Category: Russia

Georgia’s US- and Israeli-built armed forces got pulverized by the Russians during last month’s short war over South Ossetia. The Bush administration has promised $1 billion to the Georgians in reconstruction aid. So far, administration spokespeople have been at pains to stress that this aid is for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, and no mention has yet been made of the idea of rebuilding Georgia’s military.
The Bush administration’s actions during the entire Georgia crisis until now have been marked by a degree of caution and risk-avoidance that, in the circumstances, is entirely appropriate. Remember the reports about how the 100 or so military trainers the US had in Georgia at the time of the war were immediately told to change into civvies, stash any weapons they had out of sight, and sit out the war hanging round hotel swimming pools?
So why did the Bushists behave like that? Three reasons. First, they had no spare forces– their own, or forces of ‘allied’ nations– to send in. Second, they didn’t want to get drawn into a direct mano-a-mano with another Big (and also nuclear-armed) Power. Third, remember that the Russians have agreed to help out NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan by allowing non-military supplies to be shipped to NATO’s forces there through Russia…. So Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But it has the US over a railhead.
For now, the war has died down… I’m assuming that Pres. Saakashvili is desperately eager to rebuild his armed forces. There would be a number of logistical problems regarding how the US (or its Israeli surrogate) might undertake any rearming of Georgia. Ships through the Black Sea? Airlifts? Overland through Turkey?
Those problems could be solved, I suppose. But it’s the political problems that are still limiting all foreign reconstruction aid to non-military items.
So far, the call to “re-arm Georgia!” has not become any kind of a big issue in the US election campaign. (Imagine how different things might be if we had a Democrat in the White House.) But the Georgia situation has not been anywhere near resolved yet, in any durable political way. If the present status quo remains in place, I suppose it is possible a sort of “Finlandization by default” may emerge there.
However, reaching a formal, negotiated agreement on Georgia’s status– one that’s agreed to by all relevant parties including Russia, and that also resolves the currently contested status of the two now-seceded regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia– is far preferable. Absent such an agreement, all of Georgia, including the two seceded regions, would be unable to do the kind of long-term economic planning and investment that made Finlandization into a palatable and workable deal for Finland itself. Absent that agreement, all of Georgia will remain mired in the kind of directionless limbo that seems to mark Kosovo to this day.
I think I asked this before. But where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?

Yesterday, the Russian government recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In today’s FT, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev explained why. (The two main house organs of British capitalism are so much more open-minded and coolly realistic than their spluttering Wall Street counterpart. Can you imagine the WSJ opening its opinion page to Medvedev at this time?)
His bottom line on the events of the past 2.5 weeks:

we persistently tried to persuade the Georgians to sign an agreement on the non-use of force with the Ossetians and Abkhazians. Mr Saakashvili refused. On the night of August 7-8 we found out why.
Only a madman could have taken such a gamble. Did he believe Russia would stand idly by as he launched an all-out assault on the sleeping city of Tskhinvali, murdering hundreds of peaceful civilians, most of them Russian citizens? …Russia had no option but to crush the attack to save lives. This was not a war of our choice. We have no designs on Georgian territory. Our troops entered Georgia to destroy bases from which the attack was launched and then left. We restored the peace but could not calm the fears and aspirations of the South Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples – not when Mr Saakashvili continued (with the complicity and encouragement of the US and some other Nato members) to talk of rearming his forces and reclaiming “Georgian territory”. The presidents of the two republics appealed to Russia to recognise their independence.
A heavy decision weighed on my shoulders. Taking into account the freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples, and based on the principles of the United Nations charter and other documents of international law, I signed a decree on the Russian Federation’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I sincerely hope that the Georgian people, to whom we feel historic friendship and sympathy, will one day have leaders they deserve, who care about their country and who develop mutually respectful relations with all the peoples in the Caucasus. Russia is ready to support the achievement of such a goal.

These last two sentences make it sound as though regime change in Tbilisi is still on his agenda.
And “Russia had no option but to crush the attack to save lives. This was not a war of our choice.” This is the rhetoric of just about every political leader who launches a war or any other form of radical escalation of violence.
The response among the vast majority of western politicians has been a degree of verbal apoplexy fueled to a significant degree by their frustration over realizing that, actually, the “west” had no plausible military options in the Osssetian War and that their darling, Saakashvili, had recklessly overplayed his hand.
So the past inability to act led to much current spluttering. But where might the current western spluttering lead if wiser heads are not to brought into the global equation? I worry about that. Back on August 16, I asked “Where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?” He is still notably MIA. But where are the others who could also act like wiser heads?
Two small glimmers of light. While Barack Obama himself said the US should “further isolate Russia” because of its support for the two breakaway regions, two of his top national security advisers, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, called for more engagement. Good for them.
For his part, John McCain is still doing what he can to revive the embers of anti-Russianism. I wish Obama wouldn’t continue trying to sing from the same inflammatory songsheet, but would describe a realistic and constructive way forward that could de-escalate the tensions with Russia rather than further stoke them.
Another glimmer of good news comes from this FT report, which notes the following:

Diplomats acknowledge that they will soon have to work with Moscow on restricting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Russia also shows signs of wanting to calibrate its approach to the west.
Although it scaled back contacts with Nato yesterday, Russia’s move did not include a ban on Nato’s use of Russian land to supply non-military equipment to its forces in Afghanistan.

It’s not that I particularly want Russia to throw its weight behind what still looks like a badly misconceived western military project in Afghanistan. But I am glad to see that in certain fields, officials in both Russia and the west see that they have a broad degree of common interests.
Medvedev, meanwhile, has gone off to Dushanbe, capital of Tajikstan, to make his debut at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a body that since 2001 has established a lot of coordination among its members: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Also in Dushanbe will be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose application for full membership is still outstanding. Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, and India all have observer status at the SCO…. I am sure the SCO summiteers will all have lots to talk about.
This analysis of the SCO by Stephen Blank of the US Army War College indicates there is considerable tension between Russia and China within it, with each of them seeking to push it in a different direction. Anyway, it is notably not, as NATO is, a defense-pact grouping that requires an external enemy for its own justification.
This evening, I was watching the BBC’s distinctly overwrought diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall as she sought to confront Pres. Medvedev in an interview. At one point she huffed and puffed about Russia having to work a lot harder to “restore its relations with the outside world.” I was struck by that latter phrase. As though Russia were currently in some kind of tightly enclosed situation, and the people in “the outside world”– that is, the west– would be able to control the degree to which Russia could have contact with this “outside world.”
Sort of like Israel and Gaza.
Except that in the case of Israel and Gaza, that’s exactly how it is. Israel is the jailer and Gaza is the completely encircled jail. (And even then, the Gazans haven’t given in to their jailers’ demands.)
Russia, I submit, is not Gaza. There is plenty of “outside world” to which Russia has good access. Including, some of the world that lies to its west. And even more of it that lies to its east and its south.

… First of all, they’re incredibly long. That makes sustaining the troops in the field there incredibly expensive. Another way of looking at that, in the present hyper-privatized era of US public life, could be: Lots of nice fat contracts and opportunities for fraud, payoffs, and payroll padding for the logistics companies! Yum, yum, yum! (For them.)
But here, basically, are the options. (A thought: Maybe we should call the present era that of the Return of Geography, rather than– or in addition to– the Return of History?):

1. Through Pakistan.
2. Through Russia and its former satellite-states.
3. Through Iran.
4. Through China.

Well, for now, you can forget about numbers 3 and 4– as far as NATO goes. Both Iran and China have decent working and economic relations with Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. But they, um, don’t really have them with NATO.
So that leaves Pakistan– currently in a state of continuing or perhaps even escalating political turmoil… And Russia.
Oops. Our “friend” Saakashvili put a bit of a spanner in the works on that, didn’t he? Well, maybe yes, and maybe no. But evidently, as the western nations and Russia proceed with their negotiations over a more durable settlement for Georgia, NATO’s non-trivial reliance on Russia’s cooperation for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will be another big factor in the talks, along with the reliance of Germany and much of the rest of Europe on hydrocarbons from Russia.
The NATO-Russia Council has been in existence since 2002. On this handy info page that they publish you can learn what it is they do. (Or, what it is they don’t mind you knowing about they do.) Just last March the two sides established the basis for “facilitating transit though the Russian territory of non military freight from NATO, NATO members and non-NATO ISAF contributors in support of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, in accordance with UNSCR 1386.”
I guess that’s what the Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was referring to when he told Reuters yesterday,

“Without Russia’s support in Afghanistan, NATO would face a new Vietnam, and this is clear to everyone. Militarily, NATO and Russia have a very good and trusting relationship.”

Translation: “Nice little supply line system we’re running there to Afghanistan. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to that now, would we?”
Rogozin expressed some (perhaps understandable?) confidence that the present, Georgia-related tensions in the NATO-Russia relationship would not last very long…

“Now temporary decisions are being taken on the current cooperation and not about cooperation in general … These decisions are of temporary character, of regional character, not global character,” he said.
Areas that could be affected were military naval exercises in the Far East, the Mediterranean and the Baltic region, he added. “We don’t need to ruin this cooperation now.”

He also warned that “NATO rearming Georgia after all that has happened would be… cynical and illegitimate.”
Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has been doing some great blogging about the tough logistical challenges NATO/ISAF faces in Afghanistan. See e.g. here.
Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed. He adds:

If one counts with 44,000 liters as a possible standard payload of fuel for each tanker (I’m taking that figure from a news report about a previous attack), that’s 1,760,000 to 2,200,000 liters of fuel lost in the attack. Big fireball, big loss.

Christian, at “Ghosts of Alexander” has a handy map of the Uzbekistan rail system, which could be (or perhaps already is?) used to transport (non-military) goods for ISAF in from Europe– via Russia and Kazakhstan– to the Termez border point between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. It looks like passenger service takes three days from Moscow to Tashkent and maybe 18 hours from Tashkent to Termez. (Ah. Helena needs to get her ferrophilia back under control here a bit.)
… Right now, the UN Security Council is starting to see some preliminary diplomacy developing around the project to reach agreement on a durable political settlement of the Georgia-Russia crisis. Basically, two drafts are circulating. Russia submitted Sarkozy’s ceasefire plan of last week– which has been signed by both sides– to win the SC’s imprimatur of support for it. A draft resolution that France submitted yesterday, that apparently has US support, expresses support for the existing ceasefire but also calls for immediate Russian withdrawal and the “return of Georgia’s forces to their bases.”
As I noted in my CSM piece, now up on the web already though it’s dated tomorrow, if there is to be an un-vetoed resolution, then it will have to represent a negotiated consensus that all the Permanent Members can support. In these negotiations, Russia is not without its own leverage in the realms of both hard and (as Kishore Mahbubani noted) soft power. Let’s see how the negotiations proceed.

The statement issued by the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting yesterday was considerably more sensible than the belligerent, jingoistic rantings that make up much (though thankfully, a decreasing amount) of the commentary in the US MSM. At several points it goes to lengths not to express any strongly anti-Russian judgments. For example, “We deplore all loss of life, civilian casualties, and damage to civilian infrastructure that has resulted from the conflict.” It notably does not make any promise of either immediate or more delayed military aid to Georgia, saying only that NATO has agreed to measures “intended to assist Georgia, a valued and long-standing Partner of NATO, to assess the damage caused by the military action and to help restore critical services necessary for normal public life and economic activity.”
And finally, it seems to go quite a long way toward respecting the leadership in negotiating the political tasks that lie ahead regarding the Georgia crisis to… none other than “the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Alexander Stubb.”
This strikes me as extremely realistic, sensible, and helpful. The more they do that, the better. (You can read more on OSCE here.)
The NATO people well understand that the US- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces got trounced in the recent fighting. (The US had been training the Georgians mainly to do checkpoint duty in Iraq… And one of the Israeli private companies training the Georgians was headed by Gen. Gal Hirsh, drummed out of the IDF after the troops he’d trained showed in 2006 that they couldn’t do anything effective other than checkpoint duty in the West Bank. H’mmm.)
AP’s Matti Friedman had this account of some interviews he did with US trainers in Tbilisi, who were fairly disparaging about the skills of their trainees. Interestingly, Friedman interviewed these trainers last weekend while they were “on standby at the Sheraton Hotel, unarmed and in civilian clothes.”
From the beginning of the Georgia-Russia conflict, the US military took great pains to keep its own troops far away from any situation in which they might be seen as being involved in the fighting. I also saw a report that, though the US flew the 2,000 Georgians who had been in Iraq back to their country, they disarmed them before they did so, so as not to be accused by the Russians of pumping any more arms into the country during the war.
Despite its sometimes accusatory rhetoric, the actual actions on the ground taken by the Bush administration have been prudent and wise, and I am happy to give them credit for this.
It strikes me there is a huge contrast between the prudence displayed in those actions and the belligerence expressed so many times by McCain.
Journalists and others should ask McCain: “What, actually, would you have done differently? Would you have put US troops into this fight? How would you have supported them there?”
It strikes me that McCain’s rhetoric– including his repeated expressions of strong and completely uncritical support for Pres. Saakashvili– have been irresponsible and incendiary.
Why is Barack Obama not calling him on this?
Why is Obama not putting forward a strong and compelling alternative to the belligerent and dangerous approach espoused by McCain? Surely he can see that the US public doesn’t want another war? (Especially one that it has zero hope of winning.)
I just want to come back, for a moment, to the question of what it is that NATO used to do, back when it still it had a rationale. What it did was deter the Russians from sending their massive ground troops into the industrial heartlands of Western Europe.
NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn’t succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.
Georgia is not an industrial heartland of Europe. On August 8, Georgia was not a member of NATO. If it had been, NATO’s crisis would have been even sharper and more immediate– because even if it had been a “member” of NATO, very few NATO members would have come to its aid.
But member of NATO or not, the war in Georgia has shown that the old western doctrine of “deterrence” failed on that occasion.
One caveat, though: This was deterrence still at the strictly sub-nuclear level. (And that in itself is also significant. What utility at all do nuclear weapons have today?)
Deterrence, it strikes me, is closely linked to a desire (or, a readiness) to achieve significant strategic goals through “shock and awe.” Yet the whole world has now seen that even “shock and awe” didn’t bring Bush a strategic victory in Iraq, just as it didn’t bring Olmert one in Lebanon.
Military power just ain’t as useful in “foreign” encounters as it used to be. (To be discussed later, not now: the extent to which Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Georgia are actually “foreign” for Russia. Military power did prove “useful” for Russia there; and lack of a working, indigenous national-defense strategy proved disastrous for Saakashvili…)
As of now, Georgia’s military forces have been just about stripped of all their capabilities. I’m sure the Russians have been fascinated to look at all the computers, drone-control systems, naval electronics, and other military hardware and software they’ve been carting home from all the Georgian military bases they’ve over-run in the past ten days.
A question: How many sensitive US or NATO systems have been compromised as a result?
Another, more important question: What will be the outcome of the negotiations that will doubtless occur over the Georgians’ ability to rebuild their military, given that it would be starting, as of now, from somewhere around ground zero?
… Okay, I realize this is a slightly rambly post, but I’m too tired to divide it up better or do any other form of high-level editing on it. I just want to note here, finally, that The National Interest, the uber-Realist mag published by the Nixon Center, has a couple of very good pieces on Georgia/Russia on its website today.
This one is a very well-informed ‘Realist’ take on the whole Russia question, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
They write:

in reality, today’s Russia is not a resurgent imperial power. In the post-Cold War period, it was Washington, not Moscow, which started the game of acting outside the United Nations Security Council to pursue coercive regime change in problem states and redraw the borders of nominally sovereign countries. In Russian eyes, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, including arresting and presiding over the execution of its deposed President, undermined Washington’s standing to criticize others for taking military action in response to perceived threats. And American unilateralism in the Balkans, along with planned deployments of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and support for “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics, trampled clearly stated Russian redlines.

And this article is an interview with Shalva Natelashvili, the founder and chairman of the Georgian Labor Party, and a veteran leader of the Georgian opposition.
Two key excerpts from that:

Q: Why did President Saakashvili order Tskhinvali to be taken by force?
A: He probably had hopes of receiving some kind of external support. Someone must have lied to him to give him these false hopes—whether it was from the West, South, or North is uncertain. Someone was deceiving him.
Also, Saakashvili had real delusions of grandeur, and saw himself as the Napoleon of Asia, which is a psychological disorder for an individual and a tragedy for Georgia.
Third, he wanted to speed up the entry of Georgia into NATO, but this is a mistake: the issue of the Abkhazia region would still remain unresolved.
Fourth, he’s committed crimes against democracy—he established a one-party dictatorship in Georgia in all the elections held in Georgia during his reign (local, presidential, parliamentary), closed the free flow of information, seized TV companies and dozens of innocents died.

And this:

Q: How can Georgia and Russia overcome these tensions and live peacefully?
A: Russia and Georgia are fated to live peacefully together. Russia should recognize Georgian territorial integrity, and Georgia shouldn’t conduct a strident anti-Russia policy.
Georgia is a very small country located at the very center of Eurasia. Its geographical location is supposed to make it the unifying point of the Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern civilizations. That is the function of Georgia—it can solve its problems and those of the rest of the world as well.

That sounds realistic and hopeful. I hope we can all hear a lot more from this guy.

The NYT was able to use its people’s good relations with the Georgian government to get hold of the text of the ceasefire agreement that Sarkozy got the Russians to agree to at 2 a.m. Wednesday. Here it is, in PDF, with the French original bearing handwritten notes representing the Georgian side’s requests for further revisions, which according to this accompanying story by Andrew Kramer Russia had not accepted..
According to Kramer, when Sarkozy made his first stop in Tbilisi earlier this week he and the Georgians agreed to the first four four of the six points listed there. He then went to Moscow, where Putin (and Medvedev?) insisted on adding the last two points. So the six-point version without the phrases added in parentheses is what Moscow agreed to. And then, during Wednesday, yesterday, the Russians used the provision in Point 5 that says, “While awaiting an international mechanism, Russian peacekeeping forces will implement additional security measures” to advance further into Georgia, go into the military bases the Georgian forces had abandoned there, to confiscate all the weapons etc.
In the interest of assuring “security”, of course.
Since some of these bases had been built to strict NATO specifications, I imagine the Russians were also extremely interested in many of the things they found there, including computers, security systems, and so on.
But this provision about being able to implement “additional security measures” seems to give them very wide latitude to rush around wherever they please inside Georgia and to suppress any forces there that might oppose them.
(The Russians take as given that all the troops they have in Georgia are “peacekeeping forces.” Just another really horrible example– like the west’s much favored “humanitarian intervention”, or the idea of US troops as “liberators” in Iraq– of the misuse of eirenic language to euphemize what are obviously extremely coercive actions backed up by brute force.)
My reading of Moscow’s decisionmakers is that they most likely won’t, in fact, use the permission that Point Five might, by some readings, appear to give them to take over Tbilisi or other parts of Georgia. But they almost certainly will use their presence inside Georgia to extract the very best political terms they can from Tbilisi.
Charles Krauthammer, in his belligerent column today, warned against the “Finlandization” that he identified as being Russia’s goal in Georgia.
“Finlandization” is the term to describe the arrangement that tiny Finland worked out with Stalin’s Russia in 1947. It gave the Finns broad autonomy (or, a form of bounded “sovereignty”) over its conduct of the entire gamut of domestic affairs, while the Finns agreed that Moscow could exercise a virtual veto over its conduct of foreign affairs.
Wikipedia tells us that,

After the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, Finland succeeded in retaining democracy and parliamentarism, despite the heavy political pressure on Finland’s foreign and internal affairs by the Soviet Union. Finland’s foreign relations were guided by the doctrine formulated by Juho Kusti Paasikivi, emphasizing the necessity to maintain a good and trusting relationship with the Soviet Union. To this end, Finland signed an Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in April 1948. Under this pact, Finland was obliged to resist armed attacks by “Germany or its allies” against Finland, or against the Soviet Union through Finland, and, if necessary, ask for Soviet military aid to do so. At the same time, the agreement recognized Finland’s desire to remain outside great power conflicts, allowing the country to adopt a policy of neutrality during the Cold War. As a consequence, Finland did not participate in the Marshall Plan, and took neutral positions on Soviet overseas initiatives. By keeping very cool relations to NATO, and to western military powers in general, Finland could fend off Soviet preludes for affiliation to the Warsaw Pact…

In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)
Within Finland itself, the period of Finlandization is viewed with considerably more nuance than in the US. I’d like to suggest that in Georgia, some arrangement like the one that gave Finns such broad rights of local self-governance– under which they kept their country out of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, used the revenues that they saved by not having to maintain large armies to make considerable advances in their socioeconomic and educational status, and used their neutral diplomatic status to host important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference– might be considerably better for the country’s people(s) than a descent into further war?
… Anyway, the diplomacy over these issues has still only barely started. First, let’s hope the ceasefire holds.