Scenario No. 1. Fragmentation of the country. Due to the split within the national elite of Afghanistan which emerged following the latest presidential elections, contradictions remain in the country regarding the Pashtun centre and south and the Tajik-Uzbek north. Presently, the political structure of Afghanistan constitutes a conglomerate of provinces, where there is no political coherence that would be provided by the central government, whose task should be ensuring interaction between the provincial elites, with the preservation of their self-sufficiency to a considerable extent, which has always been Afghan society’s natural state.

Scenario No. 2. Confederal political order of the country. This scenario provides for keeping a limited US military presence to support the existing regime until a political solution to the Afghan problem is found that would be acceptable for the United States.

Confederal state order of Afghanistan may well be consistent with the interests of the United States. In that case, the Americans get the opportunity to exert influence by providing economic, military and humanitarian assistance for each of the regional elites separately, with the central government – a nominal symbol of a united state – being based in Kabul and governed from Washington. In this case, the Americans will be able to keep their bases and military grouping in the country for an indefinite period of time under the pretext of the need to preserve the country’s integrity, at the request of the central government and with the acquiescence of the regional elites subsidised from abroad. Thus, Washington will retain a bridgehead for exerting military and political influence on Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and the Central Asian states. As for the Taliban, it will be squeezed out into the area of the Pashtun tribes, and the Americans will be able to neutralise the threat coming from that side with the help of targeted strikes from unmanned aircraft.

But there is also the third, most pessimistic scenario. It is the creation by the Taliban of a military and political bridgehead in the Wurduj district, Badakhshan province; they have already created an enhanced area in the north and have been gradually expanding their influence to the neighbouring districts of Jurm and Yamgan. And the Taliban carries out its activities jointly with the militants of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

The activity of the Wurduj grouping of the Taliban can have the following implications:

– demonstrating the expansion of the zone of its influence, with the further spreading to the southern and eastern provinces of the country;

– preparing for the capture of Northern Afghanistan and the subsequent attack on the north – Central Asia. Here we can expect that the strength of the Afghan-Tajikistan border will be tested, especially considering that a large proportion of the militants are Tajiks;

– provoking the central government to conduct a military counter-terrorist operation in the Wurduj district in order to destroy the government forces and eliminate the influence of Karzai’s government.

It should not be ruled out that the Kabul government will have to brace itself for prolonged fighting in Badakhshan. And H. Karzai will be asking the Western coalition for aviation support. But if a critical situation arises, he might go for help on this issue to the Central Asian states, and it is quite possible that his request will be heard not only in Tashkent and Dushanbe, but also by the political leadership of the CSTO.

Time will tell what the next chapter in the history of Afghanistan will be like, but one thing is obvious: the political game around this country will be increasingly multifaceted and controversial. It is unlikely that the shaping of the Afghan political system will be completed in 2014. Therefore, it is unlikely that Washington will leave this country without its security umbrella. It has already been announced that the Americans are going to keep about 12 thousand troops at several military bases in the country.

In our view, the most sensible thing to do for both Kabul and the external players in the Afghan political field would be to ensure wide autonomy of the country’s provinces, while the central government would retain such key functions as the monitoring of power structures, the financial sphere, the implementation of the country’s economic development programmes, the distribution of external economic aid, and the implementation of the foreign and defence policies. The importance of the stabilisation of the situation in Afghanistan is a priority area for the modern globalized world – there is no doubt about that. It is in the interests of many regional and extraregional states.

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences, senior research fellow at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. The article was written exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.

The anthem of Afghanistan has the following lines: “This Land will shine forever – Like the sun in the blue sky / In the chest of Asia – It will remain as its heart forever.”

It is an exact description of this country’s true position in the Middle East and Central Asia. Without a fundamental, lasting peace in this region, there will never be stability on the southern borders of Russia.

The importance of Afghanistan for the modern international security system is explained by the fact that the situation in this country has for the last several decades been a source of threats and challenges both at the regional and global scale. The string of wars leading to the destruction of economic infrastructure in the country and the population’s poverty of the same level as in the Middle Ages had created conditions for a permanent socio-economic crisis which was exacerbated by the aggressive acts – disproportionate to the real situation – on the part of the USA and NATO, and that, in turn, created a breeding ground for terrorism, religious extremism and drug trafficking.

Modern Afghanistan has turned into a state where numerous contradictions of the contemporary world are concentrated in one place: the ideological, political, economic, social and religious contradictions giving rise to threats to international security and to the Russian Federation, in particular. The Afghan instability is spreading to the countries of Central Asia, whose political regimes are not yet capable to properly stand up to the Islamist radicals. If the ideology of Taliban advances up to the north, to the Central Asian states, the zone of political instability might spread not only to the Northern Caucasus but also to the other Islamic regions of Russia – Tatarstan and Bashkiria. Besides, these processes can affect the Islamic diaspora of the Urals, Siberia and the central regions of our country.

The failure of the USA and its NATO allies’ policy regarding the solution of the Afghanistan problem is caused by two main reasons: the desire of the West to implement its own vision of social relations in a completely different socium and the West’s misunderstanding of the processes that are taking place in the Islamic world. The government of Afghanistan guided by American political technologists sees a way out of the deadlock in holding negotiations with the Taliban in order to put an end to armed confrontation and move on to the integration of Taliban into the political system of the country. The Taliban has responded to that with its own condition that the negotiations are possible only after a complete withdrawal of the foreign troops from the country.

This has already happened before during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, when the opposition declared that reconciliation was possible after the Soviet troops’ withdrawal from the country. But then a civil war began in Afghanistan, and the Taliban came to power. It is very likely that this is what is going to happen after the coalition forces leave the country.

To prevent this sort of development of events, it is necessary to ensure that the presence of the foreign troops in the country continues. And this leads to the need for counter-insurgency operations both in the territory of Afghanistan and in the tribal areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, some experts believe that there is no military solution to the Afghan problem either in the short or long term. The fact is that the political influence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is rather strong. According to different estimates, the level of the public support for the Taliban movement, Hekmatyar’s Islamic Party and other opponents to the current regime is about 80%.

The scattered resistance of field commanders has transformed into a nationwide struggle, in the course of which representatives of the most Afghan ethnic groups – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmens and Hazaras – are striving for new consolidation by opposing the foreign invaders and the incapable central government as the Afghan people as a whole.

The presence of the coalition forces enables, to some extent, to ensure a balance of forces and to maintain the manageability of the military and political situation in the country. And Western political technologists are going to use the time available to them to look for ways of the political settlement of the Afghan problem. Meanwhile, the policy of searching for and involving the so-called “moderate Taliban” in the government under the slogan of “national reconciliation” has proven to be of no avail. Cooperation with the “moderate Taliban” is not yielding the anticipated political dividends due to its scarcity and insignificant influence on the political processes in Afghan society.

The USA’s and Great Britain’s emissaries as well as Hamid Karzai, who is pursuing the policy of Washington in Afghanistan, have been unable to split the Taliban with a view to making it weaker and eliminating the remaining pockets of resistance separately. What is happening is the other way round. Extremists are expanding and strengthening their positions in a number of provinces, thus jeopardising the existence of the present political system in Afghanistan.

The main task of the US foreign policy in Afghanistan is to establish control over the transportation of energy resources from the Middle East to exert economic pressure on China. And the environment in which they implement their policy is “controlled chaos”, which is created through manipulating the conflict potential of the region.

(to be continued)

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences, senior research fellow at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. The article was written exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.

As for the post-Soviet states, they have been more or less successfully getting used to the “status of buffer states” for more than twenty years, searching for their places in the international arena, while playing on the contradictions between the major global actors and trying to manipulate them to their advantage. Constant tactical manoeuvring of the CIS countries in this “buffer zone”, which they have formed, led to the fact that the old post-Soviet integration of economical, technological and cultural resources are now exhausted, and the absence of a stable foreign policy orientation makes it impossible to attract foreign investments – Russian, European, Turkish, Chinese, etc. However, the continued existence in this inertial phase of a political multi-vector nature is impossible, as it is impossible to continue living at the expense of the resource legacy of Soviet times. Therefore, the situation of wandering between different centres of geopolitical influence led to the fact that the resource potential of the Soviet era cannot ensure the full functioning of state organisms of post-Soviet states, and raises the question on the choice of the development vector.

The modern world is formed into large geopolitical blocks. Ultimately, the socio-political degradation, demoralization of social elites and society, the failure of the nation-state projects are waiting for those countries that turn a blind eye to the ongoing processes. That is why integration – is an imperative for the entire post-Soviet space: a transformation into a new type of a state, whose main objective is uniting of resources to counter threats and challenges of the modern era. It is necessary to create a common market in the Eurasian space, to revive production chains within a single customs space, to move from the economy of commodity rents to an economy of creating added value. Financial and economic crises have shown that countries with weak economic potential and low production of added value are the most vulnerable in the competitive global market.

A special role in the creation of the Eurasian Union belongs to Ukraine, which Russia needs in order to restore economic ties between the two countries as the basis for their modernization and development through the implementation of innovations. However, Ukraine is necessary to the Russian Federation not only in terms of its industrial potential. Ukraine is one of the largest countries, it concedes nothing to the majority of European countries in terms of economic and demographic potential. In the projected Eurasian Union, the role of Islamic vector, in which Kazakhstan and the Central Asian states will play a decisive role, will be increased without the participation of Ukraine. Ukraine is important for the Eurasian Union not only in terms of the development of trade, economic and financial ties, but also to preserve the ethnic composition of the optimal future of the formation, because this is a Slavic Orthodox country, which ethnically and religiously is the closest to the main Russian ethnicity.

When the concept of the Eurasian Union of V.V. Putin is realized, it is most important for Russia to create internal and external security zones, in the context of a continued critical level of instability and turbulence of socio-political processes in the Arab-Islamic world.

Another important thing to consider in Russia’s Eurasian strategy is to create a mechanism of control over migration flows. Russia needs labour. A Deficit of an unskilled workforce is compensated with an influx of migrants from Central Asia. This is an economic problem that should be solved in an integrated space of the future Eurasian Union. Today, migration flows alter the ethnic Russian picture of urban landscapes, change the socio-economic structure of Russian cities, and exacerbate inter-ethnic relations and weaken the institutions of statehood. Therefore, Russia must make determined efforts towards intensification of the integration processes with a goal of the development of industry and agriculture in post-Soviet states, to secure labour in their territories.

As it appears, the formation of geopolitical space of the Eurasian Union should be in the following sequence:

1. Consolidation of Russian hinterlands based on the development of economic, transport and informational connectivity of constituent entities of the Federation.

2. Confessional and cultural consolidation of Russia’s nations.

3. Creation of a near buffer zone from the post-Soviet states, as areas of direct Russian economic and political influence.

4. Formation of an outer buffer zone of economic and political cooperation, to jointly counter challenges and threats of the modern world.

The advancement of the concept of a Eurasian Union, made by V.V. Putin, is a reflection of the fact, that the time has come for a new type of formations – neo-empires, which are constructed on the basis of a supranational vertical of power, as well as a cultural and religious doctrine as a common ideological basis for such association.

The structure of the Eurasian Union should include three components:

- the core of the Union represented by the Russian Federation in its present borders;

- near zone of the Union, including the CIS countries, which are united by specially created supranational institutions;

- external geopolitical space, structured around the main poles of the political and economic, religious and cultural influences (China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey).

Within the framework of the Eurasian Union, is expedient to establish an international structure – something like the “Eurasian Forum”, whose founders should all be members of this union and represent its core. The establishment of such continental structure as the Eurasian Union will provide the grounds for a new configuration for the world order of the 21st century.

Vladimir Karyakin, PhD of Military Sciences, leading researcher at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

In the context of globalisation, a new form of geopolitical confrontation has emerged, with the involvement of the use of the mass media and telecommunications networks encompassing the whole world space and making it possible not only to exert a destructive impact on the consciousness of large masses of the population but also to carry out its transformation in a certain direction.

This allows us to talk of the use of information technologies as consciental weapon against those countries whose population is to be brought under the external forces interested in the capture of their geopolitical resources. The purpose of using this kind of weapon is to destroy the traditional structures of a person’s consciousness by changing the functioning of these structures in the following aspects:

– reducing the overall intellectual level of the population by influencing the people’s health through the deterioration of the environment and the quality of food products;

– destroying the mechanisms of traditional self-identification of the population and replacing them with new identity surrogates by involving the people in various “groups of participation” in social networks and the Internet;

– introducing into the public consciousness a new, specially designed matrix of values and norms of social and personal behaviour as the only possible patterns of behaviour. This leads to the destruction of the tribal, cultural and historical memory of the people, as well as to the psychotisation and neurotisation of society, which turns into a crowd highly susceptible to external control on the part of political technologists of the “controllable chaos” and “coloured revolutions”;

– destroying the people’s ability to understand the place and role of their country and its national strategy in order to gradually develop total indifference to the fate of their country and people, the withdrawal to the consumerist lifestyle and hedonism;

- squeezing out of the information environment space, in which a person’s consciousness exists, the issues that require a long and proper contemplating of events in order to form sustainable personal knowledge. Thanks to the application of the advanced destructive information technologies, today a person is gradually losing the ability of problematisation and personal sense of purpose. This is explained by the “information overheating” of a person’s consciousness, against the backdrop of which there appears a need for rapid obtaining of information on issues of interest, and that is provided by a demonstration of superficial demo-versions of events.

As can be seen from the experience of the “coloured revolutions”, the above-mentioned aspects of the impact on the population’s consciousness are a weapon of mass destruction of a person’s mental sphere. This weapon is used for the hidden destruction of a person’s cultural and confessional self-identification and traditional patterns of behaviour.

In the conditions of the increasing diversity of the forms of information supply, most people cannot independently solve the problem of the correlation between their own evaluation of events and the evaluation presented in the mass media. This applies, first of all, to the people who do not have sustainable religious consciousness, and that creates favourable conditions for the manipulation of the inclinations and behaviour of large masses of the population through the promotion, in the information environment, of a certain category of political and public figures, psychics and witches, representatives of show business and the street crowd leaders, whose activities have an antisocial and anti-State nature.

In the contemporary world of global communications, and information and political technologies, a person’s consciousness creates the virtual world images displayed on the television screen. At the same time, understanding the degree of the impact that the mass media has on him- or herself, the person cannot resist them. Their inner world inevitably gets deformed under the pressure of the information flow distorting the true essence of the real events.

The ultimate goal of the use of the information weapon is the exclusion of the people from their traditional confessional and cultural commonality and their transformation into isolated atomic social individuals alienated from their ethnicity, religion and culture to which they belonged by right of birth.

However, it is possible to protect yourself against information destructors in a number of ways, in particular, through the preservation of the people’s religious, cultural and historical values. The following can also be effective measures to counter external information aggression:

– development and implementation of the Programme for the creation of multiethnic and polyconfessional civilised space;

– development of the principles of the work of national information bodies in such a way that they would ensure positive influence on the consolidation of the country’s population to solve the geopolitical challenges that it is faced with and to strengthen cultural and confessional identity and the consolidation of the population.

On the whole, it should be noted that the effectiveness of information-related counter-measures against the adversary depends to a large extent on the diversity of the engaged forces and means, as well as on the wide range of impacts defined by the conditions of the situation.

Today, there is an ongoing information war against many states. Its success is proved by the collapse of the USSR, the change of power in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, the attacks on the ruling regimes in Syria and North Korea. In these circumstances, effective counter-measures against information aggression are the main condition for preserving the statehood.

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences, senior research fellow at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. The article was written exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.

Arab nationalism was the romantic anti-colonial movement of the army elites, who had received education and upbringing in the West and the Soviet Union and who believed sincerely that the establishment of state institutions based on the European model would ensure for the population of the Arab world not only getting closer to the level of life of developed states but also establishing the relations of justice and social equality. However, the army romanticists did not understand that, unlike in Europe and the USSR, tribal and clan relations prevailed in the region, and, therefore, there were no conditions for bourgeois or communist revolutions. Therefore, the striving of Nasser, Qaddafi, Hussein and Assad-senior, and their political heirs – Ali, Mubarak and Assad-junior – for etatism and secularism was profoundly alien to the population, and the Arab “street” in these countries was putting up with it while there was global confrontation between Washington and Moscow, who were funding and arming their supporters.

With the collapse of the bipolar world, Arab nation-states have lost their way. The consequence of this was a lessening of attention to the region, as the field of geopolitical rivalry, on the part of the USA and Western countries, which, being carried away by the implementation of the project to create the Broader Middle East based on the model of Western democracy, made a strategic misjudgement consisting in the fact that new players – radical Islamists led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar – had entered into the game. As a result, in 2011, the region was swept across by the wave of the “Arab revolutions”, which, in Libya and Syria, had the form of a civil war between the armed opposition and the ruling regime. However, the organisers of the popular uprisings, having destroyed the nation-states, clearly proved to be unable to propose to the Arab world any constructive programmes to alleviate pressing social problems. At the same time, in those Arab states where, for decades, people had been accustomed to living in a secular state, there emerged an active counter-response to the spread of the Wahhabi model of the organisation of society – the model characteristic of the main “integrators” of the Arab world. This indicates that the project of Doha and Riyadh for the creation of a “new Caliphate” has been postponed until better times come along, and the region is going to have the fate of “broader Arab Somalia” – a territory of uncontrollable chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, a source of terrorism and extremism, where there will be continuous inter-tribal clashes in the struggle for natural resources.

In the world where the priority of international law has ceased to be an unconditional and indisputable truth, it is an ungrateful matter trying to talk the potential aggressors out of the attack on Syria through diplomatic statements. But Russia will have to fight for Syria because this is a test for its geopolitical capabilities in the foreign policy arena, and the indicator showing that it knows how to use them protecting its interests. And the stakes are quite high here. Syria and Iran are objectively resisting the establishment of a single Middle Eastern Sunni Caliphate threatening the national security of Russia.

If the aggression of the USA and its NATO allies is carried out, this will have grave consequences for the entire region. The Syrian army is one of the most powerful in the Middle East, hence that will entail serious losses on the part of the attacker. The military conflict ignited by the aggressors will spread across the entire Middle Eastern region. It will involve Iran, the Hezbollah movement and Palestinian groups. Israel, Turkey and the United States’ bases in the region will be subjected to military strikes. But the retaliatory strikes will primarily have an asymmetrical nature – activities of subversive groups, terrorist acts which may take place not only in the region, but also in the countries of Europe.

The whole Arab world is closely following the position of the Kremlin in the conflict determining the degree of Russia’s participation in the regional policy and evaluating it as a serious ally in the future.

Another aspect of the situation is that the Americans do not know exactly the actual ability of the Syrian air defence to reflect an air strike. The losses of the allies’ aviation, when carrying out strikes on Syria, may become an unpleasant surprise for the attacker. Besides, it is not clear whether there’s going to be, and of what force, a missile strike by Iran on Israel and the American bases in the Middle East. And if this happens, it will mean the beginning a full-scale war across the whole region.

But the war in the Middle East can pay substantial dividends not only to the arms companies of the West. According to analysts of the French bank Société Générale, world oil prices can increase to 150 dollars per barrel. This trend is indicated by the fact that, with the pending military operation, the price of Brent-brand oil has already increased to 115-117 dollars. However, if strikes on Syria are carried out, no one knows how long the increased oil prices will last and what official Damascus’s ally Tehran is going to do as it has a wide range of alternative strategies in its arsenal: from showcasing its military might to closing the Strait of Hormuz, and missile strikes on Israel.

We should also bear in mind that, for the initiators of the strike on Syria, the increased oil prices can lead to a further deepening of the financial and economic crisis, a decline in the economy of the EU countries, and they can also force some European states, for example, Greece, into default.

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences, senior research fellow at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. The article was written exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.

After yet another change of power in Cairo, it has become apparent that the large-scale transformation of the Middle East is still far from complete. If at the beginning of this year it seemed that the Arab world was trending toward consolidation and the creation of a “new Caliphate”, then the events in Egypt and the success of governmental forces in Syria point toward an “Islamic awakening”, met with resistance from supporters of a secular state and representatives of the so-called “deep state”, which in the Middle East is understood as an alliance of the military, intelligence agencies, oligarchs and the powerful bureaucracy. It is possible that these forces covertly sponsored the protest movement to eliminate M. Morsi and sabotaged his political reforms in the country.

It is known that 30% of the Egyptian economy is controlled by the military: from gas stations to tourist companies. City mayors and governors are often retired military men. Therefore, M. Morsi’s desire to place his men in key posts in the regions was met with hostility in military circles. The generals were completely against the idea of war with Ethiopia, called for by the “Muslim Brotherhood”, due to the construction of a dam on the Blue Nile.

Western political scientists hold two positions about the events taking place in Egypt. Some see it as the revenge of the “militarists”, who overthrew the democratically elected president, calling for the support the new government. Others believe that the generals fulfilled the will of the people and the most progressive sectors of society, preventing the outbreak of civil war.

At the same time, the military understands that they cannot retain power on their own. Islamists have de facto turned into something stronger, and they are more determined to win than those who are in favor of liberal and secular standards of living in the country. The problem lies in the fact that at the middle and lower levels of government, the Islamist movement operates independently. They have a strong desire to go all the way and secure the release of M. Morsi as well as reverse the results of the transfer of power to the hands of the military. The “Muslim Brotherhood” is ready to start a civil war, though have so far refrained from doing so, believing that sooner or later the military will be forced to release M. Morsi and call an election, during which the Islamists hope to take revenge.

All this is reminiscent of the 1991 Algerian scenario, where the military refused to recognize the victory of the Islamists in the elections in the country. As a result, Algeria was engulfed in civil war for 10 years, causing the deaths of more than half a million people.

The dead-end situation, in our opinion, is due to the insolvency of Islamic theorists and practitioners in managing the country to address its complex internal problems. Evidence of this lies in the fact that in no country of the “Arab Spring” did Islamists manage to gain a foothold in government. Thus, the first surrendered their position to radicals in Libya, making way for Ali Zeidan and Mahmoud Jibril. While there are Islamists who retain influence in parliament, their chances of gaining complete control of the country is very small. In Tunisia, the military still retain the loyalty of the Islamist government of an-Nahda, yet operate in an extremely tenuous position, against the background of the growing youth movement “Rebellion”, which began the fight against the Islamization of the country, and could also lead to the repetition of the situation in Egypt.

An analogous situation exists in Turkey, where the Islamization of the country under T. Erdogan has contributed to growing discontent of significant segments of its population, including the secular part of the middle class as well as the Alawites and Kurds.

You can attribute the anti-Islamist movement’s growing momentum in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya to Qatar’s diminishing role as sponsor of the “Muslim Brotherhood” movement due to financial problems. The same applies to the Hamas movement, which has been gradually subsiding, returning to Iran’s separate sphere of influence.

In governing Egypt decisive action, all the way to banning the “Muslim Brotherhood” in order to prevent civil war and the country from descending into chaos, has been supported by Defense Minister General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi. Interim President of Egypt Adly Mansour is hesitant, but “Washington’s man” Mohamed ElBaradei has announced his resignation, strengthening the position of General al-Sisi, who has positioned himself as the new leader of the country.

The harsh actions of Egyptian security forces in breaking up supporters of ex-President M. Morsi have led to a review of the Western community’s relations with the new leadership of the country. Egypt’s military and police have been accused of extreme use of force. On the one hand, Washington, positioning itself as a defender of human rights around the world, has advised the country’s leaders to respect people’s rights to freedom of expression and assembly, referring to the actions of the authorities as “military repression”. As a practical step, the yearly US-Egyptian “Bright Star” military exercises have been cancelled. On the other hand, the American demarche has not resulted in the cancelation of its $ 1.3 billion in annual financial aid to Egypt. This suggests that Washington has not yet fully defined its stance with respect to the events in Egypt, the beginning of which was the decision to swap ally Hosni Mubarak for the Islamists.

In our view, the situation in Egypt could seriously worsen in the near future. The Army has begun to cleanse the political field of the “Muslim Brotherhood” and civil war could become an everyday reality. This will have resounding implications for the country as well as the region as a whole.

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences, leading researcher at the Department of Defence Policy at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

As expected, the military coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi – a supporter of the establishment of Sharia law in the country – has not created conditions for stabilization. The Muslim Brotherhood has refused to recognize the forcible removal by the army of the legitimately elected president. They are prepared to vigorously defend their position and go to extreme measures in their fight against supporters of a secular state. This leaves no chance for a bloodless outcome to the crisis and leads the country into civil war, as was in the case in Libya and is now happening in Syria.

The army handed over Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak in hopes of keeping its position in the future political system of the country. These hopes were justified. Next came the turn of Mohamed Morsi. The Egyptian “liberal plankton,” which operated in the social networks, emerged victorious. It must be said that the army made a risky choice in backing the supporters of secular development of the state. Like any non-systemic opposition, they lack not only authoritative, charismatic leaders, but also a coherent social program to solve the country’s real problems. They are opposed by seasoned fighters who have been through training camps in Pakistan, and participants of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are radical Islamists who have an ideology and determination to take up arms to fight for their beliefs.

But upon returning to power, it remains to be seen whether they would be able to solve the serious social problems of the country, among which the most pressing are:

– the use of water resources of the Nile;

– the provision of food for the population;

– the activity of militants in the Sinai Peninsula;

– uncontrolled population growth.

The Islamists do not have a program to deal with these problems, and their zeal and willingness to fight and die for their ideals will not help to solve them. Nonetheless, the Islamists, having recovered from the shock of defeat, are again rallying their forces and starting to battle their opponents. As it was in Afghanistan, now it is happening in Egypt, and next will be Syria, where the armed opposition is losing to government forces.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood have announced the mobilization of supporters, and do not recognize the legitimacy of the ousting of Morsi. The fight is gradually moving in the direction of a power struggle, amounting to the beginning of civil war. The signal of its start is the storming of the airport and air force base in El-Arish. Sinai, located in mountainous desert terrain with stockpiles of weapons, will apparently be its main launching ground.

Thus, we are witnessing a swing of the pendulum in the Egyptian revolution: overthrow of Mubarak – temporary rise to power of the military – elections and rise to power of Islamists – another surge of protests – military coup and establishment of a temporary civilian government, to another wave of protests on popular discontent over unresolved socio-political problems.

As for the situation in Syria, there has been an important event worthy of note: the U.S. Congress blocked a bill on supplying arms to Syrian rebels. This suggests that they are losing the direct support of the West. However, this little improves the situation, as clandestine arm supplies are passing through Jordan and Turkey.

Nonetheless, the civil war in Syria is coming to its logical conclusion, signified by the victory of government forces. But that does not mean the beginning of a process of stabilization and the end of chaos in the country. A new phase of confrontation with the opposition will take the form of combating terrorism, the purpose of which will be further archaization of the socio-political environment, destruction of the remnants of the country’s economy, creating an atmosphere of fear and public discontent with the authorities. Radical Islamists with support from abroad (mainly from Qatar) tried to implement such a scenario in Russia, where a few thousand militants who remained scattered throughout the North Caucasus maintained tension throughout the whole region for several years after the formal end of the second Chechen war.

Now the army of Syria, which at the price of great losses gained experience in battling the armed opposition, will have to learn to fight against terrorism. And here Russian experience may prove to be useful.

In general, it should be noted that the social and political chaos that is deepening in Middle Eastern countries provides a fertile environment for the emergence of a charismatic personality, on the scale of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, able to use their authority to establish order in the region in accordance with the rules of pure Islam, which could quite possibly mean the birth of an Arab caliphate of the 21st century.

Vladimir Karyakin, Candidate of Military Sciences and a Senior Fellow in the Department of Defense Policy of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

The Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Serbia is thought to be the oldest of the NGOs. It trained experts to organize Milosevic’s overthrow in Yugoslavia and carry out color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, as well as coup attempts in Belarus, Venezuela and Iran. US oversight is provided by the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID); its sponsors include the US-based Freedom House.

Something written by Ralph Peters could serve as the NGO’s motto: “Hollywood is ‘preparing the battlefield,’ and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade.” That suggests that the guiding principle of the Western NGOs is a desire to play on all fronts and pervade all aspects of a society’s political spectrum.1

Washington and the NGO network it has established to promote American interests under the slogans of “human rights,” “democracy” and “nonviolence” rely on “spontaneous” protest movements nourished by the local discontent of individual social groups to implement programmed regime change and advance America’s strategy for global domination. RAND Corporation has said, “[T]he United States should also recognize that nongovernmental organizations have an important role to play in fostering democratic change, particularly in efforts to mediate between groups and train organizers…. The United States can play a role in encouraging such organizations and protecting their right to function… [T]he United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology… Disseminating the messages of reformers in international online forums can also help thwart state repression of reformers.”2

A statement by Vladimir Putin during an interview with the German TV channel ARD on April 6, 2013 indicates that Russia has experienced a massive invasion of foreign NGOs. He said that during the fourth quarter of 2012 alone Russia had 654 NGOs operating with 28.3 billion rubles in funding, and 615 million rubles of that was funneled through foreign diplomatic embassies. This suggests that the countries of the West, and especially the United States, have mobilized enormous financial resources to exert soft power pressure. To accomplish that, some 350 programs in the fields of education, culture and information have been developed to promote their model of democracy and create a class of citizens focused on US values and policies.

Therefore, Washington’s operations need to be viewed in the context of NGO activities aimed at undermining the statehood of certain countries, with regime change as the goal. NGOs function as opponents of the state in Western hands. While balancing on the brink of compliance with the law and taking advantage of its imperfections, they utilize information technology in order to covertly affect people’s emotions and psychology, evangelizing ideas of Western democracy that are foreign to mass culture, moral values and market liberalism. Their goal is to bring societies they target under foreign control.

The tactics of NGOs working in the social field are based on the following principles:

- Avoid involvement in projects that are focused on strengthening the foundations of statehood;

- Give priority in distributing funds and material resources to the lower strata and the less capable;

- Train opposition movement functionaries and activists in neighboring countries;

- Organize new analytical centers independent of the state to study both social processes and political technology, legal, sociocultural and faith-based projects under development that are capable of making foreign actors more influential;

- Orient and train opposition organizations to participate in elections and challenge election results with mass protests.

The internal opposition concentrates its efforts in the following areas:

- Seek out and attract sources of funding;

- Organize and conduct social campaigns lacking an obvious (but present) political subtext in order to gain the sympathy of various categories of citizens;

- Ensure the broadest possible media coverage of its actions by gaining access to state-owned and international media;

- Establish contacts with representatives of various government agencies needed for lobbying.

Opposition structures directed and inspired by NGOs act strategically and tactically in the following areas:

- Developing tools and improving means for shaping and directing a country’s politics;

- Exercising pragmatism and consistency in relations with the authorities to ensure that comply with its rules;

- Consolidating and coordinating every cell in a network of opposition forces while concentrating on solving the main problems of the political struggle;

- Synergizing program ideas and methods for the opposition’s struggle as expressed in systematic and large-scale activities in combination with convincing slogans and action program with emotional impact;

- Minimizing the risks of the political struggle. That means that if there is government opposition or repression, the entire network structure must transition to independent operation by its cells;

- Conducting a campaign to discredit and delegitimize the country’s leadership in order to form a negative image of it in the mass consciousness;

- Searching for ways to increase external pressure on the country’s leaders;

- Searching for new ways of communicating with the country’s populace, with priority given to social networks on the Internet and cellular communications for ensuring mobility in a community and for rapidly mobilizing it to participate in protests. The ability of functional cells in the network to adapt is the capability to capture and exploit all significant trends in a country’s sociopolitical environment;

- Training the leaders of opposition structures positioning themselves as a “shadow” government to function in crisis situations;

- “Hyping” and developing opposition leaders and activists during protests, as well as seeking financial and political support from external forces;

- Realistically assessing during protests the appeal the opposition’s political program has for the populace, as well as the actual number of people who actively or passively support the opposition;

- Overcoming the state-owned media’s “information embargo” on the opposition by initiating appropriate newsworthy events;

- Expanding contacts among the country’s political and business elite and working with those who are focused on change. That involves convincing the greatest number possible that positive changes can be made if the opposition comes to power;

- Using all crises related to socioeconomic problems for propaganda purposes and advancing populist slogans to expand the opposition’s influence among the masses.

The opposition concentrates its efforts in the following areas:

- Expanding its social support base and acquiring the tacit approval of the populace;

- Consolidating all of the government’s opponents, followed by their ideological and organizational structuring;

- Maintaining the population at a critical level of dissent while shaping a positive image of the opposition’s leaders;

- Introducing into the mass consciousness a positive image of the “young politicians” who are critical of the current regime, and supporting radical young people.

Mechanisms and means of achieving the opposition’s political goals include:

-The development of a phased action plan in the online community with an emphasis on synchronization and unification;

- The promotion, if possible, of a single candidate from the opposition; the adoption of the single set of symbols; and assurance that the content of slogans and speeches are consistent with each other;

- The establishment of coordination centers to ensure a unified approach to planning actions, planning media relations and providing legal and news support for the political campaign;

- The use of information and psychological technologies to influence people’s minds;

- The development of an opposition action plan to be implemented if a state of emergency is declared.

All of this leads us to conclude that information network warfare waged by an opposition against a state is a war in virtual space. For the attacking side, it is primarily an attempt to gain control of a society, followed by control of critical components of the state structure, in a chaotic sociopolitical environment that it has created. At the same time, information network warfare against opposition movements is a means for the defender to prevent a conflict during its early stages.

That suggests information network warfare is dual in nature. The defender’s struggle with chaos and the collapse of society are in opposition to the attacker’s efforts to employ the technology of “manageable chaos” to transition the social system into a qualitatively new state and put it on a new path.

The recent events in the countries of North Africa, the Middle East and, especially, Syria can serve as clear confirmation of all this. However, the West and its henchmen are unlikely to limit themselves to those cases, because they are already preparing new operations to disrupt the foundations of statehood with the active involvement of non-governmental organizations. What countries are they aiming at? — Take a close look at yourselves!

Vladimir Karyakin, Cand. Sc. (Military) is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Defense Policy of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Exclusively for New Eastern Outlook.

Returning to the use of the Western technologies for “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East, we see that they are implemented in the following sequence:

- In the first phase, the country’s socio-political and economic systems are destabilized by creating a large-scale systemic crisis and putting it into a state of “manageable chaos,” which makes the country’s political regime vulnerable to external influence. The main goal of the aggressor state’s destabilizing actions is the formation of a “center of influence” in the form of opposition forces that build up the resistance to the ruling regime to the point of an armed conflict. To do this, the aggressor state finds supporters within the ruling elite of the “enemy” country that will transform its political system.

- In the second phase of “manageable chaos,” an attractor structure is established in the form of opposition center of sociopolitical influence with the task of taking over the country by changing the political regime.

- In the third phase, a process is initiated to form new public administration and security service institutions under the aegis of international organizations.

The indirect action strategy for waging geopolitical struggle is superior to the direct action strategies for the following reasons:

- It enables the aggressor to minimize the cost of transforming a victim country’s political system without using military force while maintaining an optimal risk/reward balance.

- It makes it possible to control damages to the enemy country’s economic structure and minimize its human and environmental resource losses for later exploitation by the aggressor.

The color revolutions that took place in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East grew out of the theory of “manageable chaos” (or, as it is also called, the theory of “controllable instability”) that was developed in the United States by Gene Sharp and Steven Mann (author of the monograph “Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought”). It served as the basis for developing the soft power strategy technology, which is based on the following principles:1

- Consolidation of all political forces opposing the existing legitimate government;

- Destruction of the confidence a country’s rulers have in their ability to stabilize the situation and in the loyalty of their security services;

- Destabilization of a country by sparking protest moods cultivated at various levels in its society for the purpose of undermining the existing political regime’s legitimacy;

- Initiation of regime change by challenging the outcome of elections (often even before the final vote count) and organizing acts of civil disobedience.

In virtually all countries caught in the chaos of mass riots, “spontaneous” flash mobs were organized by disseminating messages about rallies and protests through social networks and email, as well as by mobile telephones. Therefore, the color revolutions that occurred in recent years in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East should be classified not as revolutions, but as chaos-inspired rebellions.

The social structures that Western political strategists formed in the social networks create large numbers of protesters at the following levels:

- At the information level, opposition forces focus people’s attention on existing problems, accompanied by a heightened reaction to shortcomings in public life and populist proposals for resolving them;

- At the mental level, people become convinced that they can “no longer live under the current regime,” and that “life has become intolerable;”

- At the social level, ethnic, social, religious and regional groups are energized to adopt radical methods for resolving social problems.

Analysis of applications of the indirect action and soft power strategies have enabled us to formulate the following ways of countering them:

1. A strategy of vigilance and alertness to covert and potential, internal and external threats by making people aware of the modern political and psychological technologies for destroying a nation’s state and religio-cultural identity.

2. A strategy for ensuring the stability of state and social institutions and public awareness of attempts by foreign and domestic forces to distort and transform a country’s sociopolitical system.

3. A strategy to counter information technologies that destroy statehood through the widespread and timely dissemination of accurate information about a country’s condition, its ability to set its own rules and defend its own interpretation of events in the global information space.

4. A strategy for keeping the optimism that the public, the bureaucracy and the security services feel about society the needed level by forming a national idea and a national ideology, and through successes in defending the country’s statehood and national interests.

The need to solve these problems makes the development of a national security doctrine an urgent matter for countries that the United States and its allies have their sights on, and that doctrine must identify the threats and challenges as they emerge. As the new world order is being formed, the center of gravity of the struggle on the international stage is moving to the information-communications space, which is placing demands on state institutions and society as a whole to identify negative trends as the domestic and international situation develops so that they can be neutralized in a timely fashion.

Vladimir Karyakin, Cand. Sc. (Military), is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Defense Policy of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Exclusively for New Eastern Outlook.

As studies by a number of British and American experts on interstate conflict have shown, the strategies of indirect action and soft power are special technologies for waging geopolitical struggle to gain dominance over an “enemy” state by taking complete, all-encompassing and covert control of the formation and practical implementation of a country’s domestic and foreign policy, its political-administrative, socioeconomic, defense, cultural, ideological and other key spheres, and its very processes for future development by employing “indirect” organizational actions specially developed for that purpose and measures of a manipulative and disruptive nature. In so doing, the aggressor applies pressure to the victim country both in the absence of a direct confrontation while officially maintaining “friendly” or even partnership relations with it and during conditions of open conflict, including war. An aggressor’s main efforts during a geopolitical conflict are concentrated on gaining control of the target country’s government by developing “agents of influence” among its ruling elite and security services.

The technology for crushing “enemy” states by means of indirect action and soft power is built upon the following basic ideas and concepts:

- The use of both open and covert forms and methods without an open confrontation or a direct military clash to disrupt the enemy’s foundations of statehood;

- The aggressor achieves dominance over the target country by depriving it of economic and resource self-sufficiency and the capability for stable development. This is accomplished by developing in the victim country’s state system a special organizational mechanism for “external governance” to enable covert control by proxy over the vital functions of the country under attack and the ability to transform its sociopolitical system to satisfy the interests and goals of foreign participants in global politics. That results both in the physical destruction of the victim country’s statehood, which leads to the economic and political seizure of its territory and resources, and to the destruction of its indigenous civilization, i.e., to a change in the civilizational, religio-cultural and national identity of its people. I should stress that victory in a geopolitical conflict as distinct from victory in war is irreversible, because the victim disappears from the historical stage.

It is also worthwhile noting that the countries of the West did not pioneer the use of indirect action and soft power strategies. The principles of indirect action were first formulated in China during the 5th century BCE by the military leader and theoretician Sun Tzu, who set forth the principles for achieving victory in his Art of War. His strategy essentially involves subduing an enemy without fighting, which means achieving victory through ideas.

A comparison of the American and Chinese indirect action strategies shows that they differ significantly in terms of concept. The American model is focused on rapid disruption of the victim country’s state system by creating systemic crisis phenomena within it and forming points of bifurcation within its state system that exacerbate crisis processes. Whereas the “American scenario” for the practical use of the indirect action strategy assumes that active operations will be executed, the Chinese strategy is to facilitate the desired change in the geopolitical power of states in a way that benefits China through the victim country’s “natural” deterioration. This enables the attacking country to wait until its enemy is sufficiently weak and conditions arise that may negate the need for military action to seize territory. Then, the role of the armed forces would be reduced to the use of a heavy hand to strengthen the existing economic and demographic situation in a particular region.

Vladimir  Karyakin, Cand. Sc. (Military), is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Defense Policy of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Exclusively for New Eastern Outlook.