Text Fwd: NATO Weaves South Asian Web

* Text informed by Rick Rozoff on Dec. 22, 2010

Asia Times
December 23, 2010
NATO weaves South Asian web
By M K Bhadrakumar

-Quite obviously, the alliance is well on the way to transforming into a global political-military role, and it is forward-looking. There are skeptical voices still that in an era of European austerity, a question mark ought to be put on the alliance's ambitions. European cutbacks in military deployment and rigorous savings programs in defense budgets should not be overplayed, either. NATO is by far today the most powerful military and political alliance in the world.

-The various partnership programs of NATO in Central Asia and the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Mediterranean regions can be viewed as part of the overall approach to take recourse to other states or groups of states to promote the Euro-Atlantic interests globally.

-[T]he US will continue to give primacy to its transatlantic security partnership and intends to use NATO as a key instrument for exerting influence globally as well as for preventing the emergence of any independent power center that challenges its preeminence.

-It is within the realms of possibility that NATO would at a future date deploy components of the US missile defense system in Afghanistan. Ostensibly directed against the nearby "rogue states", the missile defense system will challenge the Chinese strategic capability.

-TAPI's proposed commissioning coincides with the 2014 timeline for ending the NATO "combat mission" in Afghanistan. The US "surge" is concentrating on Helmand and Kandahar provinces through which the TAPI pipeline will eventually run. What an amazing string of coincidences!

-TAPI is the finished product of the US invasion of Afghanistan. It consolidates NATO's political and military presence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China. TAPI provides a perfect setting for the alliance's future projection of military power for "crisis management" in Central Asia.
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What the summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at Lisbon last month brought to mind almost instinctively was that the persistent rumors about the alliance's death were indeed greatly exaggerated. The striking thing was the degree of internal unity and outward determination among the alliance's 28 members.

In recent years, derisive dismissals have featured galore in international discourse about the "dysfunctional irrelevance" of NATO and an alliance characterized as a "Cold War relic". In South Asia - Indian, in particular - this almost resulted in an intellectual ellipsis while dwelling on the overall United States regional strategies in the overlapping Afghanistan-Pakistan conflicts. In fact, NATO hardly figured in the Indian discourses on Afghanistan as an issue of consequence.


Facile impressions gathered in the South Asian strategic community that the US was desperately seeking an "exit strategy" in Afghanistan and was about to "cut and run" from the Hindu Kush.

The NATO summit in Lisbon at the end of November, therefore, came as an eye-opener for South Asians. Voices in the transatlantic space that questioned the continued raison d'etre of the alliance have fallen completely silent.

Equally, alliance members of both Old and New Europe seem to have recognized that NATO has successfully maneuvered though a transitional phase and completed a process of adjustment in the post-Cold War era. Fundamental divergences in matters of alliance policy are no more.



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