My major theme recently has been the “Northern Distribution Network” for NATO supply to Afghanistan, and the fact that dependence on this has entailed a conscious decision to support actively the dictatorships of Central Asia, including President Karimov of Uzbekistan.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/10/the_poison_from.html#comments

It also of course requires close cooperation with Russia. A Jonathan Steele points out in the Guardian, the Russian help for NATO in Afghanistan is not exactly news,.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/27/russia-afghan-agenda. In fact, transit of supplies is more valuable than the more eye-catching helicopters for the Polish contingent or Russian training for Afghan troops. Russian denials of the possibility of more direct Russian involvement do not obscure the fact they are already doing a lot.

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/10/27/28915215.html

There is another reason this Russian support is not surprising, apart from the Obama/Putin rapprochement (Medvedev is emphatically not the organ grinder).

The truth is that the NATO occupation of Afghanistan has turned into a near exact reply of the Soviet occupation. I was thinking of my good Uzbek friend in Tashkent, who had been the number two in the KGB in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.

The misnamed “Afghan National Army is over 70% Tajik and Uzbek in composition. These were the allies of the Soviets and continued under Nazbullah to fight the Taliban. The Soviet army itself of course used soldiers from the Uzbek and Tajik Soviet Socialist Republics extensively in Afghanistan. NATO is now using the same regime elites for its logistics, and the same tribes and families who supported the Soviets within Afghanistan as allies.

In the wider diplomacy, all of this relates also the NATO’s exit strategy. In effect, they are accepting that undemocratic Soviet styled regimes as in Uzbekistan – and I would argue Russia – are the best way to deal with the fact that the populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia are Muslim. They are hoping for a hardline secular regime backed by its “Northern neighbours”.

I attended the Lib Dem annual conference in Liverpool where one deep disappointment was the speech by Jeremy Browne MP, junior foreign office minister with a specific brief for human rights. There was a single cursory mention of human rights in Jeremy Browne’s speech. Indeed I am not sure there was a single thought expressed in Jeremy Browne’s entire speech which was identifiably liberal. He could have been New Labour or Conservative as he dully expounded the view that protecting this country from the terrorist threat was our number one foregin policy objective, and then hammered on about the need to “win” the war in Afghanistan. It was a speech John Reid or David Blunkett could happily have made. And he went out of his way – in a speech evidently prepared by FCO officials – to note the need to include Afghanistan’s “northern neighbours” in an Afghan settlement.

So frredom and democracy for Central Asia are completely off the agenda. What is on the agenda is an acceptance of the regime propaganda that there are no alternatives but rapacious dictatorships and Islamic fundamentalism. That kind of false dichotomy is sustenance to the armaments and securityindustry interests that dominate our foreign policy and control our politicians.

BIGGER THAN 9/11

MOD sources have revealed exclusively to Sky that the Taliban attack on HMS Astute could have been “Bigger Than 9/11”. As Sky correspondent Adam Ramsay was told exclusively by Taliban commander Hilal-al-Wemadeituppy, a crack Taliban team planted the Improvised Sandbank Device that almost destroyed HMS Astute on Friday.

HMS Astute Disabled By Deadly Taliban ISD Attack

Now MOD and security service sources have told Sky security correspondent Oswald Moseley that this attack was potentially “Bigger than 9/11”. This is the 435th such potentially bigger than 9/11 attack since 9/11.

Sky can exclusively reveal that, if the contact with the Improvised Sandbank Device or ISD had caused an explosion in the nuclear reactor on board HMS Astute, it could have wiped out the two hundred million people living on the North West Coast of Scotland.

John Reid, former Home Secretary, told Sky News that this was evidence that the Islamic threat was now potentially more destructive than a full scale nuclear war with China.

AN OVERWHELMING CASE FOR 196 DAY DETENTION

Lord Blair, formerly Head of the Metropolitan police, believes that Britian must now strengthen anti-terrorism legislation and re-open investigations into thousands of Muslims who have been searched or arrested and released.

“IIn the past we have concentrated on looking for potential bomb ingredients like sugar or domestos. We now realise that many suspected terrorist houses, where insufficient evidence could be found for a prosecution, in fact contained sand. This was often found in the garden. It was very often cunningly disguised as a playpit. All reasonable people must deplore the use of children as a front for terrorism. We believe that sand may also have been cunningly incorporated into the very fabric of some of these homes.”

Sky News can exclusively reveal that Lord Blair’s remarks have reopened debate on the vexed question of Detention Without Charge. Top security analyst Rupert Mussolini believes that the sandbank threat proves suspects should be detained for much longer periods to give the police time to think up a ludicrous pretext. “If you are going to bang people up without reason for 28 days, why not 196?” he asks.

BRITISH MUSLIMS IN SECRET AL-QAIDA TRAINING CAMPS

In the past, it has been revealed exclusively by Sky News that Muslims engaged in any form of sport or outdoor activity, such as skiing or white water rafting, are actually engaged in Al-Qaida team building exercises. Only now do we realise the full extent of such activity in intensive training camps actually here in the UK to give secret training in the preparation of Improvised Sandbank Devices (ISDs).

Deadly Sandbank Training

HISTORICAL ROOTS

Military historian Andrew Mengele has explained exclusively to Sky News that Muslims would be incapable of thinking up a tactic like the Impovised Sandbank Device (ISD) for themselves, but were taught it by the British.

Dr Mengele explained “Many military historians like myself beliive that the Improvised Sandbank Device, or ISD as we military historians call it, was intoduced into Islamic culture by that great master tactician of guerilla warfare, Lawrence of Arabia”.

Lawrence of Arabia With Prototype Sandbank

IRA LINK TO AL-QAIDA

In an interesting twist, Sky’s Northern Ireland correspondent John Knoxkingbilly can exclusively reveal to Sky viewers that the security services in Northern Ireland believe that the ISD provides further evidence of tactical and ideological linkages between al-Qaida and the IRA.

The Riddle of the Sands

There is, apparently, no end to the fanaticism of the Taliban menace, of which the Improvised Sandbank Device is but the latest manifestation of an infinite threat. In the chilling words of Taliban Commander Hilal-al-Wemadeituppy, talking exclusively to our Chief Correspondent Adam Ramsay, “We will fight them with the beaches, Inshallah”.

But Navy concludes it works better in water.

SKY NEWS EXCLUSIVE – SANDBANK PLANTED BY TALIBAN

Top Taliban commanders tell Sky News sandbank was funded by Al-Qaida contributions from UK mosques.

“We will place sandbanks in every country” says man with face in scarf we paid a tenner.

Foreign policy is a nexus of issues and relationships.. Once you get an important issue seriously wrong, it has ramifications across the whole. A seriously misguided enterprise like the occupation of Afghanistan spreads its poison across whole areas of foreign policy.

Only one such consequence, but a very bad one, is British support for the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian dictatorships. This is based on our “need” for Uzbekistan as a transit route for supplies to Afghanistan.

I had already noted the extraordinary enthusiasm of the current British Ambassador for promoting the Uzbek regime and apologising for past “misunderstandings” over Uzbekistan’s political system.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/04/britain_boosts.html

Now Joy is actively promoting Gulnara Karimova’s activities in the world of Fashion TV. That Chopard and Prado are shallow enough to be gulled by Gulnara’s billions is par for the course. For the British Ambassador to flank her at a press conference for her fashion show is unforgivable.

http://inteltrends.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/british-diplomats-toadying-to-uzbek-dictators-daughter/

Note that the headline “British Diplomats Toadying to Uzbek Dictator’s Daughter” was written by Uzbeks, not by me.

The policy of backing dictators is in my view wrong in principle. But even in terms of realpolitik, it depends on a judgement of whether you believe extreme repression in Uzbekistan stops or increases the prospect of Islamic extremist violence. I think extreme regimes spawn violence and instability. The British government now has its money firmly on the dictator.

The real motivation is short term support for military occupation of Afghanistan. The Northern supply route, or “Northern Distribution Network” as the Pentagon calls it, is all important. I highly commend to you this extremely revealing report for the Center for Security and International Studies in the US.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4RNWN_enGB325GB325&q=CSIS+Center+for+Security

Now the CSIS are bought and paid for cheerleaders for the Karimov regime and unquestioning supporters of the war in Afghanistan. They are extremely well connected in Washington and have excellent sources. This paper is a fairly definitive guide to the State Department view of Central Asia – and nowadays the FCO view of Central Asia is what the State Department tells them it is.

The CSIS position is reflected, for example, in the characterisation of the Andijan massacre as an “uprising”. Human rights and democracy are never mentioned as factors in the discussion of US relations with Uzbekistan. But nonetheless the paper does make some highly revealing statements:

The NDN was designed to provide redundancy to this critical Pakistan supply line and to help handle the surge of supplies associated with an increase of 21,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009 and, with the recent announcement by the Obama administration, an additional 30,000 troops in 2010. This obvious need and vulnerability has placed the United States’ Afghanistan war resupply squarely in the hands of other nations….

The first misunderstanding concerned priorities and expectations. In the authoritarian regimes of Central Asia, the elite’s top national priority?”its overriding policy consideration?”is to maintain its hold on power. Additional considerations can and do exist, but they are necessarily secondary in the absence of democratic mechanisms for the orderly transfer of power. An attendant expectation is that international cooperation should strengthen the regime’s hold on power. At the very least, it cannot under any circumstances weaken it….

Crony capitalism and the enmeshment of ruling dynasties in moneymaking schemes mean that commercial shippers servicing the NDN are almost certain to be woven into the dense nexus of personal and state interests that characterize post-Soviet business.

This last is a very interesting admission. I have reported previously that Gulnara Karimova is making hundreds of millions of dollars from Pentagon supply contracts. Here you see it admitted, with a slight cover of academic coyness.

The core funding for the CSIS project is from Carnegie, and one of the authors, Andrew Kuchins, is a former director of the Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The CEIP this summer published a paper on much the same subject “written” by a certain “Professor” Gulnara Islamovna Karimova. Strangely Carnegie did not mention that she was the dictator’s daughter. The article in Gulnara’s name discusses supply to Afghanistan without mentioning her personal commercial interest in it. Yet again an example of the respectability the Washington establishment is trying to confer upon the Karimovs.

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=41422&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+carnegie/afghanistan+%28DC+-+Region+-+Afghanistan%29

I gather that a visit by Hillary to visit Karimov is planned before the end of the year.

There is no cause to doubt that the US killed Linda Norgrove accidentally. My sorrow for her and her family is the same as that I feel for the thousands of entirely innocent Afghan and Pakistani civilians killed in US airstrikes.

Nor do I diminsih the responsibility of her captors. But nonetheless, the most worrying point of thw whole incident is the lie propagated by NATO that she was killed by a suicide vest wearing captor.

The suicide vest is of course a potent symbol of Islamic fundamentalist violence, and by invoking it NATO were not only lying about who killed Norgrove, they were reinforcing the image of her captors as religious fanatics, as opposed to local tribesmen.

Most of the Afghan resistance consists of locals motivated by ethnic and cultural factors defending their own soil. The characterisation of them all as Taliban is a bit of propaganda bought wholesale by the media. These may have been local partisans, or just ransom seekers. They may have been hiding a motivation behind a religious facade. There is no evidence I am aware of that the hostage takers wished to die themselves. That is why the “Linda Norgrove killed by suicide vest” lie is key.

So it is very important that an inquiry establishes not just the truth about who killed Linda Norgrove, but whether there was a suicide vest at all anywhere in the incident. Fabric is seldom destroyed by explosion, rather shredded and partially burnt. If the suicide vest is a complete invention, that would be an outrageous lie by NATO.