War of the Acronyms: GUR to HTS to TIP and the B&R
New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.
The main objective of Zelenskiy and crew, and that of their main patrons, the Biden Administration and its enthusiastic choir of former European imperialists - so far as I am able to read it - has been to escalate the conflict in the hope of imposing setbacks to Russia that would then make Russia more pliable to pressure to negotiate and to negotiate from a standpoint more favorable to Ukraine than the actual conditions of the battlefield would otherwise warrant. These conditions would, at the very least, enable Saint Everlasting-Peace Donald Trump, on the very day of his glorious Resurrection, to claim that Russia had made significant concessions and that Ukraine had won the war because Satanic Putin had never conquered the entirety of Ukraine, or of Europe or of the World - none of those things, in fact that he has never said he wanted to do anyhow.
It’s not over until the fat lady sings, as they say, but it is not looking as though the Biden strategy of escalate to de-escalate has worked. They tried ATACMS and Storm Shadow attacks on Russia. That didn’t really achieve any significant result, but rther it provoked Russia into putting on an Oreshnik demonsration to remind those who know anything about anything that the main purpose of the US military-industrial complex is not to win wars but to siphon public money into the private pockets of the Raytheons, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martins, motivating them to sell their non-competitative stuff at the highest possible prices in semi-monopolistic markets.
On the actual battlefields, Russian forces have continued their steady advance along almost all fronts, at a pace and magnitude to guarantee the exertion of the maximum attritional force on the enemy. Most if not all Ukrainian counteroffensives have been stalled or reversed, including, it would seem, the latest Ukrainian venture from Kamianski towards the Russian-held Zapporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. And why? Well, God only knows; the chances that it can still produce electricity seem slim. Further south, a large concentration of some 130,000 Russian troops are available for what appears to be a gathering Russian offensive across the Dnieper to recover Kherson, which it took and later abandoned in 2022.
In Kursk, the area still held by Ukraine is only a third of what it was in the original stages of the invasion of Russian territory. The original force of 55,000 (whose purpose, Russia says, was to attack the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant) is now down to around 10,000 in Sudzha and 12,000 reserves in Sumy. These are the pummelled victims, we are led to believe - by a campaign of dubious propaganda designed to compel a very unwilling South Korea to get more involved in the war (which it doesn’t and, at the expense, so far, of two impeached presidents, won’t) - of a force of 10,000 North Korean troops whose actual physical presence in the area seems to be very hard for anyone to verify. Russia claims that Ukraine has lost some 30,000 men in Kursk.
Russians are making significant advances in North Kupyansk where they have established a significant and growing foothold on the west bank of the Oskill and from which they will likely advance on Kupyansk itself and then down to Lyman. Russian attempts on Siversk are meeting with significant pushback, still, from Ukrainian forces. But the tide of war in Chasiv Yar is finally turning against Ukraine, while in the areas of Povchansk, Kurakhove, Toretsk and Velyka Novoselivka are gradually but surely being absorbed into Russian territory.
There is gathering evidence of a possibiity that the new pro-Western government of Moldova will stage some form of attack, possibly on its power station, against the secessionist pro-Russian area of Transnistria.
A lot of noise from the Trump campaign suggests significant, even sincere hope and expectation that Orange Man Bad will indeed clear up the mess on his first day. The real chances of that happening seem about as believable as the likelihood that this writer will win the billion dollar lottery when he doesn’t even buy the tickets. All recent comments from Putin, Lavrov and other senior Russian statesmen suggest, instead, that Russia has absolutey no patience for proposed solutions that do not involve total and perpetual Ukrainian neutrality, that do not formally recognize the four oblasts of the Istanbul agreement, along with Crimea, as irrevocably and perpetually a part of Russia, that think it’s OK for Putin to negotiate with an illegitimate Ukrainian counterpart, and do not start from an Istanbul Plus negotiating platform, a concept which, if Ukraine doesn’t make very fast speed, might well extend to include as Russian the oblasts of Kharkiv, Odessa and Kiev, along with Dnipro and Zapporizhzhia.
The latest gambit - Ukraine and its sponsors always prefer public relations spectaculars over real warfare, if they can get away with it - appears, first of all, to conjure up charges that Chinese and Russian ships in the Baltic Sea have been sabotaging cable links between Finland and Estonia. This seems unconvincing. It is not at all clear to me that the architecture of international communication is any longer vulnerable to specific geographical attacks: modern systems are deliberately designed with sufficient redundancy to render such attempts moot. Nor does it seem sensible for ships of any nationality to engage in that kind of behavior in a semi-closed sea dominated by NATO powers which can and have actually detained such ships for interrogation and investigation. It also seems unlikely that ships would be able, confidently and accurately, to use their anchors as tools with which to sabotage these cables.
What seems a good deal more likely, however, given what NATO Secretary General, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, has had to say on the matter, is that the alleged and possiby non-existent sabotage attacks will be used as a pretext for, as he says, strenghening NATO presence in the Baltic or, in other words, blockading Saint Petersburg and reducing Russian use of the Baltic to transport its oil and gas by means of Russia’s “shadow fleet” (i.e. ships that evade NATO sanctions by not insuring in London) to European and other destinations. This pattern of escalation of attacks on what we can call the infrastructure of Russian trade is a relatively new factor, but one whose efficacy seems questionable in view of Russia’s demonstrated capacity to walk around these artificial barriers to what was once, back in the 1990s. the West’s pride and joy namely, globalization.
The strategy of creating pretexts based on stories about sabotaged cables goes hand in hand with what appears to have been a sequences of six or so attacks in the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea on Russian cargo ships or ships - tankers - appearing to be carrying Russian oil and gas. This is tantamount to a NordStream-style pipeline sabotage attack to make it as difficult as possible for Russia to surmount Western pressure to reverse the astonishing ingenuity Russia has shown in turning this and other such Western tactics to its own advantage.
But it also represents what Mike Whitney, in an article this week in Global Research, has argued will likely be an escalation in Western attacks on the trading infrastructures of its key enemies, those who oppose a “globalism” that camoflauges continuing US supremacy. These are in evidence, he argues, not just in the case of Western attempts to contain and cripple Russia, but also in the vortex of new (and old) forces at play in Syria that have consequences for the futures of Russia, Iran and China. Whitney writes about the role of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) which has been a constituent part of the forces of HTS.
The recent HTS invasion and toppling of the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad has been backed principally by Turkey, with support from the US and NATO but whose members have very little organic connection to Syria other than their enforced sojourn in Idlib (following an 2018 agreement between Syria, Russia and Turkey). The invasion received help from Ukraine military intelligence organization GUR, almost certainly with CIA knowledge.
TIP includes many jihadist fighters recruited from the 12 million strong Uyghur communities of Xinjiang province in north western China and which, like many other Sunni jihadi movements, receives funding from and is manipulated by Western powers for the purpose of achieving Western covert policy ambitions (often related to the development of secessionist movements, and regime-change operations). Note in passing that the current population of the Uyghurs has grown from only five million some forty years ago, one among many reasons why fabricated Western charges of a Chinese genocide of the Uyghur population are utter nonsense. This all comes back to the Brzezinski insight thst Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent, boasting two of the world’s most advnced and economically productive regions, about 75% of global population, most of the world’s physical wealth, accounting for 60% of global GNP, and 75% of the world’s known energy resources.
There were 20,000 Uyghur jihadis in Idlib. TIP was founded in 1988 and received CIA help from its earliest days. The founder of the so-called '“East Turkestan” government-in-exile, Yusuf Turani, lives in Virginia with other senior leaders of the movement. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) was founded in 2004 by Erkin Alptekin, a former adviser to the CIA.
Mainly based in Pakistan, Whitney argues that the (TIP/WUC) movement is being primed by Western intelligence as a tool for aggressions against China’s highly effective Belt and Road initiative and its forerunner, the China-Europe Freight Train (CEFT) network of 82 routes that connect 100 cities in China to 200 cities across Europe and dozens of others in central, eastern and southeastern Asia. Russia accounts for 37% of all “CEFTS.” Because some European companies are now avoiding Russian routes, Russia is boosting the “Middle Corridor” alternative route from the Black Sea and the Caucasus to the Central Asian steppe, a pattern that follows the route of the ancient Silk Road. TIP members were among the foreign fighters receiving CIA and ISI (Pakistani intelligence) training in camps in Afghanistan in 2001. One target for TIP terrorism would be the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, another would be the Middle Corridor.
Whitney’s analysis is a useful reminder to remain mindful of the broadest possible geopolitical implications of local conflicts. An article by Edward Luttwak contrasts the amazing period of stability in Syria achieved by Hafez and Bashir Assad over forty years, against the volatility from 1948 to 1971, when the country went through 17 presidents (of whom three presided over the United Arab Republic formed by Syria in conjunction with Egypt 1958-1964), and the volatility we are almost bound to witness following the Turkish-HTS invasion in 2024 as Alawites, Arab Christians, Druze, Kurds, Armenian, Ismaili and Shia jostle for safety from a Sunni jihadi government, an invading force from Israel, a continuing Turkish presence in the northwest and Turkish armed forces at war with the Kurdish SDF, a sustained Kurdish enclave with US support in the north east, and Iraqi Shi’ite militia on eastern borders.
Israel retains a presence in southern Lebanon; there have been numerous violations by Israel of the ceasefire agreement reached just weeks ago between Israel, the government of Lebanon and Hezbollah. Israel has occupied all of the Golan Heights and moved through a UN buffer zone to take numerous further settlements in southern Syria, establishing a presence within twenty miles of Damascus. It is poised to initiate a massive strike of some kind on Iran; whether it does will depend to a considerable extent on whether it can secure a US commitment to support its agression and on its intelligence concerning advanced weaponry, perhaps including hypersonic missiles that are operative in Iran, a likelihood that will be boosted if we receive confirmation, as currently anticipated, of the long-delayed signing of the Russian-Iranian mutual defense treaty. Recent reports of crippling energy shortages in Iran signal a possibly grave weakness, as does continuing evidence of a major split in Tehran between those forces that wish to put an end to the Zionist threat once and for all (and who would want the protection of a nuclear shield to achieve it), and those who think they can buy off US support for Israel with some of renewed deal involving the abandonment of any kind of nuclear weaponry capability in return for reduced Western sanctrions.
Is Israel already in grave danger of over-extending itself? It has still to resolve the future of Gaza where it is deliberately engineering the deaths of tens of thousands more Palestinians through the bombing of residential blocs, and the denial to Palestinians of physical safety, food, and medicine. The official tally of the Gaza Health Ministry is 45,000 Palestinian deaths but, as the prestigious British media journal, The Lancet, calculated back in July, when you take account of those who die as a result of malnutrition, lack of sanitary conditions, absence of medical facilities, then the real number is much closer to 200,000, a number that will only have increased in the period since the Lancet calculation. Contributing significantly to the genocide, as a recent New York Times investigation has shown, were IDF instructions to its forces that a killing of twenty civilians for every single Hamas combatant was acceptable (a ratio that in some instances increased to 100) and that for many aerial attacks it was permissible for up to 500 civilians be killed for every military target, guidlines that were interpreted by many commanders as quotas rather than upper limits.