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Evan Taylor 2/29/12 1

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Eastward Bound

Introduction

One of the oddest parts of the current war being fought in Afghanistan is its

undefined nature. Besides offering a vague notion of needing to “fight extremism,” little

is ever said about why a large American and European army is fighting in Central Asia.

What is argued below is that this is because there is no reason, at least not in doctrinal

coherence. Instead, Afghanistan is being occupied as the logical outcome of the United

State’s post-Cold War policy. During this nineties, numerous different interests set about

trying to influence what role America was to play in the world, all of them advocating for

an expansion of American influence, both geographically eastward into the former Soviet

Union and ideologically, in the question of what situations military force should be used.

As such, these ideas became official government policy, whether through conscious

statecraft or back room lobbying.

The result of this history is that the United States now attempts to wield political

power over a vast swath of Eurasian territory, stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean

into Southwest Asia. In terms of geopolitics, this can be seen as an unprecedented

intrusion into an area that was traditionally under the influence of regional actors like

Russia and Iran. Moreover, Washington saw its strategy as a zero-sum contest, actively

trying to deny the influence of these local powers while building up its own. One glaring

example of this is in Afghanistan, where only thirteen years after the Red Army retreated

northward through the Central Asian Republics (then Soviet Republics), the US Army

invaded using proxy forces and military bases located in the Central Asian Republics.




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However, this is not to say that Washington's strategy of shutting these other powers out

of the region has been successful. Russia, Iran, and as of late China all have trade and

military relations with the area in question. In fact, it may turn out that the US's reliance

on military force has hindered its ability to influence the governments of the region.

What follows is an attempt to sketch two decades worth of history. The first

section will examine U.S.-Soviet Business dealings in the 1980’s and Chevron’s interest

in Caspian Basin energy deposits. The second section will examine U.S. policy towards

Turkey in the 1980’s. The third section looks at the administration of George HW Bush

in the context of American militarism, while the fourth looks at the Clinton years in much

the same way. Finally, the last section will detail the Central Asia’s transition into a fully

securitized region of the American empire.




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I. The Traders

On the business side, one of the men most responsible for initiating the U.S.

move into Central Asia was James H. Giffen, a businessman with a history of promoting

trade between America and the Soviet Union. While his name appeared in the business

press from time to time throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, it was not until the 21st

century that he achieved infamy, when the was indicted by the Justice Department in the

largest foreign bribery case brought against an American citizen in history. He was

charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, banning American business leaders

from bribing foreign officials.

Giffen's professional involvement in Soviet business went back to 1968, when he

turned his doctoral work at Berkeley into a textbook on trading across cold war lines. He

then entered private industry, working at Armco, an Ohio steel company that supplied the

Soviet oil industry. Giffen rose to be Vice President of the Armco oil-services branch,

serving under CEO C. William Verity, who would later be appointed Secretary of

Commerce in 1987 by Ronald Reagan.1

Both Giffen and Verity were members of the odd political breed that pressed for

increased US-Soviet economic relations during the Cold War. However, this had not

been in line with government policy since 1974, when the “Jackson-Vanick” amendment

was added to U.S. trade law. The bill tied preferential trading rates to foreign

governments’ emigration policies, denying “most favored nation” status to any

Communist country that restricted or charged high fees for the right of its citizens to

emigrate. Although in theory the bill was meant to punish human rights violations across

1Ron Stodghill, “Oil Cash and Corruption,” New York Times, November 5

th, 2006, pg. 4




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Communist countries, it specifically was aimed at Moscow’s practice of stopping Jews

from immigrating to Israel.2

But Giffen and Verity held true to their commercial beliefs, and in 1984 they

founded the Mercator Corporation, a private New York merchant bank that specialized in

American-Soviet relations. Concurrently, Giffen took over from Verity as chairman of

the “U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade Council,” a lobby for American businessmen hoping to invest

in the Soviet Union. Three years earlier, the council had met in Moscow, their first

meeting since the mid 1970’s. In a poignant marker for the beginning of the end of the

Cold War, Soviet leader Leonard Brezhnev died only five days before the Trade Council

meeting was scheduled to begin. However, according to Verity, this threw no loop in the

plans, as “Soviet officials were on telephone within two hours after Brezhnev’s death was

announced, urging the Americans to come ahead.”3

These developments coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in

Moscow, and the reformist politician was reportedly a confidant of Giffen. According to

Giffen, Gorbachev enlisted him to set up joint ventures with American corporations, an

idea out of which was born the "American Trade Consortium," a group of five large US

companies (Chevron, RJR Nabisco, Eastman Kodak, Johnson & Johnson, and Archers

Daniel Midland) that wanted to do business in the Soviet Union. Giffen began building

the consortium in 1987, and within a year an initial agreement had been signed. To mark

the occasion, Gorbachev hosted a Kremlin dinner for over 400 US businessmen, led by

C. William Verity, now the Secretary of Commerce.4 In addition to the five "blue-blood"

2Julie Ginsburg, “Reassessing the Jackson-Vanick Amendment” Council on Fo reign Relations,

July 2nd

, 2009.3

“Trade Trip,” Time, December 6th

, 1982.4Louis Kraer, "Top US Companies Move Into Russia," Fortune, July 31st, 1989.




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companies, 34 other American businesses also piggybacked on Giffen's deal and planned

to establish joint ventures in the Soviet Union.

Financially, the consortium’s business plan depended heavily on Chevron, which

would provide dollars to the other consortium members by exporting Soviet energy.

Giffen had negotiated a deal where members’ businesses would share a pool of hard

currency for investment, allowing them to circumvent the Soviet law barring foreign

companies from removing profits before their business generate currency.5 By pooling

the capital resources generated by energy sales, the corporations could both invest in the

East and move profit back to the New York ledgers of Mercator.

Chevron was primarily interested in the large energy deposits of the Caspian

Basin. Although the area had sustained an oil industry dating back to the 19 th century,

centered in the Azeri port of Baku, the supergiant Tenghiz field had only been discovered

in 1979. Armed with a pile of geological maps, a team of Chevron advisors visited the

area, accompanied by Giffen, in 1987. They were so impressed with the Tenghiz deposit

that one Chevron geologists considered it to be “the perfect oil field.”6 Another

compared it to the 3,850 foot tall Mt. Diablo, near Chevron’s San Francisco headquarters.

“He calculated that if one sawed through Mount Diablo at its base, then turned it upside

down and buried it far underground, such that its tip reached a depth of 15,000 feet, that

mountain would be Tenghiz.”7 At the time, both the Americans and the Soviets had a

conservative estimate that Tenghiz contained 10 billion barrels, making it one of the

5Krarr,. 2.

6Steve Levine, The Oil and the Glory: the Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea ,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) pg. 94.7

Ibid., 94.




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world’s ten largest fields. However, over time this calculation has risen to 18 billion

proven barrels, all contained in one massive column 1,500 feet tall. Moreover, Chevron’s

geologists were also enticed by the fact that seismographs showed Tenghiz as only part of

a larger oblong atoll of deposits. One image in particular “seemed to indicate the

presence of another field offshore containing two subterranean reservoirs, four times the

size of Tenghiz, or a minimum of 40 billion barrels of oil.”8 But energy expert Michael

Klare points out that it is not even the size of these reserves that is most significant, "but

the fact that production in this region is likely to rise in the years ahead while production

in many other oil-bearing areas is likely to decline."

9

For Chevron, the prospect of adding such a large concession to its bottom line

came at a fortuitous moment. Although it had been a member of the hegemonic Western

oil cartel that Italian President Enrico Mattei had deemed the “Seven Sisters,” the

turbulence of the 1970's recalibrated the industry in favor of producing states. Due to a

string of nationalizations, the oil majors had lost control of their crude oil holdings, which

were now in the hands of state owned companies like Saudi Aramco. This meant that the

Western companies were relegated to selling the oil abroad and providing technical

service, denying them the ability to control production and price, and taking huge

amounts of oil out of their “booked reserves,” the amount of proven oil underneath fields

they held concessions to.10 From 1977 to 1984, the Seven Sisters saw their booked

reserves drop by an incredible two-thirds.11

8Ibid., 95.

9Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001) pg. 85.

10Antonia Juhasz, The Tyranny of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 2008) pg. 104.

11Ibid., 101.




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Balancing this out was a dramatic rise in price, nominally known as the "oil

shocks." Oil prices rocketed upwards by 400% in 1973-1974, following Henry

Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy to end the Yom Kippur war, and then again in 1979 with

the Iranian Revolution. But the second half of the 1980's saw what Daniel Yergin terms

"the third oil shock," which beginning in 1985 sent prices plummeting. Yergin notes

that, "it was not merely that prices were collapsing; they were also out of control. For the

first time in memory, there was no price setting structure. There was not even an official

OPEC price. The market was victorious, at least for the time being."12

The oil majors were also using the market for a different strategy, that of the

leveraged corporate merger (a strategy helped out immensely by the Reagan's

administrations attitude towards anti-trust statutes). In her history of the oil industry,

Antonia Juhasz writes of the period that American oil companies “set out to hunt for oil

not in the field but rather on Wall Street, by buying up other oil companies.”13 In 1984,

this practice hit record heights when Texaco acquired Getty Oil for $10 billion, followed

one month later by the acquisition of Gulf Oil by Chevron. At the time, this was the

largest merger in corporate history, and Chevron saw its oil reserves nearly double to 4

billion barrels and its natural-gas reserves increase by three-quarters.14 The combination

of lost oil reserves, a wildly fluctuating market, and a culture of speculative monopoly on

Wall Street made the promise of access to Soviet Oil to avaricious to turn away from.

Initially, Chevron was not offered the Tenghiz field but instead the adjacent

Korolev field, one-twelfth the size. However, knowing that this was to be a long-term

12Daniel Yergin, The Prize (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991) pg. 751.

13Juhasz, The Tyranny of Oil , 104.

14Ibid., 112.




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commitment, Chevron “agreed to develop it so we could get in on exploration,”

according to Richard Matzke, then president of Chevron Overseas Petroleum.15 This paid

off, for in January 1990 Giffen convinced Gorbachev that the Korolev field was not large

enough to generate the necessary capital for the other members of the consortium, an

argument that Gorbachev bought.16 As a result, Chevron signed a “protocol of

intentions” at the Soviet Embassy in early June, giving the oil company exclusive rights

to explore an 8,900 sq. mile area that included the Tenghiz field, but stopping short of

establishing a joint venture that would allow oil to actually be sold.17 The following

month, Nurulstan Nazerbaev, the President of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and a

leader close to Gorbachev, visited the United States and met with Bush administration

officials, members of Congress, and businessmen. The main purpose of his trip was to

push for foreign investment in Kazakhstan, part of his plan for “economic sovereignty”

without political separation from Moscow, which stressed privatization of property,

dissolution of monopolies, expansion of entrepreneurship, and the independence of

enterprises.18 In December, Nazarbaev announced that a joint venture between the

Republic and Chevron would be signed the following month.19

In the simplest terms, Chevron managed to jump the gun, beginning the capitalist

exploitation of the Soviet Union before the Cold War actually ended. As a result, when

the USSR formally disbanded in December 1991, Chevron already had a political and

15

“The Scramble for Oil’s Last Frontier,” Business Week, January 11, 1993.16

Ibid., 2.17

“Soviet Venture may include Tengiz,” Oil and Gas Journal , June 11th

1990; Stuart

Auerbach, “Soviets Grant Chevron Corp. Rights to Explore Largest New Oil Field,”

Washington Post , June 3rd

1990.18

Clyde Farnsworth, “President of Soviet Republic Seeks U.S. Business Deals,” New York

Times, July 30th

, 1990.19

Jeff Pelline, “Chevron to Pump Oil in Soviet Union,” San Francisco Chronicle, December

12th

, 1990.




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economic agenda laid out for the “newly independent states” and their energy reserves.

While they would not have hegemonic control over the area, all negotiations began on

their terms, and the rest of the industry had to horse trade in order to get concessions.

Richard Barnet, in his analysis of the relationship between government and business in

foreign affairs, distinguishes between two scenarios—crisis management and long-term

policy. Concerning the former, business leaders “may be informed as a courtesy due to

the powerful, but they will not have an active role in making the decisions.” However,

concerning the latter, he writes:

The role of corporate managers in shaping long-term policies, such asthose affecting investment, availability, and use of resources, which areultimately more important, is much greater. On these, businessmen maketheir weight felt in two ways. The first is through continuous lobbying of the executive and Congress, most of it private and informal. The second isthrough the conduct of their business. By making ordinary businessdecisions affecting foreign countries, corporate managers set the directionof American foreign policy. 20

In this sense, the Chevron approach served as the model for the entirety of American

policy towards the former Soviet Union and the commanding heights of its economy. It

was all one big oil field, controlled by Moscow elite, to be tapped, barreled, and sold for

profit by the American political industry, with Harvard University and the International

Monetary Fund filling the roll of the Seven Sisters.

20Richard Barnet, The Roots of War: The Men and Institutions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy ,

(New York: Penguin Books, 1972) pg. 185.




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II. The Warriors

It was in Turkey that the Cold Warriors made their impact felt. For American-

Turkish relations, the military coup d'etat that took place in Ankara on September 12,

1980 serves as a turning point. The coup leaders, who reportedly had “the silent

approval” of Turkey's western allies, desired “a long term project to rebuild totally the

political and economic structures of the Turkish state.”21 In order to facilitate this

project, the Parliament was dissolved, political leaders were taken into custody, political

parties and trade unions were directed to disband, and martial law was declared

countrywide.22 However, the coup leaders planned to resolutely push Turkey into the

dominion of the U.S. military complex, and thus Washington saw these autocratic

developments as benign. As a prime example of the role major newspapers play as an

enforcer of US policy, the New York Times ran a fawning profile of Ankara's new

generalissimo only one day after he had seized power, beginning with the sentence

“General Kenan Evren, the leader of the new Turkish military government, faces the

double task of defeating terrorism and bolstering his country's position as NATO's

bastion in the troubled Middle East,” while the Washington Post ran a short factsheet

entitled, “Turkey: A Key U.S. Ally Bridging Europe and Asia.”23

21Dietrich Jung & Wolfango Piccoli, Turkey at the Crossroads, (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2001) pg. 93-94.22

Ibid., 94.23

Drew Middleton, “Man in the news; Friend to the West, Foe of Turkish Terrorists,” New

York Times, September 13, 1980; “Turkey: A Key U.S. Ally bridging Europe and Asia,”

Washington Post , September 13th

, 1980.




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During the three years of military rule that followed the coup, a form of gunboat

diplomacy took place between Washington and Ankara. With simultaneous negotiations

taking place over both its massive external debt and its military acquisitions, Turkey was

transformed into the prototypical outpost of the neocolonial project. While Washington

based international lenders like the IMF and World Bank imposed strict financial dictates

on government spending and export laws and enforced the privatization of state-run

industries, the Pentagon and State Department colluded to negotiate US arm sales and

basing rights. In essence, this was the realization of the hawkish position on Turkey that

had circulated among US strategists throughout the Cold War. The Anatolian plateau,

geographically situated in the underbelly of the Soviet Union and atop the vast resource

pools that are the Persian Gulf and Africa, would now be squarely under the political

thumb of Washington.

Tellingly, the American ambassador to Turkey was Robert Strausz-Hupe, a

venerable and experienced Cold Warrior. Although often overlooked in political history,

Strausz-Hupe had been an influential elite in Washington policy circles. Born to a

wealthy Austrian family in 1903, he immigrated to America at age twenty, eventually

ending up in New York City, where he worked at a Wall Street bank and wrote for

Current History magazine. His eye was focused across the Atlantic, to his native Europe,

where totalitarian societies were being nurtured in both Hitler's Germany and Stalin’s

Russia. This time period influenced Strausz-Hupe greatly, and in his worldview he never

abandoned this prism of totalitarianism. After World War II, he was offered a prestigious

position at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he founded the

Foreign Policy Research Institute in 1955. This would become his pulpit from which he




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preached a hard-line, totalizing view of the Cold War as a battle between ideological

extremes. Considering this, it is not surprising that he was in control of US policy

towards Turkey during the final decade of the Cold War. 24

Also not surprising is that Strausz-Hupe nominated another hardliner, Richard

Perle, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, to be his point man for negotiations. Normally,

Perle’s Pentagon post would not involve diplomatic relations, the purview of the State

Department, but Perle was the exception. Perle himself told an audience at the Foreign

Policy Research Institute “it is even rarer for an American ambassador to invite a Defense

Department official to take charge of a sensitive negotiation that would normally be

handled by the Department of State, yet that is precisely what Ambassador Strausz-Hupe

did in Ankara in the 1980's.25 Over the decade, Perle negotiated a major defense

agreement and basing rights for Washington, reaffirming the Anatolian plateau as a

military ally. At the close of the decade, he went into private practice in order to

financially benefit from his government service, forming International Advisors Inc., a

consulting firm that contracted to the Turkish government, along with his associate

Douglas Feith. It was also at the close of the decade that Turkey set into motion its “pan-

Turkic” identity that aligned the country with the Caucasus and Central Asia over the

next twenty years.

“Pan-Turkism,” an Ottoman-era ideology that imagined one united people

stretching from the Mediterranean into Western China, was reintroduced into official

language as the Soviet Union collapsed. As the decade turned, “Turkey’s cultural,

24Andrew Crampton and Gearoid O Tuathail, “Intellectuals, institutions and ideology: the

case of Robert Strausz-Hupe and American Geopolit ics,” Political Geography (Vol. 15, No.

6/7, 1996), pg. 534.25

Richard Perle, “The First Annual Robert Strausz-Hupe Lecture,” Foreign Policy Research

Institute (Volume 7, No. 11), September 1999.




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linguistic, historical and religious bonds with the newly independent states were

frequently mentioned as the basis for Ankara’s influential future role in the

Transcaucasus and Central Asia.” As such, a “Turkish speaking community of states

stretching from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China increasingly became part of

official discourse.”26 In autumn 1991, a meting was held in Ankara between Turkish

president Turgut Ozal and the presidents of all five republics plus Azerbaijan. Here, Ozal

“pledged to support their declaration of sovereignty and emergence of a Pan-Turkic

world,” a move that “immediately alerted Iran, Pakistan and the Arab countries to

Turkeys efforts.”

27

However, on the maps spread out on drawing room table, a “pan-Turkic world”

also serves as a geopolitical wet dream, a march of hard and soft power straight into the

heart of Eurasia. In terms of energy, it provided for an “East-West” pipeline corridor

from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the

Mediterranean Sea. In terms of great-power rivalry, it served as a challenge to both

Russia and China, incorporating territory traditionally under their influence.

On February 12th, 1992 Washington, President Bush met with the Turkish Prime

Minister in Washington. Afterwards, Bush, at a press conference on the White House’s

south lawn, stated “Turkey is indeed a friend, a partner of the United States, and it’s also

a model to others, especially those newly independent republics of Central Asia. In a

region of changing tides, it endures as a beacon of stability.”28 Meanwhile, James Baker

was on a five-day whirlwind tour of the Caucasus and Central Asia, visiting Moldova,

26Jung & Piccoli, Turkey at the Crossroads, 179.27 Ahmed Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism, (London: Zed Books, 1994), pg.

211.28

John E. Yang, “US, Turkey Pledge Aid to New States,” Washington Post February 12th

,

1992.




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Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In an unusually frank

assessment back in Washington, one of Baker’s aides stated that the secretary’s

conclusion of Central Asia was that “some of these new countries are going to make it,

and others are going to join the swelling ranks of third world basket cases, just limping

along. Those that are most likely to make it are those like Turkmenistan that have

economies based on agriculture, oil, gas and minerals.”29

III. The Plan

In Washington, much of the US strategy for Eurasia followed over the past twenty

years was determined during the George HW Bush administration, and especially in

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s Pentagon. In recent American history, it would be

hard pressed to match the radical militarism practiced in government by Dick Cheney and

his followers. In the two major tours of Washington duty they served, from 1989-1992

and 2001-2008, American soldiers preemptively invaded Panama, Iraq (twice), and

Afghanistan, and reportedly did everything in their power to start a war with Iran. By

and large, these are the men who have made famous the idea of the “neocons” as a

powerful elite sect, and to a degree, this idea is correct, at least as it relates to the

phenomena of the same individuals repeatedly being appointed to powerful positions

within Government.

29Thomas Friedman, “Baker’s Trip to Nations Unready for Independence,” New York Times,

February 15th

, 1992.




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These are the Pentagon apparatchiks, the paper pushers and agenda writers like

Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad, men who played

huge roles in facilitating the previously mentioned drives to war. They were Cheney’s

aides and assistants during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, where they witnessed

the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. A decade later, they

attempted to replicate this experience in the Middle East under H.W. Bush’s son George.

And when asked to produce their own national security doctrine for a post Cold War

world, they infamously planned for world domination. In an article published at the start

of George W. Bush’s “marketing campaign” for an invasion of Iraq, David Armstrong,

the Washington bureau chief for the National Security News Service, wrote of their

beliefs:

The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme isunilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for theUnited States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. Itcalls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that theUnited States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.30

The document in question is the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, a biannual planning

document charting the future of Pentagon policy. In charge of writing this strategy was

Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon Policy office. According to a report published in The New

Republic, “On Saturday mornings, Wolfowitz’s deputies convened a seminar in a small

conference room in the Pentagon’s E Ring, where they sat Cheney in front of a parade of

Sovietologists,” many of whom, “were mavericks who believed the Soviet Union was on

the brink of collapse.”31

James Mann, in his group biography Rise of the Vulcans,

30David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song for America,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2002.

31Franklin Foer and Spencer Ackerman, “The Radical,” The New Republic , November 20

th,

2003.




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elaborates on these meetings, writing that they were led by Zalmay Khalilzad, and

participants included Wolfowitz, his deputy Scooter Libby, and long time military

strategists like Andrew Marshall, Albert Wohlstetter, and Richard Perle.32

In March 1992, when a polished draft of the strategy was circulated among the

Pentagon, it was leaked to New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler, by an anonymous

individual who believed that “this post-cold war strategy debate should be carried out in

the public forum.”33 And the individual’s concerns were justified, as Tyler writes “the

classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose

position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to

deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”34

When the draft was covered in the Times and The Washington Post , it garnered

uproar from all angles in Washington. Senator Joe Biden, a member of the Foreign

Relations Committee, characterized it as an attempt by the Pentagon to erect a “Pax

Americana, a global security system where threats to stability are suppressed or destroyed

by US military power,” and the spokesman for Democratic Presidential candidate Bill

Clinton called it “one more attempt” by defense officials “to find an excuse for big

budgets instead of downsizing.”35

Even within the Pentagon the leaked paper elicited cold shoulders. Zalmay

Khalilzad felt that even Wolfowitz “didn’t want to be associated with it,” leaving

32James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet , (New York: Penguin

Books, 2004), pg. 210.33

Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals,” New York Times, March

8th

, 1992.34

Ibid.35

Patrick E. Tyler, “Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition for Critics,” New York Times, March

10th

, 1992.




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Khalilzad to feel ostracized for a number of days. That is, until he was approached by

Secretary Cheney, who told Khalilzad that his paper had “discovered a new rationale for

our role in the world.”36

As many understand Wolfowitz’s Defense Planning Guide to be the first draft of

the “Bush Doctrine,” George W. Bush’s National Security Strategy of 2002, it has

received much analysis in the 17 years since it was originally leaked. James Mann covers

it in Rise of the Vulcans, his group biography of George W. Bush’s foreign policy

advisors, as does George Packer in The Assassins Gate, his history of the 2003 invasion

of Iraq. Additionally, the National Security Archive at George Washington University

has an extensive casebook on the matter, including inter-office memos and declassified

documents.37 Pointing out the breadth of research into the DPG is to say that its

importance should not be taken lightly, for it eerily predicated policies that arose ten

years later, supposedly under the justification of the “war on terror.”

Part of the notoriety that the DPG has accumulated is due to the cast of characters

employed by both in the 1992 Pentagon and in the first term of the George W. Bush

administration. At the time, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ruled over his five-sided

empire. Third in command, at the post of undersecretary of defense for policy was

Wolfowitz. This was a very influential office to hold, as the undersecretary for policy is

the principal staff assistant and advisor to the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary on all

matters of national security and defense policy. And within Wolfowitz’s office, where

36Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 211.

37http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm




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the DPG was crafted, the picture becomes even clearer, for it is the exact same cast that

controlled American foreign policy after 9/11.

Wolfowitz’s top aide at the time was Scooter Libby, who held the title of

principal undersecretary of defense for strategy and resources, and one of Libby’s leading

assistants was Zalmay Khalilzad.38 In 2001, Wolfowitz would move up one spot in the

Pentagon hierarchy to deputy secretary of defense, Libby would become Vice President

Cheney’s chief of staff, top national security advisor, and national security advisor to the

President, and Khalilzad would first serve on the National Security Council before 9/11,

then as a “special envoy” to post war Afghanistan, then as a “special envoy” to free (read:

exile) Iraqis in 2002, then as ambassador to Afghanistan, and finally as ambassador to

postwar Iraq.

From Mann’s description, it is clear the Khalilzad gets the credit as the lead

architect of the paper up until its leak in March 1992, aggregating opinions from inside

and outside the Pentagon. But after March, Libby took it in his hands to rewrite the

paper. One of his purposes was to tone down the rhetoric of dominating other states, or

“potential rivals” as it was put. But the other reason was to correct what he saw to be a

flaw in the paper’s reasoning. While it was sufficiently bellicose to state that the U.S,

would stop a country like Germany or Japan from achieving equal military power, in

practice Libby believed this amounted to very little. He was of the opinion that the

U.S.’s existing weaponry and technology would make it “the most powerful nation in the

world for a decade or two.”39 But Libby’s concern was for the US to permanently be the

world military leader, and thus he believed the DPG should point the country on a path

38Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 209.

39Ibid. 212.




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“to become so militarily strong, so overwhelming that no country would dream of ever

becoming a rival.”40 While Libby’s finalized DPG hid much of this sentiment behind

window dressing terms like “strategic depth” and “shaping the future security

environment,” his report still set the ground for what Senator Biden had called a “Pax

Americana.” In January 1993, just days before the Clinton Administration assumed

power, Secretary Cheney declassified the paper, now called “Defense Strategy for the

1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy.”

Coinciding with the Pentagon review was a plan to expand NATO, the longtime

Atlantic military alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and fourteen other

states. In May of 1990, President Bush took the opportunity of a commencement speech

at Oklahoma State University to explain to a stadium sized crowd that the Cold War era

military alliance would not only remain intact, but would look to expand, in what Bush

euphemistically called “building a new continent.” He declared, “Our enemy today is

uncertainty and instability,“ a threat to be combated by “a sound, collective military

structure, with forces in the field backed by larger forces that can be called upon in some

crisis.”41 He also signaled that the US would keep nuclear weapons in Europe, a

controversial topic at the time, stating “we will not allow Europe to be safe for a

conventional war.”

Two months later, NATO leaders met in London, where they set out to transform

themselves from a military alliance “into a political alliance building East-West

40Ibid. 212.

41George HW Bush, “Remarks at the Oklahoma State University Commencement

Ceremony in Stillwater,” May 4th

, 1990.




20

structures of peace,” according to diplomats quoted by the New York Times.42 During the

following year and a half, the Alliance set about making their transformation a reality. In

October, it was proposed that a new political group be created within the Alliance that

included the states of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the “North Atlantic Co-

operation Council.”43

By the fall of 1991, NATO had completed its transformation in

time for a meeting in Rome, where the alliance released for the first time ever a public

document, its new “Strategic Concept.”44

Beginning in December 1991, when the Soviet Union formally broke up,

American and British officials pushed for an immediate transformation of their Atlantic

alliance, both eastward and towards global realignment. John Weston, London’s

ambassador to NATO, stated in an interview that he considered his job purpose to be

securing “the maximum amount of tolerable change,” and George Bader, a director of

European and NATO policy in Paul Wolfowitz’s office, was quoted as “one of many”

Pentagon staffers who “argued that the traditional definition of ‘out of area’ (and

therefore prohibited) theaters for NATO operations must be radically revised.”45 In fact,

in a 1997 speech at the John Hopkins Institute for International Affairs, Deputy Secretary

of State Strobe Talbott congratulated Paul Wolfowitz, because while he was directing

Pentagon policy, “it was at his behest that the first military-to-military contacts took

42Craig R. Whitney, “Evolution in Europe: NATO Leaders Gather, In Search of a Purpose,”

New York Times, July 5th

, 1990.43 “European Security: Still divided,” Economist , October 12

th, 1991.

44“The Alliance’s New Strategic Concept,”

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_23847.htm45

Hella Pick, “London’s new Man at NATO packs two hats in his kit,” Guardian, January

24th

, 1992; Hella Pick, “US Seeks Global Fire-Fighting Role for Revamped NATO,” Guardian,

May 12th

, 1992.




21

place” in the former Soviet Union.46 An early review of this period in London’s

International Affairs stresses that there was a definite push, led by Washington, to move

eastwards and towards “real-world military cooperation,” and accordingly, that there was

a consensus that “enlargement at least had to be addressed at a summit.”47

III. “The Disastrous Rise of Misplaced Power”

When Bill Clinton and his staff moved into the White House in January of 1993,

he faced a situation much like Barack Obama faced after his recent 2009 coronation.

Both men, with little policy experience in foreign affairs, assumed control of a military

administration whose purpose had been radically transformed by Bush/Cheney rule

before them. Whereas Obama is today making decisions on whether to employ the "Bush

Doctrine" of a preventive attack, Clinton faced a choice on whether to expand the

American military and financial presence into territory that had previously been

inaccessible, "rolling forward" into the former Soviet Union. As it is clear today, Clinton

took no divergence, and continued with the expansionist military doctrines set by his

predecessor, while the question is still out on Obama.

As an individual, Bill Clinton’s relationship with American militarism was

pragmatically twisted. He was the first president since Roosevelt not to have served in

the military, and claimed to have “despised” the Vietnam War, a message that fit with his

youthful, populous image. And yet, in his presidential campaign, Clinton spoke of a

46Strobe Talbott, “Farwell to Flashman: US Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia,”

Address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, July 21st, 1997.

47John Borawski, “Partnership for Peace and beyond,” International Affairs, (Vol.71, No.2,

April 1995), pg. 236.




22

“New Covenant for American Security,” which promised to change nothing in a national

security state that had just claimed to have “won” the Cold War.48 This divide between

Clinton’s personal politics and his Presidential platform resulted in him assuming control

of a military bureaucracy that he had no interest in engaging with, a feeling happily

reciprocated by the Pentagon. In reality, however, this was not a detriment to the national

security state at all, but a boon:

As soon became apparent, the utter absence of credible executive authorityin military matters across the Potomac River meant the Niagara current of open-ended arms procurement, force projection, nuclear swagger, anddefense industry dominance of Congress could flow on unchecked.

American military forces had more commitments abroad in the 1990’s thanin any decade since 1950. The Clinton defense budget reflected that, withtotals increasing from $260 billion to more than $300 billion. Under Clinton, the Pentagon would even renege on commitments that had beenmade under Reagan and Bush to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, most egregiouslyon the question of NATO expansion.49

With a White House adverse to implementing any sort of doctrinal approach to foreign

affairs, much of the United States’ foreign policy in the 1990’s was decided upon by

institutional lobbies, motivated not by the interests of the American populous but by their

own narrow agendas. Just as Dwight Eisenhower had warned in his prophetic 1961

farewell address, the military-industrial complex had gained an unwarranted influence

over the councils of government, resulting in what the World War II General had called

“the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Below, four factions of this complex—, the

NATO bureaucracy, the media, academic institutes, and the armaments industry—will be

briefly discussed. Although the interests of these groups may seem disparate, uniting

them was a mutual affinity to push the boundaries of the American Empire eastward.

*****

48James Carroll, House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power,

(New York: Hought-Mifflin, 2006) pg. 451.49

Ibid., 454.




23

Following their 1990 London meeting, when NATO strategists set in motion the

military alliance's transformation into a globetrotting "political" alliance, the bureaucratic

structures were methodically set in place in order to facilitate this transformation.

Originally, this structure was known as the “North Atlantic Cooperation Council”

(NACC), and membership was open to any NATO member and any of the newly

independent states in Europe or the former Soviet Union. Under its directive, foreign and

defense officials, former Cold War enemies but now supposed friends, met to plan what

was to be the new Eurasian military posture. Then, in the fall of 1993, a new program

was initiated to expand the NACC, the “Partnership for Peace.” In the conservative

Washington Times, journalist Warren Strobel wrote, “The security map of Europe could

be altered in startling ways under a U.S. plan to transform the 44-year-old NATO alliance

from an umbrella over Western Europe to a fulcrum of East-West cooperation…Even

four years after the Berlin Wall's fall, some of the plans seem radical.”50 Bill Clinton, in

a rhetorical twist, referred to this as “not drawing any lines in the sand,” meaning that

there were no longer any European boundaries of containment for Western might.51

Additionally, a new military school aimed at the officer classes of the Partnership

for Peace countries—The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies—

opened in the Bavarian resort town of Garmisch. Luckily for the American officers

stationed there, they could take time off from instructing Belarusians and Uzbeks in the

finer points of militarism and relax at the Edelweiss Luxury Ski Resort across town,

exclusively available to Pentagon employees and American soldiers. After occupying the

lodge in 1945, the military liked it so much they decided to stay, for 65 years and

50Warren Strobel, “Old foes would be allies in U.S. plan,” Washington Times, November 8

th,

1993.51

Borawski, “Partnership for Peace and beyond,” 234.




24

counting. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Edelweiss was one of the budget lines put

on the Defense chopping block, but the establishment of the Marshall Center saved it. 52

At a Stanford conference on Central Asia in 1997, Clinton-era Defense Secretary William

Perry said that the school was so important for him that he “planned his schedule around

its commencements and has given all six commencement addresses so far.”53

Functionally, institutions like the George C. Marshall Center can be thought of as

nodes in the expanding geographical structure through which the military operates.

When a new node lights up, as it did in the German Alps in 1993, it has two distinct

affects on the United States’ global posture. First, it creates the tangible necessities of the

structure--the airports, the supply routes, the briefing rooms. No matter the technology

developed by DARPA, the military is still run as a massive physical logistics exercise.

But also created is the intellectual drive to back up that structure. Charles Boyd, an Air

Force General serving as deputy commander of the European Command at the time,

described the George Marshall Center as part of “the new Marshall plan, with intellectual

capital instead of material capital.”54 Contingency plans emerge for possible “emerging

threats” lurking behind every corrupt politician or leftist movement. When small crises

arise, as they always do in international affairs, the combination of already existing

physical structures and contingency planning allows for a lightning quick, and thus ill

thought through, response.

As a sign of how far east Washington wanted to move, military assistance to

Kazakhstan was first added to Washington’s budget in 1993, with $163,000 allocated

52Steve Vogel, “Program Teaches Democracy to Former East Bloc Officers,” Washington

Post , August 13th

, 1994.53

“New Central Asian countries draw attention at Stanford conference,” Stanford News

Service, May 29th

, 1997.54

Vogel, “Program Teaches Democracy to Former East Bloc Officers.”




25

under the State Department’s International Military Education and Training (IMET)

Program. In the following two years, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were

also given IMET funding.55 According to the State Department, the IMET program is

seen to be a low cost and highly efficient institution that “facilitates the development of

important professional and personal relationships that have provided U.S. access and

influence in a sector of society that often plays a pivotal role in the transition to

democracy.”56

In 1995, the United States began hosting large training exercises for NATO’s new

Partnership for Peace forces. The first, titled Cooperative Nugget 95, was held over 18

days in August at Fort Polk, Louisiana. 970 soldiers attended from 14 Partnership for

Peace countries, and they received training from American, British, and Canadian

instructors.57 Then, in December, the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

agreed to form a collective security force, the Central Asian Battalion, at the behest of

NATO and Central Command.58 This was one of six such groupings formed by NATO

between 1995-2000, an overlapping mosaic of alliances stretching across Eastern Europe

and Central Asia.59

In line with its function as a “pan-Turkic” hub, Turkey also served as a military

trainer and supplier for Central Asia during the 1990s. A joint report issued by the World

55Victoria Garcia, “Kazakhstan Report,” Columbia International Affairs Online: Center for

Defense Information, December 2003, (http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gav10/).56

US Department of State: Bureau of Pol itical-Military Affairs,http://www.state.gov/t/pm/65533.htm , (accessed on 12/8/09).57

“14 former Soviet Bloc Nations Join NATO Exercises in U.S.,” Washington Post , August

9th

, 1995.58

S. Neil MacFarlane, “The United States and Regionalism in Central Asia,” International

Affairs, (Vol. 80, No. 3) pg. 452. (note: CENTOCOM was not in control of region until

1998.)59

“NATO: U.S. Assistance to the Partnership for Peace,” GAO Report to Congressional

Committees, July 2001, pg. 15.




26

Policy Institute and the Federation of American Scientists highlights the role of the IMET

program in the Turkish-American military relationship, under which the U.S. has trained

23,268 Turkish personnel since 1950. In fact, between 1989 and 1999 Turkey had been

“the biggest recipient of U.S. military training, outstripping even first-line allies like

Israel and Egypt.”60 Subsequently, these Turkish officers then imparted this knowledge

to their Central Asian counterparts. Cevik Bir, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Turkish

Army, noted in 1996 that “2,000 army officers from Central Asian nations such as

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are studying in Turkish military

schools and academies.”

61

It is worth mentioning that in 1996 Turkey also signed an extensive five-year

military agreement with Israel, tying its military and foreign policy even closer to the

West. The agreement called for “the exchange of military information, experience, and

personnel, as well as joint training exercises, the exchange of military observers at each

other’s exercises, reciprocal port access, for naval vessels, and for each country’s planes

to exercise in the other’s airspace for one week four times a year.”62 Also strengthened in

this agreement were the longstanding intelligence ties between Turkey and Israel, as

revealed by Deputy Chief of Staff Bir in his April 1996 address to the Washington

Research Institute when he stated “that Israel had requested Turkey’s assistance in

collecting intelligence information. Israel’s first priority target was Syria, while Iran was

the second.”63 The third part of the agreement, which was finalized later that September,

60“Arming Repression: U.S. Arms Sales to Turkey During the Clinton Administration,”

World Policy Institute/Federation of American Scientists, October 1999, pg. 11.61

John Pomfret, “U.S. Operations in Turkey Seeks to Train, Unite Croats and Muslims,”

Washington Post , June 6, 1996.62Jung and Piccoli, Turkey at the Crossroads, pg. 161.63Ibid., 162.




27

involved a sharing of military technology between Turkey and Israel. For the Turkish

armed forces, the Israeli military made a unique partner, due to its “technology,

reliability, and the capacity to cover almost all defense needs,” allowing Turkey to

engage in “a plan for rearmament and modernization costing in the order of US $150

billion in twenty-five years.”64

In an excited essay published in the New York Times that summer, Thomas

Friedman referred to this as a “Turkish Delight.” Opening with the sentence ‘One of the

best diplomatic stories going these days is a little known cloak-and-dagger thriller

involving bombs in Syria, an assassination attempt in Turkey, missing bags of money in

Ankara and covert Turkish-Israeli military cooperation,” Friedman concludes that the

Turkish-Israeli accord “is quite simply, a major strategic realignment in Middle-East

Asia. Israel’s peace process with the Muslim world has given Turkey the cover to openly

align itself with Israel.65

*****

Besides the military bureaucracies of NATO, there were also a number of

institutions within the United States that heavily lobbied for military expansion. One was

the major American news media. Right from the very beginning, the press saw the newly

independent states to be pawns in a geopolitical chess game. When Secretary of State

Baker took the very first diplomatic tour of Central Asia, in February 1992, The

Washington Post ran a story entitled “Power Competition in Central Asia: US, Other

Nations Vie for Influence in Former Soviet States.”66 In The New York Times, Thomas

64Ibid., 163.65Thomas Friedman, “Foreign Affairs; Turkish Delight,” New York Times, June 16th, 1996.66

David Hoffman, “Power Competition in Central Asia: US, Other Nations Vie for Influence

in Former Soviet States,” Washington Post , February 13th

, 1992.




28

Friedman wrote from Turkmenistan under the headline “Republics Promise to Protect

Rights” of the US “playing the “great game,” of geopolitics in historically contested

Central Asia, referencing the undeclared 19th century imperial contest between Britain

and Russia. 67 The Economist followed up on Friedman’s imperial theme, writing “now

that the tsarist empire's Soviet successor has collapsed, the independent khanates are

springing up as republics -- and a new round of the great game is beginning.”68 Various

sides were defined in this struggle—the US was countering Iran, the US was countering

Moscow’s communist economies, Islamist fundamentalism was the real threat—but the

media consensus was that Washington’s moves were to be thought of in an imperial,

great power manner. While no pundit had yet pinned down what America’s new purpose

in the world would be, it was clear that a peace dividend was not going to be the

preeminent talking point following the Soviet Union’s collapse.

This was also the position taken by a key sect in the scholarly community.

Throughout the 1990’s, a number of academic institutions created centers focused on the

former Soviet Union. One of the first to do so was the private Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine. According to John B.

Robert’s, in the early nineties a group of “foreign policy elite” was “convened by the

Carnegie Institute for International Peace to change U.S. foreign policy after the Cold

War.”69 Roberts, who participated in the group as a publicist, writes that the meetings,

led by Carnegie President Morton Abramowitz, “were my introduction to Clinton’s

67Thomas Friedman, “Republics Promise to Protect Rights,” New York Times February 12

th,

1992.68 “Between Marx and Mecca,” The Economist , May 16

th, 1992.

69John B. Roberts, “Roots of Allied Farce,” The American Spectator , June 1999, pg. 36.




29

Cabinet-in-waiting,” with Madeline Albright, Henry Cisneros, John Duetch, Richard

Holbrooke, Alice Rivlin, David Gergen and Admiral William Crowe in attendance.

Roberts, however, did not take to the new direction being considered, what is now known

as “humanitarian intervention.” The final report of the group, “Changing our Ways:

America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the

destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international

intervention.”70 According to Roberts, “the report also proposed the revolutionary idea

that a U.S. led military strike was justified, not to defend the United States, but to impose

highly subjective political settlements on other countries. It discarded national

sovereignty in favor of international intervention.”71

Another influential institution was the Paul Nitze School of Advanced

International Studies (SAIS), part of John Hopkins University. In 1996, when Paul

Wolfowitz was dean, the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute was established at SAIS,

led by longtime Soviet scholar S. Frederick Starr. According to journalist Ken

Silverstein, Starr views the region “almost exclusively through the prism of American

geopolitical interests and with little interest in issues like human rights and corruption.”72

Accordingly, Starr and his institute sought personal relationships with many of the

dictatorial leaders in Central Asia. Starr even went so far as to write the preface to the

English edition of Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s book, Uzbekistan on the Threshold

of the Twenty-First Century.73 In 1999, Harvard started a similar initiative, the Caspian

70Ibid., 37.

71Ibid., 37.

72Ken Silverstein, “The Professor of Repression,” Washington Babylon/Harper’s Magazine,

May 24th

, 2006: (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/05/sb-professor-repression-

3284828).73

Ibid.




30

Studies Program and Azerbaijan Initiative, led by Graham Allison, and heavily funded by

oil companies through the Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce.74

The effects of these institutions are numerous. They provide trained experts for

journalists to quote; they serve as a bridge between foreign officials and U.S. government

employees; they fund and host events for policy-makers; they work as peer-review

gatekeepers; and most importantly, they mask partisan and political agendas behind a

veneer of scholarship. However, these are not novel ideas, as they mimic much of what

occurred in the academic community at the start of the Cold War. Describing Harvard’s

Russian Research Center, where he had served as a fellow, Richard Barnet writes:

These centers, meant to reflect and rationalize official government viewsof the Soviet Union, concentrated on developing information for implementing official policy rather than on testing its validity…The war potential U.S.S.R. and the stability of the regime were the principal“academic” questions to be examined.75

The American Defense Industry also played a part in pushing for military

expansion. Following the 1995 merger between aeronautics giants Lockheed and Martin

Marietta into Lockheed Martin, executives from what was now the world’s largest arms

manufacturer created the “U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.” Chairing the committee

was Bruce Jackson, the Director of Strategic Planning at Lockheed Martin. In 1997, the

New York Times characterized Jackson and his ilk as “acting like globe-hopping

diplomats to encourage the expansion of NATO, which will create a huge market for

their wares.”76 As an individual, Jackson is the epitome of a national security elite. His

father, William Jackson, was the first National Security Advisor, serving under Dwight

74“Kennedy School Launches New Caspian Studies Program,” Harvard Kennedy School Press

Release, September 24th

, 1999.75

Barnet, Roots of War , 44.76

Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner, “Arms Makers See Bonanza in Selling NATO Expansion,” New

York Times, June 29th

, 1997.




31

Eisenhower, and his childhood neighbors included George Kennan and William Bundy.

After attending Massachusetts’s elite St. Mark’s boarding school and Princeton

University, Jackson held a variety of Pentagon positions during the Reagan-Bush years,

where he aligned himself with burgeoning neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz,

Richard Perle, and Stephen Hadley, all three of whom would sit on the board of the

NATO expansion committee in the following decade. According to an unidentified

“prominent neoconservative,” Jackson is a “nexus between the defense industry and the

neoconservatives. He translates us to them, and them to us.”77

The “U.S. Committee to Expand NATO,” is best understood as a quasi-

governmental body. While not sanctioned by the nominal power centers in the White

House or on Capitol Hill, it nonetheless spoke with an authoritative edge, blessed by the

other nodes in the American power structure. Just like so many advisory boards and Blue

Ribbon panels before it, Jackson’s committee serves as an example of “a group of

businessmen being called together at the initiative of the national security bureaucracy to

articulate and to publicize novel and controversial ideas already held by a few members

of the bureaucratic elite.”78

All of these different interest groups are the manifestation of the constant focus on

militarism as an element of Washington’s foreign policy. The idea of studying a region

and then building up and selling arms to a foreign army is an age-old imperial tactic, and

in essence U.S. history is no different. Following both World War I and World War II,

when new international boundaries were formally drawn, Washington took it upon itself

77John B. Judis, “Minister without Portfolio,” American Prospect , April 30

th, 2003; Richard

Cummings, “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Playboy.com , January 16th

, 2007.78

Barnet, Roots of War , 181.




32

to assist these “newly independent states” in becoming military fortresses. From Saudi

Arabia in 1933 to South Vietnam in 1954 to Uzbekistan in 1992, Washington has gifted

upon every sort of government every sort of training in warfare, terrorism, and domestic

security. As one researcher put it in London’s austere International Affairs, “The

emergence of the energy and security agendas in Central Asia clearly reduced the

previous emphasis in the American agenda on democratization and good governance, as

the pursuit of such objectives might have complicated the pursuit of more concrete

strategic objectives.”79 John Laughland, a human rights activist and journalist put it more

bluntly, describing the Western treatment of the “newly independent states”:

Promoting a system of political and military control not unlike that once practiced by the Soviet Union…The new NATO is both a mechanism for extracting Danegeld [a Viking-era protection tax] from new member statesfor the benefit of the U.S. arms industry and an instrument for gettingothers to protect U.S. interests around the world, including the supply of primary resources such as oil. It is, in short, a racket.80

V. The Inevitable

By 1997, the effect of these different interests had coalesced such that it was

inevitable that the United States would play a major role in the future security of Central

Asia. U.S. officials now spoke of the region in terms of National Security of the United

States, not usually a mere rhetorical flourish. In Strobe Talbott’s previously mentioned

speech at John Hopkins, he stated "an area that sits on as much as 200 billion barrels of

oil...matters profoundly to the United States."81 Nearly $1 million worth of arms

subsidies was added to the regional budget, and NATO chief Javier Solana made a round

79MacFarlane, 452.

80John Laughland, “The Prague Racket,” Guardian, November 22

nd, 2002.

81Talbott, “Farwell to Flashman.”




33

of visits that spring to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, meeting

with military with diplomatic officials in order to expand cooperation between the

alliance and Central Asia.82 In 1997, the Central Asian Battalion held their largest drills

yet, which began with 500 paratroopers from the 82nd airborne making the longest flight

in human history to Shymkent, Kazakhstan, where they would lead a week of aviation

and ground training drills with troops from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,

Georgia, Turkey, and Russia.83 Two months later, when Kazakh President Nursultan

Nazarbaev visited Washington, the two nations formalized their military ties by signing a

Defense Cooperation Agreement that called for, among other things, 40 similar missions

to take place in 1998.84 A training exchange program was also set up between different

state National Guards and Central Asia. In what Chalmers Johnson describes as a

“military version of “sister-city” relationship,” Kazakhstan was paired with Arizona,

Kyrgyzstan with Montana, and Uzbekistan with Louisiana.85 In his prescient book

Resource Wars, Michael Klare writes of this change:

The extension of American military power into the Caspian Sea regionsis, by itself, a momentous geopolitical development. As shown by theCENTRAZBAT exercises, it will require Washington to build andsustain military relationships with the Central Asian republics, as wellas to construct a globe-spanning logistical capability. In time, it couldalso involve the establishment of American military bases in an areathat was once part of the Soviet Union.

86

82Birgit Brauer, “NATO chief explains expansion plans to Central Asian nations,” Associated

Press, March 11th

, 1997.83

R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. leads peacekeeping drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post ,

September 15th

, 1997; DoD News Briefing, General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman JCS,

November 17th

, 1997.84

Ibid.85

Robert G. Kaiser, “US Plants Footprint in Shaky Central Asia,” Washington Post , August

27th

, 2002; Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the

Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), pg.175.86

Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000) pg. 5.




34

The year after Klare published these words, the US did establish basing

relationships with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, in conjunction with the Winter 2001

invasion of Afghanistan. In the first week of October, Uzbek leaders signed accords with

Donald Rumsfeld, allowing the US military to use the Khanabad airbase. Within a week,

more than 60 planes had dropped off supplies and 1,200 soldiers were on the ground,

primarily light infantry troops from Fort Drum’s tenth mountain division, the first

soldiers to be deployed to former Soviet territory. In December, Kyrgyzstan followed

suit, offering up the Manas International Airport to the US, located on the outskirts of the

capital, Bishek. Air Force engineers immediately got underway building a thirty-acre

compound at Manas, the equivalent of six city blocks, in order to house 3,000 people,

which they named “Peter J. Ganci Air Base,” after the highest-ranking Fireman to die on

September 11th.87

A report in the Washington Post at the time contains some remarkable statements

pertaining to this radical change in US military posture. Secretary of State Colin Powell

is quoted as saying “America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia

of a kind we could not have dreamed of before,” and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul

Wolfowitz is quoted as admitting that the two new bases “may be more political than

actually military.” Most blunt, though, was Thomas Donnelly, the Deputy Executive

Director of the Project of The New American Century. In an email circulated among

military analysts, Donnelly wrote that the “imperial perimeter” of the United States “is

expanding into Central Asia.” The Post reflects on these opinions and concludes “all

87Eric Schmitt and James Dao, “U.S. is Building up its Military bases in Afghan Region,” New

York Times, January 8th

, 2002; Vernon Loeb, “Piece by Piece, Air Force Flies In a Presence;

Installation for 3,000 Takes Root at International Airport,” Washington Post , February 9th

,

2002; C.J. Chivers “The Signs of a Buildup are Becoming More Evident,” New York Times,

October 10th

, 2001.




35

told, more than 50,000 US military personnel now live and work on ships and bases

stretching from Turkey to Oman, and eastward to Manas airport, 19 miles outside

Bishkek and 300 miles from the Chinese border.”88

It may be thought that these bases were established in order to facilitate an

occupation of Afghanistan. This however, is not quite accurate. While the presence of

military garrisons in Central Asia may have had some affect on the Afghan campaign, the

bases are better viewed as representing the logical outcome of the expansionist policies

that had been followed for the last decade. The bases did not have one single purpose,

but merely served as the farthest possible garrisons on the “imperial perimeter” to which

PNAC’s Donnelly referred. In The Sorrows of Empire, social scientist Chalmers Johnson

writes of the disconnect between both the Afghan and Iraq wars and the establishment of

the Central Asian bases, giving force to the argument that they are fundamentally a

symptom of the expanding mission creep that is the project of Western dominance, what

Johnson calls our “Empire of Bases:”

[Manas and Khanabad] did not extend the reach of American air power in Afghanistan to any appreciable degree. Aircraft carriers inthe Arabian Sea were just as close to targets in southern Afghanistanand much cheaper to operate. Nor were these bases meant for thedeployment of large numbers of ground forces. The Kyrgyzstan base was 620 miles from the Afghan border, and Washington’sstrategy in the war did not involve the use of large concentrations of American troops. In fact, the Kyrgyz and Uzbek bases were broughtto bear only tangentially during the war, and they were too far fromIraq to be of much use in the war already being planned againstSaddam Hussein’s regime. Nor were they intended to supplysignificant amounts of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, since thatremained largely in the hands of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations like the Red Cross, which are notnormally allowed to use bases. Nor were they there to protect thelocal regimes from Islamic militants since these governments would

88Vernon Loeb, “Footprints in Steppes of Central Asia; New Bases Indicate U.S. Presence

Will be felt after Afghan War,” Washington Post




not entrust the mission to Americans and have agreements with theRussians to deal with such problems.89

Instead, the military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were simply an expression of

US militarism, “an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely

because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to

defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand

the areas under our control with still more bases.”90.

89Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 183

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