When Pakistan ditched its ally, the Taliban, in September, and
sided with the U.S.,
Islamabad and Washington fully expected to implant
a pro-American regime in Kabul and
open the way for the Pak-American pipeline. But this was not to be.
In a dazzling coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin
stole a march on the Bush
administration, which was so busy trying to tear apart
Afghanistan to find bin Laden it failed
to notice the Russians were taking over half the country.
The wily Russians achieved this victory through their
proxy Afghan force, the Northern
Alliance. Moscow, which has sustained the Alliance since
1990, re-armed it after Sept. 11
with new tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, helicopters
and trucks. The Alliance's two
military leaders, Gen. Rashid Dostam and Gen. Muhammed Fahim, were
stalwarts of the old
Communist regime with close links to the KGB.
Putin put the chief of the Russian general staff, Viktor
Kvashnin, and the deputy director of
the KGB, in charge of the Alliance. During the Balkan
fighting in 1999, the hard-charging
Kvashnin outfoxed the U.S. by seizing Pristina's airfield,
thus assuring a permanent Russian
role in Kosovo.
Now, he's done it again. To the fury of Washington and
Islamabad, Kvashnin rushed the
Northern Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of
Bush's dictates. The Alliance is now
Afghanistan's dominant force and, heedless of multi-party
political talks in Germany this
weekend, styles itself the new "lawful" government, a claim
fully backed by Moscow.
The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, revenged
their defeat by the U.S. in
the 1980s' war, and neatly checkmated the Bush administration which, for all its
high-tech
military power, understood little about Afghanistan.
America's ouster of the Taliban regime meant Pakistan lost its
former influence over
Afghanistan and is now cut off from Central Asia's resources.
So long as the Alliance holds
power, the U.S. is equally denied access to the much
coveted Caspian Basin. Russia has
regained control of the best potential pipeline
routes. The "new Silk Road" will become a
Russian energy superhighway.
By charging like an enraged bull into the South Asian
china shop, the U.S. handed a stunning
geopolitical victory to the Russians and severely damaged
its own great power ambitions.
Moscow is now free to continue plans to dominate South
and Central Asia in concert with its
strategic allies, India and Iran.
The Bush administration does not appear to understand
its enormous blunder, and keeps
insisting the Russians are now our friends.
To put it bluntly, the Regime's obsessive need to keep its
approval ratings up by giving the droids shiny things
to watch on TV caused it to lose control of what
it and its oil company paymasters have wanted so badly
for so long. And they've
lost it to the very same people they spent 10 years and
billions of dollars chasing out of Afghanistan,
creating the fundamentalist Muslim
jihad movement that spawned Bin Laden and the Taliban
in the process. One often wonders how U.S. foreign
policy would operate if those running it had more
than two neurons to rub together and a strategic
sense slightly more advanced than "Og blow up and fix."
