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Stop NATO
January 24, 2009


Global Military Bloc: NATO's Drive Into Asia
Rick Rozoff


With the sixtieth anniversary summit of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization to occur jointly in the
French city of Strasbourg and and the German one of
Kehl on April 3-4, the world should take note of how
far from its original area of operations this,
history's first, international military bloc has
expanded in the interim since its creation in 1949.

At its genesis the Alliance did seem to have chosen an
accurate name, as 10 of its 12 founding members -
Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland,
the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United
States - had coastlines on the Atlantic Ocean and the
North Sea.

Italy of course didn't and neither did Luxembourg. And
Iceland learned the first lesson of the new
trans-Atlantic system by being forced into the
Alliance against the will of its populace.

Three years later, after bloody civil war and
heavy-handed repression made Greece and Turkey ready
for NATO's 'Euro-Atlantic values,' the Alliance, whose
tortuous logic and distorted sense of geography are
both equally infamous, expanded into the Aegean,
Marmara and Black Seas and demonstrated that its aims
extended far deeper into Eurasia than its name - false
like everything about it - indicated.

During the 42 years of its Cold War embryonic stage
NATO's major powers (surely no one can imagine nations
like Iceland and Luxembourg having much of a say in
important matters or, as NATO officials disingenuously
and routinely state, possessing veto power) were
content to use other, comparable, regional military
blocs like CENTO (Central Treaty Organization), SEATO
(Southeast Treaty Organization) and ANZUS (Australia,
New Zealand, United States Security Treaty) to both
continue a half-millenium long Western domination of
Asia and the South Pacific and to expand the American
Century into former European colonial and
semi-colonial domains.

Both the above objectives faced formidable opposition
from the peoples of the affected areas in the wave of
post-World War II anti-colonial and liberation
struggles, where the wartime propaganda of the Western
powers was taken at face value and the notion seized
hold that democracy both within and between nations
could no longer be denied to the majority of the human
race.

But it was no easy or peaceful struggle. In fact it
immediately cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of
Asians and several million more in the aftermath.
The following founding members of NATO still possessed
as colonies, territories or outposts in Asia, aside
from the Middle East and the South Pacific:

Britain
-Burma until 1947
-British Indian Empire (now India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Bhutan) 1947
-Sri Lanka 1947
-Malaya (now Malaysia) 1957
-Hong Kong 1997

France
-Cambodia 1953
-Laos 1954
-Vietnam 1954
-French India (Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahe
[Malabar coast], and Chandannagar [Bengal]) 1954

Netherlands
-Indonesia 1949

Portugal
-Goa 1961
-East Timor 1975
-Macau 1999

With the end of the Asian anti-colonial and post-War
anti-neo-colonial campaigns - all against founding
members of NATO, note - in 1975, it appeared that the
continent and its peoples were finally rid of Western
military presence and threats.

But after the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact,
itself formed six years after NATO and as a reaction
to it, in 1989 NATO and its major powers in the first
place saw that not only all of Europe but the entirety
of Eurasia as well was open to it.

Five years later it initiated what it chooses to call
the Partnership for Peace, effectively an
apprenticeship program for full NATO membership, amd
immediately inducted all fifteen former Soviet
republics, all former non-Soviet ex-Warsaw
Pact/Comecon nations and six of the seven mainland
European nations that had been in neither bloc
formerly - Albania, Austria, Finland, Ireland (a
holdout until 1999), Sweden and Switzerland - as well
as Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.

That is, NATO established military-security relations
with every state in Europe except for those in
Yugoslavia, former and then present, excepting
Macedonia by 1999.

The latter gap would soon be addressed, with NATO's
first two military operations - Operation Deliberate
Force in Bosnia in 1995 and Operation Allied Force
against what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999 -
completing the fragmentation of the nation.

Now all six former Yugoslav republics - Bosnia,
Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro (the world's newest
nation, only two and a half years old), Serbia and
Slovenia - are in the Partnership for Peace and four
of the six have been levied for troops for the Afghan
and Iraqi wars.

The Balkans and the Black Sea region - of the last
nine nations invited to join NATO five are in the
Balkans (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and
Slovenia), two on the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania)
and three on the Baltic Sea (Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania) - are NATO's bridgehead to the Caucasus and
from there to Central and South Asia and to Western
Asia, the Middle East.

But with the incorporation of the former Soviet
republics into NATO's nexus the bloc acquired outposts
and basing and transit rights within Asia itself: In
the South Caucasus with Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia and in Central Asia, right to the Russian and
Chinese borders, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

NATO was then well-positioned for its next
transformation, the deployment into Central and South
Asia and its first Asian and first ground war after
the events of 9/11 in the United States.

As the State Department's Matthew Bryza, formerly
Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and
Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy
(1998-2001, the three years preceding 9/11) and
current Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
European and Eurasian Affairs, boasted last year:

"The East-West Corridor we had been building from
Turkey and the Black Sea through Georgia and
Azerbaijan and across the Caspian became the strategic
air corridor, and the lifeline, into Afghanistan
allowing the United States and our coalition partners
to conduct Operation Enduring Freedom."
(U.S. Department of State, June 24, 2008)

NATO's tortuous, indeed torturous, logic and geography
have already been remarked upon. That attacks on the
capitals of US finance and government blamed by
Washington on nineteen perpetrators from Arab nations
would be used as justification for global and
permanent military operations from the Strait of
Gibraltar to the Philippines archipelago and from the
Indian Ocean to the Caribbean Sea is, then, perhaps
not to be wondered at.

For such is exactly was has occurred.

The US launched Operation Enduring Freedom (after its
initial name, Operation Infinite Justice, was
discarded) which to this day takes in fifteen nations:

Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay Naval Base),
Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya,
Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Seychelles,
Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) has four components:

Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan (OEF-A)
Operation Enduring Freedom - Philippines (OEF-P)
Operation Enduring Freedom - Horn of Africa (OEF-HOA)
Operation Enduring Freedom - Trans Sahara (OEF-TS)

And formerly Operation Enduring Freedom - Kyrgyzstan
and
Operation Enduring Freedom - Pankisi Gorge {Georgia).

Operation Enduring Freedom - Horn of Africa is too
little examined and commented upon, but as it's the
US-NATO opening to naval expansion into the Arabian
Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean where it links
up with Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan, a
few details are warranted.

After 9/11 the Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force -
Horn of Africa moved into the French Camp Lemonier in
Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, setting up what in
Pentagonese is called a forward operating site.

There, with the participation of French, German and
other NATO forces, Lemonier has been a base for
overseeing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the
latter leading into the Persian Gulf, and for
coordinating what can only be described as
counterinsurgency wars in Yemen and Somalia (with the
US also shelling the latter from sea) and proxy
conflicts like the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and
the Ethiopia-Eritrea and Djibouti-Eritrea border wars
of the past seven years.

The importance of this control over the Horn of
Africa, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea will be
demonstrated later when the role of NATO's most
ambitious project in Asia, the military integration of
India, is explored.

In conjunction with Operation Enduring Freedom, both
its naval and its ground and air war components, on
October 4, 2001 NATO activated for the first time in
its then 52-year history the Alliance's Article 5
'mutual defense' clause and embarked on the
'international war on terror.' (Though one would be
hardpressed to find many references to terror or
terrorism in NATO documents prior to that.)

This unprecedented action played out in three realms.
NATO begin what it calls and continues to run as
Operation Active Endeavor, a comprehensive naval
surveillance and interdiction effort throughout the
Mediterranean Sea, controlling all access into and out
of such key chokepoints as the Strait of Gibraltar,
the Suez Canal (at the north end of the Red Sea) and
the Dardanelles Strait leading into the Sea of
Marmara, which in turn leads into the Black Sea.

As NATO itself fairly brags of, Operation Active
Endeavor has already 'contacted' 100,000 vessels and
boarded 148.

As the Alliance describes it, "The mission assigned to
Operation Active Endeavour was to conduct naval
operations in the Mediterranean to actively
demonstrate NATO's resolve and solidarity."

Secondly, NATO contributed - German - Airborne Warning
and Control Systems aircraft (AWACS) to the United
States to patrol its Atlantic coast.

The third and most significant facet of NATO invoking
its Article 5 was to open up South and Central Asia to
NATO military forces.

In 2003 NATO officially took over the International
Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan,
which includes most military forces outside of the
bulk of US ones, that is all troops not serving with
Operation Enduring Freedom.

All twenty six NATO members have troops in Afghanistan
and the war that is now in its ninth calendar year has
also been used as training grounds for NATO combat
deployments for such Partnership for Peace members as
Albania, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Croatia,
Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Macedonia, Sweden and
Ukraine.

In addition, the US has an air force contingent at the
Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan and had one at the
Karshi-Khanabad base in Uzbekistan before the
government in Tashkent expelled it in 2005.

Germany retains a military base in Uzbekistan at
Termez and France has a military force and six Mirage
fighters in Tajikistan, the latter to be transferred
directly to Afghanistan as the West escalates its
South Asian war.

US, French and other NATO nations' militaries are also
present in Pakistan, though the fact is not touted for
obvious reasons.

NATO now comprises not only 26 full and two new
candidate members, and not only 23 Partnership for
Peace adjuncts throughout Eurasia from the Irish Sea
to the Chinese border, but also enough other partners
on five continents to comprise over a third of the
world's nations.

As the Alliance's US-based headquarters reported of a
recent meeting in Albania:

"Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and various other
NATO member Nations joined together for the 2008
Strategic Military Partnership Conference (SMPC) Nov.
3 - 5 in Tirana, Albania.
"SMPC [Strategic Military Partnership Conference] is
an annual event dedicated to providing a unique venue
for all [26] NATO, Partnership for Peace (PfP),
Mediterranean Dialogue (MD), Istanbul Cooperation
Initiative (ICI) and selected Contact Country (CC)
Chiefs of Defence for frank and open discussions on
issues important to partners and NATO."
[NATO International, Allied Command Transformation,
November 5, 2008)

The following is an attempt at a comprehensive list
from the Stop NATO email list:

Partnership for Peace members:
Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro
Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Mediterranean Dialogue:
Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco
and Tunisia.
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative:
Effectively the Gulf Cooperation states of Bahrain,
Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates.
Contact Country:
A looser term to designate NATO partners, ad hoc and
long-term, that are not in any of the above three
categories, which at this point could reasonably
include Afghanistan, Australia, Djibouti, Ethiopia,
India, Iraq,
Kenya, Kosovo, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan,
Singapore,
Somalia, South Korea and others not yet openly
acknowledged to have agreements with NATO such as
Lebanon, the Dutch Antilles and numerous sub-Saharan
African nations.
(Stop NATO, November 6, 2008)

The so-called Contact Country allies are largely in
the Asia-Pacific area and are such primarily because
of their involvement in NATO's Afghan and related
operations.

Australia has as many as 1,500 combat troops,
including special forces, serving under NATO command.

New Zealand has military forces serving similarly.

South Korea had over 200 troops in Afghanistan before
pulling them out in exchange for the release of
kidnapped aid workers.

In reference to earlier comments about the new,
self-proclaimed, global NATO absorbing members of
former Cold War military blocs like ANZUS, CENTO and
SEATO, the ongoing and endless Afghan war marks the
first time that US, Australian, New Zealand and South
Korean troops have fought together since the Vietnam
War.

Despite the withdrawal of South Korean ground forces,
it's recently been reported that "The Korean
government plans to send an investigation
team to Afghanistan in the wake of the Obama
administration’s expected request to Seoul for
deploying troops to Afghanistan."
(Dong-a Ilbo, January 2, 2009)

And that "South Korean officials said Thursday that
South Korean and Japanese government will hold talks
on expanding their roles in Afghanistan."
(Xinhua News Agency, January 22, 2009)

The Japanese navy has been assisting Operation
Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the Indian Ocean
from 2001 until a brief pause last year when the
nation's political opposition demanded a halt, but
plans seem afoot to resume that role soon.

Another historical footnote: The war in Afghanistan
(and increasingly in Pakistan) is the first time since
World War Two that military forces from the former
Axis powers - Germany, Italy and Japan - are engaged
in a joint military campaign.

NATO has established a tripartite commission with
Afghanistan and Pakistan to prosecute the wars in both
nations independently of the US and Operation Enduring
Freedom and NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer was in the Pakistani capital two days ago to
ratchet up the war effort.

Yesterday the official NATO website (URL: www.nato.int
- NATO International) announced that "The Secretary
General welcomed Pakistan's acceptance of NATO's offer
to provide training to Pakistani officers in NATO
schools...."

Afghan troops have been trained by NATO in Europe for
years. (Analogous to the NATO Training Mission –
Iraq.)

Growing out of the Greater Afghan War and the
Proliferation Security Initiative begun by the US in
2003, a worldwide naval interdiction effort similar to
NATO's Operation Active Endeavor in the Mediterranean,
but far more comprehensive and aimed predominantly
against Asia, recent years have witnessed increasing
references to the creation of an Asian NATO.

Candidates for this emerging bloc include Afghanistan,
Brunei, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore (with
troops in Afghanistan), South Korea, Taiwan and
Thailand, with Australia and New Zealand further
expanding their military roles in South and Far East
Asia. (Australia, for example, is involved in the
counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines in
addition to its activities in Fiji, East Timor and the
Solomon Islands.)

Two perspectives on this development appeared, one
recently, the other almost three years ago, in the
Russian and American press, respectively:

"The meeting [of the Russian and Chinsese defense
ministers] will...address the creation of a regional
missile defense system in Asia and the
Pacific involving the U.S, Japan, South Korea,
Australia, and Taiwan."
(Interfax-Military, December 10, 2009)

"[T]he Navy's 7th Fleet currently holds 100 exercises
per year and will increase that number. It will
include exercises with India, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, South
Korea and Japan.
"All branches of the U.S. military also have been
conducting secret war games that use China as an
adversary. The war games have been kept secret to
avoid alerting the Chinese."
(Washington Times, April 20, 2006}

To consolidate the Pentagon's and NATO's plans for
complete global military domination, and to further
the encirclement of China as well as Russia, the main
target of both is India, acquisition of which would be
the most significant advancement in both's history
along with the intended absorption of Ukraine.

Former career India diplomat M K Bhadrakumar wrote in
2007:

"Washington genuinely seeks a NATO-India partnership.
As NATO retools for the 21st century for new missions
in Africa and South Asia, and as it advances across
the Middle East toward the Indian Ocean, looking for
global partnerships (numbering 20 at present), India
inevitably figures in its agenda.
"NATO's future role in the Indian Ocean forms part of
a well-thought Western strategy. NATO's naval mission
to the Indian Ocean in September coincided with
another major initiative by Washington. The newly
created Africa Command (AFRICOM) of the US military,
reflecting the long-term strategic value of Africa, is
poised to begin its initial operations in October.
"For any security system in the Asia-Pacific (US,
Japan and Australia), India remains the prize catch.
Equally, without India, NATO's partnerships in the
Indian Ocean region would remain inherently weak.
(Asia Times, October 5, 2007)

The above came shortly after the Malabar 07-2 naval
exercises in the Bay of Bengal, described by the
official US armed forces newspaper as follows:

"The ongoing naval exercise called 'Malabar Exercise'
between five nations in the coast of Bay of Bengal
including United States, India, Australia, Japan and
Singapore...More than 20,000 naval personnel from five
countries kicked off Exercise Malabar off the coast of
India on Wednesday.
"The United States will be represented by the aircraft
carriers USS Nimitz and USS Kitty Hawk; guided-missile
cruisers USS Cowpens and USS Princeton; guided-missile
destroyers USS Curtis Wilbur, USS Mustin, USS John
Paul Jones, USS Chafee and USS Higgins; and various
aircraft."
(Stars and Stripes, September 7, 2007)

Below are excerpts form the Indian press at the time.

"Days ahead of the crucial multi-nation
naval exercise in the Bay Bengal, top defence
officials from Japan, Australia and US are visiting
New Delhi for talks with the Defence Ministry to
identify areas of mutual interest and chalk out plans
for further military cooperation."
(Indian Express, August 22, 2007)

"The five-nation Malabar war games are being conducted
on rules and procedures compliant with the
requirements of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation, Indian naval and air force officers
disclosed in interviews aboard the aircraft carrier
today.
"The Malabar 07-02 war games, now into the fourth day,
have raised concerns in Beijing of an emerging 'Asian
Nato."
(Calcutta Telegraph, September 8, 2007)

Two months earlier noted Indian journalist Siddharth
Varadarajan had observed:

"Two weeks before the July 2005 nuclear deal, India
and the U.S. signed a ‘New Framework for the Defence
Relationship,’ which envisaged an action plan ranging
from joint exercises, collaboration in multinational
operations, 'expand[ing] interaction with other
nations' (i.e. U.S. allies such as Japan and
Australia), enhancing capabilities to combat the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
collaboration in missile defence, and so on.
"For the true purpose behind the aircraft carrier’s
[the nuclear-armed American aircraft-carrier USS
Nimitz's] 'landmark visit' is to anaesthetise the
Indian public to the Pentagon’s decade-long plans for
logistics access and 'interoperability' with the
Indian military, thereby smoothening India’s eventual
participation in U.S.-led 'structures of cooperative
vigilance' in the wider Asian region."
(The Hindu, July 5, 2007)

Immediately after the above-mentioned Malibar
exercise, India was invited for the first time to the
annual US-NATO Red Flag war games, held that year in
Alaska.

Here are comments from Indian press services:

"Red Flag will take India even closer to NATO (North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation) countries...."
(Press Trust of India, October 6, 2007)

"Red Flag, an advanced aerial combat training
exercise, has been hosted at Nellis Air Force Base,
Nevada, and the Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, since
1975.
"It is meant to train pilots from the US, NATO and
other allied countries for real combat situations.
This includes the use of 'enemy' hardware and live
ammunition for bombing exercises.
"As for the NATO procedures, the Indian armed forces
adopted them for the first time during the five-nation
Malabar-2007 war games in September, the biggest to be
held in the Bay of Bengal....The NATO procedures were
extended to other sectors of the exercise as well in
areas like anti-submarine warfare drills and aerial
offensive and defence manoeuvres."
(Indo-Asian News Service, November 26, 2007)

To end and pull together many of the strands examined
above, here is another analysis by M K Bhadrakumar
from a feature entitled "NATO reaches into the Indian
Ocean":

"US officials are on record that Africom and NATO
envisage an institutional linkup in the downstream.
The overall US strategy is to incrementally bring NATO
into Africa so that its future role in the Indian
Ocean (and Middle East) region as the instrument of US
global security agenda becomes optimal. For the
strategy to succeed in the Indian Ocean, however, NATO
will need to align three key littoral states - India,
Sri Lanka and Singapore.
"NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General John
Craddock, acknowledged that the mission furthers the
alliance's ambition to become a global political
organization.
"By acting with lightning speed and without publicity,
NATO surely created a fait accompli.
NATO's naval deployment in the Indian Ocean region is
a historic move and a milestone in the alliance's
transformation. Even at the height of the Cold War,
the alliance didn't have a presence in the Indian
Ocean. Such deployments almost always tend to be
open-ended.
"In 2007, a NATO naval force visited Seychelles in the
Indian Ocean and Somalia and conducted exercises in
the Indian Ocean and then re-entered the Mediterranean
via the Red Sea in end-September.
"[T]he Indian warship will eventually have to work in
tandem with the NATO naval force. This will be the
first time that the Indian armed forces will be
working shoulder-to-shoulder with NATO forces in
actual operations in territorial or international
waters.
"The operations hold the potential to shift India's
ties with NATO to a qualitatively new level."


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