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Analysis : The US War in
Afghanistan
US bases pave the way for long-term intervention in Central Asia
By Patrick Martin
11 January 2002
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Recent statements by US government officials and reports in the American and
international press indicate that the Bush administration and the Pentagon are
carrying out a military buildup in Central Asia whose object is not merely
support for the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, but a permanent military
presence in the oil-rich region.
The US government has acquired basing or transit rights for passage of
warplanes and military supplies from nearly two dozen countries in Central Asia,
the Middle East and their periphery, a projection of American power into the
center of the Eurasian land mass that has no historical precedent.
On January 9, US military personnel showed off the latest acquisition, a huge
air base being built in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked
country which borders China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and was once
virtually inaccessible as far as American imperialism was concerned.
The new base, on 37 acres at the airport in Manas, 19 miles from the Kyrgyz
capital of Bishkek, is to be a major military hub. It now has temporary barracks
for 300 members of the 86th Rapid Deployment Unit, who are building facilities
that will eventually house 3,000 military personnel. The Manas base will service
fighter jets, C-130 cargo planes and KC-135 refueling planes. Last month the
Kyrgyz parliament gave its approval to unrestricted American use of the
facility, including combat missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Pentagon officials said the new base in Kyrgyzstan, only a few minutes flying
time north of Kabul, would give them the flexibility to continue the war in
Afghanistan even if the escalating conflict between India and Pakistan makes it
more difficult to use the bases in the latter country, which are currently major
staging areas for US operations.
Four KC-135s will arrive next week, along with a squadron of F-15E fighter
jets by the end of January. A US officer working at Manas told the press, “In
addition to the air force, there will be ground troops. This will be the first
air base that will offer serious support to Operation Enduring Freedom,” the
official name for the US war in Afghanistan. British, French and Danish forces
will be stationed at Manas in addition to American troops.
New US base agreements have also been concluded with Pakistan and two other
former Soviet republics, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. US warplanes are already
deployed at Kandabad air base at Karshi, Uzbekistan, backed by 1,000 US ground
troops, and a US military assessment team has visited three potential bases in
Tajikistan, at Kulyab, Khojand and Turgan-Tiube. American forces are stationed
at several locations in Pakistan, and combat engineers are improving runways and
erecting housing and other facilities for what is clearly intended as a
long-term stay.
Four other former Soviet republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan—have pledged various forms of direct military cooperation with the US
attack on Afghanistan. Armenia and Azerbaijan granted overflight rights, which
are critical for operations in landlocked Central Asia. They were rewarded
December 19, when Congress, at the urging of the Bush administration, lifted a
decade-long embargo on military aid to the two countries.
Bases and pipelines
Kazakhstan, which holds the lion’s share of the oil wealth of the Caspian
basin, is reportedly offering several locations for possible US military bases.
Turkmenistan is viewed as the prime location for the terminus of largely
US-financed pipelines which would bring the oil and gas reserves of the region
to the world market, possibly running across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the
Indian Ocean.
Locations of other US bases in the region include Camp Bondsteel, the
headquarters for US military forces in Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia;
Bulgaria, also regarded as a potential site for a pipeline to bypass the
chokepoint of the Turkish straits; Turkey, where Incirlik Air Base has been used
for a decade to carry out bombing attacks on Iraq; and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Qatar, Bahrain and Oman in the Persian Gulf.
In Qatar the US has built, in virtual secrecy, a huge $1.5 billion airbase at
Al Adid whose 15,000-foot runway is one of the longest in the Gulf. Construction
began after a visit by Clinton’s defense secretary William Cohen in April 2000.
Qatar already hosts pre-positioned equipment for a US Army brigade.
While US forces were initially stationed at Qatar in conjunction with the war
against Iraq in 1990-91, a top Pentagon official said last year that the Qatar
base was “not focused at one particular country or another, but part of a system
we would like to have in place.”
Central Command spokesman Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley told the press, “There
is great value, for instance, in continuing to build airfields in a variety of
locations on the perimeter of Afghanistan that over time can do a variety of
functions, like combat operations, medical evacuation and delivering
humanitarian assistance.”
The Al Adid airbase has already begun to attract local hostility. Last
November 7, an Arab man was shot to death by US and Qatari guards after he
allegedly opened fire on them at the base perimeter.
General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, announced that the Army,
Navy, Air Force and Marines had all adopted policies of regular troop rotation
in the Central Asian theater, a further sign that their presence will be
open-ended in duration.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz discussed the bases in an
interview with the New York Times. “Their function may be more political
than actually military,” he said. The new bases “send a message to everybody,
including important countries like Uzbekistan, that we have a capacity to come
back in and will come back in.”
A framework for intervention
While supporting the Afghan war is the pretext for many of the base
agreements, the American forces deployed in Central Asia will have a much
broader strategic scope. The Manas base in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, is only 200
miles from the border with China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang, putting
that country’s main nuclear testing facility at Lop Nor within easy reach of US
air strikes. In the opposite direction, Manas is equally close to oilfields in
Uzbekistan.
Both American and Russian combat forces are now stationed in Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan. Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly supported the
deployment of American troops on the territory of the former Soviet Union, but
there is reportedly deep concern in the Russian national security establishment
over this prospect. Much of Russia’s highest security military, nuclear and
space infrastructure is located in northern Kazakhstan and western Siberia—areas
which were once the furthest points on the globe from any US military facility,
but are now easily reached even by short-range US jets.
Then there is Afghanistan itself, where the United States has deployed 1,000
Marines at a base at Kandahar airport, now being replaced by an equivalent
number of soldiers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, whose mission is one
of semi-permanent occupation. The US has taken over the Bagram air base outside
of Kabul, the country’s capital, which was once the center for Soviet military
operations during the 1979-89 war.
These bases have been occupied in the course of the US-backed campaign to
overthrow the Taliban regime. But they provide facilities that could well serve
the American military in interventions deeper into the region, especially in the
oil-rich area along the Caspian Sea coast, which includes Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
Summing up the strategic significance of the new base structure, Los
Angeles Times special correspondent William Arkin wrote January 6: “Behind a
veil of secret agreements, the United States is creating a ring of new and
expanded military bases that encircle Afghanistan and enhance the armed forces’
ability to strike targets throughout much of the Muslim world.
“Since Sept. 11, according to Pentagon sources, military tent cities have
sprung up at 13 locations in nine countries neighboring Afghanistan,
substantially extending the network of bases in the region. All together, from
Bulgaria and Uzbekistan to Turkey, Kuwait and beyond, more than 60,000 U.S.
military personnel now live and work at these forward bases. Hundreds of
aircraft fly in and out of so-called ‘expeditionary airfields.’”
Arkin noted that while US military arrangements with foreign countries during
the Cold War were usually spelled out in public legal documents called “status
of force agreements,” many of the post-Cold War pacts are classified to protect
the host governments from domestic opposition to military subordination to the
United States. These include agreements with Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab
Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
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