is clearly not about making a more graceful exit after a two decade war that has cost US taxpayers more than $2 trillion. The argument by some US Democrats that a full pullout with endanger the rights of Afghan women with the brutal Taliban culture of misogyny is clearly not what US and NATO soldiers have been protecting with their presence. What then is at stake?

Private Mercenary Occupation

While the Pentagon has been sly about giving any direct answer, it seems that what the Team Biden neo-cons are planning is a “privatized” US military presence. According to a report by Jeremy Kuzmarov, “over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troops number 2,500. Joe Biden will withdraw this smaller group of soldiers while leaving behind US Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives — privatizing and down-scaling the war, but not ending it.” Already there are seven private military contractors in Afghanistan for every single US soldier.

Use of private military contractors allows the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies to avoid serious Congressional oversight. Typically they are special forces veterans who earn vastly more as private security contractors or mercenaries. Their work is simply classified so there is almost no accountability. The New York Times reports, citing current and former US officials, that Washington “will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives” to conduct operations inside Afghanistan.

The current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani, like that of Hamid Karzai is a creation of the United States. Ghani will remain Washington’s proxy in Kabul. His military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. For what?

What is missing from the public discussion of Afghan troop presence is the 800 pound gorilla in the room: drugs, specifically heroin.

The 800 Pound Gorilla

Some of these private soldiers of fortune are not doing nice things. DynCorp is one of the largest contractors there. As of 2019 DynCorp had gotten over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan. One of the publicized tasks of DynCorp and other US mercenary personnel in Afghanistan has been to “oversee” destruction of Afghan poppy fields that supply an estimated 93% of world heroin. Yet the clear evidence is that that opium and its global distribution has been a major province of the CIA along with the US military who guarantee secure air transport via airbases in Kyrgyzstan as well as Afghanistan into the western heroin markets. DynCorp has little to show for that drug eradication, or were they doing something else?

CIA, Mujahideen and Afghan Opium

When the US first occupied Afghanistan, claiming retribution for the Taliban role in aiding Osama bin Laden in the 911 US attacks, a severe anti-opium policy of Taliban had reduced harvests to almost zero. By October, 2001, just before the US invasion, the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001. According to Canadian economist and historian Michel Chossudovsky, “immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.” The Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan successfully restored the drug trade. The Guardian reported that, “In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.” That was six years into the US military occupation.

Within several years of US occupation under Karzai, opium crops were at all-time record levels. One of the largest Afghan opium warlords then was the brother of Karzai. In 2009 the New York Times, citing unnamed US officials, wrote that, “Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years…” In 2011 Ahmed Karzai was gunned down, mob-style, at his home in Helmland by one of his bodyguards. Helmland is the largest opium province in Afghanistan. If Helmland were a country it would be the largest opium producer worldwide. Was it accident that the CIA paid money to Karzai for at least eight years or did The Company have a stake in the business of Karzai?

While Washington and the CIA have denied supporting the huge Afghan opium trade, the CIA history since the Vietnam War with drug warlords suggests otherwise. As Alfred W. McCoy documented during the Vietnam War era in his ground-breaking book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, the CIA was deeply involved with Hmong tribesmen in Laos who were involved in opium trade. They claimed it was necessary to twin their support. Later it was found the CIA Air America was involved in secretly shipping opium from the Golden Triangle.

During the 1980’s US-financed Mujahideen war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, the CIA allegedly turned a blind eye as Osama bin Laden and thousands of “Afghan Arabs” he recruited. Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were enriching themselves along with the Pakistani ISI intelligence with vast drug trade profits. To imagine that the CIA, and private mercenary armies such as DynCorp closely tied to the agency, are today involved in the world’s largest opium and heroin source requires no great leap of faith. 

In 2018 Alfred McCoy made a damning indictment of the US war in Afghanistan. He asked, “How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1trillion on its military operations, lavishing a record $100bn more on ‘nation-building’, helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations?” His reply was that the US presence was not about nation-building or democracy. It was about heroin: “Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium,” he charged. “Its opium production surged from around 180 tons in 2001 to more than 3,000 tons a year after the invasion, and to more than 8,000 by 2007.

By 2017 the opium production reached a record 9,000 tons. After more than 16 years of US military occupation. Somewhere here is a very dirty and criminal story and the CIA as well as related private military contractors such as DynCorp appear to be in the middle of it. This is maybe the real reason Washington refuses to honestly leave Afghanistan. As Pepe Escobar points out, contrary to the narrative in Western media that the Taliban control the Afghan opium trade, “this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions — never asked by Atlanticist circles — are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit…” He points to NATO, noting that Russian citizens are “collateral damage” of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. “The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, ‘Italy, France and the Netherlands’, and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.”

The US operations in Afghanistan, the world’s largest opium producer, is far from ending. It is merely changing form.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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https://journal-neo.org/2021/04/23/the-politics-of-heroin-and-the-afghan-us-pullout/

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Back in 2020, nations all over the world have been struggling to support their economies through the times of hardships and lockdowns caused by the onslaught of Covid-19. Those efforts apparently did not prevent them from spending more money on the military than ever before in more than three decades, the latest report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has shown.

The world’s military expenditures have risen by 2.6 percent in comparison to the previous year and reached $ 1.981 trillion – “the highest level since 1988” – a SIPRI report published on Monday said. Over the last decade, global military spending increased by almost 10 percent.

The increase came in a year when the world’s “gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 4.4 percent,” the research institute notes, adding that the increase caused “the biggest year-on-year rise in the military burden since the global financial and economic crisis in 2009.”

“We can say with some certainty that the pandemic did not have a significant impact on global military spending in 2020,” said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, a researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Program. Still, some countries, like South Korea and Chile, preferred to spend some of the planned military funds on pandemic response while others, like Russia and Brazil, spent “considerably less” on defense then planned in 2020.

The US, however, still leads the list of the largest military spenders in the world by a wide margin. America’s military expenditures alone amounted to 39% of the global defense spending, SPIRI said, adding that the US also recorded one of the highest spending growth rates among the top 10 military spenders, surpassed only by Germany and South Korea, which have considerably smaller defense budgets.

“The recent increases in US military spending can be primarily attributed to heavy investment in research and development, and several long-term projects such as modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and large-scale arms procurement,” said Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher with SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Program.

“This reflects growing concerns over perceived threats from strategic competitors such as China and Russia, as well as the Trump administration’s drive to bolster what it saw as a depleted US military,” she added.

The US closest “competitor” – China – spent around three times less money on defense and its military spending in 2020 accounted for some 13 percent of the global tally. Beijing did not have to raise its defense spending at the expense of increasing the military burden, since its economy was one of the few still growing in 2020.

India, Russia and the UK also made it to the list of the top five military spenders, although their defense budgets were considerably smaller than those of China, not to mention the US. Saudi Arabia was the only nation among the top 10 military spenders that had its defense expenditures decreased in 2020

The economic downturn coupled with the continuous increases in military spending helped some NATO members to hit the Alliance’s spending target as 12 member-states spent two or more percent of their GDP on defense, SIPRI notes, adding that only nine did so in 2019. France was particularly the one to cross the two-percent threshold for the first time since 2009.

Whether it would enhance the alliance’s capabilities is another issue, though, since the development “probably had more to do with the economic fallout of the pandemic than a deliberate decision to reach the Alliance’s spending target,” at least in some cases, da Silva said.

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https://www.rt.com/news/522201-global-military-spending-pandemic-highest/

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Fearing the possibility of triggering an armed response of the Taliban (organization banned in Russia) by delaying the withdrawal of the US-led military coalition from Afghanistan, Washington is trying to stay ahead of the schedule. As a matters of fact, senior NATO officials have revealed that the planned withdrawal is due to be completed by July 4 and not by September 11, as it had been previously announced.

But since a handful of questions associated with the future redeployment of these troops haven’t been resolved, Washington tacitly hints to its European allies that they should voice a request to postpone the withdrawal of American troops, under the pretext of other NATO members having a better opportunity to prepare for leaving the country that they still occupy.

However, the real situation on the ground looks different from what the US tries to present to the rest of the world through its massive propaganda capabilities.

The primary reason for the delay is the fact that senior military officials in Washington have categorically refused to surrender a foothold at the heart of Asia and that is why they are trying to obtain the consent of one of the regional powers to host American troops by all means available to them. After all, Washington did enjoy the capacity of exercising control within this region for a while, thus retaining a base for its future large-scale deployments against the countries that are described by the Western media as main opponents of the United States – Russia and China. At the same time, American military presence in Central Asia would allow the Pentagon to keep an eye on Pakistan, India, and Iran.

It is for this reason that US embassies across the region together with various Western emissaries have noticeably intensified their efforts to persuade local elites that there’s no way that they can lose the “American shield” that supposedly protects the post-Soviet space from terrorist threats and drug trafficking. At the same time, Washington demonstrates that it is willing to meet local capitals halfway, while promising various “bonuses” as a token of gratitude. In particular, it promises that it will hand over some of the military equipment and weapons transferred from Afghanistan in exchange for a military base, along with the development of economic and military ties with the United States, and various other “benefits”.

However, in this regard, one can’t help but ask the question: Will the future American bases in Central Asia, if they are to be created, become a stronghold against terrorism and drug trafficking coming from Afghanistan?

That would be an unlikely development, as two decades of American military occupation of Afghanistan clearly demonstrate. For the most part, the US military was preoccupied with ensuring the safety of its own servicemen, paying large sums of money to various Afghan extremist groups so that they lose appetite for attacking US military bases or interfering in the drug trafficking that has been skyrocketing under the auspices of US intelligence agencies for the last 20 years. It was the reluctance to even try to achieve its stated goals that doomed the US campaign in Afghanistan completely.

As for the alleged fight against terrorism that Washington likes to brag about, it was reduced to the attempts undertaken by the White House to legitimize the Taliban, which is not just banned in Russia, but has also been outlawed in a number of other countries. However, these days the Taliban is hardly the only terrorist organization that operates in Afghanistan. It is enough to recall how Washington removed the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (banned in Russia) from its list of terrorist organizations. This formation operates in the north-eastern provinces of Afghanistan, those that are the closest to China. According to the French publication Atlantico, the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan receives funding from both American and Turkish intelligence agencies, and the US Embassy in Ankara is said to be the place that affiliates of this terrorist formation visit.

As a result, we see that behind the curtain of high notions that Washington likes to discuss so much lies a cunning plot that nobody wants to put to rest. Just like the world-famous test tubes that Colin Powell wielded at the UN that served as a pretext for Washington’s armed aggression against Iraq, so the infamous US-led “fight against terrorism” has also become a tool of US military aggression.

It is enough to mention that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda (banned in Russia), wasn’t hiding in Afghanistan. He found refuge in Pakistan where, by the way, he was killed on May 2, 2011. And it is unlikely that his location was unknown to American intelligence agencies. And if it was so, they don’t even worth their salt! It’s just that twenty years ago Washington needed a foothold in Central Asia badly, and there was no way for it to unleash an armed intervention against a nuclear-armed Pakistan, or one of the countries of the post-Soviet space that were “hiding under the Russia umbrella”. It turned out that Afghanistan was the only “convenient target” for the US to attack, which would result in its painful downfall.

As for the current situation, Washington continues its attempts to take advantage of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan as a future location of its troops after their withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, the ministry of defense of Uzbekistan has already stated that the military doctrine of the country prohibits foreign troops from being deployed on its soil.

Therefore, the attention of the United States would quickly shift to Tajikistan. However, after the visit that Tajikistan’s president Emomali Rahmon paid to Moscow on May 9, where he negotiated both special preferences and funds for his country, it would be unrealistic to count on the redeployment of American troops to Tajikistan.

Therefore, Kyrgyzstan is now under the complete focus of Washington, on the back of its obvious dissatisfaction with the position Moscow took on the recent border conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Realizing this, Russian officials invited Kyrgyzstan’s president Sadyr Japarov to visit Moscow to mend shattered ties, while nullifying the damaged inflicted upon the relations of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Washington, nevertheless, is set to continue its attempts of persuading Kyrgyz elites, taking advantage of, among other things, the expertise of the recently appointed assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs – the former US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Donald Lu, who knows the situation in Central Asia in great detail.

Thus, the battle for Central Asia is only getting more intense as the United States draws new players in the heated competition between the countries of the region. Thus, a number of anti-Iranian remarks were recently made by Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani. At the opening of a dam in Nimruz province, he announced that Iran wouldn’t be able to use the water of cross-border rivers free of charge no more, although the corresponding agreement between the countries remains in force. China, with which Iran is strengthening its strategic cooperation, has also become an indirect victim of such remarks.

Under these circumstances, Russia and the Central Asian countries have recently begun discussing a road map that will allow the borders between the latter and Afghanistan to remain impenetrable for radical elements. It’s clear that the armed forces of Russia and Kazakhstan will have to work in close coordination with Tashkent, Ashgabat and Dushanbe to be able respond to the challenges that the Taliban and its affiliates may present to the regional stability in the future.

Valery Kulikov, political expert, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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https://journal-neo.org/2021/05/15/while-withdrawing-troops-washington-craves-for-a-new-base-in-central-asia/

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