In International Affairs, What You Say Matters Less Than How Quickly You Answer.

Uncle Volodya says, “Sometimes there’s not a better way. Sometimes there’s only the hard way.”

“Watch a man–say, a politician–being interviewed on television, and you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none to give, even if you don’t understand the question, even if the question contains erroneous assumptions, even if you are ignorant of the facts required to answer. Have you ever heard a man being interviewed say, “I don’t have the faintest idea,” or “I don’t know enough even to guess,” or “I have been asked that question before, but all my answers to it seem to be wrong?” One does not “blame” men, especially if they are politicians, for providing instant answers to all questions. The public requires that they do, since the public has learned that instant answer giving is the most important sign of an educated man.”

– Neil Postman

For the west, at least, all questions regarding trouble in the world have the same answer – Putin. All conversational roads, you might say, provided the conversation is about an election stolen, an incipient war bubbling like an evil stew, the road not taken…lead to the President of the Russian Federation.

I’ve said before and will say again that I consider Mr. Putin the greatest – and perhaps the only – statesman alive today, and I will miss him when he’s gone. But the ones who will be snuffling into their black hankies at his funeral, whether present in person or only in spirit, will be the luminaries, policymakers and sages of western government as well as the celebrities of western news networks and journalism. The departure into the mystic of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will mean they will have to learn to think again when invited to attribute responsibility to some minor or major calamity.

Who’s to blame for instability in eastern Europe? Putin. Who put the haywire in European energy markets? Putin. Who’s making Joe Biden’s government look like someone arranged the high-speed collision of chaos theory and the law of unintended consequences? Putin. Who’s home screwing your wife while you’re at work? You know.

Thus it is that when the new year kicked off, it was easy to put the blame for the boiling over of unrest in Kazakhstan where it belonged – Putin. Thanks, et Al and Moscow Exile, for the link.

As with so many current events these days, when the world seems to make less sense every time the sun starts its daily pilgrimage from east to west, I hardly know where to start. The popular protests in Kazakhstan began in Zhanaozen when drivers learned the price of fuel had doubled overnight. Protests tied to the rising cost of living simmered throughout 2020, and boiled over on New Year’s Day. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is, unsurprisingly, broadly approving of the protesters, just as it is enthusiastic about protest anywhere in the lands of its enemies and just as broadly scolding about protests at home or in countries which are its allies. There are degrees and gradations of government in the western lexicon; friendly governments are to be heard and obeyed by their populations, while their leaders are accorded generous slack in the methods they may use to keep the recalcitrant in line, and those methods are termed ‘protecting the country’. In the bitter and authoritarian countries of non-aligned governments, resistance and opposition are transcendingly noble, and measures taken by the government to control them are ‘crackdowns’. If you paid close attention to the foregoing two sentences and are not afraid of changing jobs, you probably know enough already to be a journalist for Reuters or the Associated Press.

But that’s wandering from the point. Kazakhs have grounds to protest. But what happens when you express outrage against a government decision, and the President accepts the resignation of the government and reverses the policy that sparked the complaint? Wasn’t that what the protesters wanted? Apparently it was not, since they went on smashing stuff and setting fire to things, to the point the President decreed no more fucking around, and invested security forces and law enforcement with the authority to shoot to kill where necessary to prevent damage to public property, and prevent the situation in the streets achieving thermal runaway. And petitioned the Russian Federation for additional security forces to maintain public order. That, of course, was Putin making his move, since he planned the whole protest crisis ten moves in advance and knew exactly what would happen – his battle-hardened Special Forces Orcs probably had lunch and dry socks already packed.

Let’s take a little closer look at that, what say? We could do worse than starting with the overall hyperbolic hysteria of the piece’s author, Andrew ‘Hyperbole’ Higgins. Let’s look at an example; here’s Higgins.

“After offering in August 2020 to provide what he called “comprehensive assistance” to help President Alexander Lukashenko of neighboring Belarus halt a wave of huge protests, Putin then sent “peacekeepers” to stop a vicious war over disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Russia has stationed more than 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine to press demands that Kyiv abandon its yearslong flirtation with NATO.”

Notice how ‘peacekeepers’ is in quotation marks, which is journalist-speak for ‘so-called’, meaning ha, ha, we’re wise to your tricks, Putin. This is perfectly in line with his contention that once Russian ‘peacekeepers’ are installed in someone else’s country, they never go home. They become a permanent and threatening fixture, their presence a constant reminder of Moscow’s mailed fist.

Here’s how the same situation was reviewed in a report entitled, “Azerbaijan and Armenia: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict”, prepared for the Congressional Library of the United States by authors Cory Welt and Andrew S. Bowen, both analysts in Russian and European Affairs.

“Long-standing U.S. policy over several Administrations has been to facilitate a resolution to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict that would achieve a negotiated settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh’s political status, peaceably restore Azerbaijani control over territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, and provide security for residents of and returnees to the conflict zone.”

We all still on the same page, here? The United States of Do As I Say has as regional priorities (1) a negotiated settlement; (2) peaceful reiteration of Azerbaijani control; and, (3) security for residents anbd returnees. Well, the brief war is ended, so how did that conclusion come about?

“During fighting from September to November 2020, Azerbaijani forces captured territory—eventually including the strategically located town of Shusha (in Armenian, Shushi)—through several advances. Poised to attack Nagorno-Karabakh’s urban center of Stepanakert (in Azerbaijani, Khankendi), Azerbaijan ceased offensive operations after Armenia agreed to a cease-fire agreement mediated by the Russian Federation. The agreement obliged Armenian/Nagorno-Karabakh forces to withdraw from additional territories they had controlled since the 1990s and introduced about 2,000 Russian troops into the conflict zone as peacekeeping forces.”

For some reason, the report’s authors did not find it necessary to surround ‘peacekeeping forces’ with sarcastic airquotes. Tell me more.

“The autumn 2020 war was a short but brutal conflict that ultimately did not resolve the disputed political status of Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the war’s local and regional consequences continue to unfold. The conflict led to the deaths of at least a few thousand armed personnel on each side and dozens of civilians. Azerbaijan recovered territories that had been lost to it for more than a quarter of a century, and the Azerbaijani government has promised to make the investments necessary to enable hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced in the 1990s to return to the region. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh have gained a new sense of insecurity, tempered by the presence of Russian forces, and many remain displaced. A new balance of power exists between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and regional powers Russia and Turkey have increased their influence.”

So Russian direct intervention – as opposed to shouting “Cut it out, y’all” from far away like Mike Pompeo did or making dithering appear to be decision like European leaders did – made it a short conflict; since Russia was otherwise uninvolved, it had nothing to do with the ‘brutal’ part. But America’s preferred victor – Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan – crashed and burned like the Hindenburg. Well, as the various artists who covered Danny O’Keefe’s “Good-Time Charlie’s Got the Blues” sang, some gotta win, some gotta lose. Bear in mind that Pashinyan came to power in a western-sponsored political reversal of fortune, inspired by protests over utility costs that the label-o-holic western press dubbed “Electric Yerevan”. But the conflict was ended. It did not resume. What’s wrong with referring to the political and military influences that brought that about as peacekeepers without sarcastic quotation marks?

Anyway, that’s just an example of Captain Hyperbole’s partisan ramblings. Let’s move on.

“The arrival in Kazakhstan of 2,500 troops from a Russian-led military alliance amid continuing spasms of violent protest was the fourth time in two years that Moscow has flexed its muscle in neighboring states — Belarus, Armenia and Ukraine being the other three — that the West has long tried to woo.”

Mmmm…the west has long tried to woo Kazakhstan. By allowing Kazakhstan to offer investment opportunities to US oil giants, presumably. But ‘wooing’ sounds…persuasive, and sort of sweet; an atmosphere fostered by President Joe Biden’s warm assurances that “the United States is proud to call your country a friend.” President Biden has sniffed Kazakhstan, and found it good.

Oh, but.

“For Mukhtar Ablyazov, a Kazakh tycoon who fled into exile after falling out with his former patron, Nazarbayev, the current wave of protests and the Kazakh government’s appeal to Moscow for military help to crush them is proof that the West miscalculated and handed Russia a big win.

Kazakhstan, he said Thursday as Russian troops deployed, succeeded in “putting the international community to sleep” with promises of big contracts. “The result: Kazakhstan is now under the boot of Putin, who takes advantage of this to extend his power.”

Regular readers of this blog should feel their spider-senses start to tingle when they read the word ‘tycoon’ applied to a an aw-shucks local businessman who is also an expert confidante of the west. ‘Tycoon’ is what the fawning western press labeled Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, although ‘oligarch’ or ‘crook’ was good enough for wealthy opponents like Igor Kolomoisky, which should not be interpreted as an endorsement of Kolomoisky. Poroshenko continued to run his myriad businesses, and even added a few throughout his presidency, which traditionally open democracies – a quaint concept that expired in the late 1960’s – used to term a ‘conflict of interest’. Nary a word of complaint from the brave corruption-fighters in the western media. In fact, they didn’t even notice at the time that President Poroshenko was too busy setting up an offshore shell company through Panamanian corporate-services provider Mossack-Fonseca to notice that leading elements of the Ukrainian Army were getting their asses handed to them in the Debaltseve encirclement. All Putin’s doing, naturellement. Probably why he’s so happy – or so a very bitter Anna Nemtsova tells us he is – to learn that Poroshenko has been formally charged with treason against the Ukrainian state and financing of terrorism.

Anyway, if you felt that little warning shiver, your instincts served you well – whoops!! Mukhtar Ablyazov is also, when he’s not busy being a tycoon and a western expert source, a ‘top Kazakh opposition figure’! Who could have seen that coming? He’s actually head of the “Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan”, which probably saved him the trouble of popping ’round to the State Department to present his credentials; the name kind of says it all. In case any lingering doubts remain in the minds of the stubbornly impartial, Mr. Ablyazov’s prescription for What Ails Kazakhstan is “The West should tear Kazakhstan away from Russia.” That’s a quote. Which might leave you wondering curiously, “what kind of proud friend goes behind your back to hobnob with opposition exiles, and takes counsel from them that the future direction of your nation should be determined by violent external intervention?” The kind that will kick your fucking feet out from under you faster than you could say “welcome to Kazakhstan”, that’s what kind.

Hey; you know what I’d like to see? Some real, honest-to-goodness Higgins analysis. Let me see here…why, no sooner said than done!

“Kazakh authorities say that dozens of protesters have died in the unrest so far, with many more injured, and that 18 security officers have been killed. If the clashes drag on, the Kremlin could wind up alienating a broad swath of the Kazakh population, which in large cities like Almaty often speaks Russian and had been relatively pro-Russian. That would repeat the scenario in Ukraine, where anti-Russian sentiment has become so strong that it is unlikely to subside for years or decades.”

And with that, the slobbery lips of the quicksand closed over his head. According to polling data from 2019 published in 2020 – after Ukraine had supposedly been ‘at war with Russia’ for 5 years – even in the Russophobic west of Ukraine, 71% of respondents held a positive view of the Russian people. Far fewer held a positive view of the Russian government, but that is hardly a surprise since it is blamed for all their problems. And it should be looked at in context – at the same time, President Zelensky’s popularity rating in the country he was leading fell more than 20 percentage points in only two months, while the percentage of his electorate which viewed him negatively nearly tripled. While we’re still on the subject of context, Putin outperformed both President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in polls of American Republican voters just six months ago. He barely beat Trudeau (although Canadian voters were not asked), but he smoked Biden by a full ten percentage points. If – ha, ha – Joe Biden is planning on a second career after this hitch, and it does not involve a taxidermist, he might want to consider not citing his latest employers as a reference.

But here’s an angle that seems to me to have gone broadly unexplored, and it’s a viewpoint that speaks to both the continued fury of the protesters and the possibility of outside meddling from somewhere other than the ever-popular spoiler Putin. Why did the Kazakhstan government take the provocative step of boosting fuel costs in the first place? Was it simply greed, as those who would like to see another change of government in Kazakhstan contend? Maybe – maybe not; it depends on who you believe. Because according to Bloomberg, interest-rate hikes and reduction of external risk by the Kazakh government in 2020 were linked to its efforts to strengthen the national currency (the Tenge), stabilize pricing of staples and reduce the use of the US dollar in the Kazakh economy. I daresay if readers put their minds to it, they could draw some lines linking “large oil producer” and “moving away from the dollar” and “looks like Kazakhstan needs some freedom”.

Let’s bring it on home. Like Bashar al-Assad and Alexander ‘Lucky’ Lukashenko before him, Tokayev asked for security assistance from Russia because he felt confident that he would get it, that it would arrive promptly and that it would be an effective tool to help him regain control. Russia responded to a state request for military assistance, which is instead being portrayed in the western media as a subversive trick to secure more influence for Russia. That is extremely likely to be the outcome, but it’s hard to see how the overall situation was a satanic plot by Putin. Russia earned goodwill from Syria and Belarus by minding its own business until its help was invited, considering the request without delay or gloating when it came, and supplying assistance that quickly and efficiently resolved the problem to the satisfaction of the ruling government. There is every reason to imagine the same sequence, or one very similar in execution and resolution, will unfold in Kazakhstan.

“It is a doctrine of war not to assume the enemy will not come, but rather to rely on one’s readiness to meet him; not to presume that he will not attack, but rather to make one’s self invincible.”

Sun Tzu, from “The Art of War”