Originally posted in Feb. 2022, right after Russia's intervention in Ukraine:
In a three-pronged blitz from the north, east and south, Russian ground forces, backed by close air support and volleys of cruise missiles launched from ships, have overrun Ukraine and laid siege to the capital, Kyiv, whose impending fall is days away, reminiscent of precipitous fall of Kabul last August with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport.
Chairman
Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his
historic Congressional testimony that couple of hundred Pashtun cowboys riding
motorbikes and brandishing Kalashnikovs overran Kabul without a shot being
fired, and the world’s most lethal military force fled with tail neatly folded
between legs, hastily evacuating diplomatic staff from sprawling 36-acre US
embassy in Chinook helicopters to airport secured by the insurgents.
Apart from
indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids mounted by Americans, Afghan security forces
didn’t put up serious resistance anywhere in Afghanistan and simply surrendered
territory to the Taliban. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US
forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks
before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15.
The
sprawling Bagram airbase was the nerve center from where all the operations
across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the
US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular
militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.
In southern
Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which
the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was
spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar
and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district
after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the
Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.
What has
stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though,
was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern
Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of
the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups. In recent
years, however, the Taliban has made inroads into the heartland of the Northern
Alliance, too.
The
ignominious fall of Kabul clearly demonstrates the days of American hegemony
over the world are numbered. If ragtag Taliban militants could liberate their
homeland from imperialist clutches without a fight, imagine what would happen
if it confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The
much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological
than real.
Although cutting
a dashing figure sporting military fatigues and urging compatriots to rise up
in arms against “Russian invaders” in a sentimental address while at the same
time pandering to NATO patrons to provide military assistance and impose
harshest sanctions on the Kremlin, the fate of Ukraine’s comedian president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, would be no different from deposed president of
Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who fled to neighboring Tajikistan on the eve of the
Taliban invasion with suitcases stashed with $69 million stolen cash and is now
comfortably sojourning in the UAE.
In contrast,
in a televised address to the nation following the Ukraine intervention,
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin uttered a chilling warning to adversaries: “Whoever
tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people,
must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the
consequences you have never seen in history.”
Warships are
transiting the Mediterranean Sea and nearby waters in numbers
rarely seen [1] in recent decades, adding another dimension to the ongoing
tensions between NATO and Russia. The USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group
arrived in mid-December as part of a long-planned deployment. Another four
destroyers began operating in the European theater in mid-January and early
February.
Although the
US rarely announces submarine deployments, it also is common for carrier groups
to have undersea support. The scale of US ships deployed to 6th Fleet is
impressive — including about 12 destroyers and at least one cruiser.
The Truman
sailed with the French Charles de Gaulle and the Italian Cavour carrier strike
groups. The three carrier strike groups sailing together in the Mediterranean
not only was unusual but also a significant show of NATO power.
The Russian
Defense Ministry announced earlier this month it soon would send warships —
some with Kalibr and hypersonic Oniks cruise missile capabilities — from its
Caspian Sea flotilla to the Mediterranean and Black seas.
That’s in
addition to at least six Russian amphibious assault ships from the Baltic and
Northern fleets that recently sailed through the Mediterranean before entering
the Black Sea for military exercises. A Russian Kilo-class submarine armed with
Kalibr cruise missiles and a patrol ship also entered the Black Sea.
NATO said
earlier this month that their Russian counterparts had conducted themselves professionally
at sea. But CNN reported that a Navy P-8 maritime patrol plane had a “very
close” encounter with multiple Russian jets, which US officials described as
unsafe.
With the
sheer scale of naval deployments by the both sides, it’s obvious that any
inadvertent skirmish could trigger an apocalypse that would not only be
perilous for the belligerents but also for the wider world.
At the
height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest
50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October, 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft
took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute,
which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from
ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.
The bomb was
released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in
the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground.
Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the
Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock
wave but was able to recover and land safely.
The
8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane
and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high.
A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the
explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from
the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.
All
buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from
ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts
hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone
ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast
damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.
According to
an Oct. 2017 Turkish
parliament report [2], there were around 15,000 nuclear warheads at 107
sites in 14 countries, and 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons belonged
to Russia and the US. Russia had 7,000 nuclear weapons, the US 6,800, France
300, China 260, Britain 215, Pakistan 130, India 120, Israel 80 and North Korea
had 10 nuclear weapons.
It added
that some 4,150 of the weapons in arsenals were ready to be used at any minute,
while 1,800 were in “high alarm” status, which meant they could be prepared for
use in a short period of time.
The report
also noted that nuclear weapons belonging to the US were deployed in five NATO
member states that did not themselves have developed nuclear programs. “There
are nearly 150 US nuclear weapons in six air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy,
the Netherlands and Turkey,” it added.
During the
Cold War, the US placed nuclear weapons in NATO countries, including Turkey, as
part of the organization’s nuclear sharing program. Some of the nuclear weapons
placed in the 1960s are still deployed in Turkey.
The safety
of fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs deployed at Incirlik airbase in Turkey
became a matter of real concern during the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the
Erdogan government after the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir
Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the
coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and
the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according
to a
report [3] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.
Following
the Second World War, the covert Operation Paperclip was launched in which more
than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, including Wernher von
Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were kidnapped from Germany and shuttled to the
United States. The V-2 rocket program was later adapted to send Apollo missions
to the moon. Thus, the US nuclear and ballistic missile programs were actually
stolen from the Nazi Germany.
Notwithstanding,
the mainstream reporting nowadays seems prosaic screeds extolling the virtues
of patriotism and loyalty to the “Western democracy” and striving desperately
hard to expose imaginary plots hatched by “vile dictators,” notably Russian
President Vladimir Putin, to take undue advantage of “gullible patsies” in the
alternative news media unwittingly playing the role of Putin’s “useful idiots.”
After
sufficiently proving their loyalty to the “American democracy” and the US-led
“benevolent imperialism” that has ended “the age of darkness” in the
post-colonial world and ushered it into “the age of enlightenment” under
Washington’s neocolonial tutelage, the spin-doctors go on to draw the attention
of the readers to the misleading notion that since the catastrophic Second
World War, the Ukraine intervention is the first ever war in Europe in the
living memory.
It’s worth
recalling that the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath
of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed
thousands of fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of
refugees for which nobody is to blame but Washington’s militarist policy of
subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western
capitalist bloc.
Incidentally,
one of the leading reasons Putin defensively intervened in Ukraine is to save
himself from the fate that befell his predecessors, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who
presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and are
judged harshly by Russian masses as well as the Leftists around the world.
Biden
approved on Thursday, Feb. 24, an additional 7,000
US troops [4] to be deployed to Germany, bringing the total number of
American forces sent to Europe to 12,000 this month, including troops
previously deployed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Besides Ukraine, all these
states on Russia’s western flank were its staunch allies and the whole Eastern
Europe used to be in the Russian sphere of influence, not too long ago, before
the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But today,
the perfidious East European states are hosting thousands of NATO troops,
strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at
Russia, and the NATO forces alongside the regional clients are provocatively
exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting
joint military exercises and naval drills meant to intimidate Russia into
submission.
Who’s the aggressor here? Before attempting to answer the rhetorical question, bear in mind that Ukraine is Russia’s backyard whereas the distance between New York and Kyiv is over 7,500 kilometers. Wouldn’t it be a cause of immense consternation for the US military strategists and policy-makers if Russia or China deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable strategic bombers and provocatively exercised “freedom of navigation” right by deploying nuclear submarines in the Gulf of Mexico straddling the US borders?
