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01 October 2010 By Rick Rozoff
The Foreign Ministry of Bangladesh disclosed on
September 26 that the United States had requested
combat troops for the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization’s military command in Afghanistan.
The effort to recruit Bangladeshi soldiers for the
nine-year-old war was made in an overture by U.S.
Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan
Richard Holbrooke to Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister
Dipu Moni in New York City, presumably on the
sidelines of or following last week’s United Nations
General Assembly session.
A statement issued by the government of Bangladesh
said that Holbrooke “sought for any kind of help like
deploying combat troops, providing economic and
development assistance or giving training among the
law enforcement agencies.” [1]
Should the government of Bangladesh accede to the
American request, it would become the 48th official
Troop Contributing Nation for NATO’s International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the seventh
Asia-Pacific nation to provide troops to the North
Atlantic military alliance for its war in South Asia,
one which has further advanced across Afghanistan’s
eastern border into Pakistan with marked ferocity
during the past five days. NATO will have gained
another major ally in the building of its Asian
complement using the Afghan-Pakistani war theater as
the grounds for integrating the armed forces of
countries on the other side of the world from the
North Atlantic for what is expanding into a global
U.S.-led military network.
Bangladesh’s combat forces would join military
units from Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea,
Australia and New Zealand among Asia-Pacific
countries, with a report that a 275-troop marine
contingent from Tonga is also to arrive in Afghanistan
soon. Japan has personnel assigned to NATO’s
Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the country and in
the past has supplied the U.S. with naval assistance
for the war effort.
The inclusion of Bangladesh into the ranks of
NATO’s ISAF, however, would constitute a milestone in
two key ways. It would be the only country in South
Asia with troops in the war zone aside from the two
nations in which the expanding conflict is being
fought: Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Bangladesh would
be the second most populous state contributing to
NATO’s military campaign, only surpassed by the U.S.,
as it has the seventh largest population in the world
at 160 million.
The war in Afghanistan has provided the Pentagon
and NATO the groundwork for working with the
militaries of scores of nations under real world and
real time combat conditions. Every European country
except Belarus, Cyprus, Malta, Moldova, Russia and
Serbia has deployed troops to Afghanistan under NATO
command, as have the nations of the South Caucasus:
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The United Arab
Emirates is the first Persian Gulf state to do so.
Though not yet official contributing nations,
several other countries have personnel in Afghanistan
or on the way, including Bahrain, Colombia, Egypt and
Japan. Over a quarter of the world’s nations have
supplied military contingents for the North Atlantic
bloc’s war in Afghanistan.
In the past year both the U.S. and NATO have
intensified activities aimed at integrating Bangladesh
into the West’s military nexus, both in preparation
for the deployment of its troops to Afghanistan and
for solidifying what for the past decade has been
referred to as Asian NATO.
This May 12 a roundtable meeting was held in the
capital of Bangladesh entitled “The Role of NATO in
the New Security Order” with the participation of
several “experts, military personnel and former
government officials from the region.” [2] The title
of the event suggests it was conducted in the context
of last year’s discussions of the new NATO Strategic
Concept held in several European and North American
nations. The Indian subcontinent is far-removed from
the North Atlantic Alliance’s point of origin, but the
new doctrine to be adopted this November at NATO’s
summit in Portugal will institutionalize the bloc’s
expansion into an international military and – to use
its own term – security organization.
The keynote address was delivered by former
Norwegian defense minister Anders Christian Sjaastad
and the roundtable as a whole “discuss[ed] the present
and possible role of NATO in [the] new security
order….”
A local newspaper account of the meeting reported
that “Speakers at a roundtable here…said the greatest
evolution taken place in NATO over the past 20 years
was its transition from a static, defensive force to a
force ready to take on security missions well beyond
its traditional Trans-Atlantic borders.”
“Since the last revision of the strategic concept,
NATO forces have undertaken missions in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, counter-piracy missions
in the Gulf of Aden, counter-terrorism missions in the
Mediterranean Sea, training missions in Iraq, and
active military operations in Afghanistan.” (NATO’s
bombing campaign in and deployment of 60,000 troops to
Bosnia in 1994-1995 predated the current Strategic
Concept adopted in 1999.)
NATO has in fact expanded into a global military
force, the first in history, and in the words of the
former Norwegian defense chief, “It was the attacks of
September 11 in 2001 and the Afghanistan campaign that
turned what had been theoretical analysis into
reality.” [3]
“The event made NATO ‘go global.’” [4]
Whether fully cognizant of it at the time or not,
Sjaastad spoke volumes regarding NATO’s 21st century
plans in stating that Asia “is where the action is
nowadays. Europe, in comparison, is rather dull….All
the global conflicts originated from this part of the
world.” Whether regarding the recent or remote past,
his claim that all global conflicts originated from
Asia is an absurd contention, but is indicative of
NATO’s determination to pacify and subjugate “unruly”
parts of the non-Euro-Atlantic world.
The opening remarks were made by retired Major
General ANM Muniruzzaman, the founder and president of
the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies
which sponsored the event, who “spoke of the eastward
expansion of NATO, saying that the institution has
undergone a sea change. The New NATO had a fresh
strategic concept and was expanding beyond its
original Eurocentric perimeters.” That is, Europe has
been united under NATO control and now it is time to
move on Asia.
Someone identified as retired Major General Roomi
was in the audience and commented from the floor:
“NATO instead of doing policing is protecting its
own security and posing a threat to others. And why
are you in Afghanistan? It is not just because of Al
Qaeda and the Taliban. It is also because of the oil
in the region. You want to ‘tame’ Pakistan, Iran. All
this has other motives. NATO only comes with its own
interests at heart.” [5] The former general evidently
remembered which side the U.S. and its NATO allies
were on during his country’s 1971 war of independence.
Since late last year the Pentagon has demonstrably
increased efforts to pull the armed forces of
Bangladesh into its geopolitical orbit.
In early November three U.S. military commanders
visited Bangladesh. Theirs were names to conjure with:
Lieutenant General Benjamin Mixon, Commanding General
of United States Army Pacific and former commander of
the Multi-National Division North in Iraq. Vice
Admiral John Bird, commander of the U.S. Seventh
Fleet, the largest forward-deployed fleet in the
world. U.S. Marine Corps Major General Randolph Alles,
Director for Strategic Planning and Policy at the U.S.
Pacific Command, the largest overseas military command
in the world.
The three made “separate trips, but the goal of
each of the visits [was] to strengthen bilateral
security cooperation between the two countries.” They
met with the chiefs of the host country’s army and
navy as well as senior government officials.
Beforehand the U.S. embassy in Dhaka announced that
“Their discussions will focus on interoperability,
readiness in the region, security-force assistance,
and bilateral approaches to maintaining regional
stability.” [6]
Also in early November the U.S. led the first of
four Tiger Shark military exercises held in the
nation. The latest, Tiger Shark-4, ended on September
26.
At the close of the first, U.S. Ambassador James F.
Moriarty attended a graduation ceremony for 59 navy
commandos at the Bangladesh Navy Special Warfare and
Diving Salvage Centre at the BNS (Bangladesh Naval
Ship) Issa Khan Naval Base in Chittagong. “The
commandos received specialised training during the
US-Bangladesh ‘Tiger Shark’ exercise” that ended on
November 13.
According to the American envoy, “The United States
Government will continue to assist the Government of
Bangladesh in developing this professional, elite
force.
“The training demonstrates the United States
Government’s commitment to Bangladesh and to regional
security by promoting military-to-military
relationships throughout Asia and the Pacific.” [7]
Tiger Shark-2 was held this May and U.S. army
personnel “provided highly sophisticated training to
the Bangladesh Army on counter terrorism, marksmanship
and urban operations.” Ambassador Moriarty “reaffirmed
the US government’s support to the Bangladesh
government’s efforts to establish a more capable
military.” [8]
Tiger Shark-3 occurred the next month and this time
was multi-service on the Bangladeshi side, with army,
navy, air force and coast guard units training with
the U.S. to “enhance interoperability between the
militaries of the two countries” in exercises that
included “combat diving, infiltration and
ex-filtration techniques, rappelling, helicopters
operations, vessel boarding search and seizure, small
boat maintenance and repair, maritime navigation,
small unit tactics and small boat handling and
tactics.” [9]
Tiger Shark-4 was held from September 19-26 with
500 Bangladesh army, air force and navy personnel
along with helicopters and ships and 350 U.S. troops
and aircraft, helicopters and ships. For the first
time the exercises provided comprehensive “joint
military exposure between Bangladesh and the USA,” and
“a Commodore from the Bangladesh side and a Rear
Admiral from the US side” led their respective
nation’s forces. [10]
As the largest of the four Tiger Shark exercises
was underway, 65 American airmen and two C-130
Hercules military transport aircraft arrived in
Bangladesh for the three-day Cope South 2010 exercise
to practice “aircraft generation and recovery,
low-level navigation, tactical airdrop, and air-land
missions; and conducting subject-matter expert
exchanges in the operations, maintenance and rigging
disciplines” [11] for regional disasters. In the words
of U.S. 36th Airlift Squadron commander Lieutenant
Colonel Tim Rapp, “The techniques our two nations
share and the relationships we build will
significantly ease planning and execution of any
future combined efforts.” [12]
Washington’s efforts to recruit Bangladesh into an
Asia-Pacific military alliance that includes all but a
small handful of nations in the region complements its
building a new army and upgrading strategic air bases
in Afghanistan. Its penetration of Pakistan’s armed
forces. Its further forging of a strategic military
alliance with India. [13]
After employing NATO to subjugate Europe, launching
U.S. Africa Command to gain military dominance over
the 54-nation continent, and occupying and pacifying
most of the Middle East, the Pentagon is concentrating
on Asia and increasingly on South Asia.
1) Radio Netherlands/Agence France-Presse,
September 26, 2010
2) The New Nation, May 11, 2010
3) The New Nation, May 13, 2010
4) Probe News Magazine, May 2010
http://www.probenewsmagazine.com/index.php?index=2&contentId=6024
5) Ibid
6) All Headline News, November 2, 2009
7) Financial Express, November 13, 2009
8) Associated Press of Pakistan, May 13, 2010
9) All Headline News, June 20, 2010
10) The New Nation, September 15, 2010
11) 13th Air Force Public Affairs, September 21, 2010
12) American Forces Press Service, September 21, 2010
13) India: U.S. Completes Global Military Structure
Stop NATO, September 10, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/09/10 /india-u-s-completes-global-military-structure
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