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| Old foes should unite to fight new enemies | | | Hiranmay Karlekar
Russia under Putin is not what it had been reduced to under Boris Yeltsin. It has the will and military strength to intervene decisively abroad. Instead of confronting, the US should join hands with it against the IS
The United States and
its European allies, primarily Britain and France, which loudly condemn Russian military action in Syria, display a startling lack of understanding of history. The Soviet Union, whose dissolution on December 26, 1991, led to the rise of the Russian Federation, commonly called Russia, was a superpower which matched the other superpower, the United States, in strength and stature. Not all its actions were laudable; its interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) were certainly not, nor was its exploitative hold over the East European countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact. But the hard fact was that it was a formidable power and nobody dreamt of messing with it. Yet this very country had become a passive witness to the global power game after its withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed on February 15, 1989, and even more so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As an incompetent Russia, burdened with wrong policies under President Boris Yeltsin, grappled with the profound changes unleashed by perestroika and glasnost, processes of reform and openness that had gathered momentum under Mikhail Gorbachev's helmsmanship, the US had become the sole dominant global power with China close at its heals. It was, however, clear to those even with a rudimentary knowledge of Russia's history and the dynamics of global power relations, that this situation could not continue, and the intense national pride of the Russians, which had fuelled the military triumphs against Napoleon and Hitler's armies, would again propel the country to the centre-stage of international realpolitik.
That this would happen sooner than later was clear from the fact that despite its problems, Russia remained militarily formidable with its large Army, Air Force and Navy and a massive nuclear arsenal and delivery system with trans-continental reach. Most Russians knew this, which made them even more resentful of both their own internal situation and their country's global marginalisation. It was this feeling, which Mr Vladimir Putin, currently President of Russia, fully shared, that contributed to his election as President, in 2000 after he was made acting President in 1999, following Yeltsin's sudden resignation.
Mr Putin did not immediately launch a stridently assertive foreign policy. The reasons for this perhaps included his 16-year tenure with the KGB from which he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1991. Intelligence gathering, where one has to be circumspect, avoiding hasty moves and knee-jerk reactions, can make for a proneness to act after careful deliberation. Another reason was perhaps Russia's own internal conditions which required dealing with a wide range of challenges on the economic front as well as coping with Chechen secessionism.
The third was the need to combat a wider development of which the Chechen secessionism was a part-militant global Islamist fundamentalism. It is the realisation of the seriousness of the threat, posed by the latter, underlined by the rebellion in Chechnya and repeated terror strikes by Chechen rebels, that has been perhaps the most important element in Russia's security and foreign policies during the last decade and a half. It explains, among other things, Moscow's accommodating attitude to permitting American overflights and railway transportation to Afghanistan through Russian territory. The office of the spokesman of the US Department of State provided an eloquent testimony to this when it stated in a media note on April 20, 2011, that the day recorded a significant milestone in cooperation with Moscow with the 1,000th supply mission transiting through Russian airspace. These overflights, the noted added, resulted from a bilateral agreement in support of operations in Afghanistan announced during the July 2009 US-Russia summit. The agreement, in turn, "has been a major success of the 'reset' in US-Russia relations and has resulted in the transfer of over 1,50,000 personnel in support of international efforts in Afghanistan to date".
Under a separate North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-Russia transit agreement, complementary to the Russo-American one, supplies were sent by rail through Russia and Central Asia to support the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
These despatches totalled 25,000 by April 20, 2011. That Russia did all this despite the critical American role in the 1980s in ensuring the Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan, is a tribute to the wisdom of its leaders. It stands in sharp contrast to the short-sightedness of the Reagan Administration, which backed fundamentalist Islamist Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to avenge American defeat in Vietnam, overlooking the fact that some of them were rabidly anti-American. The result - the rise of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda, and later the Taliban - is well-known.
The same kind of short-sightedness characterises Washington's attitude to President Bashar al-Assad's Government in Syria, which has never been more reactionary and authoritarian than the Saudi monarchy with which Americans have supped with relish for decades.
Attempts to destabilise Mr Assad's regime have only helped the rise of the Islamic State which will be the principal gainer if it falls, as elements like the Boko Haram and Al Shabaab have been the principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the Gaddafi regime.
The question that Washington needs to ask is whether Syria and Libya - in fact the whole of the Middle East - are better off now than they were before the eruption of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.
Mr Assad is doubtless an ally of Russia which had been helping him with arms and diplomatic support before its recent military intervention in his favour.
Moscow knows what the consequences of his ouster will be. The West will do well to reach out to it and agree to settlement that secures the rights of moderate Syrian rebels without a regime change. Russia under Mr Putin is not what it had been reduced to under Yeltsin.
Thanks to the military modernisation programme that he has personally supervised since the war with Georgia in 2008, it has both the will and the military strength to intervene decisively abroad.
The performance of Sukhoi-34 strike aircraft and the Kalibr cruise missile with a range of over 900 miles - fired from a Caspian Sea-based strike force led by the missile cruiser Moskva - shows this, as do the speed and manner of the deployment of its troops and aircraft in Syria. Instead of confronting Moscow, Washington should ally with it in the war with the Islamic State. There is no reason why it should balk at the idea when Roosevelt could ally with Stalin against Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.
(Courtesy@daily Pioneer.com) |
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