Word: nato
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Russia has escalated its showdown with its small, NATO-inclined neighbor of Georgia by closing all transport and postal communications. No trains, no flights, no ships, no vehicles, no mail money orders - nothing can cross the border. This time, it's much worse than just another Russian spat with a former satellite state. The Georgia standoff may soon create a major headache for the Bush Administration, because of U.S. support for Georgia's right to align itself with the West...
...issue driving the conflict is Georgia's geopolitical orientation: Georgia has joined the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that skirts Russia and ends its monopoly on transporting Caspian Sea oil to world markets; it has defied Moscow on a range of regional issues; and it is attempting to join NATO, presenting the Russian military brass with the prospect of a strategic rival strengthening its position along Russia's southern underbelly. In short, the crisis is an expression of Russia's failure to accept Georgia's independence...
...historical perspective, that's almost inevitable. The overarching Soviet threat of the cold war was extraordinary; so was the cooperation, from the Marshall Plan to nato to Fulbright scholarships, it inspired. "The closeness we grew used to of shared perspectives between 1950 and 1990 was the exception rather than the rule," says Tony Judt, a British-born professor of European history at New York University. "Before World War II, no one spoke about 'the West' as a shared cultural area. Americans, mostly of recent European descent, saw themselves as getting away from Europe. Europeans saw America as worryingly rootless...
...When Musharraf's government, earlier this month, concluded a non-aggression pact with local pro-Taliban militants in the tribal province of Waziristan - long considered a likely hiding place of Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda leaders - NATO leaders were as furious as Karzai. Reports that the deal had been brokered in part by exiled Taliban leader Mullah Omar only deepened the sense that Pakistan had, in effect, made a separate peace with the Taliban. Key NATO countries whose troops are fighting a hot war with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan - Britain, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands - actually...
...debate among the NATO countries was instructive: They agree that Pakistan should be pressured to end its backing of the Taliban and arrest Taliban commanders who operate openly in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, where, NATO says, the command, control and logistical center of the Taliban insurgency is based. But Britain cautioned against openly confronting and pressuring Pakistan, reminding the others of the critical importance of its intelligence cooperation in foiling al-Qaeda plots, most recently the scheme to blow up airliners over the Atlantic...