Tag Archives: Russia

As the Karzai Era Ends, What’s Next for Afghanistan?

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With Zalmay Khalilzad, Jerry Boykin, Gordon Chang, Roger Robinson

ZALMAY KHALILZAD, formerly a US Ambassador to the UN, Afghanistan, and Iraq, lays out what remaining leverage Russia has over the US in Afghanistan. He also explains why he is hopeful that this Saturday’s presidential elections in Afghanistan will see a president elected who is in favor of a bilateral security agreement with the US.

Lt. Gen. JERRY BOYKIN, Executive Vice President of the Family Research Council, argues that social experimentation is turning the US military into a homeland defense force, unable to respond effectively to problems overseas. He also reports on the FBI’s apparent severing of ties with the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center.

GORDON CHANG, of Forbes.com and World Affairs Journal, weighs in on the rationale leading up to North Korea’s recent non-lethal shelling into South Korean waters. Chang goes on to discuss an array of topics that include China’s courting of South Korea, President Obama’s recent effort to restore Korean-Japanese relations, and First Lady Michelle Obama’s trip to China.

Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs at the National Security Council ROGER ROBINSON draws parallels between the implementation of economic warfare in the U.S.S.R. of old and Putin’s Russian Federation of today. He details further several measures by which the United States and its NATO allies can best combat Russia’s economic strategy.

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Russia In Latin America: The Problem We Have Chosen To Ignore

As Russian control of Crimea consolidates and the fear of a potential invasion of continental Ukraine increases, Russian activities closer to home in the Western Hemisphere have been largely overlooked or perhaps just disregarded. There have been reports of  increasing Russian  military cooperation with countries in Latin America that are hostile to the United States, mainly Cuba, Venezuela, and  Nicaragua.  This includes agreements between Russia and the above named countries that would enable Russia to place their naval logistic facilities in Venezuelan, Cuban and Nicaraguan territory. According to Russia’s Secretary of Defense, those facilities could serve long-range aircraft. The motive, according to Russia expert, Stephen Blank is that Russia seeks access to ports and air bases for refueling purposes as well as  great power influence.

The Russian invasion of Crimea raises the question of whether or not  the old cold war  logic remains relevant.

Russia may have given up communism but it did not give up the pride of being an empire with a broad sphere of influence they, namely Vladimir Putin considers belonging to them and to them alone.   It seems this was the reasoning behind Russia’s 2008 aggressive attempt to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. This was followed up by  Russia’s military invasion which successfully  detached South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, making  them politically independent but subjected to Russian authority.  The same logic applies to the current crisis in the Ukraine.

Indeed, the focus  of U.S. polices in the cold war was to contain the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union (and communism in general) throughout the globe. The U.S. fought communist attempts at dominating countries, often through proxies, occasionally supporting opposition forces (including the local armed forces) and sometimes by directly intervening with U.S. troops on the ground. By the same token, there was a tacit recognition of what the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence was and there the U.S. did not really interfere except by using some empty rhetoric. Such was the case of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

By the same token, American polices in its own sphere of influence, especially in Latin America, were more aggressive, particularly after the Cuban revolution. The U.S. felt entitled to be concerned with the pro-Soviet tendencies of the government of the Salvador Allende regime in Chile in the early 1970’s. The same applied to  the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in the later part of that decade.

Today, almost a quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, such tacit mutual containment does not apply.

While Russia views the former Soviet republics as naturally belonging to Russia’s traditional area of domination, the United States views this concept as being antiquated. Moreover, U.S. policy in its former sphere of influence, namely Latin America, is based on catharsis, in a sort of apologetic mood for its  past support of coups d’etat and other former  aggressive policies. This feeling of guilt still haunts  the United States in spite of the fact that in the last three decades the United States has supported democracy in Latin America while repudiating coups d’etat. Likewise, the U.S. has supported a policy of free trade aimed at reducing barriers of commerce between our markets  and Latin America making it easier for Latin American countries to place their products in the U.S. market.

Furthermore, as the U.S. was presenting a clear benevolent post-cold war approach, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and similar governments in Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua emerged. Their  political agenda was quite clear as they became  openly hostile  towards  the United States  with aspirations of reducing American influence in the region and if possible in the world.

This did not go unnoticed by Vladimir Putin and his Machiavellian circle. In my book “Latin America in the Post-Chavez Era” I warned that Russia may use Latin America as a card to prevent the further advance of the West and NATO in the former Soviet sphere of influence. Thus, I concluded Russia’s presence in the region could have negative geo-political consequences.

Indeed, in 2008 Russia offered Venezuela $1billion in credits to buy Russian weaponry and nuclear cooperation. At the same time, the Russian and Venezuelan navies conducted joint exercises.  Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mocked these steps and dismissed the Russia-Venezuelan weapon agreements as inconsequential business deals. Yet, not only that an enemy of the United States and its closest ally Colombia was being armed by Russia but many of these weapons ended in the hands of the subversive Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

By the same token, in October 2010 the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and then Russian president Dmitry Medveded reached an agreement to build two 1,200 megawatt nuclear reactors similar to the one built in Iran also with Russia’s help and completed in August of that year while the West was concerned about the possibility of a nuclear Iran.  Medveded, himself, acknowledged that his 2008 trip to Latin America was out of geo-political considerations. According to a recent article by Joseph Humire, it is estimated that the sale of Russian weapons in Latin America over the next decade will add up to $50 billion dollars. To date, Venezuela has bought the bulk of that weaponry including surface to air missiles now positioned in Caracas.

Despite having a set of hostile countries in the region, and an increasing presence of Iran, China and Russia, U.S. policies remained restricted to trade and trade only. These developments did not raise concern among policy makers. No strategy was ever developed to counteract these geo-political challenges.

Between U.S. self-criticism and guilt and its consequent passivity and the increasing number of anti-American countries in the region, Russia, like Iran and China, knows how to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the Bolivarian Alliance.

As the United States abandons its desire to be involved in international affairs, Russia and China aspire to increase their influence in areas of the world that have traditionally been part of the U.S. sphere of cultural and political influence. Simultaneously, Iran cultivates its own political alliances and terrorist networks in the region. The Bolivarian Alliance is a threat to democracy and stability in the region. Russia, China and Iran will do anything to reinforce these regimes.

Is the United States going to follow Pat Buchanan’s reasoning that what is happening in the world is not our business and does not affect us, and therefore we should not be involved? Or is the United States the leader of the free world that understands that we   represent a force of good by virtue of being a mighty democracy, and that our job is to work with our allies to provide a counterbalance to harmful influences?

On the pages of the Americas Report we have stressed many times the importance of having an active U.S. role in the region aimed at confronting these challenges. This included an active pro-democracy policy and more attention to challenges that affect our national security.  Not even once did we suggest anything like military intervention.

As the world is watching, a laissez-fair foreign policy can be as nefarious as going to war, because it is a sign of weakness that makes us more and more vulnerable.

Don’t Expect Putin to Stop At the Ukraine, Warns Amb. John Bolton

John Bolton, the former US Ambassador to the UN, warned on Friday’s Secure Freedom Radio that if Vladimir Putin is successful in Ukraine, “all of the former Republics—including the three NATO members, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are going to be coming next.” And after that, Bolton predicts, Putin will set his sights globally.

Bolton argued that Putin’s boldness is due largely to the lack of western resistance he is receiving.  He blamed European inaction on economic fears, and American inaction on President Obama’s foreign policy.

“The Europeans allowed themselves to become increasingly dependent on Russian oil and gas. Putin is going to exploit that. He’s going to exploit the fears in the Western European countries that their economies, their fragile economic recoveries, will tank if sanctions are imposed and trade is cut off, and, in turn, if Russia imposes sanctions on the West,” said Bolton.

Ambassador Bolton maintained that the current crisis could have been prevented had Western Europe been braver about incorporating former Soviet republics into their economic sphere.

“I think Europe flunked one test back in April of 2008 at the Bucharest NATO summit, when President Bush put on the table the idea of bringing both Ukraine and Georgia on a very clearly defined timetable into NATO. That was intended to avoid exactly what happened four months later when the Russians attacked Georgia, and what we’re seeing now in Ukraine,” Bolton said. “The Europeans were too worried, too nervous about Russia’s reaction, and they wouldn’t accept the idea. And we’re now playing out the consequences of that.”

Bolton was also sharply critical of President Obama’s handling of the entire situation.

The Russians, he said, “are operating under a grand strategy and they’re going to continue to pursue it.” On the other hand, Bolton said, “the President just doesn’t pay attention to national security issues. He doesn’t care about it. He sent John Kerry to negotiate with Sergey Lavrov: that’s like sending a warm stick of butter to negotiate with a steak knife.”

After host Frank Gaffney brought up the underreported use of cyber warfare by the Russians in Ukraine, Bolton said he is not optimistic about the choices Obama will likely make in the near future on that front.

He doesn’t “doubt that [Russia would] be delighted to negotiate a treaty with us that would solemnly foreswear the use of cyber warfare in international relations—and then they’d probably violate it. We, on the other hand, especially in the Obama administration, would adhere to it. So the Russians would advance, the Iranians, the North Koreans. Everyone would advance except us. This is exactly the wrong way to proceed, so I have no doubt it will become a priority for Barack Obama,” he commented wryly.

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Edward Snowden, Traitor

Against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Crimea – and its threats to do the same to other parts of the Ukraine, a top U.S. intelligence officer today issued an ominous warning.  He says the Kremlin might have gained access to the American military’s secret contingency war plans.

Not that anyone is contemplating having our armed forces come to the aid of Ukrainians seeking freedom from Russian imperialism. Still, the comment by Lieutenant General Mike Flynn suggests that Vladimir Putin may have knowledge of how to defeat our military that could embolden him to act even more aggressively in the future.

If so, blame for this portentous compromise, like so many others, will lie with Edward Snowden, making clear that he is not some heroic whistle-blower, but a traitor to our country.

Unrealities’ Dangerous Reality

Much divides President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the moment.  But both are seen as disconnected from reality.  And that’s not a good thing in the midst of the potentially explosive crisis involving the Ukraine.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Putin is “in another world.” The Washington Post says “Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.” If either one of these is true, it’s a serious problem. If both are, it could be a calamity.

That’s because the former KGB colonel in the Kremlin is cunning, determined and ruthless enough to try to bring about his alternative reality. That would be a new Russian empire. Call it “Soviet Union 2.0.”

The danger is that President Obama’s foreign policy fantasies create an environment where Putin is virtually certain to go for it.

Penalties for Putin

Russia’s foreign minister yesterday assured his American  counterpart that the Kremlin would “respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Secretary of State John Kerry responded in a press conference that what matters at the moment are actions, not words.

That certainly should be true of the United States and its allies. But Vladimir Putin is clearly calculating that the West is only going to talk about opposing his predictable effort to break up, if not control the whole of, the Ukraine.

Much worse is to come if there are no real costs to Putin associated with Russia’s threatening military mobilization just across the boarder from Ukraine and the armed seizures by Russians of government buildings in the Crimea region. The West must bring to bear real strategic and economic penalties, not empty rhetoric.

Putin’s Next Move in Ukraine

Last week, Ukrainians seeking their freedom from Vladimir Putin’s puppet in Kiev, were subjected to murderous violence. Then, suddenly, like a fairy tale, it was seemingly all over.  President Victor Yanukovych was impeached by the parliament. His political opposition appears to have prevailed, and a new day dawned in the Ukraine.

Unfortunately, this is isn’t a fairy tale.  It’s more like a chess match – one that Ukrainians are playing with Russians, for whom the game is their national sport. The stakes may, as a result, literally be life and death for the Ukraine.

Now, it’s Putin’s move. With the Olympics behind him, the Russian kleptocrat no longer needs to be on his good behavior.  We must persuade him that the costs of subverting the Ukrainian revolution 2.0 will be unacceptably high.

While Obama Resets, Putin Rearms

Kremlin cheating on arms control agreements happens all the time. So it should hardly come as a surprise that Russia is violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

It certainly doesn’t surprise me.  I worked for President Reagan on the negotiation of that accord and warned at the time Moscow could exploit its defects to field prohibited ground-launched cruise missiles.

The trouble is not simply that Vladimir Putin’s cheating is giving Russia a new capability to threaten our allies and interests.  It’s also making a mockery of the whole arms control enterprise, in which successive U.S. administrations have massively over-invested.

So, we have the spectacle of Russian perfidy being met by American excuse-making, “quiet diplomacy” and pathetic inaction that only invites further bad behavior from Putin and his friends.

Putin celebrates birth of KGB, USSR’s hated spy service

The bloody birth of the most murderous secret police in history occurred 96 years ago and is being celebrated across Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Always feared, the KGB is now revered.

“In the past, the services worked for the Communist Party and the party ran the state,” says Michelle Van Cleave, former head of U.S. counterintelligence. “Now, the intelligence services are the state. That’s a very different government structure than we’re accustomed to.”

Nicknamed Cheka, the All-Russian Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage existed to smash any and all opposition to Vladimir Lenin’s creation of a utopian socialist society. “We represent in ourselves organized terror — this must be said very clearly,” proclaimed its first leader, Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

The Cheka became the world’s prototype for industrial-scale mass persecution, torture and human slaughter. For Dzerzhinsky, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, “extermination” of all opponents was an explicit and planned policy.

As the Cheka evolved under different names — with its officers always calling themselves Chekists — others would study it and copy it.

Building Hitler’s dictatorship in 1930s Germany, the Nazis were fascinated by the Chekists’ ruthlessness and efficiency. Historian Edward Crankshaw wrote that in the early years of Soviet collaboration with Nazi Germany, SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller visited the Soviet Union to study how the Chekists operated, and borrowed that system to design the Gestapo.

Instead of mourning the anniversary of what arguably was the greatest tragedy of Russia’s 1,000-year history, President Putin is celebrating it. To KGB veterans like Putin, the Cheka represents the essence of what is Russia and serves as the ultimate instrument of power. Even today, the official seals of the Russian security services feature the Cheka’s sword-and-shield emblem.

“The Cheka tradition has thoroughly infiltrated the upper levels of the Russian elite,” says British historian Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security and organized crime and a professor at New York University.

Putin spent part of his KGB career in the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic (GDR), working closely with the Communist secret police known as Stasi.

After Reuters unearthed documents in 2001 from the Stasi office in Dresden, where Putin worked, the Moscow Times reported that the Stasi awarded Putin a commendation for his contribution to “fraternal cooperation between the GDR’s Chekists and the Soviet security organs against the common enemy.”

Years later, when the U.S. uncovered 11 Russian sleeper agents and sent them back to Moscow, “Putin greeted them and led them in singing the KGB anthem, the same song from the old Chekist days,” a former senior intelligence officer tells the American Media Institute.

“Putin has honed what was the KGB (now known as the foreign SVR and domestic FSB) into an operational government,” according to John J. Dziak, a retired senior U.S. intelligence officer and author of “Chekisty,” a definitive history of the Russian intelligence services.

“Russia’s great strength is because it breaks the rules and gets away with it,” says Galeotti. “Internationally, Putin has an extraordinarily nuanced grasp of just how far he can push.”

Western countries don’t push back, Galeotti says, because they know the Russian elites will take reprisals. “Under Putin, the West realizes that there will be a very strong backlash, and would rather not risk it.”

That attitude only invites more pushing, say American intelligence officials. “Our president rushing to make nice just reinforces Putin’s illusion and fantasy that Russia is a great power and it matters as much as it used to,” says former CIA director Michael V. Hayden.

Russia continues an intensive, aggressive espionage campaign around the world, and particularly against the United States. Van Cleave, National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) in the George W. Bush administration, is blunt:

“Today, there are more Russian intelligence personnel operating in the United States than there were at the height of the Cold War.”

By law, the Office of the NCIX must submit annual reports to Congress about foreign intelligence threats. However, that office has not issued such a report for the public since 2011. While the office has sent classified reports to Congress, their secrecy has all but erased the issue from public awareness.

“I don’t think the American public realizes the extent of Russian espionage,” laments Robert W. Stephan, a Russia expert who served nearly 20 years in the CIA.

Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has encouraged the intelligence community to alert the public about threats from Russia.

In testimony before Feinstein’s committee last March, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper reported that Russian espionage is as urgent a threat as terrorism and international organized crime. “These foreign intelligence methods employ traditional methods of espionage and, with growing frequency, innovative technical means,” he said.

As if aggressive espionage against free societies wasn’t enough, the Chekists have another asset: thieves of highly classified U.S. intelligence information such as four-month National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Moscow earlier this year with four laptop computers crammed with highly classified material.

He has been an intelligence and propaganda boon for Putin and the former KGB. “They have happily taken him into their embrace, and there’s no reason to think they have not gotten everything he had,” Van Cleave says.

In addition to the incalculable loss of intelligence information that Snowden is believed to have handed the Chekists, the American defector provided Putin with a propaganda bonanza.

Snowden’s leaked information that the NSA was eavesdropping on foreign leaders — including the private cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel — has driven wedges between the U.S. and longtime loyal allies. “They’ll use every opportunity they can find to try to separate the U.S. from our allies in Western Europe and elsewhere,” Van Cleave observes. “If they can undermine confidence or spread suspicion about the United States, they will do that.”

As they were when they looted Russia’s wealth in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chekists today are an organized criminal syndicate unto themselves, experts say. “In Russia,” Clapper testified, “the nexus among organized crime, some state officials, the intelligence services, and business blurs the distinction between state policy and private gain.”

Putin’s political rise illustrates the transformation of Russia. He went from being a simple KGB officer earning roughly $100 a month to become one of the wealthiest men in Russia — without ever holding a private-sector job.

Upon leaving East Germany for his native St. Petersburg, Putin was one of several KGB officers who surrounded the city’s reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. Victor Yasmann, then of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, reported at the time that Putin handled hard currency operations for the city — a job that put him in charge of huge quantities of fungible cash with little oversight.

During the Soviet collapse, the KGB made sure its officers were integrated into the emerging economy as tightly as possible. Soviet law required all joint ventures with foreign companies to have a KGB officer as a corporate vice president. Soon, Chekists would be vice presidents of factories, service companies, construction enterprises, hotels and banks that had Western investors.

The success of economic reformers in St. Petersburg attracted the attention of Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin. While Yeltsin was instrumental in bringing down the Communist Party, he lacked a political base of his own, and threw in his lot with the KGB. He placed Chekists in key posts, naming Putin head of the Presidential Property Administration, in charge of a vast network of buildings, land and other assets.

In a short time, Putin had taken control of the country’s internal security apparatus, the Federal Security Service — which had been the domestic control machinery of the KGB.

Yeltsin, by now ailing, named Putin prime minister and constitutional successor. Yeltsin resigned suddenly on Dec. 31, 1999, making Putin president. Alternating between the posts of president and prime minister to observe the term limits set under the new Russian constitution, Putin has remained in power ever since.

“The criminal organizations that last along generations know how to institutionalize coercion, and use violence as a last resort,” says Galeotti. “You want to use deception, co-option, and you want to use threat to deter. Those are precisely what the modern-day Cheka is very able to do.”