“Legitimate Press” Runs Report from Iranian PressTV On Secret CIA Army In Syria

[The following report is more significant because of where it was found, rather than what it says.  It was on re-posted on a "legitimate news" site, the NY Daily News, after it  was originally posted on Iranian PressTV, where historian and researcher Webster Tarpley is often interviewed for his expert opinions.]

CIA ‘secret army’ seeks to destroy Syria: Report

Tehran, Aug 9 — An American author and historian says a “secret army” of US spy agency CIA has the goal of destroying the Syrian state, Iran’s Press TV reported Thursday.

“It’s a secret army of the CIA if you will and the goal is to destroy the Syrian state,” Webster Griffin Tarpley told Press TV.

“Recent news reports indicate that the so-called Free Syrian Army, the death squads are focusing on killing government officials even if they’re in the civil service… the government is targeted,” Tarpley said.

“They’re also attempting to kill scientists because these people are also considered to be the supporters of (President Bashar) Assad and as we’ve seen on July 18 a huge terrorist attack on the Syrian government killing the defence minister and other top personnel,” he said.

On July 18, a bomb attack on the headquarters of the National Security Bureau in Damascus killed Defence Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Deputy Defence Minister Assef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani.

National Security Bureau chief Hisham Bakhtiar also died of wounds sustained in the attack two days later.

“So there is no doubt this is terrorism. Al Qaeda has always been… the CIA-Arab legion and it continues to do this,” the American author said.

IANS

Washington Puts Its Money on Proxy War

The Election Year Outsourcing that No One’s Talking About 
By Nick Turse

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began funneling aid to mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the U.S. that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.

From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare. Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world.

While the United States is currently engaged in just one outright proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it’s laying the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate forces in the future, training “native” troops to carry out missions — up to and including outright warfare.  With this in mind and under the auspices of the Pentagon and the State Department, U.S. military personnel now take part in near-constant joint exercises and training missions around the world aimed at fostering alliances, building coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into shape to support U.S. national security objectives.

While using slightly different methods in different regions, the basic strategy is a global one in which the U.S. will train, equip, and advise indigenous forces — generally from poor, underdeveloped nations — to do the fighting (and dying) it doesn’t want to do.  In the process, as small an American force as possible, including special forces operatives and air support, will be brought to bear to aid those surrogates.  Like drones, proxy warfare appears to offer an easy solution to complex problems.  But as Washington’s 30-year debacle in Afghanistan indicates, the ultimate costs may prove both unimaginable and unimaginably high.

Start with Afghanistan itself.  For more than a decade, the U.S. and its coalition partners have been training Afghan security forces in the hopes that they would take over the war there, defending U.S. and allied interests as the American-led international force draws down.  Yet despite an expenditure of almost $50 billionon bringing it up to speed, the Afghan National Army and other security forces have drastically underperformed any and all expectations, year after year.

One track of the U.S. plan has been a little-talked-about proxy army run by the CIA.  For years, the Agency has trained and employed six clandestine militias that operate near the cities of Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad as well as in Khost, Kunar, and Paktika provinces.  Working with U.S. Special Forces and controlledby Americans, these “Counterterror Pursuit Teams” evidently operate free of any Afghan governmental supervision and have reportedly carried out cross-border raids into Pakistan, offering their American patrons a classic benefit of proxy warfare: plausible deniability.

This clandestine effort has also been supplemented by the creation of a massive, conventional indigenous security force.  While officially under Afghan government control, these military and police forces are almost entirely dependent on the financial support of the U.S. and allied governments for their continued existence.

Today, the Afghan National Security Forces officially number more than 343,000, but only 7% of its army units and 9% of its police units are rated at the highest level of effectiveness.  By contrast, even after more than a decade of large-scale Western aid, 95% of its recruits are still functionally illiterate.

Not surprisingly, this massive force, trained by high-priced private contractors, Western European militaries, and the United States, and backed by U.S. and coalition forces and their advanced weapons systems, has been unable to stamp out a lightly-armed, modest-sized, less-than-popular, rag-tag insurgency.  One of the few tasks this proxy force seems skilled at is shooting American and allied forces, quite often their own trainers, in increasingly common “green-on-blue”attacks.

Adding insult to injury, this poor-performing, coalition-killing force is expensive.  Bought and paid for by the United States and its coalition partners, it costs between $10 billion and $12 billion each year to sustain in a country whose gross domestic product is just $18 billion.  Over the long term, such a situation is untenable.

Back to the Future

Utilizing foreign surrogates is nothing new.  Since ancient times, empires and nation-states have employed foreign troops and indigenous forces to wage war or have backed them when it suited their policy aims.  By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tactic had become de rigueur for colonial powers like the French who employed Senegalese, Moroccans, and other African forces in Indochina and elsewhere, and the British who regularly used Nepalese Gurkhas to wage counterinsurgencies in places ranging from Iraq and Malaya to Borneo.

By the time the United States began backing the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, it already had significant experience with proxy warfare and its perils.  After World War II, the U.S. eagerly embraced foreign surrogates, generally in poor and underdeveloped countries, in the name of the Cold War.  These efforts included the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro via a proxy Cuban force that crashed and burned at the Bay of Pigs; the building of a Hmong army in Laos which ultimately lost to Communist forces there; and the bankrolling of a French war in Vietnam that failed in 1954 and then the creation of a massive army in South Vietnam that crumbled in 1975, to name just a few unsuccessful efforts.

A more recent proxy failure occurred in Iraq.  For years after the 2003 invasion, American policy-makers uttered a standard mantra: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”  Last year, those Iraqis basically walked off.

Between 2003 and 2011, the United States pumped tens of billions of dollars into “reconstructing” the country with around $20 billion of it going to build the Iraqi security forces.  This mega-force of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police was created from scratch to prop up the successors to the government that the United States overthrew.  It was trained by and fought with the Americans and their coalition partners, but that all came to an end in December 2011.

Despite Obama administration efforts to base thousands or tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for years to come, the Iraqi government spurned Washington’s overtures and sent the U.S. military packing.  Today, the Iraqi governmentsupports the Assad regime in Syria, and has a warm and increasingly close relationship with long-time U.S. enemy Iran.  According to Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency, the two countries have even discussed expanding their military ties.

African Shadow Wars

Despite a history of sinking billions into proxy armies that collapsed, walked away, or morphed into enemies, Washington is currently pursuing plans for proxy warfare across the globe, perhaps nowhere more aggressively than in Africa.

Under President Obama, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years.  These include last year’s war in Libya; the expansion of a growing network of supply depots, small camps, and airfields; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; and a special ops expeditionary force(bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.  (This mission against Kony is seen by some experts as a cover for a developing proxy war between the U.S. and the Islamist government of Sudan — which is accused of helping to support the LRA — and Islamists more generally.)  And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

In Somalia, Washington has already involved itself in a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against Islamist al-Shabaab militants that includesintelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and commando raids.  Now, it is also backing a classic proxy war using African surrogates.  The United States has become, as the Los Angeles Times put it recently, “the driving force behind the fighting in Somalia,” as it trains and equips African foot soldiers to battle Shabaab militants, so U.S. forces won’t have to.  In a country where more than 90 Americans were killed and wounded in a 1993 debacle now known by the shorthand “Black Hawk Down,” today’s fighting and dying has been outsourced to African soldiers.

Earlier this year, for example, elite Force Recon Marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (or, as a mouthful of an acronym, SPMAGTF-12) trained soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force.  It, in turn, supplies the majority of the troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) currently protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu.

This spring, Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in Somalia.  In April and May, members of Task Force Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment of the Texas National Guard, took part in a separate training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu, Burundi.  SPMAGTF-12 has also sent its trainers to Djibouti, another nation involved in the Somali mission, to work with an elite army unit there.

At the same time, U.S. Army troops have taken part in training members of Sierra Leone’s military in preparation for their deployment to Somalia later this year.  In June, U.S. Army Africa commander Major General David Hogg spoke encouragingly of the future of Sierra Leone’s forces in conjunction with another U.S. ally, Kenya, which invaded Somalia last fall (and just recently joined the African Union mission there).  “You will join the Kenyan forces in southern Somalia to continue to push al Shabaab and other miscreants from Somalia so it can be free of tyranny and terrorism and all the evil that comes with it,” he said. “We know that you are ready and trained. You will be equipped and you will accomplish this mission with honor and dignity.”

Readying allied militaries for deployment to Somalia is, however, just a fraction of the story when it comes to training indigenous forces in Africa.  This year, for example, Marines traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching riot-control techniques to that country’s military as part of what is otherwise a State Department-directed effort to rebuild its security forces.

In fact, Colonel Tom Davis of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) recently told TomDispatch that his command has held or has planned 14 major joint training exercises for 2012 and a similar number are scheduled for 2013.  This year’s efforts include operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria, including, for example, Western Accord 2012, a multilateral exercise involving the armed forces of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Gambia, and France.

Even this, however, doesn’t encompass the full breadth of U.S. training and advising missions in Africa.  “We… conduct some type of military training or military-to-military engagement or activity with nearly every country on the African continent,” wrote Davis.

Our American Proxies

Africa may, at present, be the prime location for the development of proxy warfare, American-style, but it’s hardly the only locale where the United States is training indigenous forces to aid U.S. foreign policy aims.  This year, the Pentagon has also ramped up operations in Central and South America as well as the Caribbean.

In Honduras, for example, small teams of U.S. troops are working with local forces to escalate the drug war there. Working out of Forward Operating Base Mocoron and other remote camps, the U.S. military is supporting Honduran operations by way of the methods it honed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  U.S. forces have also taken part in joint operations with Honduran troops as part of a training mission dubbed Beyond the Horizon 2012, while Green Berets have been assisting Honduran Special Operations forces in anti-smuggling operations.  Additionally, anincreasingly militarized Drug Enforcement Administration sent a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team, originally created to disrupt the poppy trade in Afghanistan, to aid Honduras’s Tactical Response Team, that country’s elite counternarcotics unit.

The militarization and foreign deployment of U.S. law enforcement operatives was also evident in Tradewinds 2012, a training exercise held in Barbados in June.  There, members of the U.S. military and civilian law enforcement agencies joined with counterparts from Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to improve cooperation for “complex multinational security operations.”

Far less visible have been training efforts by U.S. Special Operations Forces in Guyana, Uruguay, and Paraguay.  In June, special ops troops also took part in Fuerzas Comando, an eight-day “competition” in which the elite forces from 21 countries, including the Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay, faced-off in tests of physical fitness, marksmanship, and tactical capabilities.

This year, the U.S. military has also conducted training exercises in Guatemala, sponsored “partnership-building” missions in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Panama, and reached an agreement to carry out 19 “activities” with the Colombian army over the next year, including joint military exercises.

The Proxy Pivot

Coverage of the Obama administration’s much-publicized strategic “pivot” to Asia has focused on the creation of yet more bases and new naval deployments to the region.  The military (which has dropped the word pivot for “rebalancing”) is, however, also planning and carrying out numerous exercises and training missions with regional allies.  In fact, the Navy and Marines alone already reportedly engage in more than 170 bilateral and multilateral exercises with Asia-Pacific nations each year.

One of the largest of these efforts took place in and around the Hawaiian Islands from late June through early August.  Dubbed RIMPAC 2012, the exercise brought together more than 40 ships and submarines, more than 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Tonga.

Almost 7,000 American troops also joined around 3,400 Thai forces, as well as military personnel from Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea as part of Cobra Gold 2012.  In addition, U.S. Marines took part in Hamel 2012, a multinational training exercise involving members of the Australian and New Zealand militaries, while other American troops joined the Armed Forces of the Philippines for Exercise Balikatan.

The effects of the “pivot” are also evident in the fact that once neutralist India now holds more than 50 military exercises with the United States each year — more than any other country in the world.  “Our partnership with India is a key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on a recent trip to the subcontinent. Just how broad is evident in the fact that India is taking part in America’s proxy effort in Somalia.  In recent years, the Indian Navy has emerged as an “important contributor” to the international counter-piracyeffort off that African country’s coast, according to Andrew Shapiro of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Peace by Proxy

India’s neighbor Bangladesh offers a further window into U.S. efforts to build proxy forces to serve American interests.

Earlier this year, U.S. and Bangladeshi forces took part in an exercise focused on logistics, planning, and tactical training, codenamed Shanti Doot-3.  The mission was notable in that it was part of a State Department program, supported and executed by the Pentagon, known as the Global Peace Operations Initiative(GPOI).

First implemented under George W. Bush, GPOI provides cash-strapped nations funds, equipment, logistical assistance and training to enable their militaries to become “peacekeepers” around the world.  Under Bush, from the time the program was established in 2004 through 2008, more than $374 million was spent to train and equip foreign troops.  Under President Obama, Congress has funded the program to the tune of $393 million, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by the State Department.

In a speech earlier this year, the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro told a Washington, D.C., audience that “GPOI is particularly focusing a great deal of its efforts to support the training and equipping of peacekeepers deploying to… Somalia” and had provided “tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment for countries deploying [there].”  In a blog post he went into more detail, lauding U.S. efforts to train Djiboutian troops to serve as peacekeepers in Somalia and noting that the U.S. had also provided impoverished Djibouti with radar equipment and patrol boats for offshore activities.  “Djibouti is also central to our efforts to combat piracy,” he wrote, “as it is on the front line of maritime threats including piracy in the Gulf of Aden and surrounding waters.”

Djibouti and Bangladesh are hardly unique.  Under the auspices of the Global Peace Operations Initiative, the U.S. has partnered with 62 nations around the globe, according to statistics provided by the State Department.  These proxies-in-training are, not surprisingly, some of the poorest nations in their respective regions, if not the entire planet.  They include Benin, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Togo in Africa, Nepal and Pakistan in Asia, and Guatemala and Nicaragua in the Americas.

The Changing Face of Empire

With ongoing military operations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the Obama administration has embraced a six-point program for light-footprint warfare relying heavily on special operations forces, drones, spies, civilian partners, cyber warfare, and proxy fighters.  Of all the facets of this new way of war, the training and employment of proxies has generally been the least noticed, even though reliance on foreign forces is considered one of its prime selling points.  As the State Department’s Andrew Shapiro put it in a speech earlier this year: “[T]he importance of these missions to the security of the United States is often little appreciated… To put it clearly: When these peacekeepers deploy it means that U.S. forces are less likely to be called on to intervene.”  In other words, to put it even more clearly, more dead locals, fewer dead Americans.

The evidence for this conventional wisdom, however, is lacking.  And failures to learn from history in this regard have been ruinous.  The training, advising, and outfitting of a proxy force in Vietnam drew the United States deeper and deeper into that doomed conflict, leading to tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese.  Support for Afghan proxies during their decade-long battle against the Soviet Union led directly to the current disastrous decade-plus American War in Afghanistan.

Right now, the U.S. is once again training, advising, and conducting joint exercises all over the world with proxy war on its mind and the concept of “unintended consequences” nowhere in sight in Washington. Whether today’s proxies end up working for or against Washington’s interests or even become tomorrow’s enemies remains to be seen.  But with so much training going on in so many destabilized regions, and so many proxy forces being armed in so many places, the chances of blowback grow greater by the day.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, andregularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several books, including the recently published Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt). This piece is the latest article in his newseries on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation.

 

US should disclose future plans on Afghanistan – Russia

[If so many alternative news analysts like myself have long understood that American intentions are to stay in Afghanistan come "hell or high water," then why do Putin and his pals in the Kremlin seem so surprised now?  Pentagon spokesmen have been talking openly about a 25 year mission in Afghanistan for quite a while, even though the White House has kept babbling-on about some imaginary "withdrawal."  Surely Moscow understands Washington double-speak better than that.   I am certain that the KGB (replaced by FSB--Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) knows that American presidents and their spokesmen NEVER do what they say they will do.  Presidents only speak towards their own re-election.  Every word or public deed is designed to improve their electoral prognosis.  If they say that they plan to leave Iraq or Afghanistan then it is only a political ploy.  

If governments like Iraq manage to occasionally turn the tables on Washington, then things appear more hopeful for all mankind that the madness is over.  The war on terror is a war against all humankind, with the ultimate objective of bringing all nations under Washington's domination.  Anything that slows or sidelines the American mission is a plus for the human race.  Whatever facilitates White House plans to override the authority of all other Nations, leads to the subjugation of the entire race.  

If Washington were now to "come clean" on their real plans for Afghanistan and Central Asia, it would be an admission of guilt over the destruction that has been and would be wrought, all in the name of fighting an imaginary "war on terror."  Such an admission could only be considered a renunciation or repudiation of those plans for world conquest--The sweetest words that mankind could hear at this dire juncture in human history.]  

Reuters / Ahmad Nadeem

 

Russia’s deputy defense minister has said that it was a surprise to learn that the United States planned to stay in Afghanistan even after the ISAF leaves the country in 2014. Moscow demanded an explanation over the situation.

Anatoly Antonov was talking to press in the Tajikistan capital Dushanbe and said that the situation in Afghanistan was perplexing.

“We have a question: if the ISAF are planning to pull out from Afghanistan in 2014, does it mean that they have completed all tasks mentioned in the mandate that caused their presence in this country? If it is so, they must report to the body that had issued the mandate,” the Russian official said.

Antonov went on to say that Russia is worried by the news that Washington plans to maintain the military presence in Afghanistan even after 2014.

“All over a sudden we learn that the USA is staying in Afghanistan and again we have a question: if they have completed their task, why are they staying and if they have not, why are they going?” the deputy minister said.

The Russian official added that his country wanted additional explanation over the future plans of US military presence in Afghanistan – whether it will be military bases, or some other installations or anything of such kind.

“We want to know if American military bases will appear near the CSTO borders” Antonov said.

The CSTO is a Russia-led military bloc uniting Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan has recently announced that it was quitting the bloc, but according to the charter it must remain a member for some time after the announcement.

Antonov’s comments came one week after Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States should finish their job in Afghanistan before withdrawing the troops.

“It is regrettable that many participants in this operation are thinking about how to pull out of there,” Putin said at a meeting with paratroopers in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. “They took up this burden and should carry it to the end.”

Central Asia’s Simmering Instability

During some of the trials taking place in Osh and other southwestern Kyrgyzstan towns over the June ethnic clashes, Uzbek defendants and their relatives have been repeatedly targeted with physical violence, mental abuse and intimidation by relatives of Kyrgyz victims. (Photo: Dean C.K. Cox)

Central Asia’s Simmering Instability

 

Ilan Greenberg

Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev.There is potential for bloodshed in Central Asia. While it is unlikely that mountainous Kyrgyzstan will turn from an ethnographic documentary to something more like a Japanese monster movie, other less extreme but likely scenarios could cripple the prospects for post-Soviet Central Asia stability: more ethnic strife, the displacement of large numbers of aggrieved ethnic Uzbeks to countries elsewhere in the region that are unable to assimilate migrants, a sanctuary for the drug trade and the entrenchment of a desiccated economy with the potential to dry out more of the thirsty economies all around it.

The present instability has roots in clashes that took place in the summer of 2010. Two months after public protests overthrew the widely despised government of Kyrgyzstan president Kurmanbek Bakiyev and an interim administration had been installed, the South of Kyrgyzstan erupted in days of lethal violence and destruction.

Bakiyev had made news before. In 2009, he threatened to evict the U.S. transit air base, called Manas, from the Kyrgyz capital, only to reverse course and announce the reinstatement of its lease in return for lucrative new rents. The populist revolt against Bakiyev and the subsequent upheaval in the South of the country received media attention, but many policy makers have minimized the peril of Kyrgyzstan’s continuing instability and ethnic tensions. Yet the situation feeds concerns about possible scenarios ranging from increased Islamic radicalization among oppressed minorities to the (albeit unlikely) military intervention of Uzbekistan if the Kyrgyz South were to violently unspool again.

Kyrgyzstan’s South is a checkerboard of cheek-by-jowl ethnic communities, predominantly Kyrgyz, who also dominate the country’s North, and Uzbeks, many living just over the zigzag valley border from Uzbekistan. On June 10, 2010, a dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbek youth touched off a night of street brawls across southern Kyrgyzstan. Although the two ethnicities have a history of animosity, including a deadly clash in 1990 when Kyrgyzstan was still part of the Soviet Union, few anticipated what followed: two days of roiling attacks on Uzbek communities; large and organized mobs of ethnic Kyrgyz, some armed with automatic weapons and joined by police on foot, horseback and in armored personnel carriers, streamed into tight-knit Uzbek neighborhoods, called mahallas, to loot, burn and kill. By time the carnage ended, there were more than 450 fatalities—about 75 percent were ethnic Uzbek—more than 110,000 people fled for their lives into Uzbekistan and an additional 300,000 Uzbeks found refuge elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan.

Two years later, the situation is again ominous.

Most of the worst violence occurred in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city and, historically, a center of Uzbek business, trade and culture. An International Crisis Group (ICG) report released in March 2012 on widening ethnic divisions in Kyrgyzstan’s South found “while a superficial quiet has settled on the city, neither the Kyrgyz nor Uzbek community feels it can hold.”

Since “the June events,” as the pogrom against Uzbeks was quickly euphemized, ethnic Uzbek citizens have been subordinated to a shadow population: patrolling police and soldiers enforce an after-dark curfew on Uzbeks, corralling them into their mahallas, while during the daytime police break up small gatherings of Uzbek men on sidewalks or in markets; the government has shut down almost all Uzbek-language media; credible photographic evidence of the torture of Uzbek men arbitrarily arrested on village streets is circulated widely; Kyrgyz have seized Uzbek-owned businesses and taken over entire segments of the economy previously captured by Uzbeks, such as taxis and restaurants; even the powerful criminal cartels responsible for smuggling poppy from Afghanistan through Kyrgyzstan to points west are thought to have switched from Uzbek control to Kyrgyz. The result, said the ICG report, is “the sense of physical and social isolation is breeding a quiet, inchoate anger among all segments of the community—not just the youth, who could be expected to respond more viscerally to the situation, but also among the Uzbek elite and middle class. This is increased by an acute awareness that they have nowhere to go.”

By tradition, the Kyrgyz, who now number about 70 percent of the nation’s population, are rural and pastoral nomads; the Uzbeks, who make up only about 15 percent of the population or about 750,000 people but are urbanized, are heavily represented in the big southern cities of Osh and neighboring Jalalabad. Tension between the two ethnicities dates to long before the Soviet era, and during the past twenty years of Kyrgyzstan’s existence as an independent state, successive governments allowed and at times encouraged tensions to fester. When a political scuffle in Jalalabad in April 2010 instigated a power grab by a local ethnic-Uzbek politician that resulted in unsubstantiated accusations that Uzbeks had burned down property owned by the president and were preparing to fight for southern secession from the country, the June events were all but ordained.

Hypernationalism and Ethnic Supremacy

Ethnic unrest, given horrifying expression in the June events and hardened by two years of systemic anti-Uzbek repression, is further fueled by competing assertions of victimhood at the hands of the other. Both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks claim a post-June-events narrative that holds the other group primarily responsible for the violence.

There is some small risk of violence from the passive Uzbek population—Islamists or youths raging against discrimination and state harassment. However, the real threat comes from the Kyrgyz, who assign responsibility for the June events to the Uzbeks themselves and consider Uzbeks a separatist diaspora population—guests, not citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic. Ethno-supremacy has gone viral all over the country, and “Kyrgyzstan is for Kyrgyz” is a slogan with particular resonance in the South. Kyrgyz police routinely enter Uzbek homes to search for weapons, really as a pretext to intimidate, and it is most likely that the next miasma of violence will be against vulnerable Uzbeks.

On top of this bonfire, the mayor of Osh, Melis Myrzakmatov, a fierce Kyrgyz ultranationalist who routinely villainizes the Uzbek population and has written a book that explicitly calls for Uzbek social and political marginalization, holds Uzbeks responsible for the June violence against them. In public statements he repeatedly has intimated the need for Uzbek subjugation and has hinted he favors mass expulsion of Uzbeks from Kyrgyzstan. Perhaps most disturbingly, the ICG report found that “many well-educated southern Kyrgyz, in fact, view the mayor as the moderate, acceptable face of nationalism” because of his smooth communication skills. “He’s our little Hitler,” was how one prominent Uzbek lawyer in Osh, prone to carefully measured pronouncements, recently put it.

Incursions by international actors also have played a deleterious role. The United Nations has, to some degree, simply declared the crisis over. On January 18, 2012, in an address to the Stanley Foundation Conference on the Responsibility to Protect, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared the UN had successfully “used diplomacy” to end ethnic strife and violence in Kyrgyzstan. The OSCE, which maintains a large field office in Osh, is widely viewed by all sides as sitting on the sidelines and contributing to the federal government’s tendency to shrug at the continuing turmoil in the South (the OSCE pulled its people out of Osh during the June violence). The U.S. Agency for International Development has a 2012 congressional budgetary directive to address the Kyrgyz Republic’s chronic instability, which was “exacerbated by the effects of the 2010 political upheaval and ethnic violence,” but the USAID officials now on the ground in Kyrgyzstan paint a hallucinogenic picture of social progress and ethnic reconciliation.

The government of President Almazbek Atambayev, a northerner and increasingly characterized in private conversations among international observers as rapacious, also benefits from Kyrgyzstan’s membership in a number of international organizations participating in housing reconstruction, such as the Asia Development Bank (ADB), a $100 million donor in the reconstruction effort. Because of its membership in the ADB, and to encourage the country’s more open and democratic practices relative to other countries in Central Asia, the ADB has largely exempted Kyrgyzstan from its policy of paying NGOs directly, instead funneling funds to international NGOs working on reconstruction through Kyrgyz government agencies.

The Battle Deferred

“The Uzbeks are utterly pacified at this point. Let me give you an example,” began the sunburned French NGO administrator in a bustling restaurant on a hot summer night in a park in Osh. It was after dark, and not a single ethnic Uzbek occupied any of the tables. Earlier that week, the administrator had watched as a large SUV nearly collided with an elderly Uzbek woman walking across the street. The car’s occupants, three ethnic-Kyrgyz men, emerged from their vehicle to aggressively physically intimidate the old woman for getting in between their vehicle and their destination. The French administrator, who was accompanied by three burly Uzbek colleagues, was outraged and jumped out of his own car to come to the elderly pedestrian’s aid. His Uzbek colleagues quickly hauled him back into his car. “This is not a fight we can have,” they told him.

Two years on, most of the approximately three thousand destroyed properties have been rebuilt, and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan have reverted to a deeply submissive crouch. Kyrgyzstan is not a triumph of preventive diplomacy, ethnic tensions are not declining, international donors and foreign actors on the ground are not using their every leverage to insist on minority rights and stopping the radical nationalist agenda, and the central government is disengaged. This kind of story doesn’t end well.

Ilan Greenberg is a journalist and visiting public policy scholar at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, International Security Studies Program, in Washington, DC.

Image: premier.gov.ru

Exclusive: U.S. Banks Told To Prepare for the Big One

Exclusive: U.S. banks told to make plans for preventing collapse

By Rick Rothacker

 

(Reuters) – U.S. regulators directed five of the country’s biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the “living wills” the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.

Officials like Lehman Brothers former Chief Executive Dick Fuld have been criticized for having been too hesitant to take bold steps to solve their banks’ problems during the financial crisis.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency first directed five banks – which also include Citigroup Inc,, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co – to come up with these “recovery plans” in May 2010.

They told banks to consider drastic efforts to prevent failure in times of distress, including selling off businesses, finding other funding sources if regular borrowing markets shut them out, and reducing risk. The plans must be feasible to execute within three to six months, and banks were to “make no assumption of extraordinary support from the public sector,” according to the documents.

Spokespeople for the five banks declined to comment. The Federal Reserve also declined to comment.

Recovery plans differ from living wills, also known as “resolution plans,” which are required under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Living wills aim to end bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks by showing how they would liquidate themselves without imperiling the financial system.

“Recovery plans are about protecting the crown jewels,” said Paul Cantwell, a managing director at consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. “It’s about, ‘How do I sell off non-core assets?’ The priority is to the shareholders. A resolution plan is about protecting the system, taxpayers and creditors.”

The recovery plans are being used as part of regulators’ ongoing supervisory process. In Britain, recovery and resolution plans have both been part of the living will requirements for large banks.

Mike Brosnan, senior deputy comptroller for large banks at the OCC, said the regulator continuously evaluates contingency planning at the banks and savings associations it supervises.

“Recovery plans required of the largest banks are helpful in ensuring banks and regulators are prepared to manage periods of severe financial distress or instability affecting the banking sector,” he said.

This summer, nine global banks submitted living wills to the Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, and regulators released the public portion of the documents.

The recovery plans requested in 2010, meanwhile, have received little publicity. The names of the banks required to submit them have not been previously disclosed, and Reuters obtained them only through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Fed supplied Reuters with the letters requesting plans from banks, but not the banks’ actual plans because they were deemed confidential supervisory information. The regulator said it was withholding 5,100 pages of information.

MOVING FURTHER FROM DISASTER

Five years after the financial crisis, concerns remain about whether blow-ups at big banks could lead to another round of taxpayer bailouts. Trading losses have cost JPMorgan nearly $6 billion so far, and scandals such as the alleged rigging of an international interest rate benchmark have only highlighted the risks lurking inside big banks.

These disasters have damaged banks’ reputations, but not their balance sheets. Most are still profitable, and in recent years the five banks have improved their capital bases and liquidity. They also have been subjected to annual Federal Reserve stress tests that measure whether the banks have sufficient capital to weather severe economic scenarios.

Bank of America and Citigroup, in a sense, have already been executing the kind of moves called for in the recovery plans. Both have been selling off non-core operations and assets to streamline their sprawling businesses, after receiving multiple bailouts during the financial crisis.

Bank of America in June 2011 told Fed officials that it could shed branches in some parts of the country if it needed to raise capital in an emergency, a person familiar with the matter said in January. The proposal was part of a series of options provided to the Fed, including issuing a tracking stock for Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch operations.

But just because the bank proposed selling branches does not mean it’s a desirable move or highly probable, the person said. In the past year, Bank of America has shown progress in building capital without such actions. Its Tier 1 common capital ratio increased to 11.24 percent of risk-weighted assets as of June 30 from 8.23 percent a year earlier.

Tier 1 refers to a bank’s core capital and has been the main focus of regulators in assessing a bank’s capital adequacy.

MENTIONED IN PASSING

The banks’ chief risk officers, and in the case of Citigroup, Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, received letters in May 2010 instructing them on what to include in the recovery plans. The requests stemmed from January 2010 crisis management meetings held by regulators. The letters sent to the five banks were nearly identical.

Each plan was to address severe financial stress at the firm, as well as “general financial instability.” The plans should be capable of being executed ideally within three months, but no longer than six months, the documents said.

The plans should “make appropriate assumptions as to the valuations of assets and off-balance sheet positions,” the documents said.

Recovery plans have been mentioned in public before, but only in passing. In testimony to Congress in July 2010, Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo said the “largest internationally active U.S. banking organizations” were working on recovery plans. The initiative stemmed from work led by the Financial Stability Board, a body that coordinates the work of international financial regulators, he said.

In a presentation in March, JPMorgan Chase said it had a recovery plan in place and said it was ordered by regulators. The presentation was organized by Harvard Law School and was closed to the media at the time, but is available online. (here)

(Reporting By Rick Rothacker in Charlotte, North Carolina; Additional reporting by David Henry in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Iran and rivals face showdown in Mecca over Syrian civil war

Michael Theodoulou

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is heading for a rocky ride at an emergency summit of Muslim leaders called by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia that will focus on the civil war in Syria.

Iran’s uncompromising pledge of support on Tuesday for Bashar Al Assadis likely to make debate especially heated – if not in public, then certainly in private.

Iran launched a pre-emptive diplomatic strike to head off its expected isolation at next Tuesday’s summit. Tehran is hosting a hastily assembled meeting today of foreign ministers from a “dozen countries” that have a “principled and realistic position” on ending the violence in Syria.

The meeting will bring together representatives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said yesterday.

Sitting alongside the Syrian president in a televised display of solidarity on Tuesday, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s powerful national security adviser, cast the Syrian crisis as part of a wider struggle with the United States and its regional allies.

“What is happening in Syria is not an internal Syrian issue but a conflict between the axis of resistance and its enemies in the region and the world,” Mr Jalili said.

Iran has long accused its Arabian Gulf rivals of arming “terrorist” Syrian opposition groups at the behest of the “warmongering” US to break an “axis of resistance” linking Iran, Syria and Hizbollah against the “Zionist regime” and America.

Mr Jalili, a personal representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the Islamic republic would never allow this 30-year-old alliance to be smashed.

The collapse of the Assad dynasty would threaten Iran’s links with Hizbollah, Tehran’s Shiite ally in Lebanon, which gives the Iranians an invaluable proxy presence on Israel’s northern border and enables Iran to project its reach into the Arab world.

In turn, the West and Arabian Gulf states accuse Iran of, at the very least, providing Mr Assad with advisers on security and communications.

Syrian rebels capitalised on those charges by claiming 48 Iranians they captured in Damascus on Sunday are Revolutionary Guards. Iran insists they are Shiite pilgrims but acknowledged for the first time yesterday that some were “retired” Guards members.

Tehran is seeking Turkey’s help to secure their release but infuriated Ankara when Iran’s chief of general staff warned Turkey on Tuesday to end its support for the Syrian opposition. Otherwise, Hassan Firouzabadi said, Turkey would next be afflicted by the Syrian conflict.

As host of next week’s summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Mecca, it would have been inconceivable for Saudi Arabia not to invite Iran, a key member of the 57-nation bloc.

Equally, Iran would never boycott a gathering that gives it a cherished opportunity to stake its claim as a major regional player that cannot be ignored.

Experts differ widely over Saudi Arabia’s game plan. Some believe King Abdullah would have preferred not to invite Iran.

Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Gulf’s ideologically opposed leading powerhouses, are bitterly divided on Syria, Bahrain, and Tehran’s nuclear programme.

“The Saudis were hoping Ahmadinejad would stay away,” said Abdelbari Atwan, editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al Arabi newspaper, based in London. “He’s embarrassed them by accepting immediately. Now he’ll be the star of the summit.”

Others believe Saudi Arabia will use the opportunity to unite Sunni Muslim ranks against Mr Assad’s faltering regime and, by extension, to pressure Iran.

“Iran will be shown to be out of line with the consensus of the overwhelming body of Muslim opinion on Syria,” said Gerald Butt, an expert on Arabian Gulf affairs. “It’s a clever move by the Saudis. If Iran stayed away it would appear isolated, but it will also appear isolated when it does show up.”

But there is also informed speculation that Saudi Arabia, fearful the Syrian crisis is spiralling out of control, is keen to de-escalate the situation and wants to explore whether Iran can be part of the solution.

“The Saudis are not holding back in any way on their efforts to counter Iran in the region, but they don’t want to get into a direct or indirect military confrontation with Iran,” said Trita Parsi, an Iran expert in Washington.

Despite visceral mistrust between Tehran and Riyadh, each has a strong incentive to defuse the Syrian crisis.

“The deterioration of the Syrian situation is in no one’s interest and that may create the incentive for some sort of constructive discussion instead of posturing and accusations,” said Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii.

The Mecca summit presents Mr Ahmadinejad with a coveted chance to perform on the world stage. The summit is a challenge the publicity loving and combative Iranian president will relish.

At home he has been shut out of decision-making on key issues such as foreign policy and Iran’s nuclear talks with world powers because of his long-running struggle with Ayatollah Khamenei.

The Iranian president’s hardline rivals have made clear he should have no illusions that his invitation to Mecca was a Saudi olive branch.

A leading Iranian politician, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said at the weekend: “After facing several defeats in Syria, Saudi Arabia is trying to use the sacred and spiritual atmosphere of Mecca to prove the public opinion of Muslim nations against Syria.”

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae

* With additional reporting by Elizabeth Dickinson