This article is the eighth of our series focusing on scenarios depicting interventions in the Libyan war. In our previous article, we discussed an international intervention that started to support the nationalist side of the conflict, but encountered difficulties in partnering with Libyan factions on the ground, as well as an air-strike-only campaign by the international coalition that abandoned the strategy of partnering with a spectrum of Libyan groups – a group of scenarios we wrap up here. In this article, we shall focus on scenarios related to an intervention that supports a UN-backed Libyan unity government, a case very similar to what is currently taking shape with the Government of National Accord. In our scenario, our UN-backed Libyan unity …
The Antarctic versus Dubai – The Planetary Crisis Rules (5)
Three seemingly unrelated events occurred in April 2014. The IPCC, the international body of scientists tasked with monitoring climate change, released its fifth report, assessing that, between today and 2100, climate change could induce a rise of one metre of the sea level, and the radical necessity to start adaptation policies (IPCC, fifth report, 2014). Meanwhile, in Dubai, the immense beach, which has become the support for a gigantic tourist and real estate industry, welcomed the first open water swimming championships on 18 and 19 April 2014 (1st Dubai International Open Water Swimming Championships). While this sportive event was taking place, a gigantic iceberg, six times the size of Manhattan, was breaking off from an Antarctic glacier into the open ocean (Will …
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The Islamic State in Libya – Force, Fighters and Tribes
What is the current state of play for the Islamic State in Libya, and, most importantly, how can it evolve? The question is increasingly relevant considering the rising possibility of an international intervention in Libya against the Islamic State, a complex matter considering notably the questioned domestic legitimacy of the new U.N.-prompted Government of National Authority (GNA) (e.g. APA, “Libya unity gov’t approval postponed indefinitely“, 19 April 2016), despite strong pressure imposed on Libyans to recognise it, such as the U.S. President “Executive Order — Blocking Property And Suspending Entry Into The United States Of Persons Contributing To The Situation In Libya” (White House, 19 April 2016). Is the Islamic State’s threat in Libya hyped and “not a realistic fallback” for a Khilafah, furthermore …
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Libya’s Future Scenarios – Sc 2 (7) Libyans vs International Coalition, Tensions ahead
This article is the seventh of our series focusing on scenarios depicting interventions in the Libyan war. In our previous article, we discussed an international intervention that entered the Libyan conflict in favor of the nationalists, but partnered with several powerful Libyan factions. Though the coalition prefers as many Libyan partners as possible, they focus more on the powerful groups, such as Zintan, Misrata, and the Libyan military. At this stage of our scenario, the international coalition encounters difficulties in partnering with Libyan factions and faces the potential of partnered groups breaking away. Note: Considering the future names of potential factions that would result from a new split between the unity government, we shall use the label nationalist for those that supported the nationalist/liberal-dominated …
Israel and the Coming Long Threat – The Planetary Crisis Rules (4)
Israel faces an unexpected and immensely dangerous strategic threat: climate change.
This threat is shared with the rest of the world: it is the way climate change keeps getting stronger and how its effects are combining with pre-existing systems of vulnerabilities at country and regional level, the Middle East in the case of Israel (Dahr Jamail, “Experts warn of “Cataclysmic changes” as planetary temperatures rise”, Truth Out, 27 April 2015).
The effects of this “long emergency” have started hammering the whole region and putting under pressure the sustainability of the countries that compose it (James Howard Kunstler, The Long emergency, surviving the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century, 2005).
Thus, Israel has also entered this new era. It is surrounded by countries already feeling the converging effects of the political and social crisis induced by climate change, its relationships with these countries was already complex (Jean-Michel Valantin, “Collapse war in the Middle East” and “Climate nightmare in the Middle East”, The Red Team Analysis Society, April 7 2015 and September 14 2015).
Continue reading “Israel and the Coming Long Threat – The Planetary Crisis Rules (4)”The Islamic State and Terrorist Attacks: License to Kill
As the Islamic State loses ground in Mesopotamia, in the west in Syria with the defeat in Palmyra (e.g. Adam Withnall The Independent, 27 March 2016), in the north with an increasingly large territory recaptured by the Kurds (e.g. Avi Asher-Schapiro, Vice News, 22 Dec 2015) and in the east in Iraq, first with the battle of Ramadi (“Battle of Ramadi (2015–16)“, Wikipedia) and now with the start of Iraqi “Operation Conquest” to free Mosul (Paul D. Shinkman, US News, 24 March 2016), it could be tempting to discard the Islamic State and its Khilafah as a bygone threat and a now inconsequential enemy . If this string of victories against the Islamic State is definitely important and crucial in the war against the Khilafah, …
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The Planetary Crisis Rules (3): Kazakhstan, a Case Study of the Anthropocene
A strange process is affecting the planet: the global life conditions, which have dominated the planet for thousands years are changing quickly, because of the massive impact of human activities and forms of development. Meanwhile, new life conditions emerge and they are not those that have supported the emergence and development of modern societies.
On the contrary, one must wonder if the modern world is going to be able to adapt itself to the new set of planetary conditions. These have been created through global urbanization, industry, chemical pollution, industrial agriculture, transformation and destruction of natural habitats and of animal and vegetal species. It goes with the disruption of the hydrologic cycle and climate change (John MC Neill, Something new under the Sun, an environmental history of the twentieth century, 2000).
This new era is qualified as the “Anthropocene”, in order to describe the fact that, at a global level, the human species has become the main geological and biological force on Earth ((Jan Zalasiewicz, Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?, 2011).
In order to penetrate the reality of the Anthropocene and of its origins, we shall focus upon the case of Kazakhstan.
We shall combine the “Anthropocene” perspective to strategic analysis, to capture the paroxystic way this country has gone from the former geologic era, known as the Eocene, which lasted for 13000 years, to nowadays and the emerging Anthropocene.
This paroxysm for Kazakhstan exemplifies the violence of the different processes that are at the origin of the Anthropocene, and which are nothing less than the transformation of the very fabric both of the planetary ecology and of society (Jean-Michel Valantin, “The Planetary Crisis Rules (1)”, The Red Team Analysis Society, January 25, 2016).
These dynamics will allow us to see, first, how the forced social and agricultural transformation of Kazakhstan have altered the social and ecological fabric of this country, and how these changes are reinforced by the global anthropogenic climate change.
Then we shall focus upon the way this transformation has been deepened by the military nuclear history of Kazakhstan, which is exemplary of the Anthropocene.
Finally, we shall turn to the way the emergence of the Anthropocene has been reinforced by the strategic history of the 20th century
Imposed transformation: the great socio-environmental dismantlement
Kazakhstan has known some of the most extreme forms of rapid and environmental, social and nuclear military transformation, imposed by the Stalinist regime, one of the most ruthless political power unleashed during the twentieth century (Robert Service, Russia, from Tsarism to the twenty-first century, 2015).
During the 1920s, the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakh people went through a forced settlement imposed by the Soviet authorities, without any preparation. In 1929, Stalin’s agrarian politics forced the Kazakh to give the majority of their cattle to the government, which killed 1,3 million people out of a 4 million strong population over a few years (Lucien Bianco, La Récidive, Révolution russe, révolution chinoise, 2014).
This went with a forced urbanization of the surviving population, and thus the social structures drastically changed (Ibid.). During the thirty years that followed, the Soviet program of agrarian development was accompanied by the massive transfers of population, which happened during and after World War II. It led to the installation of more than two million Russian people in Kazakhstan, which went with long-lasting social, ethnic, cultural, economic and political tensions. In the same time, this mammoth endeavour of social engineering came along the disappearance of the multi-millenarian way of life of the agro-pastoralist nomads (Sébastien Peyrouse, Marlène Laruelle, Éclats d’empire, Asie Centrale, Caucase, Afghanistan, 2013).
Within the same framework, the Soviet regime decided during the 1960s to transform part of the Kazakh steppe, in order to bolster agriculture, and thus the food security and economy of the Soviet Union (Robert Service, ibid). To attain this goal, the Amu Darya and the Syr Daria, the two rivers that were feeding the interior Aral Sea, were detoured by a gigantic work of canal development, in order to bring water to the chosen region to develop agricultural projects, especially related to cotton (Fred Pearce, When the Rivers run dry, 2006).
This immense Soviet water diversion’s project had as impact to devastate the Aral Sea. The Sea literally disappeared over the last fifty years as it was deprived of its two main water supplies. Furthermore, during the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of chemical pollution from the agricultural and industrial development of the region accumulated into the silt (John Mc Neill, ibid).
The current drying off of the sea exposes the polluted former marine basin to the constant wind, which spreads salt and chemically polluted dust from Kazakhstan to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and beyond (Jean-Michel Valantin, “The Planetary crisis rules”, ibid). As a result, chronic epidemics of blood and kidney ailments as well as specific problems for pregnant women and unborn children spread (Pearce, ibid).
So, today, the Aral Basin is constituted by a new system of topsoil, water, chemical, weather, and climatic conditions, with new interacting compared with those existing before the 1950s. These current conditions are not anymore favorable to the collective human existence (Valantin, ibid), contrary to what it was only sixty years ago.
This already dangerous situation combines itself with the effects of climate change on Kazakhstan. In effect, during the 20th century, the rising of the regional temperatures was twice the global average, reaching between 2°C and 3.6°C. This has heavy consequences on the Kazakh agriculture, which is the world 17th producer of wheat and 7th exporter. According to USAID, the spring wheat harvests could decrease by more than 70% after 2030, which could have dire consequences for the Kazakh food security as well as for the world food market and thus for the food security of numerous countries (“Kazakhsthan – Environment and climate change”, USAID, March 18, 2016).
In effect, the relative decrease of the Russian and Ukrainian agricultural productivity in 2010 resulting from a historical heat wave had heavy consequences in 2011 on the world wheat prices, with dramatic social and political consequences, notably subjecting the fragile Arab societies to heavy pressure, which, in turn, fed the tensions that drove the “Arab spring” (Werrell and Femia, The Arab Spring and Climate Change, 2013.
The long nuclear bombing
Between 1949 and 1989, what happened in the northeast region of Semipalatinsk, turned by Moscow into the place where the Soviet military prepared for nuclear war, is another aspect of the brutal forcing of Kazakhstan into the realm of modernity (Alain Joxe, Le cycle de la dissuasion, 1990).
Then, Semipalatinsk became the “nuclear polygone” where more than 456 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs were detonated. Semipalatinsk was one of the main spots of the Cold War nuclear arms race (“The Semipalatinsk Test Site”, International Atomic Energy Agency).
As a result, the 19000 square kilometres area became one of the most heavily irradiated inhabited regions in the world, the radioactivity affecting the health of one Kazakh out of ten, with heavy public health consequences.
The discovery of the immensity of the danger inherent to this region, notably because of the very large-scale environmental risk, to which should be added the contraband of plutonium and irradiated materials, led the Russian, the Kazakh and the American political, scientific and military authorities to work secretly together for ten years in order to decontaminate and neutralize this “plutonium mountain” (“Semipalatinsk Test Site”, Nuclear Threat Initiative NTI).
In fact, this international nuclear cooperation centered on Semipalatinsk is intrinsically inscribed in what we call here “Anthropocene politics”. Indeed, one if the strongest signals identified by the scientists in order to demonstrate the emergence of the Anthropocene is a singular layer of dust all over the planet, which is one of the effects of the different campaigns of nuclear test bombings since the first test explosion in 1944 in New Mexico (Sarah Griffiths, “Dawn of the Anthropocene era: new geological epoch began with testing of the atomic bomb, experts claim”, Mail On Line, 16 January 2015).
It must be noted that on 8 September 2006, Kazakhstan signed the Central Asia nuclear weapons free zone treaty, with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (“Central Asia nuclear weapons free zone (CANFWZ)”, Nuclear Threat Initiative NTI). This may indicate the particular sensitivity and awareness of the Central Asian Republics to the nuclear danger.
A strategic analysis of the Anthropocene in Kazakhstan
In other words, the forced settlement of a nomadic population, urbanization, the destruction of the Aral Sea and the long nuclear bombing of Semipalatinsk are manifestations of how, during the 20th century, Kazakhstan went through a massive socio-environmental transformation, exemplary of the dynamics of the Anthropocene.
This transformation was imposed in order to support the political project of accelerated modernization at the heart of the Soviet regime (Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, Stalinism as a civilization, 1997).
It was exerted on the people, the social structures, the land, the surface water cycle, and the air to turn the country into a material support for the forced industrial, agricultural, and military nuclear development of Soviet Russia, which was imposing itself as a super power.
From a strategic point of view, it appears that the Second World War and the following Cold War have been a fundamental driver of the industrial, military and strategic dynamics, which synergy have been so powerful that they have altered the very geophysics of the Earth. Moreover, these changes, from radioactive pollution to anthropogenic climate change, are permanent transformations of the ecological conditions of the human social development.
In other terms, the case of Kazakhstan reveals the role played at the origin of the Anthropocene not only by the Soviet political, agricultural and industrial dynamics but also by the strategic and military dynamics of the 20th century (Gabriel Kolko, Century of war, politics, conflicts and society since 1914, 1994).
Similarly, the First and the Second World War have been major boosters for the development of modern agriculture and industry. Bolstered by this immense momentum, those latter have become essential supports for the development and power of modern societies and states, which growth is in itself a main driver of the Anthropocene (Tim Flannery, Here on Earth, a twin history of the Planet Earth and of the human race, 2011 and Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down, catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, 2006).
Furthermore, the transformation of Kazakhstan has induced the exploitation of oil in the Caspian Sea and at the north of the Caspian Basin, knowing that the use of oil is one of the main drivers of anthropogenic change, which hammers Central Asia (James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, The Oil Road, Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London, 2012 and IPCC, fifth report, 2014).
In fact, the fate of Kazakhstan condenses the way modern war, industry, agriculture, international competition and the alteration of ecology as well as of the social fabric are united in a self-reinforcing planetary-social loop of transformation so powerful and permanent that it changes not only entire continental regions, but our planet itself.
It now remains to see if this loop can be governed, or not.
Featured image: Fort-Shevchenko , Kazakhstan Bebop Drone 2015-09-02 by w0zny CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Scenarios for the Future of Libya – Sc 2 (6) International Intervention with Libyan Partners
This article is the sixth of our series focusing on scenarios depicting interventions in the Libyan war. In our previous article, we discussed the preliminary stages of an international coalition created to intervene in Libya in favor of the nationalists – either by invitation from the nationalist government, or if the new unity government fails and fragments. However, Libya’s new Government of National Accord (GNA) is now recognized by the U.S., UK, Italy, Germany and France as “the only legitimate government in Libya” (European Union Statement, March 13, 2016; Musa, Boston Globe, March 13, 2016), which means that any international intervention that favors the nationalist side will now occur only after (and if) this unity government fragments into former factions. …
An Updated Guide to the Islamic State Psyops
last update: selected 10 videos… updated dates for all the latest issue of magazines, Amaq in Bengali, al-Bayan in Bengali. The defeated attack by the Islamic State on Ben Guerdane in Tunisia on 7 March 2016 probably indicated a worrying shift in tactics and strategy, which must be considered (e.g. Vanessa Szakal, “Mainstream Media on Ben Guerdane: victory and foreboding in Tunisia“, Nawaa, 11 March 2016). This attack may be seen as having been heralded by a significant call made by the Islamic State to the Islamic Maghreb through five psyops videos published over two days (19-20 January 2016). In parallel, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb started to copycat the Islamic State’s type of videos (Andrea Spada, “Al-Qaeda tries to imitate Daesh in new threatening …
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Tempobs – Things Come Together: Saudi Arabia and Iran
Early 2016 has witnessed a succession of dramatic developments that have inflamed the already contentious Iran-Saudi relationship, bringing it to the forefront of global governmental and media attention. These have included: Riyadh’s decision to break diplomatic relations with Tehran at the beginning of the year, the accelerated decline of the price of oil deeply affecting both countries’ economies, the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal leading to Iran’s reinsertion into the global economic system, and a reversal of fortune in the Syrian civil war with Iranian and Russian-supported regime forces scoring major advances against the Saudi-backed opposition. We shall survey these developments (deferring, however, discussion of the fast changing situation in Syria to a later post) with the aim of …
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