One of the many catastrophic side effects of a delusional US government with an obsessive-compulsive streak is that things that really, really matter fall through the cracks. Bhradrakumar's analysis today is an excellent case in point:
From the details coming out of Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and Moscow over the weekend, it is apparent that the great game over Caspian energy has taken a dramatic turn. In the geopolitics of energy security, nothing like this has happened before. The United States has suffered a huge defeat in the race for Caspian gas. The question now is how much longer Washington could afford to keep Iran out of the energy market.The implications of this move are huge, on several levels:
Gazprom, Russia's energy leviathan, signed two major agreements in Ashgabat on Friday outlining a new scheme for purchase of Turkmen gas. The first one elaborates the price formation principles that will be guiding the Russian gas purchase from Turkmenistan during the next 20-year period. The second agreement is a unique one, making Gazprom the donor for local Turkmen energy projects. In essence, the two agreements ensure that Russia will keep control over Turkmen gas exports.
First, this is the disastrous end to a twenty-year effort by the United States to lock down control of the gigantic gas resource base in Turkmenistan (fourth largest in the world with proven reserves of 100 trillion cubic feet, about half US proven reserves of 211 trillion cubic feet). For longtime Central Asia watchers like Ahmed Rashid, the entire Neocon's Excellent Adventure™ in Central Asia, from arming Bin Laden in the 1980's to turning a blind eye to Pakistani exports of rogue nuclear technology, can be traced back to continuing efforts by the United States to gain access to Turkmenistan, and to build a gas pipeline through one of the most unstable regions on the planet to India and Pakistan. In a very real sense, the long and bloody path from the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, through 9/11, to the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, can be walked back to this moment of defeat.
Second, India has a problem. Russian control of Turkmen gas not only implies that Russia wins the Great Game as far as natural gas is concerned, it means that India probably doesn't get access to that resource. China has already locked down a 30 Tcf gas deal with Turkmenistan, a deal that will now be facilitated by Gazprom. Without access to a long-term gas resource, it's not clear what India does next.
Third, Europe has a problem. Plans for a US-Euro controlled gas route from the Caspian Basin are no longer viable:
The agreements with Turkmenistan further consolidate Russia's control of Central Asia's gas exports. Gazprom recently offered to buy all of Azerbaijan's gas at European prices. (Medvedev visited Baku on July 3-4.) Baku will study with keen interest the agreements signed in Ashgabat on Friday. The overall implications of these Russian moves are very serious for the US and EU campaign to get the Nabucco gas pipeline project going.The most interesting part of all of this is that Russia closed the deal by actually offering Turkmenistan what the gas is actually worth, about double what they've been offered to date. Gazprom won't make much money on this deal. But they will lock down one of the last free range gas supplies in the world, assuring the effectiveness of any future move towards a global gas supplier cartel.
Nabucco, which would run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary, was hoping to tap Turkmen gas by linking Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan via a pipeline across the Caspian Sea that would be connected to the pipeline networks through the Caucasus to Turkey already existing, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
But with access denied to Turkmen gas, Nabucco's viability becomes doubtful. And, without Nabucco, the entire US strategy of reducing Europe's dependence on Russian energy supplies makes no sense.
The most hilarious part of all of this, of course, is that India, and Europe, and the US really have only one option left if they want natural gas without going through Russia - Iran, with about 940 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves. This makes it much harder to bully Iran about the rogue nuclear technology that they got from Pakistan while the US was propping up the corrupt and totalitarian government there so that they would support Bin Laden and the Taliban who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan so that we could run a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan. In the immortal words of Malcom X, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Hat tips to Juan Cole.
Not good:
American forces have abandoned the outpost in northeastern Afghanistan where nine American soldiers were killed Sunday in a heavy attack by insurgents, NATO officials said Wednesday. The withdrawal handed a propaganda victory to the Taliban, and insurgents were quick to move into the village of Wanat beside the abandoned outpost, Afghan officials said. Insurgents nearly overran the barely built outpost in a dawn raid on Sunday, the most deadly assault for United States forces in Afghanistan since 2005.
...
Only 45 American soldiers and 25 Afghans had occupied the Wanat outpost for a few days before the attack. Far outnumbered by militants, the force was nearly overrun and fought a four-hour battle before the Taliban were repelled. In addition to the nine American deaths, 15 American soldiers were wounded. Four Afghan soldiers were wounded.
Notice what has happened here. Over half of a large platoon of US soldiers are casualties in an action where a company-sized Taliban unit overran their position, then executed a tactical withdrawal while meeting no further resistance from NATO forces. The position has been abandoned as indefensible, leaving the Taliban firmly in military control of the area.This follows a previously noted pattern in Pakistan, where remote outposts in place since the British Raj are being abandoned following successful overrun attacks by company to brigade sized Taliban units.
Nothing like this has ever happened in the American wars in Iraq. It would be considered a catastrophe if it ever did. But in Afghanistan, the news of a rapidly deteriorating military position in Afghanistan lives where the real scoop always lives in US newspapers these days, safely tucked away between pages 15 and 19 of the A section where only the wonks will find it.
From ACLU comes word this week that the official double-secret probation list of suspected terrorists in our midst has hit a million names.
Let's look at the math. On the morning of September 11, 2001, there were no more than about 6,000 people in the world with a violent terrorist agenda, a willingness to commit suicide to serve that agenda, and the resources and connections needed to actually carry out a serious terrorist attack. We are literally talking about one in a million people. It is sobering to contemplate the fragility of a global society that cannot withstand human contaminants on the order of one part per million.
In any case that number, despite the Bush Administrations best efforts to vastly increase the number of people who hate us, hasn't really changed that much. Let's say for the sake of argument that it's up to 10,000 people now. Even if you make the heroic assumptions that every one of those people is in or headed to the United States, and even if you assume that the Ministry of Homeland Security has managed to get every one of those people on the magic list of People We Don't Like (improbable), the list is 99% fluff. If you make far more realistic assumptions - say, 10% of the people we should actually should care about are both on the list and have a sudden urge to fly around the US - the list is 99.9% fluff. And that's generous. There are a lot of Robert Johnsons and Gary Smiths and Jim Robinsons in the world, but they are only three of the names on the list.
The next target to celebrate will be the point where the number of names on the terrorist watch list exceeds the US prison population, sometime towards the end of McCain's first term.
We here in the US tend to have no idea how big our economy is relative to the rest of the world. This utterly cool map gives a good clue. Just to add a little more context, California (7th largest in the world at slightly larger than France) represents about 10% of the total US economy.
Just in case you were thinking that the news blackout on Pakistan means that things are OK....they're not:
Hundreds of militants have overrun a paramilitary fort in north-west Pakistan, killing or kidnapping many troops, the military says. At least eight soldiers died in the raid and 15 escaped, the army says. The whereabouts of another 25 are unknown. A Taleban spokesman told BBC Urdu that 16 troops had been killed and another 12 captured during the fighting. Two Taleban died in the fighting, he said. South Waziristan is a known stronghold of pro-Taleban and al-Qaeda militants. The region has been at the centre of fighting between the army and the militants in recent months. "About 200 militants charged the fort from four sides," army spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas said. "They broke through the fort's wall with rockets." Local officials and other reports suggest the number of militants may have been nearer to 1,000.
Other reports put the actual number of attackers in the 400-700 range. Notice what we are talking about here - a battalion-sized unit of enemy fighters has destroyed a company-sized fort that has been there since the British Raj, and walked away unchallenged.
We haven't even gotten to the part where voters get to choose next month between a dictator, a religious nut, and a spectacularly corrupt political hack for their next President.
Update: The unraveling accelerates:
Pakistani troops have abandoned a fort in a remote tribal area, a day after another was overrun by pro-Taleban militants, officials and witnesses say. They say that paramilitary personnel at Sipla Toi military post in South Waziristan left their positions fearing an attack by the militants.
And we're back.
The political tactics around climate change have shifted. Despite a vicious and well-funded rearguard action, there is a general realization that denial is no longer an effective tactic for avoiding the issue. The game now becomes one of minimizing impact, and maximizing profit. The new responses that from the deniers and delayers, nationally and locally, tend to fall into one of four categories:
- Look good while doing nothing of substance (examples are electric utility and most – but not all - other voluntary offset and green power schemes),
- Go about business as usual, adding disingenuous reassuring incantations about healing the earth, maybe later, if we feel like it (we are currently fighting a round of new coal plant proposals across the country that are aggressively pushing this line),
- Cherry-pick the proposals on the table to concoct a poison pill emissions regulation package that makes rational discussion of the best policy answer impossible. Get prominent organizations that actually want to do the right thing to engage you seriously, thereby associating them with a deeply unpopular and flawed proposal. The resulting controversy and confusion kicks the can down the road for another decade or so (Dingell’s schizophrenic initiative on climate is an excellent instance of this play).
- Make sure that regulation, when it comes, vastly enriches the usual suspects, while accomplishing little to nothing that substantially changes the medium term carbon emissions vector (a cap-and-trade artificial carbon market with a giveaway is the most egregious example, and is probably what we will end up getting). At worst, this can be combined with the above tactics to actually be counter-productive (the heavily subsidized Archer-Daniels Midland approach to biofuels is a great example of this).
This last play is what Lieberman-Warner is all about. As with the poison-pill strategy, success hinges on co-opting trusted environmental groups and foundations to lend their reputation for integrity in service of your lame initiative. Unfortunately, in the case of Lieberman-Warner, that part has been ridiculously easy. A litany of big-box environmental groups, from Natural Resources Defense Council to National Wildlife Federation, is enthusiastically flogging this legislation around Congress.
This is very, very bad. Why, you ask?
Well, back about three years ago, before it became abundantly apparent how much trouble we are really in, the mainstream consensus among climate scientists was that in order to stabilize atmospheric carbon levels at twice baseline levels (an arbitrary target, but one expected at the time to hold long-term impacts to a serious but not catastrophic level), we would need to reduce current US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (something that Clinton already promised and failed to do by 1999), and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. The dire news coming out of recent climate research indicates that we will have to do better then that. But let's keep that as a baseline for now.
Using that metric, minimally acceptable legislation:
- must result in emission reductions that get us in or below the band of a path that stabilizes carbon concentrations at or below 450-550 parts per million, or twice pre-industrial levels (the overlay graphic above is from a typically optimistic legislative analysis done by the World Resources Institute),
- must front-load the institutional mechanisms that get us there instead of making a meaningless promise to hit an imaginary goal half a century from now (in politics, a decade is a very long time, and fifty years is eternity),
- must be comprehensive,
- must not transfer vast sums of wealth to polluters, and
- must not be so leaky that the goals are a shuck.
It would be nice if the legislation temporarily attenuated the direct hit on small energy consumers until our current round of guzzling cars and appliances die, while assuring that the next car and appliance does the right thing. Given that the price of carbon will ramp in slowly as targets start to tighten, there is no particular reason why industrial polluters should get any kind of pass, let alone a windfall.
This is the non-negotiable threshold position. There are lots of good arguments for doing more than this. Anything *less* than this is not just a waste of time, it is a betrayal of our future. Less simply doesn’t get the job done. That is not ideological purity talking. It's arithmetic.
Lieberman-Warner is a warmed-over version of Lieberman-McCain, and fails the above criteria on all counts. It is the least effective serious proposal on the table. Even taking the "mandated" 70% reduction by 2050 seriously, overall reductions end up way above the band of what it takes to reach climate stabilization at 450-550 ppm. It simply does not do what needs to be done.
But the reality of the bill is much worse. It isn’t comprehensive – it only applies to 75% of current US greenhouse gas sources, ever. It doesn't even start until 2012 (so much for being in a hurry to get it done in 2008). It gives away huge (though declining) indulgences to big industrial and electric generation polluters (effectively exempting them as well) until 2036, and a grab bag of other indulgences forever, seriously weakening the synthetic carbon market that is supposed to solve the emissions problem by internalizing carbon costs. You can see the effect in a recent (optimistic) analysis of Lieberman-Warner from Duke University, with carbon costs not hitting $50/ton (a good rule-of-thumb marker for what you are spending if you are serious) for another 30 years. It is full of goodies for special interests, particularly the coal industry, and has a laughably naïve fixation on carbon sequestration, casting it as a gigantic Hail Mary play that magically makes everything work out in the end. Finally, only a tiny fraction of the huge embedded subsidies go to actually help consumers - the rest go to allowing the usual suspects to continue business as usual.
But the most damning indictment of Lieberman-Warner is that the already inadequate 70% reduction number that proponents like to throw around is a fraud. Unlike most of the other proposals on the table, the 70% reduction marker in Lieberman-Warner is indexed to 2005 emission levels, not 1990 levels. And, it doesn't even come close to meeting that disingenuous expectation. The legislation would, in fact, only directly reduce US climate emissions 20% by 2050. That's barely enough to get us back to 1990 levels by 2050. The rest of the assumed savings – the vast bulk of the alleged reductions - in Lieberman-Warner hinge on massive, indirect carbon offsets (extremely dicey to reliably quantify, and really just outsourcing the damage even if you get what you think you getting), and on theoretical free-driver (as opposed to free-rider) emission reductions in the 25% of current US carbon sources that the legislation does not address at all.
Bottom line: Contrary to the hype, Lieberman-Warner would only reduce US carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2050. If this grotesque legislation becomes the official US response to climate change, we lose.
We haven't even gotten to the question of why we are bothering with federal climate legislation at all while Bush is president, or what happens when Lieberman-Warner is the position we are negotiating down from. On its face, why would any responsible public policy advocate actively support this proposal?
So why have most of the big-box environmental groups signed up for this turkey? We’ll talk about that in part 2.
It is humbling to see what real resistance to dictatorship looks like. Sometimes, living in a country without a pretense of democracy has its advantages.
Washington, DC November 17, 2007
Statement by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte in Islamabad, PakistanThe following is the text of remarks by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte upon his departure from Islamabad, Pakistan:
Good morning. I would like to make a brief statement before taking a few questions and departing for Washington.
During this brief trip to Islamabad, I had meetings with President Musharraf and other senior Pakistani government officials, including National Security Advisor Aziz, Vice Chief of Army Staff General Kayani, former Foreign Minister Kasuri, and Inter-Services Intelligence Director General Taj. I also spoke by phone with Pakistan People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto.
In my meeting with President Musharraf, he reiterated his vision for a moderate, prosperous, and democratic Pakistan. Under his leadership, Pakistan has made great progress toward that vision. Over the past few years, the Pakistani people have witnessed expanded and freer media, unprecedented economic growth and development, and the moderation of gender-based laws and school curricula. President Musharraf has been and continues to be a strong voice against extremism. We value our partnership with the Government of Pakistan under the leadership of President Musharraf.
We welcome President Musharraf's announcement that elections will take place in January, a commitment he repeated to me yesterday in categorical terms. He also repeated his commitment to retire from his army post before commencing his second presidential term, and we urge him to do so as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the recent police actions against protestors, suppression of the media, and the arrests of political and human rights leaders run directly counter to the reforms that have been undertaken in recent years. Their continuation undermines the progress Pakistan has made.
I urged the Government to stop such actions, lift the state of emergency, and release all political detainees. Emergency rule is not compatible with free, fair, and credible elections, which require the active participation of political parties, civil society, and the media. The people of Pakistan deserve an opportunity to choose their leaders free from the restrictions that exist under a state of emergency.
Looking to the future, the United States believes that the best way for any country to counter violent extremism is to develop and nurture a moderate political center. We believe this is true for Pakistan as well, and in my talks I encouraged reconciliation between political moderates as the most constructive way forward. A democratic Pakistan that continues the fight against terror is vital to the interests of both the United States and Pakistan. In the current circumstances, engagement and dialogue – not brinksmanship and confrontation – should be the order of the day for all parties.
The United States supports the Pakistani people in their efforts to develop a prosperous and democratic nation.
Do you see anything in here that doesn't leave genuine democratic resistance and the rule of law twisting slowly in the wind, as Musharraf and Bhutto quarrel over divvying up the spoils? I don't either.
