ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Pepe Escobar - Asia Times " - By the time you read this Russia will have invaded Ukraine. Well, that's what the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, is spinning. Breedlove Supreme says the Russians are "ready to go" and could easily take over eastern Ukraine. Western corporate media have already dusted off their Kevlar vests. Now compare Breedlove Supreme with a grown-up diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has called on NATO to please de-escalate the "unreasonable" warmongering rhetoric, which also includes officially ending all civilian and military cooperation with Russia and planning more military moves in Eastern Europe. While NATO - shorthand for the Pentagon's European division - freaks out, especially via its outgoing secretary-general, Danish patsy Anders Fogh Rasmussen, let's see where we really stand on the ground, based on leaks from both Lavrov...

Summary A delegation of South American foreign ministers will arrive in Venezuela on April 7 to lay the groundwork for a settlement between the government and opposition, but lately the protest situation in the country has been shifting in the government's favor. The wave of protests that began Feb. 12 has so far failed to seriously threaten the administration of President Nicolas Maduro. The frequency of protest marches and barricades has tapered off, and Caracas' law enforcement efforts appear to be effectively disrupting protest activity. The underlying causes of the protests are no closer to being resolved, however, and demonstrations will continue and could even swell to the extent that they could threaten Maduro's hold on power. Analysis After nearly two months of street demonstrations and makeshift barricades across Venezuela , the protesters are no closer to achieving their stated goal of ousting Maduro. The movement's most visible leaders, opposition legislator...

Summary Between April 7 and May 12, more than 800 million Indians will go to the polls to elect India's 16th Lok Sabha, the lower house of the country's parliament. The vote, possibly the largest democratic event in history, comes at a critical time in the country. India faces declining economic growth, as well as rising militant threats from a weakened Pakistan and a post-NATO Afghanistan. At the same time, India is beginning to re-engage its periphery and re-evaluate its relationships with two global powers, China and the United States. Two parties dominate India's political landscape: the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the Indian National Congress. The BJP's prime minister candidate is Narendra Modi, a controversial pro-business Hindu nationalist who currently serves as chief minister of the economically vibrant Gujarat state. Congress, on the other hand, is semi-socialist and one of the world's oldest political parties, currently in its fourth generation of...

By Finian Cunningham The best way to understand the seemingly reckless, recurring threat of nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula is this: the East Asian region is being run like a Mafia protection racket. And the criminal Mafia is the US. The conflict emanates from Washington and is perpetuated by Washington. Why? To justify what would otherwise be seen as simply outrageous US militarism in the Asia Pacific hemisphere, and in particular a criminally aggressive agenda towards the main geopolitical targets of Washington - China and Russia. Korea’s conflict is not primarily about North and South “enemy states”. It is, as it has been for the past 68 years since the end of World War II, about Washington using military force to criminally assert its hegemony on the global stage. But you wouldn’t know this from a casual reading of the Western news media. No, we are told over and over again that the US is “protecting” South Korea and its other Asian allies. The military presence of the US is “...

Afghan policemen count bags containing heroin as they are presented to the media at a police station in Jalalabad on September 19, 2013. (AFP Photo / Noorullah Shirzada) Download video (26.89 MB) Finding a solution to the thriving heroin production in Afghanistan has been on the back burner ever since the Americans occupied the country. The new Afghan president who will be elected next weekend will have to battle record opium harvests. Since the US came down on the Taliban and occupied Afghanistan in 2001, heroin production in the country has surged almost 40-fold. One year ago the estimated number of heroin addicts dying due to Afghan heroin in the preceding decade surpassed well over one million deaths worldwide. Last year, Afghanistan harvested a record quantity of opium. The annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board maintains that Afghan poppy fields now occupy a record 209,000 hectares, a 36 percent increase from 2013. Today more than half of the provinces ...

New Details on What Secrets Israel Asked Pollard to Steal CIA Withholding Overturned on Appeal by National Security Archive National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 407 Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson Washington, DC, December 14, 2012 – When Naval Investigative Service analyst Jonathan Pollard spied for Israel in 1984 and 1985, his Israeli handlers asked primarily for nuclear, military and technical information on the Arab states, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union – not on the United States – according to the newly-declassified CIA 1987 damage assessment of the Pollard case, published today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University ( www.nsarchive.org ). The damage assessment includes new details on the specific subjects and documents sought by Pollard's Israeli handlers (pages 36-43), such as Syrian drones and central communications, Egyptian missile programs, and Soviet air defenses. The Israelis specifically asked for a signals intelligence manu...

On March 1, the Islamabad government cut a deal with the Taliban. And since then, all hell has been breaking loose in neighboring Afghanistan. In the last month, the Taliban has killed dozens of people in a string of attacks timed to destabilize Afghanistan ahead of the presidential elections on Saturday. Most recently, a suicide bomber breached the heavy security at the Interior Ministry building and blew himself up, killing six police officers. And that may be just a preview, if local Taliban commanders are to be believed. “We told Afghans not to vote,” said Haji Shakor, a Taliban commander in central Afghanistan. “If we found out you voted, you won’t take your five fingers home.” But the real accelerators of this violence aren’t Shakor and his fellow Afghanistan-based militants, local intelligence and security officials tell The Daily Beast. Instead, it’s Taliban insurgents streaming over the border from Pakistan that have enabled the group’s recent killing spree in Kabul. And they ...

In a new doc, the former defense secretary says he never meant to imply that Saddam was behind 9/11—despite the implications that the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda were in cahoots. In The Unknown Known , Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War) turns his infamous interrotron on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He was one of the key architects of the U.S. response to the attacks of September 11th under President George W. Bush, which included wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title of Morris’ documentary, out April 4, is taken from a controversial response Rumsfeld gave in February 2002 when, as Secretary of Defense, he was prodded about the lack of evidence concerning “reports” propagated by the Bush administration that Iraq was supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups: “Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. Ther...