In both cases, however, the wars proved lengthy and expensive. Iraq was all but engulfed in civil war following the fall of Baghdad and the major insurgency that followed, while in Afghanistan reaction to the intervention was as resourceful and determined as it had been against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, with Pakistan again providing crucial support for the hardline resistance fighters. Many thousands of servicemen gave their lives, while more than 150,000 US veterans are listed as suffering from wounds and injuries that rank them as being at least 70 per cent disabled.70 This comes on top of the hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed or wounded in military action or – by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in cross-fire, drone strikes or car bombings – as ‘collateral damage’.71
Financial costs galloped upwards at an astonishing pace. One recent survey estimates the cost of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being as high as $6 trillion – or $75,000 for every American household once long-term medical care and disability compensation is taken into account. This represents around 20 per cent of the rise in US national debt between 2001 and 2012.72
That the effect of the interventions has been more limited than hoped only makes things worse. By 2011, President Obama had all but given up on Afghanistan, according to his former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who realised how bleak the situation was in a meeting in the White House in March 2011. ‘As I sat there, I thought: The President doesn’t trust his commander [General Petraeus], can’t stand [Afghan President] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.’73 It is a description angrily echoed by President Karzai, who had been built up, supported and, in the view of many, enriched by the west. ‘As a nation’, he told the author William Dalrymple, Afghanistan has suffered enormously because of US policy; the Americans ‘did not fight against terrorism where it was, where it still is. They continued damaging Afghanistan and its people.’ There was no other way to put it, he said: ‘This is a betrayal.’74
In Iraq, meanwhile, there is little to show for the loss of life, the vast cost and the dashed hopes for the future. Ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the country could be found at the lower end of the indices that track the transition to healthy democracy. On human rights, press freedom, minority rights, corruption and freedom of speech, Iraq ranks no higher than it did under Saddam Hussein, and in some cases it is lower. The country has been crippled by uncertainty and unrest, with minority populations subjected to catastrophic upheaval and grotesque violence. Prospects for the future look bleak.
Then, of course, there is the reputational damage to the west in general and to the US in particular. ‘We should avoid as much as possible creating images of Americans killing Moslems,’ Donald Rumsfeld advised President Bush two weeks after 9/11.76 This apparent sensitivity was quickly replaced by images of inmates being held without trial in the deliberate limbo of Guantánamo Bay – a location specifically chosen on the basis that inmates could be denied the protection allowed by the US Constitution. Inquiries into the run-up to the Iraq War in the United States and the United Kingdom found that evidence had been misrepresented, manipulated and moulded to support decisions that had already been reached behind closed doors. Efforts to control the media in Iraq post-Saddam, where the concept of freedom would be trumpeted by journalists using ‘approved US Government information’ to underline ‘hopes for a prosperous democratic future’, evoked memories of Soviet-style commissars sanctioning stories based not on reality but on a dream.76
On top of that come extra-judicial renditions, torture on an institutional scale and drone strikes against figures deemed – but not necessarily proven – to be threats. It says a great deal about the sophistication and pluralism of the west that these issues can be debated in public, and that many are horrified by the hypocrisy of the message of the primacy of democracy on the one hand and the practice of imperial power on the other. So appalled were some that they decided to leak classified information that laid bare just how policy was created: pragmatically, on the hoof and often with little thought about international law and justice. None of this showed the west in a good light – something felt keenly by the intelligence agencies themselves, which have fought to keep reports of the nature and extent of torture classified, even in the face of direct challenges from the US Senate itself.
While attention has been focused on efforts to influence and shape Iraq and Afghanistan, it is important not to overlook the attempts to bring about change in Iran. These have included sanctions, enforced dynamically by Washington, which have arguably been counter-productive. As in Iraq in the 1990s, it is clear that the effect is strongest and most pronounced on the poor, the weak and the disenfranchised – making their bad lot even worse. Restricting Iranian oil exports of course has an impact on the standard of living not only of Iranian citizens but also of people living on the other side of the world. In a global energy market, the price per unit of gas, electricity and fuel affects farmers in Minnesota, taxi drivers in Madrid, girls studying in sub-Saharan Africa and coffee growers in Vietnam. We are all directly affected by the power politics going on thousands of miles away. It is easy to forget that, in the developing world, cents can make the difference between life and death; the enforcement of embargoes can mean silent suffocation for those whose voices cannot be heard – mothers in the slums of Mumbai, basket weavers in the suburbs of Mombasa or women trying to oppose illegal mining activities in South America. And all so that Iran is forced to disavow a nuclear programme built on US technology sold to a despotic, intolerant and corrupt regime in the 1970s.
As it is, apart from the diplomatic and economic pressure put on Teheran, the US has consistently made it clear that it would consider using force against Iran to impose an end to the enrichment programme. In the final stages of the last Bush administration, Dick Cheney claimed that he had pushed hard for strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, even though reactors such as Bushihr are now heavily protected by sophisticated Russian Tor surface-to-air missile systems. ‘I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than many of my colleagues,’ he said in 2009.77 Others warned him that pre-emptive strikes would make the situation across the region worse, not better. He has returned to the idea repeatedly. Negotiations will fail unless there is a threat of military action, he said in 2013, for example. ‘I have trouble seeing how we’re going to achieve our objective short of that,’ he told ABC News.78
The theme that the west needs to threaten – and be willing to use – force to get what it wants has become a mantra in Washington. ‘Iran will have to prove that its programme is really peaceful,’ Secretary of State John Kerry said in November 2013. Iran should bear in mind, he warned, that ‘the president . . . has said specifically that he has not taken [the] threat [of military action] off the table’. It is a message that he has articulated repeatedly. ‘The military option that is available to the United States is ready,’ Kerry said in an interview with the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya channel in January 2014. If necessary, he added, the US would ‘do what it would have to do’.79 ‘As I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency,’ President Obama stressed, ‘I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.’80
Despite issuing threats designed to bring Iran to the negotiating table, the US appears to have been taking action behind the scenes to achieve what it wants anyway. While there were several potential sources for the Stuxnet virus that attacked the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran and then other reactors across the country, multiple indicators suggest that the highly sophisticated and aggressive cyber strategies targeting the nuclear programme could be traced back to the United States – and directly to the White House.81 Cyber-terrorism is acceptable, it seems, as long as it is in the hands of western intelligence agencies. Like the threat to use force against Iran, protecting a global order that suits western
interests is simply a new chapter in the attempt to maintain position in the ancient crossroads of civilisation. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
Conclusion
The New Silk Road
In many ways, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have represented something of a disaster for the United States and Europe as they have played out their doomed struggle to retain their position in the vital territories that link east with west. What has been striking throughout the events of recent decades is the west’s lack of perspective about global history – about the bigger picture, the wider themes and the larger patterns playing out in the region. In the minds of policy planners, politicians, diplomats and generals, the problems of Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq seemed distinct, separate and only loosely linked to each other.
And yet taking a step back provides valuable perspective as well as remarkable insight, enabling us to see a broad region that is in turmoil. In Turkey, a battle is raging for the soul of the country, with internet providers and social media being shut down on a whim by a government divided about where the future lies. The dilemma is replicated in Ukraine, where different national visions have torn the country apart. Syria too is going through a traumatic experience of profound change, as forces of conservatism and liberalism battle each other at huge cost. The Caucasus has been through a period of transition too, with multiple issues of identity and nationalism bubbling up, most notably in Chechnya and Georgia. Then of course, there is the region further east, where the ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 was the prelude to a long period of political instability, and Xinjiang in western China where the Uighur population have become increasingly unsettled and hostile, with terrorist attacks now such a threat that the authorities have decreed that growing a long beard is a mark of suspicious intentions, and have begun a formal programme, known as Project Beauty, to prevent women from wearing the veil.
There is more going on, then, than the clumsy interventions of the west in Iraq and Afghanistan and the use of pressure in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere. From east to west, the Silk Roads are rising up once more. It is easy to feel confused and disturbed by dislocation and violence in the Islamic world, by religious fundamentalism, by clashes between Russia and its neighbours or by China’s struggle with extremism in its western provinces. What we are witnessing, however, are the birthing pains of a region that once dominated the intellectual, cultural and economic landscape and which is now re-emerging. We are seeing the signs of the world’s centre of gravity shifting – back to where it lay for millennia.
There are obvious reasons why this is happening. Most important, of course, are the natural resources of this region. Monopolising the resources of Persia, Mesopotamia and the Gulf was a priority during the First World War, and efforts to secure the greatest prize in history have dominated the attitudes of the western world to this region ever since. If anything, there is now even more to play for than there was when the scale of Knox D’Arcy’s finds first became apparent: the combined proved crude reserves under the Caspian Sea alone are nearly twice those of the entire United States.1 From Kurdistan, where newly discovered oil reservoirs such as the Taq Taq field, whose production has risen from 2,000 to 250,000 barrels per day since 2007 – worth hundreds of millions of dollars per month – to the huge Karachaganak reserve on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia which contains an estimated 42 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as liquefied gas and crude oil, the countries of this region are groaning under its natural resources.
Then there is the Donbas basin that straddles Ukraine’s eastern frontier with Russia, which has long been famed for coal deposits estimated to have extractable reserves of around 10 billion tons. This too is an area of rising significance because of further mineral wealth. Recent geology-based assessments by the US Geological Service have suggested the presence of 1.4 billion barrels of oil and 2.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as considerable estimated volumes of natural gas liquids.2 Alongside this sit the natural gas supplies of Turkmenistan. With no less than 700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas estimated to be below the ground, the country controls the fourth largest supplies in the world. And then there are the mines of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan that form part of the Tian Shan belt, second only to the Witwatersrand basin in South Africa for the size of its gold deposits. Or there are beryllium, dysprosium and other ‘rare earths’ found in Kazakhstan that are vital for the manufacture of mobile phones, laptops and rechargeable batteries, as well as the uranium and plutonium that are essential for nuclear energy – and nuclear warheads.
Even the earth itself is rich and valuable. Once, it was the horses of Central Asia that were a highly prized commodity, coveted in the imperial court in China and in the markets of Delhi, as famous to the chroniclers of Kiev as those of Constantinople and Beijing. Today, large parts of the grazing land of the steppes have been transformed to become the astonishingly productive grainfields of southern Russia and Ukraine: indeed, so fertile and sought after is the trademark chernozem (literally ‘dark earth’) that one NGO has found that close to a billion dollars’ worth of this soil is dug up and sold annually in Ukraine alone.3
The impact of instability, unrest or war in this region is not just felt in the price of oil at petrol pumps across the world; it affects the price of the technology we use and even that of the bread we eat. In the summer of 2010, for example, weather conditions produced a poor harvest in Russia, with yields well below domestic demand. As soon as the likely deficit became clear, an immediate ban was placed on the international export of cereals, effective with ten days’ warning. The impact on global cereal prices was instant: they rose 15 per cent in just two days.4 Turmoil in Ukraine at the start of 2014 had a similar impact, forcing the price of wheat sharply upwards because of fears about its effect on agricultural production in the world’s third largest wheat exporter.
The cultivation of other crops in this part of the world follows similar principles. Once, Central Asia was famous for Babur’s orange trees and, later, for the tulips that were so highly prized in capital cities across western Europe in the seventeenth century that canal houses in Amsterdam were exchanged for single bulbs. Today it is the poppy that is fought over: its cultivation, above all in Afghanistan, underpins worldwide consumption patterns for heroin, and determines its price – and of course impacts the costs that result from treatment for drug addiction and rehabilitation care as well as the price for trying to police organised crime.5
This is a part of the world that may seem strange and unfamiliar to the west, and even alien to the point of bizarre. In Turkmenistan, a giant golden statue of the President that revolves to face the direction of the sun was erected in 1998, while four years later the months were renamed, with April (previously ‘Aprel’) changed to ‘Gurbansoltan’ after the then leader’s late mother. Or there is neighbouring Kazakhstan, where the President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was re-elected in 2011 after winning an impressive 96 per cent of the vote, and leaked diplomatic cables reveal that pop stars like Elton John and Nelly Furtado have performed private concerts for the President’s family after receiving offers that were too good to refuse.6 In Tajikistan, after briefly holding the record for the world’s tallest flagpole, attention has now turned to building Central Asia’s largest theatre, to sit alongside the region’s largest library, biggest museum and most voluminous tea house.7
Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan, over on the western side of the Caspian Sea, President Aliyev – whose family was compared by US diplomats to ‘the Corleones of Godfather fame’ – had to make do with an only marginally less convincing 86 per cent of the vote in recent elections. Here, we learn that the ruler’s son reportedly owns a portfolio of villas and apartments in Dubai worth a cool $45 million – or 10,000 years of the average Azeri income; not bad for an eleven-year-old.8 Or there is Iran to the south, where one recent President is on record denying the Holocaust and accusing ‘western powers and despots’ of developing the HIV vi
rus ‘so that they could sell their drugs and medical equipment to the poor countries’.9
It is a region characterised in western minds as backward, despotic and violent. For too long, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2011, the centre of Asia has been ‘torn apart by conflict and division’, a place where trade and co-operation have been stifled by ‘bureaucratic barriers and other impediments to the flow of goods and people’; the only way to a ‘better future for the people who live there’, she concluded, was to try to create lasting stability and security. Only then will it be possible ‘to attract more private investment’ that, in her view at least, is essential for social and economic development.10
For all their apparent ‘otherness’, however, these lands have always been of pivotal importance in global history in one way or another, linking east and west, serving as a melting-pot where ideas, customs and languages have jostled with each other from antiquity to today. And today the Silk Roads are rising again – unobserved and overlooked by many. Economists have yet to turn their attention to the riches that lie in or under the soil, beneath the waters or buried in the mountains of the belts linking the Black Sea, Asia Minor and the Levant with the Himalayas. Instead they have focused on groups of countries with no historical connections but superficially similar measurable data, like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), often now voguishly replaced by MIST countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey).11 In fact, it is the true Mediterranean – the ‘centre of the world’ – to which we should be looking. This is no Wild East, no New World waiting to be discovered – but a region and a series of connections re-emerging in front of our eyes.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Page 64