America Needs To Stop Lying About Russia And China

johnmenadue |  The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

for racetards and bibtards mistakenly believing they've spotted some common ground...,

salon |  Sometime in 1994, as Afghanistan tumbled into disarray in the wake of the civil war that followed the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, there emerged a highly secretive and heavily armed group known as the Taliban. Its declared purposes were to restore peace, to enforce traditional law and to defend the Islamic character of Afghanistan. The world now knows the rest of the story. After the cleric-led movement captured Kabul, the nation’s capital, in September 1996, it became clear to all observers that the Taliban represented a very troubling development in Islamic radicalism.

The Taliban, which springs from the Sunni branch of Islam, began a genocidal campaign designed to wipe out Shiite Muslims from much of Afghanistan. It openly countenanced international terrorism, harboring the criminal mastermind Osama bin Laden and giving him virtually free rein to plan bombings and assassinations. And it imposed a disturbing and deeply fundamentalist form of Muslim culture on the nation. Under the Taliban regime, girls’ schools were closed and women were forced to quit their jobs (at one time, 40 percent of Afghan doctors were female) and to wear a head-to-toe garment known as the burkha. Movies, television, videos, music and dance — all were banned.

This is a story that needs telling to a wide audience, and journalist Ahmed Rashid, who has covered the Afghan wars for more than 20 years as a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Daily Telegraph, is well equipped to do that. Getting it was not an easy task: The Taliban is about as impenetrable a political organization as exists anywhere in the world. Its acknowledged leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has never met with Western reporters or diplomats and has never even been photographed.

The tale is even more complicated, though. There’s also the matter of oil — specifically the desire of international oil companies to build a pipeline from the Caspian oil-producing region (home to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and several other small nations) to serve potentially massive markets in South Asia. The route goes directly through Afghanistan, and the result has been what Rashid refers to as “romancing the Taliban”: For years, he reports, U.S. economic interests, driven by oil, took precedence over human-rights concerns; only very recently did pressure from American women concerned about the repression of Afghan women finally lead to a reversal in policy. Rashid was on the scene all along, covering what he calls the new “Great Game” in Central Asia, a late 20th century version of the late 19th century colonial struggle for hegemony. “Policy was not being driven by politicians and diplomats,” he writes, “but by the secretive oil companies and intelligence services of the regional states.”

The chief virtue of Rashid’s account is his ability to delve beneath the surface of events without falling prey to a one-sided Marxist-style economic analysis. Oil is important — but so is geopolitics, including the American desire to play off Afghanistan against Iran; and so are the obvious issues surrounding the oppression of women by the Taliban. As Rashid places the Taliban in its historical and social context, he accomplishes the difficult task of maintaining a degree of empathy while still excoriating the organization as cruel, barbaric and repressive. Its members aren’t even good Muslims by anyone’s standard except their own:

The Long War - Consequences and Costs (Part III)

Third, Where we are going:

The Neoconservatives, who have set the foreign policy of the Bush administration, have called for what they call The Long War. They expect it to last about half a century, that is for most of your lives.

What is it? What will it do to our position in the world? What will it do to our laws and our concept of civil liberties? What effect will it have on our society and economy? What will it cost in terms of money?

• The core idea of neoconservatism is that America , alone among world powers, has the strength, the wisdom and the right to impose its will upon all the nations of the world, in effect to remake them not in the American image, as we would define it, but as subordinate states within a new American security system. These concepts have been spelled out in numerous articles and speeches by prominent neoconservatives within and outside of government. The most important have also been embedded in the 2005 “National Defense Strategy of the United States of America ” which baldly states that “ America is a nation at war [which] At the direction of the President…will defeat adversaries at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing.” That is, to engage in preemptive military strikes. Adversaries are variously described, but among the descriptions are those who seek to “limit our global freedom to act” and “dominate key regions” or “develop and use breakthrough technologies to negate current U.S. advantages in key operational domains.” Broadly speaking, “Our role in the world depends on effectively projecting and sustaining our forces in distant environments where adversaries may seek to deny us access.” In short, the official doctrine of America is world domination.

• Attempting to implement this doctrine now has us engaged in wars in Iraq , Afghanistan and Somalia . Inevitably, these military actions spill over into neighboring countries. Fighting in Afghanistan has caused in the last week to attack targets in Pakistan (infuriating not only the pro-American government and causing it to close down our supply route to Afghanistan but causing great popular anger while doing little or nothing to improve our position in Afghanistan ). We can be sure that wherever we try to implement the neoconservative doctrine, we will lose allies and friends while entrenching and embittering those we attack.

• The effect on the American society is already pernicious. Our government has acquired the habit of lying to us (as it did on the Iraq war), of withholding information even from the Congress (as it has done on the Department of Defense expenditures), of setting aside the Constitution (as it has done on incarceration and torture of prisoners of war and on invasion of privacy of our own citizens by wiretaps in violation of the law) and in numerous other ways that would have shocked our ancestors. In short we have taken several steps toward the ghastly world described by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

• It has polarized our society to a degree that makes intelligent debate on public policy nearly impossible and often dangerous and has so skewed our economy that, as I have pointed out, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world combined and more than we spend on all other public programs combined. Doing so, and refusing the admit the costs, have caused us to go deeply into debt, to allow our cities and schools to degrade and kept us from addressing the ultimate security issue of any free society, the health of our citizens.

• The cost we can project to implement the neoconservative program is literally staggering. Some estimates, which are probably underestimates, run to about double our gross national product, upwards of $20 trillion.

Is this just a fantasy? A pipedream of a bunch of unbalanced, angry and frustrated neoconservatives?

I wish I could tell you that it is. Sadly, it is much more. For example, we now have nearly 1,000 U.S. military bases in other countries. We have the troops and weapons in place to act anywhere in the world. The Bush administration maintains publicly that it has the authority to do so. The previously operative law, the War Powers Resolution (P.L 93-148 of 1973), which was passed by Congress over the veto of President Nixon, limits the president’s authority to commit American troops into hostile situations and requires him “in every possible circumstance” to consult with the Congress before so doing. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush convinced the Congress to grant him full authority (P.L. 102-1 of September 18, 2001) to “use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq.” President Bush has taken the position that this resolution gives him even wider authority over anywhere he deems a threat to exist. With this in mind, the Department of Defense, under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, created a special secret force, said to number 55,000 men with a budget of about $80 billion, which does not have to report to Congress or even to civilian representatives of the Government, the ambassadors, but is authorized to carry out assassinations and even to overthrow governments. Members of this force were active in the Somalia invasion and are already said to be involved in covert activities in Iran . We learned on September 11, 2008 that some of them had been sent into Pakistan despite the refusal of its government to allow them.

It is, of course, possible to encourage proxies to act without committing American troops. This seems to have been the case in the recent crisis over Georgia .

What happened in Georgia may be almost as much a lesson for America as what is happening in Iraq , Afghanistan and Somalia . The major difference is that an attack on Russia would cause a nuclear world war. Russia, under the Tsars, the Communists and Vladimir Putin, naturally was sensitive to what happened on its frontier – just as America, under the Monroe Doctrine, has always been in Latin America. Recognizing this strategic reality, James Baker, the first President Bush’s secretary of state, promised the Russians that we would not move NATO ahead “even one inch.” We have now moved it right into Russia ’s immediately neighborhood. I agree with Mr. Baker that this was not a wise move. But worse was to follow. You would have to read the press very carefully to learn that it was Georgia that attacked South Ossetia (whose citizens have Russian passports and which has been essentially independent for about 20 years). On August 7, Georgian President President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the attack when, he claims, he was given a “green light” by the Bush administration. Anticipating the move, the Russians reacted in their usual heavy-handed fashion. So we were furious. Vice President Dick Cheney rushed to Georgia to promise them a billion dollars in aid and after considerable diplomatic arm twisting a NATO delegation rushed in to commiserate. But then, of course, nothing happened. We would not go to war with Russia to protect South Ossetia . Nor would NATO. So we created a crisis where none existed and both Georgians and inhabitants paid the bill in suffering.

Now look at what lies ahead in Iran

Two issues have dominated discussion of Iran – its alleged attempts to acquire nuclear weapons and its supposed intervention in Iraq . Of course, also, many people, particularly women, dislike its regressive social policies toward women. But, on the nuclear issue bear in mind two things:

• first, it was America that got Iran started toward nuclear weapons. As Jonathan Power wrote, “Lost somewhere in the mists of history is the knowledge that it was the pro-American Shah of Iran who initiated Iran ’s quest to build a nuclear bomb. And it was the anti-American revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini that initially suspended work on the bomb.” Also our most authoritative estimators of facts in foreign affairs, our 16 intelligence agencies, found unanimously last November that they had “high confidence” that Iran had no nuclear weapons and had no plans to attempt to build them.

I obviously do not have access to all of the data available to intelligence community, but I have learned in my foreign affairs experience that to understand any other country’s policies one must put himself, as it were, on the other side of the table, in the chair occupied by its leader. So what would I do if I were Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or President Mahmoud Ahmadi Najad? I would see that President Bush singled out three countries which he called “the Axis of Evil.” Then he threatened them with “regime change.” The Iranian leader would know that regime change is a euphemism for overthrowing their governments and killing their leaders. So what did America do? Iraq , which did not have nuclear weapons, was destroyed while North Korea , which did have nuclear weapons and so could not be safely attacked, was offered an aid program, money and food supplies. That leaves Iran . What would a rational, patriotic, practical Iranian leader do? No doubt he would try to acquire this ultimate defense tool as quickly and as secretly as he could. Even blowing up all the identified nuclear-related sites and killing all the nuclear-related technicians will simply delay the process and guarantee that Iran will eventually get the bomb.

• second, the Bush administration has charged that Iran was playing a significant role in thwarting our operations in Iraq – that is acting as we expected in our 2005 National Security Strategy. But the US intelligence experts found that these charges were exaggerated or unproven.

Again, if I were an Iranian policy planner, I would urge that my government do what it could to make American lives there difficult. As an Iranian, I would react as an American would if a foreign power, which proclaims itself our enemy, were occupying Mexico . Imagine our reaction to that! In fact, we don’t have to imagine. We just have to remember the Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba .

We are not yet in a full-scale war against Iran , but if we attack Iran with nuclear weapons, the estimates are that we will kill upwards of 3 million Iranians but then we will be in a guerrilla war that will make Iraq look like a picnic. Iran has 150 thousand national guardsmen, already organized and fully equipped for guerrilla warfare – in 2003 Iraq had none at all – and Iran has a fleet of fast, highly maneuverable and lethal speed boats that will attack our fleet and above all oil tankers. On attacking Iran , the “free world” is not with us. Public opinion polls tell us that whereas at least the western Europeans used to regard us as the world’s leader toward stability, many now think of us as a rogue nation. Americans would not use that term, but the latest polls in April this year show that 81% of us think that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.” In my meetings with conservative business leaders, I find that practically all think that an attack on Iran would be insane. Many think that our brief role as the world’s leader is nearly ended, that if the 20th century was the American century, the 21st will not be. Now, for the first time, we are even being turned down for further borrowing by the great sovereign wealth funds. They have come to regard us the way a bank does a customer whose assets are pledged, who is spending too much and who does not seem to be acting rationally.

Do Bears Sh*t in the Woods?

Is Afghanistan a Narco-State? Read the article describing the current state. Pasted here for your convenience are its preposterous conclusions;

The solution remains a simple one: execute the policy developed in 2007. It requires the following steps:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.

3. Increase the number of D.E.A. agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.

4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.

5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.

There are other initiatives that could help as well: better engagement of Afghanistan’s neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction programs. But if we — the Afghans and the U.S. — do just the five items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban.

What a crock of unmitigated nonsense that entire little gubmint puff-piece was. The fact of the matter is really quite a bit more simple than all that. Bears will not be dissuaded from sh*tting in the woods unless and until there are either no more bears or no more woods.

in measured results, how successful have Petraeus' strategies been in Afghanistan and Iraq?

aljazeera | Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to him as "the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation".

But his critics say, the legacy of his career is not that stellar and deserves far more scrutiny than the US media and politicians are willing to give it. 

Earlier this year, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis released a whistleblower report on conditions in Afghanistan.

He said that Petraeus consistently gave glowing and inaccurate accounts of US military progress and that Petraeus built a so-called "cult of personality" around himself.

"A message had been learned by the leading politicians of our country, by the vast majority of our uniformed service members, and the population at large [that] David Petraeus is a real war hero - maybe even on the same plane as Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower .... But the most important lesson everyone learned [was to] never, ever question General Petraeus or you'll be made to look a fool!"

In his report, Davis was scathing in his assessment of US military commanders:

"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognisable.

"This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."

calling afghanistan what it is - a drug war

Salon | In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and profiting from opium -- and then, ironically, fell from power only months after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the U.S. military intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the government in Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have taken control of ever larger parts of the Afghan countryside.

These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise in Afghanistan's opium harvest -- from just 250 tons in 1979 to 8,200 tons in 2007. For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has accounted for as much as 50 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90 percent of the world's heroin supply.

The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it defies solution by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its most inept and least competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total eradication, the Bush administration dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai. In recent years, opium farming has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly 20 percent of the country's estimated population, and funds a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: In poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

a secret war in 120 countries

TomDispatch | Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight. It was atypical. While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military
Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate. Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions. These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."

This assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.

Growth Industry
From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command. Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM’s baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion. If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8 billion in these years. Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold. Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon.

towards a world war III scenario

Globalresearch | The war on Libya is an integral part of the broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which until recently consisted of three distinct areas of conflict: Afghanistan and Pakistan (the AfPak War), Iraq, Palestine.

These four war theaters are interrelated. They are part of a broader region of conflict, which extends from North Africa and the Middle East, engulfing a large part of the Mediterranean basin, to China's Western frontier with Afghanistan, and Northern Pakistan.

The Battle for Oil

More than 60 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves lie in Muslim lands. “The Battle for Oil” waged by the US-NATO-Israel military alliance requires the demonization of the inhabitants of those countries which possess these vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

Iran possesses ten percent of global oil and gas reserves. The US is the first and foremost military and nuclear power in the world, but it possesses less than two percent of global oil and gas reserves.

The US-led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region.

Demonization is applied to an enemy which possesses three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves. “Axis of evil”, “rogue states”, “failed nations”, “Islamic terrorists”: demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America’s “war on terror”. They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.

The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. The oil fields are encircled by NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN “peacekeeping” operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea deployed as part of the “war on terrorism”.

The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under “free market” supervision. This control also extends to strategic oil and gas pipeline corridors (e.g. Afghanistan).

Demonization is a psy-op, used to sway public opinion and build a consensus in favor of war. Psychological warfare is directly sponsored by the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus. It is not limited to assassinating or executing the rulers of Muslim countries; it extends to entire populations. It also targets Muslims in Western Europe and North America. It purports to break national consciousness and the ability to resist the invader. It denigrates Islam. It creates social divisions. It is intended to divide national societies and ultimately trigger “civil war”.

Is a World War III Scenario Unfolding?

The US and its NATO allies are preparing to launch a nuclear war directed against both Iran and North Korea with devastating consequences. This military adventure in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity. While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality.

The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

It is not Iran and North Korea which are a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.

Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. War preparations to attack Iran are in an advanced state of readiness. Hi-tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.

This military adventure has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board since the mid-1990s: first Iraq, then Iran, according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.

Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, this strategic military deployment also threatens North Korea, China and Russia.

u.s. joins ranks of failed states?

ICH | According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family, and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

afghan bomber kills cia operatives

WaPo | A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history, U.S. officials said.

The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted -- Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda's home base.

U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.

It is unclear exactly how the assailant managed to gain access to the heavily guarded U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA. The bomber struck in what one U.S. official described as the base's fitness center.

In addition to the dead, eight people were wounded, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.

While many details remained vague Wednesday, the attack appears to have killed more U.S. intelligence personnel than have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in late 2001. The CIA has previously acknowledged the deaths of four officers in fighting in Afghanistan in the past eight years.

sipri yearbook 2010 - armaments, disarmament, and international security

SIPRI | ‘The 12 chapters of SIPRI Yearbook 2010 and their accompanying appendices and documentation provide the single most comprehensive and in-depth assessment of developments in international security, armaments and disarmament over the past year’

Chapter 5. Military expenditure
Sample chapter (PDF)
Summary
Total global military expenditure in 2009 is estimated to have been $1531 billion. This represents an increase of 6 per cent in real terms compared to 2008, and of 49 per cent since 2000. Military expenditure comprised approximately 2.7 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009. All regions and subregions saw an increase in 2009, except the Middle East.

The global economic crisis had little impact on world military spending in 2009, as most major economies boosted public spending to counteract the recession, postponing deficit reduction. While military expenditure was not a major feature of economic stimulus packages, it was not generally cut either. Nine of the top 10 spenders increased military spending in 2009. However, some smaller economies less able to sustain large deficits did cut spending.

Natural resource revenues appear to be a significant driver of military expenditure in many developing countries, with rapidly rising revenues from oil and other commodities in recent years, due to increases in both price and production. This may lead to increased military spending as a means of protecting resources from internal or external threats, while resource revenues are often a source of funding for arms purchases. The drop in commodity prices in 2009 has slowed this trend in some cases.

The conflict in Afghanistan is proving increasingly costly to many of the countries with a substantial troop presence there and has also generated debates as to the focus of military spending, between equipment of use in current conflicts and major weapon platforms designed for power projection. In the UK a combination of the Afghanistan conflict, high deficits and an overambitious equipment programme have sharpened this debate.

US military spending is continuing to rise under the Obama Administration, partly due to the escalating conflict in Afghanistan. Spending is budgeted to rise further in 2010, and military spending is exempted from a general freeze on discretionary spending. The 2010 budget saw some refocusing of priorities, with cancellation of some major weapon systems and increased focus on information and communications technology, but no major strategic shift.

Military spending patterns in Afghanistan and Iraq both reflect the demands of rebuilding a country’s armed forces from scratch following external invasion and with continued requirement for substantial external funding.

Oil, not democracy.....,

These wars are about oil, not democracy - in yesterday's Toronto Sun.

Four major western oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Total are about to sign U.S.-brokered no-bid contracts to begin exploiting Iraq's oil fields. Saddam Hussein had kicked these firms out three decades ago when he nationalized Iraq's oil industry. The U.S.-installed Baghdad regime is welcoming them back.

Iraq is getting back the same oil companies that used to exploit it when it was a British colony.

As former fed chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted, the Iraq war was all about oil. The invasion was about SUV's, not democracy.

Afghanistan just signed a major deal to launch a long-planned, 1,680-km pipeline project expected to cost $8 billion. If completed, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI) will export gas and later oil from the Caspian basin to Pakistan's coast where tankers will transport it to the West.

The Caspian basin located under the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakkstan, holds an estimated 300 trillion cubic feet of gas and 100-200 billion barrels of oil. Securing the world's last remaining known energy El Dorado is a strategic priority for the western powers.

But there are only two practical ways to get gas and oil out of land-locked Central Asia to the sea: Through Iran, or through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Iran is taboo for Washington. That leaves Pakistan, but to get there, the planned pipeline must cross western Afghanistan, including the cities of Herat and Kandahar.

So simple when viewed in its totality and in retrospect....,

aging white population of Europe/North America vs youth of Central/Western Asia and Afrika

pbs |  WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The scenes of the children and the education, if you can call it that, that they’re getting are really quite terrifying.

And I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit more about the men who think that this is a good thing to teach children, to teach children so young to learn how to kill.

NAJIBULLAH QURAISHI: I have never seen this in my journalism life before.

At the beginning, I didn’t know when they mentioned me they have a school, they are children, if I want to go and film. I was thinking maybe there is a proper lesson, they maybe learn some mathematics, some grammar or some language or something or maybe proper Koran. I was thinking like this.

But, suddenly, I come across with jihad for 3 years old, or 4- or 5-year-old children. You’re telling what is jihad and how to kill. So then I was shocked.

MAN (through interpreter): What is this word? Jihad. What is jihad?

NAJIBULLAH QURAISHI: These guys mainly come from Pakistan.

They were telling me that this is the time they should teach the children, and they should learn from now and they should be prepared.

MAN (through interpreter): Fire it from a standing position, like this.

NAJIBULLAH QURAISHI: For them, they should be ready for fighting, for everything at the age of 12 or 13 for something like this.

They were asking the children about the weapons, for example, how many bullets it takes, where this pistol made from, where is Kalashnikov made from, why we should use this, and who should we — against with this, and lots of different things which the children knew from this age.

Then, on the film, you can see the second generation, which is all the teenagers, like 13 or 17. And they’re ready to blow themselves up or to do a suicide attack.

I came to the conclusion about Afghanistan’s future and Afghanistan’s next generation. Still, we have over 90 percent uneducated people. We don’t have security. Day by day, all the terrorists come into Afghanistan, all the farmers.

Right now in Afghanistan, we have Haqqani Network. We have Hezb-e-Islami or Hekmatyar. We have the Taliban. And now we have this crazy group, the most — worst group ever I have seen in my life. And I cannot see any bright future about that country, and I don’t think if there is any — any power to defeat them.

Fall Of Afghanistan: Cornpop Hiding, Blinken Eating Shit Sandwiches, Kamala Devi Looking Good...,

Talked to a buddy who was an Embedded Tactical Trainer with the ANA in Afghanistan for a few tours.

Some of his observations as to why the Afghan National Army is folding so quickly were quite interesting to me, so here goes

1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists. pic.twitter.com/5Q05xqV7rg

— TheHuntForTomClancy (@HuntClancy) August 14, 2021

In addition to not being paid, fed, or resupplied by leadership that fled the country with cars full of embezzled $$$ - the Afghan National Army folded quick, fast, and in a hurry for the following reason(s):

1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists.

2. So, the Taliban knows who the ANA Kandak commanders are. Everyone's got a cousin in the Taliban and a cousin in the ANA/ANP/ABP/CTPT whatever. The ANA Kandak commanders get a phone call from the Taliban commanders: we've got your family in X province under our protection now.

3. When the American ETT's lost operational control over their advisors, the ANA officers and NCOs had no one to put a check on the tendency to abuse new Askars, and also the tendency to steal the new Askars' money (Here's $100, we'll take $90 back now for your food and uniform).

4. Morale within the units is shit, and the trust and mutual respect needed for effective small-unit combat actions to actually work doesn't really exist. Corruption runs wild, drug abuse is a big problem, and again, everyone's got a cousin on the other side, so fuck it, right?

5. Plus, the US concentrated on developing combat forces in their own image, supplying the ANA with surplus Flag of United States arms, vehicles, uniforms & commo gear. The US spent thousands upon thousands of dollars training and equipping each ANA Askar, but forgot something: they didn't issue eyeglasses.

6. I have shit uncorrected eyesight, like, I really need glasses to do just about anything, certainly to shoot an M4 or an M203 accurately enough to kill the person I'm aiming at. Don't you reckon there might be myopic askars? None of the Askars had eyeglasses.

7. Afghanistan was a complete, total, and epic fuckup by the Administration, the Intelligence Community, the American Deep State. Sheer and utter incompetence played out over 20 years to the nth degree. For any of us looking, all I got is that we should now understand our Vietnam veterans better. And, man, every administration since Jimmy Carter (or hell, you can go back to Eisenhower and Morrison-Knudsen's dam building efforts) fucked up afghanistan.

p.s. the Talibs also have cousins who are Askars in the army. The difference is that the Talibs believe they're right and the Askars don't. That's the biggest difference. Weapons and big spending can't buy that.

This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm

— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021

downed drone belonged to cia

Video - RT 'US poker, Iran chess: Lies vs strategy'

WaPo | The unmanned surveillance plane lost by the United States in Iran was a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA, U.S. officials said Monday.

The officials said Iran’s military appears to be in possession of one of the more sensitive surveillance platforms in the CIA’s fleet, an aircraft that was shaped and designed to evade enemy defenses.

The mission of the downed drone remains unclear. Iran, a longtime adversary of the United States, is believed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be pursuing the development of a nuclear weapon and is also accused of providing support to anti-coalition elements in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The RQ-170 has been used by the CIA for highly sensitive missions into other nations’ airspace, including months of surveillance of the compound in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was hiding before he was killed in a May raid by Special Operations forces.

A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the drone was being flown by the agency. A Pentagon spokesman, George Little, also declined to comment.

The disclosure that the drone apparently recovered by Iran was being flown by the CIA comes after previous signals from U.S. officials that had created the impression that the plane was being flown by the U.S. military on a more mundane mission over Afghanistan and had simply strayed into Iranian territory.

A statement issued by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan on Sunday said that the downed drone “may be a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status.”

U.S. Dollar Hegemony Ended Last Wednesday

popularresistance |  Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG, speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for taking time to speak with me today, Michael.

Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.

MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has benefited the wealthy class in the United States?

MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor.

Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism, when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States. And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.

This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.

And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.

MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or what’s happening?

The Russian People Have Given The Kremlin Carte Blanche To Get Even

strategic culture |  Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

a case for demilitarizing the military

tomdispatch |  General Lloyd Austin, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), recently testified before Congress, suggesting that Washington needed to up its troop levels in Iraq and Syria.  Meanwhile, in his own congressional testimony, still-to-be-confirmed incoming CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel, formerly head of U.S. Special Operations Command, seconded that recommendation and said he would reevaluate the American stance across the Greater Middle East with an eye, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman put it, to launching “a more aggressive fight against the Islamic State.”  In this light, both generals called for reviving a dismally failed $500 million program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to support the U.S. fight against the Islamic State (IS).  They both swear, of course, that they'll do it differently this time, and what could possibly go wrong? 

Meanwhile, General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), pressed by Senator John McCain in congressional testimony, called on the U.S. to “do more” to deal with IS supporters in Libya.  And lo and behold, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had only recently presented an AFRICOM and Joint Special Operations Command plan to the president’s “top national security advisers.”  They were evidently “surprised” to discover that it involved potentially wide-ranging air strikes against 30 to 40 IS targets across that country.  Meanwhile, in Afghanistan -- U.S. Special Operations units and regular troops having recently been rushed once again into embattled Helmand Province in the heartland of that country’s opium poppy trade -- General Austen and others are calling for a reconsideration of future American drawdowns and possibly the dispatch ofmore troops to that country.

Do you sense a trend here?  In the war against the Islamic State, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have been engaged in the drip, drip, drip of what, in classic Vietnam terms, might be called “mission creep.”  They have been upping American troop levels a few hundred at a time in Iraq and Syria, along with air power, and loosing Special Operations forces in combat-like operations in both countries.  Now, it looks like top military commanders are calling for mission speed-up across the region.  (In Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it already seems to have begun.)

And keep in mind, watching campaign 2016, that however militaristic the solutions of the Pentagon and our generals, they are regularly put in the shade by civilians, especially the Republican candidates for president, who can barely restrain their eagerness to let mission leap loose.   As Donald Trump put it in the last Republican debate, calling for up to 30,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq, “I would listen to the generals.”  That might now be the refrain all American politicians are obliged to sing.  Similarly, John Kasich called for a new “shock and awe” campaign in the Middle East to “wipe them out.”  And that’s the way it’s been in debate season -- including proposals to put boots on the ground big time from Libya and possibly even the Sinai peninsula to Afghanistan, bomb the region back to the stone age, and torture terror suspects in a fashion that would have embarrassed Stone Age peoples. 

Put another way, almost 15 years after America’s global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster writes today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom recognized, no less discussed or debated.  TomDispatch hopes to rectify that with a monumental post from a man who knows something about the realities of both the U.S. military and changing civilian relations to it.  Gregory Foster, who teaches at National Defense University and is a decorated Vietnam veteran, suggests that it’s time we finally ask: Whatever happened to old-fashioned civilian control over the U.S. military?  Implicitly, he also asks a second question: These days, who controls the civilians?