UQ – Afghanistan Influence Now

Link Turn – General

It could even be argued that the Bush administration’s aggressive unilateralism on the war in Iraq, its often cavalier attitude toward human rights in the War on Terror, and its executive power grab on the home front emboldened Putin to behave similarly. While most of the alleged Bush-Putin parallels are specious, the actions of the Bush White House easily lent themselves to a self-serving interpretation by the Putin clique, validating its cynical conviction that democracy is just a cover for “might makes right.” The war in Iraq also made it far too easy to equate all efforts at “democracy promotion,” even peaceful activities such as assisting civil rights groups, with naked imperialism. This helped the Putin propaganda machine stoke Russian unease about the U.S. role in the “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, which replaced those nations’ governments with ones less devoted to Moscow. Many Russians certainly experienced the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of Russia’s influence abroad as a blow to their national pride. But the notion that the United States rubbed Russia’s face in its humiliation is a myth. (If the West rejoiced in Communism’s Cold War defeat, so did most of the Russian media and political elites at the time.) Yes, NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics ranks high on the list of Russian grievances. But when NATO first began seriously considering admitting former Eastern Bloc states in the early 1990s, most supporters of expansion assumed that it could eventually include Russia—and Russia seemed receptive. These prospects were undercut by pressures from neo-Communists and nationalists in the Russian parliament, who wanted a less pro-Western stance, and by mixed signals and suspicions on both the Russian and the U.S. sides. It could be that the conflict is more contrived than real on Russia’s end. The belief that Kremlin rhetoric about the American threat is a faux paranoia, calculated to enable bullying at home and abroad, is shared by numerous commentators inside Russia, from the Carnegie Endowment’s Lilia Shevtsova to former top-level Soviet arms negotiator Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin. Writing in the independent online journal EJ.ru in April 2008, Dvorkin pointed out the obvious: Given Russia’s nuclear potential, a military attack by NATO troops on Russia is unthinkable, no matter how many of its neighbors join the alliance. The real danger to Russia, in Dvorkin’s view, is “civilizational isolation” if the country continues to resist democratization and modernization and finds itself surrounded by neighbors integrated into the West.

In short, the United States remained heavily committed to a region stretching from Iraq to Pakistan, with main force committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of commitments to Pakistan (and above all to Iran) on the table. U.S. ground forces were stretched to the limit, and U.S. airpower, naval and land-based forces had to stand by for the possibility of an air campaign in Iran — regardless of whether the U.S. planned an attack, since the credibility of a bluff depended on the availability of force. The situation in this region actually was improving, but the United States had to remain committed there. It was therefore no accident that the Russians invaded Georgia on Aug. 8 following a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Forgetting the details of who did what to whom, the United States had created a massive window of opportunity for the Russians: For the foreseeable future, the United States had no significant forces to spare to deploy elsewhere in the world, nor the ability to sustain them in extended combat. Moreover, the United States was relying on Russian cooperation both against Iran and potentially in Afghanistan, where Moscow’s influence with some factions remains substantial. The United States needed the Russians and couldn’t block the Russians. Therefore, the Russians inevitably chose this moment to strike.