Half of Ukrainians support independence for S.Ossetia, Abkhazia - poll

Just to show that things in Ukraine are more complicated than a lot of folks in the West would like to admit, a recent poll showed that half of the Ukrainians interviewed supported Russia's recognition of the independence of the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko has been one of the loudest critics of Russia over their recent conflict with Georgia; he even flew to Georgia's capital Tbilisi in a show of solidarity. He, of course, supports Georgia’s territorial integrity (in other words, he’s against independence for the two regions). Yushchenko has also been pushing for Ukraine's quick entry into NATO and the European Union.

But Yushchenko’s approval ratings are somewhere around the 10% mark and he is in real danger of suffering huge losses in the country's parliament if new elections need to be called (which is becoming more and more likely), so it might be a mistake to assume what Yushchenko wants and what the people of Ukraine want are one and the same.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan...

It will be interesting to see if Afghanistan comes up in tomorrow night's Presidential debate, because the news coming out of there in the past few days has been decidedly bad...

First was this rather stark admission by the commander of British troops in Afghanistan Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith who said over the weekend "We're not going to win this war."

Rather than all-out victory, the Afghan campaign (according to Carleton-Smith) should be about "reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army. We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency," he said. It was a rather blunt statement of an argument that European officials have been making more quietly in recent weeks: that the American strategy in Afghanistan is deeply flawed and it will never bring about the decisive victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda that American politicians talk about.

There is a growing feeling that the war in Afghanistan has reached a stalemate and that Western forces will never be able to entirely root insurgents out from the vast, wildly rugged Afghan countryside. History may back the critics up - in 1979 the Soviet Union conquered all of Afghanistan's cities in little more than a week, then spent the next nine years trying (and failing) to win a war in the mountains and valleys of the country; the mighty British Empire didn't do much better back in the 19th century.

And Western officials are reportedly getting more and more frustrated with the government of President Hamid Karzai, which is described as weak and corrupt (more on this in a moment). Karzai has his own problems with Western militaries operating in his country following several well-publicized events where Afghan civilians were killed, the worst being a US-led air strike in August reported to have killed up to 90 civilians. Karzai and some European officials are now saying that Western troops in Afghanistan are more of a problem than a solution – that their actions are doing more to strengthen the insurgency than to weaken it.

But there's a good chance there will be fewer and fewer Western troops in Afghanistan in the coming months anyway. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to get all of his country's troops out by 2011, while the Germans are saying they won't be renewing the deployment order for their special forces operating in south Afghanistan. And reports out of France are that some soldiers from that country set to deploy to Afghanistan are refusing to go. Ten French soldiers were killed in August after a daylong battle with Taliban troops, an event that turned French public opinion against the war.

Getting back to Karzai, according to the New York Times, the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is also reported to be a major drug dealer, profiting from the lucrative poppy trade (poppies provide the raw material for drugs like opium and heroin). Ahmed is said to use his position in government (he is on the council that rules a good chunk of Afghanistan, including the second-largest city, Kandahar) to protect his part of the trade. The Karzai brothers dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks.

Considering how both Obama and McCain have the fight in Afghanistan a part of their policy platforms, you would think this would be a topic to discuss in the debate. We’ll see if that happens…

Say hello to Africom

Though it went basically unnoticed in the American press, the US military underwent a major shake-up in its priorities last Wednesday when it established the Africa Command (or Africom).

“Commands” are the tool the military uses to organize its actions in a specific part of the world – Europe has its own command, so does the Middle East and the Pacific. Until last week operations in Africa were carved up among these three other commands, an awkward arrangement at best.

The Pentagon says that Africom’s main responsibility will be to help African nations fight terrorism, while supporting democracy in the continent and supplying humanitarian relief. Nations in Africa though are more skeptical, especially emerging powers like South Africa, Nigeria and Libya. They worry that Africom is the start of an American militarization of the region and wonder about how much humanitarian aid will actually be provided by the US military (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela voiced a similar concern over the US Navy’s recent decision to reactivate the US Fourth Fleet supposedly to provide humanitarian assistance to South America). Some Americans are asking the same questions. The New York Times quotes former Clinton administration Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon who said: “The military should stick to military tasks and let diplomats and development experts direct other aspects of U.S. policy in Africa.”

Nearly a quarter of all US development aid now flows through the Pentagon, a drastic increase from just the past decade when the military controlled less than 4%. US military officials counter with the claim that they have found that an interagency approach is the best way to deal with troubled regions, and that the military only acts in a supporting role to development efforts.

It will take some time to see how Africom plays out on the ground. For now Africom isn’t even based in Africa – there has been reluctance among African nations to hosting a large American base, though Liberia is said to be interested – so for now it will operate from afar in Stuttgart, Germany. What is clear though is that Africa will be a larger and larger part of US foreign policy in the coming years for a very simple, and familiar reason – oil.

Estimates are that the US could import up to 25% of its crude oil from West Africa within the next decade. It’s also a part of he world where our influence has been waning, China has been investing heavily in Africa in the past few years, and now Russia is showing interest in the region as well, signing development deals with Libya earlier in the year, and now having some talks with Somalia, meaning that Africom could have a very interesting future.

Georgia's Saakashvili: freedom fighter or rights abuser?

That's the question that Georgia's political opposition is starting to ask about President Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing him of stepping on human rights and democracy in the wake of the conflict with Russia in August.

While they admit that Georgia is freer now than it was when it was part of the Soviet Union, they say that Saakashvili is far from the democrat that politicians in the West (particularly the US) want to make him out to be. In fact they blame the war in August on Saakashvili's authoritarian tendencies - his government lacked any dissenting voices to tell him what a colossally bad idea it was to pick a fight with Russia. Human Rights Watch is also warning that Saakashvili is taking a sharp turn away from democracy in a recent report citing, among other thing, the "quick resort to use of force by law enforcement agents" against the political opposition. The most visible example of this was last November when Saakashvili ordered riot police to break up a large, but peaceful, demonstration against his government in the capital, Tbilisi.

The opposition though makes it clear that while they are upset with Saakashvili, they are not about to turn to Moscow for support, exactly what Saakashvili's government is accusing the opposition of wanting to do. Instead, they want Saakashvili to live up to the democratic principles he championed during Georgia's peaceful Rose Revolution that brought him to power.

Enough already...

It's a good thing there's only a month left in the presidential election, I don't think I could stand anymore. Case in point: this take on the Vice-Presidential debate by way of CNN -Palin spoke at 10th-grade level, Biden at eighth.

That's the word from Global Language Monitor, a Texas-based group that apparently micro-analyzed the speech patterns of the debaters and found, among other things, that Sarah Palin used the passive voice in 8% or her sentences, more than Joe Biden who only spoke passively 5% of the time.

Usually you only find stat keeping to this level of minutiae on sports-talk radio debates about Major League Baseball.

There are and have been some big, substantial issues to talk about, but too often the media focus has been on things like shoes, "lipstick on a pig" comments and other silly distractions. But maybe that's to be expected with a 24-hour news cycle and a campaign that's been going on for two years now.

Unfortunately things don't look good for the future. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was pretty outspoken in his opposition to last week's economic bailout package, which prompted some to speculate if he wasn't trying to set himself up for a run at the White House in 2012. I also heard a discussion of Sarah Palin making her own run in oh-12 should the McCain/Palin ticket lose next month.

After all, Election Day 2012 is only 49 months away.

Mystery about those Ukrainian tanks

So where exactly was that shipload of tanks seized by Somali pirates headed?

The story is that the tanks were sold by a Ukrainian company to the government of Kenya and were on their way there when the pirates attacked. But according to the BBC, there is growing evidence that the tanks were really headed to South Sudan.

When we talk about Sudan, usually it's about the ongoing unrest (many would call it genocide) in the western region of Darfur, but forces in the southern part of the country also fought their own bloody civil war against the central government in Khartoum. That conflict has was halted in 2005 thanks to a peace treaty, though part of the treaty agreement was that the region can have a referendum in 2011 on independence. Reports are that groups in both the north and south of Sudan are building up their forces in preparation for 2011, thinking that the South will vote to go its own way from the rest of Sudan. Defense analysts think that South Sudan could already have as many as 100 tanks in their arsenal, not counting the three dozen currently embargoed by the Somali pirates. It is a force that analysts say could change the balance of power in the region.

Both the governments of Ukraine and Kenya deny that the tanks were really headed for South Sudan. The pirates meanwhile are demanding a ransom of $20 million for the release of the ship, its crew and the tanks.

The VP debate

Since I talked last week about the first Presidential debate, I figured that I should say a little something about last night's Vice-Presidential debate, even though my take on the debate is like a lot of the ones I've read today: objectively Joe Biden was the winner, but Sarah Palin did well enough, and exceeded expectations to such a degree that it also has to be considered a win for her as well.

Palin last night was the Sarah Palin that we first met at the Republican convention, self-confident and folksy, a package aimed at appealing to that mythic place "Middle America", not the deer-in-the-headlights version from the Katie Couric interview. Her performance alone can't save McCain's floundering campaign, but she may have thrown him a lifeline to stay afloat a little while longer, at least until his head-to-head match up with Barack Obama next week.

As for Biden he did the best thing anyone can do in these debates - he seemed presidential. Watching the debate I couldn't help but think it was too bad that we didn't get to see him give a performance like that when he was still in the running for the nomination. Biden was only in for the early debates, the ones with seven, eight, or nine candidates. Let's be real, a debate with nine people isn't a debate, it's some kind of weird group press conference, no one has a chance to stand out. And that's too bad for Biden, if he'd had the chance early on, and if he'd turned in a performance like he did last night, maybe the election might look a little different now.

Germany says no NATO for Georgia, Ukraine

German Chancellor Angela Merkel put the brakes on the idea of speedy membership for Georgia and Ukraine.

The United States and Great Britain have been pushing to make the two nations full NATO members and were planning to propose Membership Action Plans (MAPs) for both at a NATO meeting in December. But Merkel on Thursday said that it was too soon to commit to a timetable for membership, a position that Germany held the last time MAPs were suggested at a meeting last April. Germany was concerned then about the regions of South Ossetia and Abkahzia in Georgia, suggesting that Georgia should have to first settle these disputes as a way of showing they were ready for NATO membership. Since then war broke out, Russia sent in troops and the two regions have effectively stopped being a part of Georgia, though Georgia remains determined to win them back.

The US and UK though are taking the position that the conflict only strengthens the case for Georgia's membership in NATO, that membership is needed to protect Georgia from Russian aggression. The Germans though don't seem to be buying that argument. Since membership decisions in NATO have to be made by consensus, Germany’s opposition would be enough to stop the MAPs.

Merkel's comments came at a press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in St. Petersburg. Russia is bitterly opposed to NATO membership for either Georgia or Ukraine. Germany, meanwhile, happens to be one of Russia's chief trading partners and is working with them on building a massive pipeline to bring natural gas directly from Russia to Germany.

Tata abandons cheapest car plant

India's Tata Company has finally given up on its plan to build an automobile plant in the Indian state of West Bengal.

Tata made a splash when they announced plans to build the "world's cheapest car", a tiny sub-compact called the Nano that would sell for approx. $2,300. The car was a hit with India’s growing, but largely car-less middle class, with people lining up to put in down payments for their own Nano. As part of their plans, Tata built a huge plant near Singur in West Bengal, where they hoped to build up to a quarter million cars per year.

But land for the plant was seized from thousands of local farmers, and while many were willing to take compensation for the land, a group of about 2,000 were not and demanded their farms back. Their protests turned violent in recent months, halting work at the plant. Finally Tata gave in. "We cannot run a factory with police around all the time," said Tata chief Ratan Tata. His company had spent more than $350 million to build the massive factory, which is basically complete and was ready to start cranking out Nanoes.

Officials in West Bengal (which has a Marxist government) are now worried that investors may be scared away from funding large projects in one of India's least developed states. Tata, meanwhile, says that the Nano will be produced at other plants around India.

Somalia ready to recognize Abkhazia, South Ossetia

The word from Russia's RIA Novosti news service is that Somalia is ready to recognize the independence of Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. So far, aside from Russia, only Nicaragua has recognized the two places as independent countries, though Belarus and Venezuela are reported to be considering recognition as well. Russia wants to get other nations to declare the two regions as countries in their own right to counter pressure from the United States and European Union who both consider the regions a part of Georgia and want Russia to withdraw its recognition.

Of course you could question whether Somalia itself is even a country - it hasn't had a working government since a civil war in the early 1990's, warlords run the capital city, Mogadishu, and the Somali coast is a haven for pirates (like the ones who recently captured a Ukrainian shipload of tanks) because there is no one around to enforce the law. The Somali government has often met in neighboring Kenya in recent years because it was just too dangerous to travel to Somalia.

This is Russia's problem in acting as patron for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the nations looking to support their claims are kind of a global rogues gallery: the non-functioning state of Somalia, Belarus - the place Condi Rice called "Europe's last dictatorship", and Venezuela - home of Hugo Chavez, the self-anointed successor to Fidel Castro.

It's kind of reminding me of an episode of the cartoon series "Family Guy", where Peter (the main character) declares his home and yard to be an independent country. In a bid for legitimacy he invites a group of world leaders to a pool party, but the only ones that show up are look-alikes for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic, and the Ayatollah to name a few. Not exactly the greatest crowd to run with.

In their announcement, Somalia also talked about starting military and technical cooperation with Russia in the near future.