Friends,
Below are some links to recent articles by yours truly...Enjoy and feel free to pass along.
1. "Did Donald Rumsfeld Whitewash Massacre in Uzbekistan?," The Atlantic, April 20, 2011
2. "Minsk Rumors: What was behind last week's mysterious bombing in Belarus?" The New Republic, April 21, 2011
3. "The Russian Reset: A Eulogy;" Commentary, April 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/04/did-donald-rumsfeld-whitewash-massacre-in-uzbekistan/237568/
Did Donald Rumsfeld Whitewash Massacre in Uzbekistan?
By James Kirchick
In interviews and in his memoir, the former Secretary of Defense defends the Uzbek government -- and himself -- over a 2005 incident that left hundreds of unarmed protesters dead
In his door-stopper of a memoir, Known and Unknown, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spends just three pages recounting what he calls "one of the most unfortunate, if unnoticed, foreign policy mistakes of our administration." The episode he describes took place not in Iraq or Afghanistan but, rather, in Uzbekistan. Yet Rumsfeld's account of what happened and why appears wildly out of sync with the public record.
As a Central Asian former Soviet republic, it's not surprising that events in Uzbekistan would go "unnoticed." But Uzbekistan's strategic location, wedged above Afghanistan, gave it newfound prominence in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when its government offered the United States use of a decaying, Soviet-era airbase (Karshi-Khanabad, or K2). Ruled by former Soviet apparatchick Islam Karimov since it gained independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has an abysmal human rights record -- one that did not improve after the war in Afghanistan drew it closer to U.S. influence.
That tension between American interests and values reached a turning point in May 2005. It began when the Uzbek government imprisoned 23 businessmen from the city of Andjon. The regime speciously accused them of involvement with an extremist Muslim organization, a charge it frequently levels against its many opponents. Thousands of unarmed protesters gathered in Andijon, voicing opposition to the arrests and to broader concerns about government corruption and cronyism. In the early hours of May 13, gunmen -- who had earlier raided a police garrison -- stormed the prison where the businessmen were being held, freeing them and some others. In response, Uzbek forces fired into the vast crowd of protestors. A definitive count of the dead has proven nearly impossible to determine, but estimates range from the government's official tally of 187 to NGO reports that claim casualties nearing 1,000. A Human Rights Watch report states, "Eyewitnesses told us that about 300-400 people were present at the worst shooting incident, which left few survivors. There were several incidents of shooting throughout the day."
Rumsfeld's account of the tragedy at Andijon is jarringly different from what most international observers say happened. "It appeared that the goal of the assault was to release members of an Islamic extremist group accused of seeking to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate, in eastern Uzbekistan," Rumsfeld writes of the prison break. And of the massacre: "This was not a simple case of soldiers slaughtering innocents, as had been widely alleged and misreported." His version is at odds with that of seemingly everyone: human rights groups, international media, eyewitnesses, U.S. intelligence, even the State Department. Everyone, that is, except the Karimov regime.
Information provided by Rumsfeld himself contradicts his own narrative. According to a memo prepared by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, helpfully posted on Rumsfeld's website and even cited in the text of his memoir, "The popular perception was that these businessmen were upstanding community members -- not Islamic extremists." Unable to assess the regime's "evidence" allegedly connecting the businessmen to insurrection, the memo's author, DIA Director L.E. Jacoby, concluded that the thousands of protestors who had gathered to demand their release were provoked by legitimate grievances against a corrupt and abusive regime, not a desire to impose an Islamic caliphate. "Their motivation almost certainly was anger and frustration over poor socioeconomic conditions and repressive government policies rather than a unifying extremist ideology," Jacoby wrote. "There are no indications that Karimov understands that a deep sense of injustice was at the center of the unrest."
Rumsfeld largely repeated the regime's argument that the prison break was perpetrated by people with an Islamist agenda (he refers to these individuals variously as "rebels" and "insurgents"). However, the Jacoby memo categorized the composition of the assailants under a section entitled "What We Don't Know," concluding, "Our sources suggest the fighters were disgruntled Soviet-Afghan war veterans" and that "no credible information indicates extremist groups participated in the attacks."
None of this nuance made it into Rumsfeld's version of events. "Self-proclaimed human rights advocates with longstanding records of opposition to the Uzbek government quickly got into the act," he writes in the withering tone he deploys against those who disagree with him on Andijon, portraying them as self-righteous simpletons naïve to the difficulties of global power politics. Using scare quotes, he dismisses reports of the Uzbek government's indiscriminate use of deadly violence against civilians, stating that "Human Rights Watch declared them peaceful 'protesters'" and "Amnesty International called the uprising a 'mass killing of civilians' and denounced the Uzbek government's 'indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.'" He contemptuously writes that "comparisons were made to the massacre of Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square, and stories circulated of a deliberate massacre of civilians peacefully demonstrating in the street." While acknowledging that "the government's security forces and public affairs officials functioned poorly," Rumsfeld concludes that, "this was not a simple case of soldiers slaughtering innocents."
However, it's not just the media and human rights organizations that contradict Rumsfeld's account of the events at Andijon. Other branches of the U.S. government belie his sympathetic portrayal of the Uzbek regime. According to the State Department's 2005 Annual Report on Human Rights, "That evening [of May 13], according to several eyewitness accounts, government forces fired indiscriminately and without warning into the crowd. There were credible reports of many more civilians killed while fleeing the scene."
The State Department report continues, "Eyewitnesses reported that soldiers returned to the scene of the shootings on the morning of May 14 and summarily executed wounded persons who remained among the dead. Several other witnesses reported that after the shooting, government workers loaded victims' bodies onto trucks, transported them to makeshift morgues, and buried many in unmarked graves." On May 27, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent visited a site outside the city. He found 37 mass graves where victims of the massacre had been buried. The following day, the man who led RFE/RL to the graves was stabbed to death by unknown attackers.
When I interviewed Rumsfeld last month, I asked him about the DIA report -- which he had himself commissioned. But he was unmoved. "I certainly stand by what I wrote in the book," he told me. "And I would add that you can find scraps of intelligence that are on all sides of most issues and what it requires is analyzing and synthesizing and pulling those threads together and then coming to some judgments about what is likely." Yet the information disputing Rumsfeld's version of events constitute more than mere "scraps of intelligence." The evidence, which is largely consistent by all accounts except for Rumsfeld's and Karimov's, leaves the former Defense Secretary's version of the tragedy at Andijon looking factually dubious, strategically inept, and, ultimately, self-serving.
As Rumsfeld recounts in his memoir, he ultimately lost an internal policy battle over how the U.S. should have responded to Andijon. Three weeks after the massacre, the Washington Post reported on a debate between Defense and State Department officials over whether the U.S. should join calls for an international investigation into the massacre. The Post quoted "a senior diplomat in Washington" as saying, "there's clearly inter-agency tension over Uzbekistan. ... The State Department certainly seems to be extremely cool on Karimov," in contrast to Rusmfeld, who at a NATO meeting in Brussels "had emphasized the risks of provoking Uzbekistan."
In his memoir, Rumsfeld recounts a Bush administration principals meeting the following month in which he "argued for a more measured handling of Uzbekistan," and voiced his opposition to "berating them and shoving them back in the wrong direction." Yet his "arguments did not prevail" against the State Department mandarins. "At an NSC meeting, Condi Rice responded to me by declaring, 'Human rights trump security,'" he recalls. Meanwhile, then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns "echoed in the press" that "We made a clear choice, and that was to stand on the side of human rights."
Public criticism from the State Department and members of Congress outraged the Uzbek government, which immediately curtailed U.S. flights into and out of the base. But it was U.S. cooperation with a United Nations airlift of Uzbek refugees who had fled the massacre that ultimately led a furious Tashkent to order a formal eviction on July 29. Noting that, "our eviction from Uzbekistan came at a critical time," Rumsfeld doesn't mention the humanitarian airlift.
The reason Rumsfeld says he considers U.S. post-Andijon policy towards Uzbekistan to be such a monumental blunder is because of the supposedly deleterious effects it had on the war effort in Afghanistan. The eviction left "those of us in the Defense Department scrambling to try and come up with alternatives, all of which were considerably more expensive," he writes. Furthermore, because of U.S. outspokenness on human rights, "Uzbek leaders then began to strengthen ties with nations that would not berate them regarding democracy and human rights -- such as Russia and China."
Despite his warning, these alleged effects turned out to be largely overblown, and possibly nonexistent. Three days before the Uzbeks ordered the formal eviction from K2, Rumsfeld won assurances from neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that they would continue to allow the U.S. use of bases on their territory. (In a rare instance of humility, Rumsfeld overlooks his own success in deftly engineering this agreement, which came just weeks after the Kyrgzy and Tajiks had succumbed to Russian and Chinese pressure to mandate a deadline for U.S. withdrawal.) Days before the Uzbeks ordered the formal eviction from the base, Rumsfeld told journalists, "We're always thinking ahead. We'll be fine." What's more, Uzbek displeasure with Western criticism was not strong enough to prevent Karimov from granting NATO, in 2006, the right to use Uzbek territory as an overland supply route. Nor did that criticism dissuade him from giving the U.S. use of a military a base in the city of Navoi three years later.
Rumsfeld has also struck out at U.S. senators and officials whose criticism of the Uzbek government, he argues, hurts American credibility abroad. In the wake of the eviction from K2, a bipartisan group of senators, led by John McCain, insisted that the U.S. government should withhold reimbursements to the Uzbek government to censure its behavior. Recalling a May 29, 2005, press conference headed by McCain, Rumsfeld writes, "'[H]istory shows that continued repression of human rights leads to tragedies, such as the one that just took place,' McCain lectured. Around the same time, I received a letter from McCain, co-signed by five other senators, insisting that America not pay the $23 million we owed the [Uzbek] government from our military's use of the Uzbek air base at K2." In his reply to the legislators, Rumsfeld wrote that, "[F]ailing to pay for the services we had requested and received and the goods we consumed would send a harmful message to all of the other nations helping us that the United States could not be relied on." But, as Joshua Kucera of Eurasianet recently wrote, Rumsfeld misleads readers on this point. The bipartisan letter from McCain was actually sent on September 19, over a month after Uzbekistan had already evicted the U.S. military from K2, not "around the same time" as the May 29 press conference. In other words, the demand that the United States withhold reimbursements to Tashkent was made in response to the Karimov regime reneging on its own promise to host U.S. forces.
A few days before the U.S. military was evicted from K2, Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his undersecretary Douglas Feith, "Let's quickly make sure we've paid Uzbekistan everything we owe them." Was Rumsfeld anticipating the expulsion and trying to get Tashkent its money before Congress could intervene? A year later, in a memo dated January 10, 2006, he wrote, "I want to remember the mistake we made on Uzbekistan, and damaging our MIL to MIL relationships unnecessarily."
It's understandable that Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, would be more willing than those in the State Department or Congress to maintain a positive relationship with Uzbekistan. After all, he had a war to fight in its mountainous, landlocked neighbor, and the human rights records of "allies" were not his primary concern. But Rumsfeld has shown a remarkable willingness to parrot the Karimov regime's line on Andijon. It seems that Rumsfeld considers the massacre there to be "one of the most unfortunate" foreign policy failures of the Bush administration not because of any damage to U.S. credibility, which was largely unhurt, or to U.S. interests in Afghanistan, which were barely effected, but for no greater a reason than that he lost the argument.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/87143/belarus-bombing-lukashenko-rumors
Minsk Rumors
Who was behind last week's mysterious bombing in Belarus?
By James Kirchick
Of all the countries in the world that one would expect to be a target of terrorist attacks, Belarus surely ranks near the bottom of the list. Unlike its neighbor, Russia, where a January bomb that killed 35 people at Moscow's Domodedovo airport was just the latest in a string of attacks related to the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, Belarus is not fighting an Islamic insurgency—or, in fact, any type of insurgency. It's an ethnically and religiously homogenous nation mostly composed of Orthodox Christian Slavs, kept in the tight grip of its authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko. There aren't violent sectarian rifts of the sort that brought decades of terrorism to Northern Ireland or ethnic cleansing to the Balkans. And Belarus is not participating in any foreign military operations of the kind that might inspire overseas terrorist organizations to strike.
So, when an explosion hit Kastrychnitskaya (October Square) subway station in Minsk last Monday, killing 13 and injuring over 200, many Belarusians were shocked. "Who would do that and why?" Iryna Vidanava, editor of the independent multimedia youth magazine 34, asked me. "It's obvious [Belarus] is not a country where we would have any problems with terrorism or explosions or terrorist groups." Granted, this isn't the first time there has been a bombing in Belarus: There was one in 2005, in the eastern city of Vitebsk, and another in 2008 in Minsk, both of which injured dozens and which authorities blamed on "hooligans." Yet the sheer randomness of these crimes and their inexplicable place in Belarus's political culture has created more questions than answers—the most uncomfortable being, who benefits?
Lukashenko, a former collective farm chairman who seems to have come out of central casting to play the role of a Soviet-era apparatchik, has ruled Belarus since 1994 . His regime routinely assaults, arrests, and occasionally "disappears" political opposition, shuts down independent media , and controls most of the economy. The repression culminated last December, when Lukashenko rigged a presidential election—his fourth victory—and then ordered truncheon-wielding riot police to attack tens of thousands of peaceful protestors in Minsk. Lukashenko jailed 700 opposition activists and continues to hold dozens on trumped-up charges that could keep them imprisoned for up to 15 years.
Unsurprisingly, then, high-ranking officials have intimated that the opposition is responsible for the recent subway attack. The day after the bombing, the head of the Belarusian KGB (as the country's internal security service is still called) suggested political opponents were to blame for the attack. "You know that there were events recently," he said, referring to the post-election protests, "and not all people who have been held responsible or investigated by the prosecutors and the courts agree with the decisions of those courts. … There are those today who do not like the way of life in Belarus or the Belarussian security structure. They are looking for changes that will exacerbate the situation by spreading fear, panic and distrust of law enforcement agencies and government organs."
Then, with unusual swiftness, the Belarusian government claimed to have "solved" the crime: Less than two days after the explosion, police announced the arrest of three perpetrators, who allegedly confessed not only to last week's blast but to involvement with the 2005 and 2008 attacks as well. Those confessions, however, were conveniently announced just one day after Lukashenko speculated that the bombings were "links in a single chain." The regime has also withheld the names of the suspects, as well as any other incriminating details or information about a possible motive.
Needless to say, many Belarusians aren't buying what their government is telling them. "The thinking of people now is diametrically the opposite of what we are hearing from our televisions," Andrei Dynko, editor-in-chief of Nasha Niva, one of the handful of independent media outlets in Belarus, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. One popular theory? That the Belarusian government itself carried out the latest bombing to pin blame on the opposition and rally support behind Lukashenko. So widespread is this theory that it has made it as far up as the U.N. Security Council, where an anonymous member recently told Foreign Policy, "Well informed sources around Minsk believe that there was an even chance that the government might be behind this." (What's more, in light of this concern, the council condemned the bombing as an "apparent terrorist attack," the first time the body has used such language.)
According to the theory of government involvement, Lukashenko has come under increasing domestic and international criticism for cracking down on opponents—criticism he would obviously like to do without. Still, it wouldn't appear that Lukashenko needs to intimidate his already beleaguered and demoralized opposition, certainly not by conspiring to set off a bomb in downtown Minsk. And, to be sure, no evidence has surfaced to implicate the government in a plan to use violence as a means of undermining its detractors. But there is speculation that the regime could be complicit in the explosion for other reasons—namely, an impending economic crisis the likes of which the country hasn't seen since the era of the communist breadline.
Throughout his rule, Lukashenko has been able to marshal popular support via the economic stability that his authoritarian system, largely buoyed by Russian oil subsidies, provided. When I reported from Belarus in December, I was surprised by the number of people I met who said they backed Lukashenko because he had insulated the country from the economic shocks bedeviling the Western world due to the global financial crisis. Some 80 percent of citizens are employed by the government, which regulates the prices of most goods. Last November, a month before the election, Lukashenko raised salaries 30 percent in a bid to win popularity.
But, according to Katia Glod, an independent political and economic analyst based in Minsk, "the economy has remained unreformed largely since the collapse of the Soviet Union." Far too much money has been spent on social welfare to keep the population content, while insufficient amounts have been invested in modernizing the economy and encouraging entrepreneurship. Added to this strain is that Moscow has grown impatient with Lukashenko's lack of economic reforms; it has delayed its extension of billions of dollars in credits over the regime's hesitancy to reduce state spending, tighten monetary policy, and turn over much of its oil refineries and chemical plants to Russian control.
Now, after almost two decades of economic calm, it appears that the key assumption behind Lukashenko's authoritarian social contract—that Belarusians would exchange political freedom for economic stability—is crumbling. In recent weeks, long lines have formed outside currency exchange centers, with citizens waiting days to get their hands on rare U.S. dollars and euros. Since the beginning of the year, Belarus has used up 20 percent of its hard foreign currency reserves. Five days before the subway blast, RFE/RL reported that the economy was "teetering on the brink of collapse."
How could the bombing play into this? It's not clear, of course, that it does at all. But those who believe the rumor that the government was involved say Lukashenko may have hoped the blast would be a distraction from the economy's nosedive. And, according to people I spoke to, the bombing did divert public attention for a while. "All people were talking about before and after the explosion was the price of sugar, where to get dollars," Iryna Vidanava of 34 told me. But, after the bomb went off, "for a couple of days, everyone forgot about the economic hardship."
The initial shock from the blast quickly subsided, however, and the government's inability or unwillingness to produce information about the alleged attackers in its custody has only contributed to public distrust. Indeed, it still remains unclear whether authorities have arrested four men and one woman, or three men and one woman, and they haven't revealed any of the individuals' names. On Tuesday, a Russian website revealed the identities of what it claims are three of the suspects, all of whom live in a single apartment block in Vitebsk. But the Belarusian government has refused to confirm or deny the report. All it will say is that the suspects constructed the bombs in the basement of the building in which they live.
The regime is also highly sensitive to the perception that it might be withholding information about the bombing or, worse, that it was responsible for it. "Only idiots and scoundrels can allege that, only the scum can do that," Lukashenko snapped in a Tuesday statement, responding to allegations that the government perpetrated the attacks to distract the country from its economic woes. The regime has reprimanded two independent newspapers, Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya, for publishing articles critical of its response to the attack. Earlier this week, a local prosecutor sent an official warning to a journalist at a local newspaper who raised questions about the government's explanations, accusing him of "distributing false information about the investigations into the Minsk subway bombing," and for attempting to "discredit and insult law-enforcement officers [and] Belarusian statehood and society."
Understandably, with no evidence on their side, Belarusians are being careful with what they say publicly; in particular, most of the speculation about the regime's motives is being whispered in private or published anonymously on internet forums. "I would say that it's too early to draw any conclusion like that," Vidanava says when I ask her if she thinks the government might be behind the bombing. "As of today, if I say this is the case, it's a criminal responsibility for me."
Was the government actually involved? Right now, the only thing that's clear is that nothing is adding up to explain who set off the bomb in Minsk and why. It doesn't help that conspiracy theories, whether ultimately correct or not, seem to be as plausible as the government line. Worst of all, in country where information is so tightly controlled, the Belarusian people may never know the truth about what happened.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-russian-reset-a-eulogy/
The Russian Reset: A Eulogy
By James Kirchick
April 2011
Last April in Prague, President Barack Obama met his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, to sign the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. Known colloquially as New START, the treaty is the latest in a series of agreements between the United States and Russia aimed at reducing the countries' nuclear stockpiles, a process that has been pursued by Democratic and Republican presidents for decades. Over the course of seven years, New START commits the two sides to lowering the limit on deployed strategic warheads by 30 percent and nuclear launchers by half. Most important, the treaty renews the mutual-inspection regime of nuclear facilities, pithily articulated by Ronald Reagan's maxim, "Trust but verify."
New START has been hailed by the White House and its supporters as the most significant of Obama's foreign-policy achievements, which says something about the administration's record thus far. Contrary to the grand claims of advocates, who argued that reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia were vital in preventing nuclear proliferation, New START is no panacea. Over the past 30 years—especially during the administration of George W. Bush—both countries have dramatically lowered stockpiles, while nations like North Korea and Pakistan attained nuclear arsenals and Iran jump-started its own program.
However, the totemic importance bestowed on the treaty makes sense when one recognizes the role it has been assigned in the Obama administration's attempt at a larger diplomatic rapprochement with Russia. Termed the "reset," this policy has sought to repair relations with the erstwhile superpower, relations that had reached a low point toward the end of the Bush administration. Though the passage of New START has been trumpeted as a milestone in renewed Russo-American cooperation, the "reset" of which it is only a part serves, at best, to prettify a stagnant relationship and, at worst, to give a revanchist, anti-democratic regime broader license to aggress. Indeed, by broadcasting an outwardly positive and respectful tone, the Obama administration has already elevated Russia, a decaying, failing state, into a major international player.
This is a policy with some history. For two decades, the popular understanding of Russo-American relations has been dominated by a false narrative that places the blame for tensions on the United States. The U.S. supposedly foiled an exceptional opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union to midwife a democratic Russian state by "humiliating" Russia and not paying enough obeisance to its wounded pride as a once (and, at least in its own eyes, future) great power. NATO expansion, a policy with widespread support among Democrats and Republicans, has been blamed for making Russia feel "encircled." The succession of former Soviet satellite states to the Atlantic Alliance, in the words of Anatole Kaletsky of the London Times, "contributes to a territorial encirclement very similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means." Former American ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has said that "if this process is not stopped, we're going to see a NATO that is no longer capable of pursuing the purposes for which it was created because it will be preoccupied watching its own navel and its expanding waistline." And no less a figure than George Kennan, architect of the Cold War policy of containment, referred to NATO enlargement as "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."
The facts tell a different story. Since 1992, the United States has provided $9 billion of assistance to Russia and has regularly consulted it on NATO expansion via the NATO–Russia Council. The common critique also fails to appreciate the plain fact that NATO is a defensive alliance, with no offensive designs on Russia whatsoever.
That some sectors of the Russian nomenklatura continue to harbor paranoid thoughts about the West and its intentions is not something that should force the United States and its allies to alter their policies or compromise their fundamental values. Still, the call for an American alteration or compromise is hardly new. It has been adopted, at least rhetorically, in some form or another by every presidential administration since the end of the Cold War. Take, for instance, the joint statement issued by George W. Bush and then-President Vladimir Putin on April 8, 2008:
The declaration is indistinguishable from the various communiqués, speeches, and press releases issued by the Obama administration, which are in turn remarkably similar to the statements issued by the Clinton administration and the first Bush administration before that. The common feature of these pronouncements is the admission that while Russia and the United States have differences on some issues, they share strategic interests and the differences should not overshadow the agreements that exist in more numerous and significant areas. A common feature of the declarations is their imperviousness to reality; the rosy view above was offered eight years into the Putin era. Four months after it was issued, Russia invaded Georgia.
Four months after that, another American pledge to heal the relationship was announced. The "reset" was first articulated by then-President-elect Obama in December 2008 and later elaborated by Vice President Joe Biden in a speech to the Munich Security Conference the following February. Biden cited a "dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance" and called for Russo-American cooperation on the three issues that have come to form the crux of the reset policy: stabilizing Afghanistan, New START, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
There were well-intentioned rationales underlying this framework. Among them was the idea that the U.S. and Russia share a "mutual interest in Afghanistan's stable and peaceful development," as asserted in a recent statement by eight former ambassadors to Moscow and Washington. This claim has been bolstered by Moscow's 2009 decision to grant NATO the right to fly planes over Russian territory and its much-heralded offer last year of a handful of helicopters and military trainers to the Afghan army. To be sure, Russia does not want to see the Taliban regain control of the country, as such an outcome would embolden militant Islamists throughout Central Asia and within Russia's own North Caucasus region. But that does not necessarily mean that it wants the United States and its NATO allies to succeed in completely wiping them out, thus ensuring a Western security presence in its backyard for the foreseeable future. It is more likely that the Kremlin desires to see the United States and its allies bleed in a protracted Afghanistan stalemate for years to come. It is for this reason that the Russian government has put enormous pressure on the former Soviet Central Asian states—which have played a crucial role as hosts for the Afghan supply chain—to desist cooperation with the United States. If the convergence of American and Russian goals in Afghanistan is so apparent, why did Moscow wait until the war was eight years old before deciding to cooperate with NATO?
There are also those who envision a costly but valuable U.S.-Russian alignment on Iran. In what was widely seen as a quid pro quo for Russian cooperation on sanctions against the regime in Tehran, the U.S. announced in September 2009 that it would scrap its intention to construct long-planned missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. The news came as a shock to the governments of those two countries, steadfast allies of the United States and rightly concerned about Russian hegemony in what Moscow considers its "near-abroad." The Kremlin had long opposed the plans, claiming that the missile-defense system—designed to defend against an attack from Iran, not Russia—was aimed at undermining its own deterrent. Rather than confront the dishonesty behind this argument, the administration buckled to Russian demands.
It is certainly true that Russia does not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, and Tehran's role in promoting Islamic extremism could further destabilize the region. But Russia is not nearly as alarmed by the prospect of a nuclear Iran as is the United States or its Western allies. The major reason is economic: Russian exports to Iran have increased from $250 million in 1995 to more than $3 billion in 2008. Also, as Russia is a major producer of oil and gas, the possibility of a sharp rise in energy prices (a probable consequence of Iranian nuclear capacity) does not keep Putin awake at night. "Iran is a mania with the Americans; it's not our problem," a Putin adviser reportedly said in 2009. Just as Moscow relishes the sight of America getting bogged down in the Afghan morass, it does not look forward to the warming of relations that would arise between the U.S. and a post-revolutionary Iranian government.
In September, Medvedev signed a decree banning the sale to the Islamic Republic of S-300 air-defense systems and other weapons that Russia had agreed to supply in 2006. And, yes, this was a significant foreign-policy achievement for the White House for which the administration should be given credit. But with the S-300 deal, Moscow created a diversion from the many ways in which Russian policy on Iran has been problematic. For one, the announcement declaring the ban includes a clause allowing Moscow to rescind it at any point. Moreover, Russia still sells other types of weapons to Iran, and its state energy conglomerates continue to do heavy business in the Iranian gas and oil sectors. Russia is still assisting Iran in the construction of its Bushehr nuclear reactor, which is operated by the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
No less concerning is that the Russian regime has been increasingly aggressive on its borders and more authoritarian at home. Last June, a week before Medvedev visited Washington, Russian Newsweek, a since-folded publication often critical of Kremlin authoritarianism, published an 18,000-word "leaked" Russian foreign-policy document. Combined with a military doctrine that was formally released last February, a picture emerges of a Kremlin apparatus that continues to view the world through a Cold War prism. For all the recent talk about NATO-Russia cooperation and shared objectives, the Kremlin views the defensive Western alliance as its "main external military danger." The military document attacks NATO for attempting to arrogate to itself "global functions carried out in violation of the norms of international law." Meanwhile, the foreign-policy document seeks the imposition of the European Security Treaty, a Medvedev initiative that would override NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as a collective security instrument, thus achieving the "containment of NATO's expansionist activities." Seeing that U.S. policy supports the rights of states to choose their own alliances, and that Russia opposes NATO expansion (its war on Georgia serving as a warning to its former satellites), it is difficult to characterize this "disagreement" over collective defense as anything but irreconcilable.
Russia is attempting to weaken NATO in other ways; its meager offer of assistance in Afghanistan came as part of a package of extraordinary demands. Moscow has made specific stipulations regarding NATO force posture, insisting that the allliance not deploy forces larger than a brigade or station more than 24 aircraft for more than six weeks a year on the territories of post-Soviet NATO members. Russia is also demanding a veto within the NATO–Russia Council over future NATO deployments, which would strike at the founding purpose of the alliance. The Kremlin does not believe it needs to offer anything in return for these concessions because, according to Russian diplomats quoted in Russia's Kommersant newspaper, "it is NATO that is expanding and threatening Russia and not the opposite." Meanwhile, news emerged in November that Russia had staged a military exercise simulating a nuclear war against NATO member Poland.
Predating the reset, the conflict in Georgia changed the rules of post–Cold War Europe. For the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia had invaded a neighbor. A 2007 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi describing a series of Russian attacks on Georgian targets concluded that the "cumulative weight of the evidence of the last few years suggests that the Russians are aggressively playing a high-stakes, covert game, and they consider few if any holds barred." To this day, Russia stands in violation of the European Union cease-fire it signed, as it continues to station troops on sovereign Georgian territory and recognizes the "independence" of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in contravention of international law. It has strengthened its military position in both provinces, deploying a battery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Abkhazia last August. With the fragile reset in play, the Obama administration has been hesitant to pressure Russia to the extent that it could.
This has meant American reticence in the face of Russia's deteriorating human-rights situation—a near strategic reversal of the national posture that led the U.S. to Cold War victory. As more independent journalists are assaulted or murdered and peaceful protests are violently dispersed, the rule of law is being displaced by what Medvedev himself has characterized as "legal nihilism." Russia's Kafkaesque justice system was put on full display in the seven-year odyssey of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, who ran afoul of Putin by funding liberal opposition politicians. Khodorkovsky's show trial ended in December when a judge convicted him of embezzlement and money laundering. According to a recent study by the Russian Association of Lawyers for Human Rights, corruption may account for a full half of Russia's GDP, and Transparency International ranked Russia 154th out of 178 countries, behind Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Less than two weeks after the Senate ratified New START, the Russian FSB (internal security service) broke up demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, arresting 130 people, including leading opposition figure Boris Nemstov.
What has imperiled the march of liberty has been good for Moscow. "Haven't you noticed? We're gradually turning into allies," the Kremlin's human-rights ombudsman told Time magazine following a meeting with U.S. officials over the summer. "Since there was no criticism towards us, we didn't criticize them."
What has the United States actually gained from the reset policy? The most the administration can claim is a collection of atmospheric achievements: in 2009, the NATO–Russia Council, a consultative instrument founded in 2002, held its first meeting since the Georgia war. Last May, NATO troops joined Russian ones for a march in Red Square to commemorate the Allied victory in World War II. And in November, Russia participated in NATO's annual summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
With little more than that to its credit, the administration has been content to declare the reset an unmitigated success. Indeed, Obama said as much while dining with Medvedev over hamburgers and fries at a Washington-area fast-food restaurant last June. And in the interests of promoting this rosy narrative, a spy scandal involving 10 Russian operatives, uncovered by the FBI just a week after Medvedev's departure, was summarily swept under the rug by both countries. In this juxtaposition of circumstances lays the folly of the reset. Its successes, such as they are, are as ephemeral as a fast-food photo opportunity, while its shortcomings are rooted in a Russian national character more enduring than Washington is ready to publicly acknowledge.
This is not to say that the administration no longer understands the character of the Russian regime. According to the collection of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks late last year, Russia, in the words of American embassy officials in Moscow, is ruled by a "modern brand of authoritarianism" and is a place where "Stalin's ghost still haunts the metro." The Russian Defense Ministry "has not changed its modus operandi for information exchange nor routine dialoguing since the end of the Cold War." The cables reveal that NATO has devised specific war plans for the defense of the Baltic states against possible Russian attack, news that "bewildered" Moscow.
It now remains for the administration to reassess its view of Russia on the world stage. For even if the Russian leadership were inclined to play a more constructive role in the various initiatives proposed by Washington, it's unclear just how useful its cooperation would be. The country—as measured by its shrinking population, internal political and ethnic disunity, and failure to modernize or diversify its hydrocarbon-dependent economy—is in decline. Over the past five years, Russia dropped from 57th to 65th on the United Nations Human Development Index, and the most recent World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report ranks it near the very bottom with regard to the strength of state institutions and protection of private-property rights. American policy should be oriented toward the management of this decline, marked by a return to a Cold War–era posture of containment. For all the fears about its ability to pressure Europe via the cutoff of gas and oil (a weapon it has not hesitated to use), Russia depends far more on its European consumers than vice versa; the Continent accounts for 67 percent of its gas exports and 69 percent of its oil exports. Russia cannot survive without its European export market, and its threats to cut off oil and gas should be understood within this context.
In terms of specific policies, this means being more assertive with Moscow when it comes to the explication of our interests and values and not backing down so easily in the face of Kremlin demands and threats. It could start with the resumption of defensive weaponry sales to Georgia that were halted following the 2008 war. As the French are going to sell Moscow precisely the sorts of ships the Russians say they need to seize Georgia's Black Sea coast, there is no good reason why the United States ought not to sell defensive armaments to an ally and prospective NATO member. There has not been nearly enough debate about Russia's membership bid to join the World Trade Organization, something which it desperately seeks to do, while it continues to violate so many of the provisions of the international organizations to which it is already member, like the OSCE and the Council of Europe. And the United States could impose visa bans on Russian officials implicated in human-rights abuses, as has been proposed in bipartisan Senate legislation. Doing any of the above will certainly make for less-sunny bilateral public relations, but it will also deliver the benefit of advancing American interests.
The experimental phase in extending American goodwill to Moscow has come about specifically because the U.S. is a secure enough country to take such a chance. It has failed because Russia is at once too unstable and too blustering, and, more crucially, does not see that it in its interests to reciprocate. The administration would do well to keep that in mind as it moves to adopt a harder line with Medvedev and Putin. Until such time that Moscow finds itself in a position to press the button, any genuine reset will remain on indefinite hold.
Below are some links to recent articles by yours truly...Enjoy and feel free to pass along.
1. "Did Donald Rumsfeld Whitewash Massacre in Uzbekistan?," The Atlantic, April 20, 2011
2. "Minsk Rumors: What was behind last week's mysterious bombing in Belarus?" The New Republic, April 21, 2011
3. "The Russian Reset: A Eulogy;" Commentary, April 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/04/did-donald-rumsfeld-whitewash-massacre-in-uzbekistan/237568/
Did Donald Rumsfeld Whitewash Massacre in Uzbekistan?
By James Kirchick
In interviews and in his memoir, the former Secretary of Defense defends the Uzbek government -- and himself -- over a 2005 incident that left hundreds of unarmed protesters dead
In his door-stopper of a memoir, Known and Unknown, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spends just three pages recounting what he calls "one of the most unfortunate, if unnoticed, foreign policy mistakes of our administration." The episode he describes took place not in Iraq or Afghanistan but, rather, in Uzbekistan. Yet Rumsfeld's account of what happened and why appears wildly out of sync with the public record.
As a Central Asian former Soviet republic, it's not surprising that events in Uzbekistan would go "unnoticed." But Uzbekistan's strategic location, wedged above Afghanistan, gave it newfound prominence in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when its government offered the United States use of a decaying, Soviet-era airbase (Karshi-Khanabad, or K2). Ruled by former Soviet apparatchick Islam Karimov since it gained independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has an abysmal human rights record -- one that did not improve after the war in Afghanistan drew it closer to U.S. influence.
That tension between American interests and values reached a turning point in May 2005. It began when the Uzbek government imprisoned 23 businessmen from the city of Andjon. The regime speciously accused them of involvement with an extremist Muslim organization, a charge it frequently levels against its many opponents. Thousands of unarmed protesters gathered in Andijon, voicing opposition to the arrests and to broader concerns about government corruption and cronyism. In the early hours of May 13, gunmen -- who had earlier raided a police garrison -- stormed the prison where the businessmen were being held, freeing them and some others. In response, Uzbek forces fired into the vast crowd of protestors. A definitive count of the dead has proven nearly impossible to determine, but estimates range from the government's official tally of 187 to NGO reports that claim casualties nearing 1,000. A Human Rights Watch report states, "Eyewitnesses told us that about 300-400 people were present at the worst shooting incident, which left few survivors. There were several incidents of shooting throughout the day."
Rumsfeld's account of the tragedy at Andijon is jarringly different from what most international observers say happened. "It appeared that the goal of the assault was to release members of an Islamic extremist group accused of seeking to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate, in eastern Uzbekistan," Rumsfeld writes of the prison break. And of the massacre: "This was not a simple case of soldiers slaughtering innocents, as had been widely alleged and misreported." His version is at odds with that of seemingly everyone: human rights groups, international media, eyewitnesses, U.S. intelligence, even the State Department. Everyone, that is, except the Karimov regime.
Information provided by Rumsfeld himself contradicts his own narrative. According to a memo prepared by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, helpfully posted on Rumsfeld's website and even cited in the text of his memoir, "The popular perception was that these businessmen were upstanding community members -- not Islamic extremists." Unable to assess the regime's "evidence" allegedly connecting the businessmen to insurrection, the memo's author, DIA Director L.E. Jacoby, concluded that the thousands of protestors who had gathered to demand their release were provoked by legitimate grievances against a corrupt and abusive regime, not a desire to impose an Islamic caliphate. "Their motivation almost certainly was anger and frustration over poor socioeconomic conditions and repressive government policies rather than a unifying extremist ideology," Jacoby wrote. "There are no indications that Karimov understands that a deep sense of injustice was at the center of the unrest."
Rumsfeld largely repeated the regime's argument that the prison break was perpetrated by people with an Islamist agenda (he refers to these individuals variously as "rebels" and "insurgents"). However, the Jacoby memo categorized the composition of the assailants under a section entitled "What We Don't Know," concluding, "Our sources suggest the fighters were disgruntled Soviet-Afghan war veterans" and that "no credible information indicates extremist groups participated in the attacks."
None of this nuance made it into Rumsfeld's version of events. "Self-proclaimed human rights advocates with longstanding records of opposition to the Uzbek government quickly got into the act," he writes in the withering tone he deploys against those who disagree with him on Andijon, portraying them as self-righteous simpletons naïve to the difficulties of global power politics. Using scare quotes, he dismisses reports of the Uzbek government's indiscriminate use of deadly violence against civilians, stating that "Human Rights Watch declared them peaceful 'protesters'" and "Amnesty International called the uprising a 'mass killing of civilians' and denounced the Uzbek government's 'indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.'" He contemptuously writes that "comparisons were made to the massacre of Chinese citizens in Tiananmen Square, and stories circulated of a deliberate massacre of civilians peacefully demonstrating in the street." While acknowledging that "the government's security forces and public affairs officials functioned poorly," Rumsfeld concludes that, "this was not a simple case of soldiers slaughtering innocents."
However, it's not just the media and human rights organizations that contradict Rumsfeld's account of the events at Andijon. Other branches of the U.S. government belie his sympathetic portrayal of the Uzbek regime. According to the State Department's 2005 Annual Report on Human Rights, "That evening [of May 13], according to several eyewitness accounts, government forces fired indiscriminately and without warning into the crowd. There were credible reports of many more civilians killed while fleeing the scene."
The State Department report continues, "Eyewitnesses reported that soldiers returned to the scene of the shootings on the morning of May 14 and summarily executed wounded persons who remained among the dead. Several other witnesses reported that after the shooting, government workers loaded victims' bodies onto trucks, transported them to makeshift morgues, and buried many in unmarked graves." On May 27, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent visited a site outside the city. He found 37 mass graves where victims of the massacre had been buried. The following day, the man who led RFE/RL to the graves was stabbed to death by unknown attackers.
When I interviewed Rumsfeld last month, I asked him about the DIA report -- which he had himself commissioned. But he was unmoved. "I certainly stand by what I wrote in the book," he told me. "And I would add that you can find scraps of intelligence that are on all sides of most issues and what it requires is analyzing and synthesizing and pulling those threads together and then coming to some judgments about what is likely." Yet the information disputing Rumsfeld's version of events constitute more than mere "scraps of intelligence." The evidence, which is largely consistent by all accounts except for Rumsfeld's and Karimov's, leaves the former Defense Secretary's version of the tragedy at Andijon looking factually dubious, strategically inept, and, ultimately, self-serving.
As Rumsfeld recounts in his memoir, he ultimately lost an internal policy battle over how the U.S. should have responded to Andijon. Three weeks after the massacre, the Washington Post reported on a debate between Defense and State Department officials over whether the U.S. should join calls for an international investigation into the massacre. The Post quoted "a senior diplomat in Washington" as saying, "there's clearly inter-agency tension over Uzbekistan. ... The State Department certainly seems to be extremely cool on Karimov," in contrast to Rusmfeld, who at a NATO meeting in Brussels "had emphasized the risks of provoking Uzbekistan."
In his memoir, Rumsfeld recounts a Bush administration principals meeting the following month in which he "argued for a more measured handling of Uzbekistan," and voiced his opposition to "berating them and shoving them back in the wrong direction." Yet his "arguments did not prevail" against the State Department mandarins. "At an NSC meeting, Condi Rice responded to me by declaring, 'Human rights trump security,'" he recalls. Meanwhile, then-Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns "echoed in the press" that "We made a clear choice, and that was to stand on the side of human rights."
Public criticism from the State Department and members of Congress outraged the Uzbek government, which immediately curtailed U.S. flights into and out of the base. But it was U.S. cooperation with a United Nations airlift of Uzbek refugees who had fled the massacre that ultimately led a furious Tashkent to order a formal eviction on July 29. Noting that, "our eviction from Uzbekistan came at a critical time," Rumsfeld doesn't mention the humanitarian airlift.
The reason Rumsfeld says he considers U.S. post-Andijon policy towards Uzbekistan to be such a monumental blunder is because of the supposedly deleterious effects it had on the war effort in Afghanistan. The eviction left "those of us in the Defense Department scrambling to try and come up with alternatives, all of which were considerably more expensive," he writes. Furthermore, because of U.S. outspokenness on human rights, "Uzbek leaders then began to strengthen ties with nations that would not berate them regarding democracy and human rights -- such as Russia and China."
Despite his warning, these alleged effects turned out to be largely overblown, and possibly nonexistent. Three days before the Uzbeks ordered the formal eviction from K2, Rumsfeld won assurances from neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that they would continue to allow the U.S. use of bases on their territory. (In a rare instance of humility, Rumsfeld overlooks his own success in deftly engineering this agreement, which came just weeks after the Kyrgzy and Tajiks had succumbed to Russian and Chinese pressure to mandate a deadline for U.S. withdrawal.) Days before the Uzbeks ordered the formal eviction from the base, Rumsfeld told journalists, "We're always thinking ahead. We'll be fine." What's more, Uzbek displeasure with Western criticism was not strong enough to prevent Karimov from granting NATO, in 2006, the right to use Uzbek territory as an overland supply route. Nor did that criticism dissuade him from giving the U.S. use of a military a base in the city of Navoi three years later.
Rumsfeld has also struck out at U.S. senators and officials whose criticism of the Uzbek government, he argues, hurts American credibility abroad. In the wake of the eviction from K2, a bipartisan group of senators, led by John McCain, insisted that the U.S. government should withhold reimbursements to the Uzbek government to censure its behavior. Recalling a May 29, 2005, press conference headed by McCain, Rumsfeld writes, "'[H]istory shows that continued repression of human rights leads to tragedies, such as the one that just took place,' McCain lectured. Around the same time, I received a letter from McCain, co-signed by five other senators, insisting that America not pay the $23 million we owed the [Uzbek] government from our military's use of the Uzbek air base at K2." In his reply to the legislators, Rumsfeld wrote that, "[F]ailing to pay for the services we had requested and received and the goods we consumed would send a harmful message to all of the other nations helping us that the United States could not be relied on." But, as Joshua Kucera of Eurasianet recently wrote, Rumsfeld misleads readers on this point. The bipartisan letter from McCain was actually sent on September 19, over a month after Uzbekistan had already evicted the U.S. military from K2, not "around the same time" as the May 29 press conference. In other words, the demand that the United States withhold reimbursements to Tashkent was made in response to the Karimov regime reneging on its own promise to host U.S. forces.
A few days before the U.S. military was evicted from K2, Rumsfeld wrote a memo to his undersecretary Douglas Feith, "Let's quickly make sure we've paid Uzbekistan everything we owe them." Was Rumsfeld anticipating the expulsion and trying to get Tashkent its money before Congress could intervene? A year later, in a memo dated January 10, 2006, he wrote, "I want to remember the mistake we made on Uzbekistan, and damaging our MIL to MIL relationships unnecessarily."
It's understandable that Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, would be more willing than those in the State Department or Congress to maintain a positive relationship with Uzbekistan. After all, he had a war to fight in its mountainous, landlocked neighbor, and the human rights records of "allies" were not his primary concern. But Rumsfeld has shown a remarkable willingness to parrot the Karimov regime's line on Andijon. It seems that Rumsfeld considers the massacre there to be "one of the most unfortunate" foreign policy failures of the Bush administration not because of any damage to U.S. credibility, which was largely unhurt, or to U.S. interests in Afghanistan, which were barely effected, but for no greater a reason than that he lost the argument.
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/87143/belarus-bombing-lukashenko-rumors
Minsk Rumors
Who was behind last week's mysterious bombing in Belarus?
By James Kirchick
Of all the countries in the world that one would expect to be a target of terrorist attacks, Belarus surely ranks near the bottom of the list. Unlike its neighbor, Russia, where a January bomb that killed 35 people at Moscow's Domodedovo airport was just the latest in a string of attacks related to the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, Belarus is not fighting an Islamic insurgency—or, in fact, any type of insurgency. It's an ethnically and religiously homogenous nation mostly composed of Orthodox Christian Slavs, kept in the tight grip of its authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko. There aren't violent sectarian rifts of the sort that brought decades of terrorism to Northern Ireland or ethnic cleansing to the Balkans. And Belarus is not participating in any foreign military operations of the kind that might inspire overseas terrorist organizations to strike.
So, when an explosion hit Kastrychnitskaya (October Square) subway station in Minsk last Monday, killing 13 and injuring over 200, many Belarusians were shocked. "Who would do that and why?" Iryna Vidanava, editor of the independent multimedia youth magazine 34, asked me. "It's obvious [Belarus] is not a country where we would have any problems with terrorism or explosions or terrorist groups." Granted, this isn't the first time there has been a bombing in Belarus: There was one in 2005, in the eastern city of Vitebsk, and another in 2008 in Minsk, both of which injured dozens and which authorities blamed on "hooligans." Yet the sheer randomness of these crimes and their inexplicable place in Belarus's political culture has created more questions than answers—the most uncomfortable being, who benefits?
Lukashenko, a former collective farm chairman who seems to have come out of central casting to play the role of a Soviet-era apparatchik, has ruled Belarus since 1994 . His regime routinely assaults, arrests, and occasionally "disappears" political opposition, shuts down independent media , and controls most of the economy. The repression culminated last December, when Lukashenko rigged a presidential election—his fourth victory—and then ordered truncheon-wielding riot police to attack tens of thousands of peaceful protestors in Minsk. Lukashenko jailed 700 opposition activists and continues to hold dozens on trumped-up charges that could keep them imprisoned for up to 15 years.
Unsurprisingly, then, high-ranking officials have intimated that the opposition is responsible for the recent subway attack. The day after the bombing, the head of the Belarusian KGB (as the country's internal security service is still called) suggested political opponents were to blame for the attack. "You know that there were events recently," he said, referring to the post-election protests, "and not all people who have been held responsible or investigated by the prosecutors and the courts agree with the decisions of those courts. … There are those today who do not like the way of life in Belarus or the Belarussian security structure. They are looking for changes that will exacerbate the situation by spreading fear, panic and distrust of law enforcement agencies and government organs."
Then, with unusual swiftness, the Belarusian government claimed to have "solved" the crime: Less than two days after the explosion, police announced the arrest of three perpetrators, who allegedly confessed not only to last week's blast but to involvement with the 2005 and 2008 attacks as well. Those confessions, however, were conveniently announced just one day after Lukashenko speculated that the bombings were "links in a single chain." The regime has also withheld the names of the suspects, as well as any other incriminating details or information about a possible motive.
Needless to say, many Belarusians aren't buying what their government is telling them. "The thinking of people now is diametrically the opposite of what we are hearing from our televisions," Andrei Dynko, editor-in-chief of Nasha Niva, one of the handful of independent media outlets in Belarus, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. One popular theory? That the Belarusian government itself carried out the latest bombing to pin blame on the opposition and rally support behind Lukashenko. So widespread is this theory that it has made it as far up as the U.N. Security Council, where an anonymous member recently told Foreign Policy, "Well informed sources around Minsk believe that there was an even chance that the government might be behind this." (What's more, in light of this concern, the council condemned the bombing as an "apparent terrorist attack," the first time the body has used such language.)
According to the theory of government involvement, Lukashenko has come under increasing domestic and international criticism for cracking down on opponents—criticism he would obviously like to do without. Still, it wouldn't appear that Lukashenko needs to intimidate his already beleaguered and demoralized opposition, certainly not by conspiring to set off a bomb in downtown Minsk. And, to be sure, no evidence has surfaced to implicate the government in a plan to use violence as a means of undermining its detractors. But there is speculation that the regime could be complicit in the explosion for other reasons—namely, an impending economic crisis the likes of which the country hasn't seen since the era of the communist breadline.
Throughout his rule, Lukashenko has been able to marshal popular support via the economic stability that his authoritarian system, largely buoyed by Russian oil subsidies, provided. When I reported from Belarus in December, I was surprised by the number of people I met who said they backed Lukashenko because he had insulated the country from the economic shocks bedeviling the Western world due to the global financial crisis. Some 80 percent of citizens are employed by the government, which regulates the prices of most goods. Last November, a month before the election, Lukashenko raised salaries 30 percent in a bid to win popularity.
But, according to Katia Glod, an independent political and economic analyst based in Minsk, "the economy has remained unreformed largely since the collapse of the Soviet Union." Far too much money has been spent on social welfare to keep the population content, while insufficient amounts have been invested in modernizing the economy and encouraging entrepreneurship. Added to this strain is that Moscow has grown impatient with Lukashenko's lack of economic reforms; it has delayed its extension of billions of dollars in credits over the regime's hesitancy to reduce state spending, tighten monetary policy, and turn over much of its oil refineries and chemical plants to Russian control.
Now, after almost two decades of economic calm, it appears that the key assumption behind Lukashenko's authoritarian social contract—that Belarusians would exchange political freedom for economic stability—is crumbling. In recent weeks, long lines have formed outside currency exchange centers, with citizens waiting days to get their hands on rare U.S. dollars and euros. Since the beginning of the year, Belarus has used up 20 percent of its hard foreign currency reserves. Five days before the subway blast, RFE/RL reported that the economy was "teetering on the brink of collapse."
How could the bombing play into this? It's not clear, of course, that it does at all. But those who believe the rumor that the government was involved say Lukashenko may have hoped the blast would be a distraction from the economy's nosedive. And, according to people I spoke to, the bombing did divert public attention for a while. "All people were talking about before and after the explosion was the price of sugar, where to get dollars," Iryna Vidanava of 34 told me. But, after the bomb went off, "for a couple of days, everyone forgot about the economic hardship."
The initial shock from the blast quickly subsided, however, and the government's inability or unwillingness to produce information about the alleged attackers in its custody has only contributed to public distrust. Indeed, it still remains unclear whether authorities have arrested four men and one woman, or three men and one woman, and they haven't revealed any of the individuals' names. On Tuesday, a Russian website revealed the identities of what it claims are three of the suspects, all of whom live in a single apartment block in Vitebsk. But the Belarusian government has refused to confirm or deny the report. All it will say is that the suspects constructed the bombs in the basement of the building in which they live.
The regime is also highly sensitive to the perception that it might be withholding information about the bombing or, worse, that it was responsible for it. "Only idiots and scoundrels can allege that, only the scum can do that," Lukashenko snapped in a Tuesday statement, responding to allegations that the government perpetrated the attacks to distract the country from its economic woes. The regime has reprimanded two independent newspapers, Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya, for publishing articles critical of its response to the attack. Earlier this week, a local prosecutor sent an official warning to a journalist at a local newspaper who raised questions about the government's explanations, accusing him of "distributing false information about the investigations into the Minsk subway bombing," and for attempting to "discredit and insult law-enforcement officers [and] Belarusian statehood and society."
Understandably, with no evidence on their side, Belarusians are being careful with what they say publicly; in particular, most of the speculation about the regime's motives is being whispered in private or published anonymously on internet forums. "I would say that it's too early to draw any conclusion like that," Vidanava says when I ask her if she thinks the government might be behind the bombing. "As of today, if I say this is the case, it's a criminal responsibility for me."
Was the government actually involved? Right now, the only thing that's clear is that nothing is adding up to explain who set off the bomb in Minsk and why. It doesn't help that conspiracy theories, whether ultimately correct or not, seem to be as plausible as the government line. Worst of all, in country where information is so tightly controlled, the Belarusian people may never know the truth about what happened.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-russian-reset-a-eulogy/
The Russian Reset: A Eulogy
By James Kirchick
April 2011
Last April in Prague, President Barack Obama met his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, to sign the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. Known colloquially as New START, the treaty is the latest in a series of agreements between the United States and Russia aimed at reducing the countries' nuclear stockpiles, a process that has been pursued by Democratic and Republican presidents for decades. Over the course of seven years, New START commits the two sides to lowering the limit on deployed strategic warheads by 30 percent and nuclear launchers by half. Most important, the treaty renews the mutual-inspection regime of nuclear facilities, pithily articulated by Ronald Reagan's maxim, "Trust but verify."
New START has been hailed by the White House and its supporters as the most significant of Obama's foreign-policy achievements, which says something about the administration's record thus far. Contrary to the grand claims of advocates, who argued that reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia were vital in preventing nuclear proliferation, New START is no panacea. Over the past 30 years—especially during the administration of George W. Bush—both countries have dramatically lowered stockpiles, while nations like North Korea and Pakistan attained nuclear arsenals and Iran jump-started its own program.
However, the totemic importance bestowed on the treaty makes sense when one recognizes the role it has been assigned in the Obama administration's attempt at a larger diplomatic rapprochement with Russia. Termed the "reset," this policy has sought to repair relations with the erstwhile superpower, relations that had reached a low point toward the end of the Bush administration. Though the passage of New START has been trumpeted as a milestone in renewed Russo-American cooperation, the "reset" of which it is only a part serves, at best, to prettify a stagnant relationship and, at worst, to give a revanchist, anti-democratic regime broader license to aggress. Indeed, by broadcasting an outwardly positive and respectful tone, the Obama administration has already elevated Russia, a decaying, failing state, into a major international player.
This is a policy with some history. For two decades, the popular understanding of Russo-American relations has been dominated by a false narrative that places the blame for tensions on the United States. The U.S. supposedly foiled an exceptional opportunity after the fall of the Soviet Union to midwife a democratic Russian state by "humiliating" Russia and not paying enough obeisance to its wounded pride as a once (and, at least in its own eyes, future) great power. NATO expansion, a policy with widespread support among Democrats and Republicans, has been blamed for making Russia feel "encircled." The succession of former Soviet satellite states to the Atlantic Alliance, in the words of Anatole Kaletsky of the London Times, "contributes to a territorial encirclement very similar to what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by cruder means." Former American ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has said that "if this process is not stopped, we're going to see a NATO that is no longer capable of pursuing the purposes for which it was created because it will be preoccupied watching its own navel and its expanding waistline." And no less a figure than George Kennan, architect of the Cold War policy of containment, referred to NATO enlargement as "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."
The facts tell a different story. Since 1992, the United States has provided $9 billion of assistance to Russia and has regularly consulted it on NATO expansion via the NATO–Russia Council. The common critique also fails to appreciate the plain fact that NATO is a defensive alliance, with no offensive designs on Russia whatsoever.
That some sectors of the Russian nomenklatura continue to harbor paranoid thoughts about the West and its intentions is not something that should force the United States and its allies to alter their policies or compromise their fundamental values. Still, the call for an American alteration or compromise is hardly new. It has been adopted, at least rhetorically, in some form or another by every presidential administration since the end of the Cold War. Take, for instance, the joint statement issued by George W. Bush and then-President Vladimir Putin on April 8, 2008:
[W]e reaffirm that the era in which the United States and Russia considered one another an enemy or strategic threat has ended. . . . Rather, we are dedicated to working together and with other nations to address the global challenges of the 21st century, moving the U.S.-Russia relationship from one of strategic competition to strategic partnership. . . . We will strive to identify areas of positive cooperation where our interests coincide . . . while minimizing the strain on our partnership where our interests diverge. Going forward, we intend to deepen our cooperation wherever possible, while taking further, even more far reaching steps, to demonstrate our joint leadership in addressing new challenges to global peace and security. . . .
The declaration is indistinguishable from the various communiqués, speeches, and press releases issued by the Obama administration, which are in turn remarkably similar to the statements issued by the Clinton administration and the first Bush administration before that. The common feature of these pronouncements is the admission that while Russia and the United States have differences on some issues, they share strategic interests and the differences should not overshadow the agreements that exist in more numerous and significant areas. A common feature of the declarations is their imperviousness to reality; the rosy view above was offered eight years into the Putin era. Four months after it was issued, Russia invaded Georgia.
Four months after that, another American pledge to heal the relationship was announced. The "reset" was first articulated by then-President-elect Obama in December 2008 and later elaborated by Vice President Joe Biden in a speech to the Munich Security Conference the following February. Biden cited a "dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance" and called for Russo-American cooperation on the three issues that have come to form the crux of the reset policy: stabilizing Afghanistan, New START, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
There were well-intentioned rationales underlying this framework. Among them was the idea that the U.S. and Russia share a "mutual interest in Afghanistan's stable and peaceful development," as asserted in a recent statement by eight former ambassadors to Moscow and Washington. This claim has been bolstered by Moscow's 2009 decision to grant NATO the right to fly planes over Russian territory and its much-heralded offer last year of a handful of helicopters and military trainers to the Afghan army. To be sure, Russia does not want to see the Taliban regain control of the country, as such an outcome would embolden militant Islamists throughout Central Asia and within Russia's own North Caucasus region. But that does not necessarily mean that it wants the United States and its NATO allies to succeed in completely wiping them out, thus ensuring a Western security presence in its backyard for the foreseeable future. It is more likely that the Kremlin desires to see the United States and its allies bleed in a protracted Afghanistan stalemate for years to come. It is for this reason that the Russian government has put enormous pressure on the former Soviet Central Asian states—which have played a crucial role as hosts for the Afghan supply chain—to desist cooperation with the United States. If the convergence of American and Russian goals in Afghanistan is so apparent, why did Moscow wait until the war was eight years old before deciding to cooperate with NATO?
There are also those who envision a costly but valuable U.S.-Russian alignment on Iran. In what was widely seen as a quid pro quo for Russian cooperation on sanctions against the regime in Tehran, the U.S. announced in September 2009 that it would scrap its intention to construct long-planned missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. The news came as a shock to the governments of those two countries, steadfast allies of the United States and rightly concerned about Russian hegemony in what Moscow considers its "near-abroad." The Kremlin had long opposed the plans, claiming that the missile-defense system—designed to defend against an attack from Iran, not Russia—was aimed at undermining its own deterrent. Rather than confront the dishonesty behind this argument, the administration buckled to Russian demands.
It is certainly true that Russia does not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, and Tehran's role in promoting Islamic extremism could further destabilize the region. But Russia is not nearly as alarmed by the prospect of a nuclear Iran as is the United States or its Western allies. The major reason is economic: Russian exports to Iran have increased from $250 million in 1995 to more than $3 billion in 2008. Also, as Russia is a major producer of oil and gas, the possibility of a sharp rise in energy prices (a probable consequence of Iranian nuclear capacity) does not keep Putin awake at night. "Iran is a mania with the Americans; it's not our problem," a Putin adviser reportedly said in 2009. Just as Moscow relishes the sight of America getting bogged down in the Afghan morass, it does not look forward to the warming of relations that would arise between the U.S. and a post-revolutionary Iranian government.
In September, Medvedev signed a decree banning the sale to the Islamic Republic of S-300 air-defense systems and other weapons that Russia had agreed to supply in 2006. And, yes, this was a significant foreign-policy achievement for the White House for which the administration should be given credit. But with the S-300 deal, Moscow created a diversion from the many ways in which Russian policy on Iran has been problematic. For one, the announcement declaring the ban includes a clause allowing Moscow to rescind it at any point. Moreover, Russia still sells other types of weapons to Iran, and its state energy conglomerates continue to do heavy business in the Iranian gas and oil sectors. Russia is still assisting Iran in the construction of its Bushehr nuclear reactor, which is operated by the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
No less concerning is that the Russian regime has been increasingly aggressive on its borders and more authoritarian at home. Last June, a week before Medvedev visited Washington, Russian Newsweek, a since-folded publication often critical of Kremlin authoritarianism, published an 18,000-word "leaked" Russian foreign-policy document. Combined with a military doctrine that was formally released last February, a picture emerges of a Kremlin apparatus that continues to view the world through a Cold War prism. For all the recent talk about NATO-Russia cooperation and shared objectives, the Kremlin views the defensive Western alliance as its "main external military danger." The military document attacks NATO for attempting to arrogate to itself "global functions carried out in violation of the norms of international law." Meanwhile, the foreign-policy document seeks the imposition of the European Security Treaty, a Medvedev initiative that would override NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as a collective security instrument, thus achieving the "containment of NATO's expansionist activities." Seeing that U.S. policy supports the rights of states to choose their own alliances, and that Russia opposes NATO expansion (its war on Georgia serving as a warning to its former satellites), it is difficult to characterize this "disagreement" over collective defense as anything but irreconcilable.
Russia is attempting to weaken NATO in other ways; its meager offer of assistance in Afghanistan came as part of a package of extraordinary demands. Moscow has made specific stipulations regarding NATO force posture, insisting that the allliance not deploy forces larger than a brigade or station more than 24 aircraft for more than six weeks a year on the territories of post-Soviet NATO members. Russia is also demanding a veto within the NATO–Russia Council over future NATO deployments, which would strike at the founding purpose of the alliance. The Kremlin does not believe it needs to offer anything in return for these concessions because, according to Russian diplomats quoted in Russia's Kommersant newspaper, "it is NATO that is expanding and threatening Russia and not the opposite." Meanwhile, news emerged in November that Russia had staged a military exercise simulating a nuclear war against NATO member Poland.
Predating the reset, the conflict in Georgia changed the rules of post–Cold War Europe. For the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia had invaded a neighbor. A 2007 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi describing a series of Russian attacks on Georgian targets concluded that the "cumulative weight of the evidence of the last few years suggests that the Russians are aggressively playing a high-stakes, covert game, and they consider few if any holds barred." To this day, Russia stands in violation of the European Union cease-fire it signed, as it continues to station troops on sovereign Georgian territory and recognizes the "independence" of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in contravention of international law. It has strengthened its military position in both provinces, deploying a battery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Abkhazia last August. With the fragile reset in play, the Obama administration has been hesitant to pressure Russia to the extent that it could.
This has meant American reticence in the face of Russia's deteriorating human-rights situation—a near strategic reversal of the national posture that led the U.S. to Cold War victory. As more independent journalists are assaulted or murdered and peaceful protests are violently dispersed, the rule of law is being displaced by what Medvedev himself has characterized as "legal nihilism." Russia's Kafkaesque justice system was put on full display in the seven-year odyssey of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, who ran afoul of Putin by funding liberal opposition politicians. Khodorkovsky's show trial ended in December when a judge convicted him of embezzlement and money laundering. According to a recent study by the Russian Association of Lawyers for Human Rights, corruption may account for a full half of Russia's GDP, and Transparency International ranked Russia 154th out of 178 countries, behind Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Less than two weeks after the Senate ratified New START, the Russian FSB (internal security service) broke up demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, arresting 130 people, including leading opposition figure Boris Nemstov.
What has imperiled the march of liberty has been good for Moscow. "Haven't you noticed? We're gradually turning into allies," the Kremlin's human-rights ombudsman told Time magazine following a meeting with U.S. officials over the summer. "Since there was no criticism towards us, we didn't criticize them."
What has the United States actually gained from the reset policy? The most the administration can claim is a collection of atmospheric achievements: in 2009, the NATO–Russia Council, a consultative instrument founded in 2002, held its first meeting since the Georgia war. Last May, NATO troops joined Russian ones for a march in Red Square to commemorate the Allied victory in World War II. And in November, Russia participated in NATO's annual summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
With little more than that to its credit, the administration has been content to declare the reset an unmitigated success. Indeed, Obama said as much while dining with Medvedev over hamburgers and fries at a Washington-area fast-food restaurant last June. And in the interests of promoting this rosy narrative, a spy scandal involving 10 Russian operatives, uncovered by the FBI just a week after Medvedev's departure, was summarily swept under the rug by both countries. In this juxtaposition of circumstances lays the folly of the reset. Its successes, such as they are, are as ephemeral as a fast-food photo opportunity, while its shortcomings are rooted in a Russian national character more enduring than Washington is ready to publicly acknowledge.
This is not to say that the administration no longer understands the character of the Russian regime. According to the collection of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks late last year, Russia, in the words of American embassy officials in Moscow, is ruled by a "modern brand of authoritarianism" and is a place where "Stalin's ghost still haunts the metro." The Russian Defense Ministry "has not changed its modus operandi for information exchange nor routine dialoguing since the end of the Cold War." The cables reveal that NATO has devised specific war plans for the defense of the Baltic states against possible Russian attack, news that "bewildered" Moscow.
It now remains for the administration to reassess its view of Russia on the world stage. For even if the Russian leadership were inclined to play a more constructive role in the various initiatives proposed by Washington, it's unclear just how useful its cooperation would be. The country—as measured by its shrinking population, internal political and ethnic disunity, and failure to modernize or diversify its hydrocarbon-dependent economy—is in decline. Over the past five years, Russia dropped from 57th to 65th on the United Nations Human Development Index, and the most recent World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report ranks it near the very bottom with regard to the strength of state institutions and protection of private-property rights. American policy should be oriented toward the management of this decline, marked by a return to a Cold War–era posture of containment. For all the fears about its ability to pressure Europe via the cutoff of gas and oil (a weapon it has not hesitated to use), Russia depends far more on its European consumers than vice versa; the Continent accounts for 67 percent of its gas exports and 69 percent of its oil exports. Russia cannot survive without its European export market, and its threats to cut off oil and gas should be understood within this context.
In terms of specific policies, this means being more assertive with Moscow when it comes to the explication of our interests and values and not backing down so easily in the face of Kremlin demands and threats. It could start with the resumption of defensive weaponry sales to Georgia that were halted following the 2008 war. As the French are going to sell Moscow precisely the sorts of ships the Russians say they need to seize Georgia's Black Sea coast, there is no good reason why the United States ought not to sell defensive armaments to an ally and prospective NATO member. There has not been nearly enough debate about Russia's membership bid to join the World Trade Organization, something which it desperately seeks to do, while it continues to violate so many of the provisions of the international organizations to which it is already member, like the OSCE and the Council of Europe. And the United States could impose visa bans on Russian officials implicated in human-rights abuses, as has been proposed in bipartisan Senate legislation. Doing any of the above will certainly make for less-sunny bilateral public relations, but it will also deliver the benefit of advancing American interests.
The experimental phase in extending American goodwill to Moscow has come about specifically because the U.S. is a secure enough country to take such a chance. It has failed because Russia is at once too unstable and too blustering, and, more crucially, does not see that it in its interests to reciprocate. The administration would do well to keep that in mind as it moves to adopt a harder line with Medvedev and Putin. Until such time that Moscow finds itself in a position to press the button, any genuine reset will remain on indefinite hold.
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