Posted on 03/02/2004 6:07:50 AM PST by Axion
The Pakistani government has firmly denied that it gave the United States permission to conduct military operations inside its borders. Masood Khan, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, said that there were no "artificial linkages" that gave the United States the right to cross into sovereign Pakistani territory. Since it is obvious that U.S. Special Operations troops are operating inside Pakistani territory -- a fact that the United States makes no bones about -- it would appear that the official Pakistani position is that this is being done against the Pakistani will.
Obviously, the official response is for domestic consumption, but it increases the threat to the government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If it becomes apparent that Pakistan is cooperating with the United States, there will be hell to pay in Pakistan. If, on the other hand, Musharraf manages to convince the United States that he is really not planning to cooperate, there will be hell to pay on that front. The Pakistanis are trying to buy time, but it is not at all clear what end Musharraf is pursuing.
In the meantime, to our shock, there are two geopolitical shifts going on elsewhere.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin named a new prime minister. His name is Mikhail Fradkov, currently the Russian envoy to the European Union. Other than that, he is a complete nonentity, which is what makes the choice so interesting. Putin is trying to change the Russian Constitution informally. Rather than eliminating the position of prime minister, Putin is moving the position to complete irrelevance by naming someone to it who has no political existence except as a minor bureaucrat. That means that Putin's relative strength -- and the strength of the presidency -- is measurably greater.
There are major changes under way in Russia. Putin is emerging as far more than a democratically elected president. He is taking control of the Russian machinery of government and extending the government's power -- and his own -- substantially. This does not surprise us. Whatever Russia is to be, it will be authoritarian, as it has always been. Its experiment with both capitalism and liberal democracy has not gone well, and Russia's standing in the world has declined rapidly. We believed that when Putin came to power in 1999 he intended to reintroduce authoritarianism and curtail the power of the oligarchs. As we put it then: The probability that the economy of Russia would be dominated in perpetuity by a Jewish oligarchy was too preposterous to contemplate.
Putin is conducting a slow, systematic campaign to put the Russian state at commanding economic heights. What has surprised us is how slowly Putin has moved. However, he is clearly moving -- if not in the direction of a dictatorship, then certainly in the direction of a society in which the state is at the center of everything and the president is at the center of the state. Russia has been written off as a major power. We continue to believe that that is a mistake. Nothing regenerates itself as quickly as military power, and Putin cannot regenerate the state without regenerating its military. We are watching an important evolution in Russia.
We are also watching an important evolution in Venezuela, although it is difficult to know what to make of it. President Hugo Chavez is embattled, but he has always been embattled. He has also survived situations that he had no business surviving. He is, in our view, one of the most underestimated men in Latin America. Observers are constantly dismissing him as unsophisticated, insane and/or an ideological fanatic. This is all interesting speculation, but there is one single fact: He is still in power, while his sophisticated, rational and pragmatic opponents have been smashed into disarray. This is not to say that he will survive this time. It is merely to argue that news of his demise has always been premature in the past, and we see no reason not to regard it as premature in the present.
What is interesting about this particular crisis is that Washington appears to have a bit of an appetite for it. In past crises -- since Sept. 11 -- the last thing the United States wanted was problems with Venezuela. The U.S. position was simply this: Ship the oil, keep the government. This time, the United States appears to be more interested in bringing Chavez down than before. It is not clear what chips Washington is actually prepared to put on the table, but nevertheless, it seems willing to take some risks. That may have less to do with the situation in Venezuela than the situation in Iraq, which -- despite periodic attacks -- clearly is stabilizing. On the other hand, it would be well to remember Pakistan before becoming too adventurous elsewhere. Haiti is a self-indulgence the United States can afford. Venezuela is another matter entirely.
Hmmm. I wonder what role Stratfor forecasts for Russia in that region? The US is taking pretty good root in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
It is hard for me to imagine Russia becoming a dominant military power once again without coming to loggerheads with the US.
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