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Понедельник, 29 августа 2016 16:48

KEEPING TURKEY IN THE U.S. ORBIT

Sohrab Ahmari, The Wall Street Journal, 28.08.2016   

 

LEADERS FROM KIEV TO JERUSALEM TO TOKYO ARE FAMILIAR WITH ANKARA'S DISCONTENT WITH OBAMA   

 

Turkey is living through a 24/7 state of emergency. The latest alarm came Thursday with an assassination attempt on the leader of the secular opposition. Kemal Kilicdaroglu was traveling the country’s northeast when his convoy came under fire. A member of his security detail was killed in the shootout, but Mr. Kilicdaroglu was unharmed and evacuated by helicopter. The perpetrators escaped, though Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s aides say his bodyguards may have killed one of them.  

 

“Even though we are attacked, we will continue with determination in the path that we believe in,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said in an interview Friday at the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. The separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, took credit but said government security forces, not Mr. Kilicdaroglu, were the intended target.  

 

In today’s Turkey such incidents capture headlines only to be overshadowed a few hours later by the next thing to go bang. Sure enough, hours after the Kilicdaroglu attempt, a truck bomb on Friday killed 11 Turkish police officers near the Syrian border. The PKK also claimed responsibility for that attack.  

 

Life goes on. Men and women still gather in outdoor bars to sip raki, watch soccer and shoot the breeze. The margin of personal freedom remains wider than in most of the region. Even so, the mood is dark. With July’s failed coup, nearly three million Syrian refugees, a fresh PKK insurgency in the southeast and the menace of Islamic State, the Turks feel they can’t catch a break.  

 

The Turkey emerging out of these manifold crises is more insular, paranoid and illiberal. This means Ankara may no longer be as solidly anchored in the West as it has been since the Cold War. Washington assigns the blame for this turn to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and rightly so in Turkey’s domestic sphere. But the president isn’t alone to blame for Ankara’s troubles abroad.  

 

Mr. Erdogan’s project to concentrate power in the presidency was well under way before the coup attempt on July 15. Most serious observers here believe followers of the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen organized the ill-fated coup. Few have forgotten that the Gülenists were the authoritarian handmaidens to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, before the two Islamist camps turned on each other in 2013. In the mid-2000s, when Messrs. Erdogan and Gülen were still allies, well-placed Gülenists in the judiciary persecuted and sidelined a common enemy: the old secular establishment.  

 

The failed coup has accelerated Mr. Erdogan’s will to power. But it has also rallied much of the country behind his grievance narrative. Turks, secular and pious, feel betrayed. The West lectures them about the post-coup purges, they complain, without acknowledging the deep trauma of the coup itself: the putschist pilots who buzzed their apartments, the tanks that rolled down their streets.  

 

Meanwhile, pro-government media feed the population a steady diet of ever-nuttier propaganda suggesting U.S. involvement in the coup attempt. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the opposition leader, says the ruling party’s dominance over media leaves little doubt that it is “guiding the public.” A Western diplomat puts it nicely: “The government shapes public opinion and then claims to be constrained by that same opinion.”  

 

Then again, externalizing responsibility for one’s destiny is nothing new in this part of the world. The relevant question for the American national interest is how to prevent this strategically crucial country from drifting further toward Russia’s orbit and away from the U.S.-led security order — or what remains of it after eight years of President Barack Obama.  

 

Here the Turks ought to be listened to. Not all of Ankara’s lashing out at Washington derives from Mr. Erdogan’s cynicism and ideological hubris. Some of it is in reaction to the same sudden shift in U.S. policy under Mr. Obama that has jolted allies world-wide. Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent.  

 

Turkey has felt the jolt most acutely in Syria. Mr. Erdogan took Mr. Obama at his word when the American said in 2011 that Bashar Assad “must go.” He also took seriously Mr. Obama’s red line on chemical weapons.  

 

Turkey’s much-maligned early policy in Syria included overt support for moderate rebels and a laissez-faire policy that enabled the movement of more hard-line jihadists into the country. Ankara expected that Washington would favor its traditional allies and disfavor others: namely the Iranian mullahs, Mr. Assad and their various Shiite proxies.  

 

Mr. Obama scrambled that friend-enemy pattern. He awkwardly ignored the red line, and the U.S. carried out secret talks that would culminate in a nuclear deal with Tehran and tie America’s hands against Mr. Assad. Then came a second shock to the Turks. America increasingly relied on Syrian-Kurdish factions with close ties to the Turkish PKK as its main ground forces in the country.  

 

Suddenly an internationally designated terrorist group came to be seen “as defenders of civilization,” a senior Turkish government official says. The Syrian Kurds did defend civilization against Islamic State barbarism, and valiantly. But the Turks believe, not without reason, that the PKK has also been emboldened by the legitimacy that flowed to their factional cousins in Syria.  

 

There is a lesson here about the destabilizing effects that follow when a superpower tires of its leadership role. For the White House, irritating the Turks was a price worth paying for a small American footprint in Syria. But it would behoove the next administration not to humiliate the Turks with the fiction that the PKK and the Syrian-Kurdish question are separate.  

 

Nor should anyone be shocked that Turkey aims with its recent Syrian incursion to check both Islamic State and the growth of a contiguous PKK-friendly Kurdish statelet on its doorstep. Any Turkish government would behave the same way.  

 

Washington should also be forthright with Mr. Erdogan about his own authoritarian drive at home. A Turkey that isn’t beholden to the whims of one man will be better equipped to cope with Syria’s furies.

Понедельник, 29 августа 2016 16:31

A POWERFUL RUSSIAN WEAPON: THE SPREAD OF FALSE STORIES

Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times, 28.08.2016  

 

With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.  

 

The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.  

 

They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.  

 

“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s spokeswoman.  

 

As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But they, numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.  

 

In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Mr. Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.  

 

“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”   

 

The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past.  

 

The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the European Union have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.  

 

The Kremlin’s clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, American officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.  

 

The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.  

 

Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Unge, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said.  

 

The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis.  

 

Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces toseize Crimea. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, blaming the C.I.A. and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian presidential aircraft.  

 

The cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by Russia.  

 

Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia.”  

 

“There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing.  

 

Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns.  

 

“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.  
 

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”  

 

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”  

 

The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.  

 

“The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.  

 

A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.  

 

“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”  

 

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets.  

 

In Germany, concerns over immigrant violence grew after a 13-year-old Russian-German girl said she had been raped by migrants. A report on Russian state television furthered the story. Even after the police debunked the claim, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, continued to chastise Germany.  

 

In Britain, analysts said, the Kremlin’s English-language news outlets heavily favored the campaign for the country to leave the European Union, despite their claims of objectivity.  

 

In the Czech Republic, alarming, sensational stories portraying the United States, the European Union and immigrants as villains appear daily across a cluster of about 40 pro-Russia websites.  

 

During NATO military exercises in early June, articles on the websites suggested that Washington controlled Europe through the alliance, with Germany as its local sheriff. Echoing the disinformation that appeared in Sweden, the reports said NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals.  

 

poll this summer by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively, that only 32 percent viewed the European Union positively and that at least a quarter believed some elements of the disinformation.

 

“The data show how public opinion is changing thanks to the disinformation on those outlets,” said Jakub Janda, the think tank’s deputy director for public and political affairs. “They try to look like a regular media outlet even if they have a hidden agenda.”

 

Not all Russian disinformation efforts succeed. Sputnik news websites in various Scandinavian languages failed to attract enough readers and were closed after less than a year.

 

Both RT and Sputnik portray themselves as independent, alternative voices. Sputnik claims that it “tells the untold,” even if its daily report relies heavily on articles abridged from other sources. RT trumpets the slogan “Question More.”

 

Both depict the West as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable. “They want to give a picture of Europe as some sort of continent that is collapsing,” Mr. Hultqvist, the Swedish defense minister, said in an interview.

 

RT often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish. Its coverage of the Democratic National Convention, for example, skipped the speeches and focused instead on scattered demonstrations. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, as an underdog maligned by the established news media.

 

Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, said the channel was being singled out as a threat because it offered a different narrative from “the Anglo-American media-political establishment.” RT, she said, wants to provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo chamber.”

 

Moscow’s targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War program the Soviets called “active measures.” The effort involved leaking or even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that they would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a Cold War expert at Harvard.

 

The story that AIDS was a C.I.A. project run amok spread that way, and it poisons the discussion of the disease decades later. At the time, before the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the Kremlin was selling communism as an ideological alternative. Now, experts said, the ideological component has evaporated, but the goal of weakening adversaries remains.

 

In Sweden recently, that has meant a series of bizarre forged letters and news articles about NATO and linked to Russia.

 

One forgery, on Defense Ministry letterhead over Mr. Hultqvist’s signature, encouraged a major Swedish firm to sell artillery to Ukraine, a move that would be illegal in Sweden. Ms. Nyh Radebo, his spokeswoman, put an end to that story in Sweden, but at international conferences, Mr. Hultqvist still faced questions about the nonexistent sales.

 

Russia also made at least one overt attempt to influence the debate. During a seminar in the spring, Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Kremlin and Russian foreign intelligence, argued against any change in Sweden’s neutral status.

 

“Do they really need to lose their neutral status?” he said of the Swedes. “To permit fielding new U.S. military bases on their territory and to send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?”

 

Whatever the method or message, Russia clearly wants to win any information war, as Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia’s most famous television anchor and the director of the organization that runs Sputnik, made clear recently.

 

Speaking this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message to Western journalists.

 

“Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview on the state-run Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion” is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.”

 

Четверг, 25 августа 2016 19:28

THE WEST HAS A UKRAINE CHALLENGE, AND IT'S NOT GOING AWAY

Ariel Cohen, Atlantic Council, 19.08.2016  

 

Since the Middle Ages, Kyivan Rus—the loose network of warring principalities whose borders vaguely coincide with today’s Ukraine—has been exposed to waves of invaders from neighboring states. This list of aggressors includes the Normans, Mongols, Poles, Ottomans, Habsburg Austrians, Germans, and Nazis — and not least, Muscovite Russians, the Romanov Russian Empire, and Bolsheviks. Each invasion destroyed political and social institutions, produced staggering human casualties, and delayed the country’s development.  

Today Russia’s policy toward Ukraine demonstrates that Russian foreign policy has always been expansionist. Russia is eager to control neighboring states through diplomacy and economic ties if possible (to wit, the Eurasian Economic Union), and through destabilization and force if necessary. The Russian drive for empire is so primeval, it has been in evidence even without an “official” ideological doctrine since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

Privatization czar Anatoly Chubais’ “liberal empire” was an early warning that modern Russia had not given up its expansionist impulses. Now the liberal epithet is gone and far more sinister figures play in the imperial sandbox, including the military and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, as well as Alexander Dugin, Alexander Prokhanov, Maxim Shevchenko, and other anti-Western great power chauvinists, ultra-nationalists, and Ukraine-haters.   

 

The Kremlin has found that Ukraine is too big to swallow. Nonetheless, despite Russia’s international isolation, sanctions against it, decline in oil prices, and subsequent recession, the Kremlin has not changed its Ukraine agenda. While the 2014 Novorossiya project, which included the destabilization, annexation, and occupation of six regions in Ukraine’s east and south, has been shelved for now, the Kremlin’s program includes continuing Russia’s military support of the separatists, holding parliamentary "elections" in the Russian-controlled Donetsk and Lugansk regions, tipping the balance of power in Kyiv, and applying economic pressure.  

This type of intervention through disruption will likely remain Russia’s preferred power projection: it may be less costly than a full-scale military operation in Ukraine, and is a strategic tool to keep Kyiv far away from the Western integration path.   

However, something more sinister may also be under way. In July, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin expressed “concerns” that increased tensions in the Donbas region are “proof” that Ukraine is preparing for a military campaign to take back its eastern territory. Moscow is not ready to abandon separatists in eastern Ukraine. On August 6, the leader of the Russian puppet Luhansk People’s Republic, Igor Plotnitsky, was severely injured by a car bomb. Now the situation is becoming even more tense.   

 

The recent provocation in Crimea has prompted some observers to compare the events with the Gleiwitz incident, which led to the German onslaught of Poland in September 1939. And indeed, Russian troops are now gathered in the northern part of Crimea but not in numbers to a suggest a massive invasion to take Kyiv.   

Ukrainian forces were put on alert. Ukraine's envoy to the UN, in vain, asked Russia to provide evidence of the claims, and yet another fake Russian video showing Ukrainian provocation spread virally online. One can only hope that the upcoming Russian elections and the need to mobilize pro-Putin voters was at the heart of the Crimean provocation.  

Washington faces three challenges in the Russia-Ukraine space. First, adequate US policy development regarding Russia is impossible without high-level human intelligence and top quality analysis. This intelligence has been lacking for a while: both the 2008 Georgian invasion and the 2014 occupation of Crimea and war in Donbas were haplessly described by as “surprises.” Without good information, there is no way to forecast the behavior of unpredictable leaders who are in full control of their policy tool boxes.    

The second challenge is the creation of a credible NATO deterrent. Making three thousand soldiers look like thirty thousand is mission impossible. Russians can count. When NATO announced its deployment of three battalions from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Moscow countered with three divisions.   

 

The third challenge is the demonstration of political will. The West must convince Moscow that it means business if Ukraine is destabilized—or worse, invaded. Ukraine cannot fight and win a war with Russia on its own. However, Europeans and Americans are clearly in no mood to fight for it—or for other Central and Eastern European countries, as Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump recently suggested. The EU and the US are engrossed in their own problems. The EU is dealing with Brexit, as well as the arrival of over one million refugees. Moreover, France and Germany are spooked by Russia’s actions and do not want to escalate the conflict.   

The bitter truth is that political elites in both the EU and the US mistakenly think there is not much at stake for them in the Ukraine conflict. They would rather trade with Russia. And no Western nation, with perhaps the exception of Poland, is ready to go into a full-scale war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine.   

Thus, leaders in the US and Europe should recognize that an ounce of deterrence is better—and cheaper—than a pound of warfare. Bolstering NATO, improving intelligence and strategic information operations, putting a credible deterrent in Eastern Europe, and supporting Ukraine’s security and independence, is a realistic program that Washington, Berlin, and Brussels can and should get behind.
  
Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center and the Global Energy Center.

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