Federico Bordonaro

Article written by Kevin Whitelaw for the NPR Radio, with bits of an interview of this Author.

Homegrown Terrorist Risk

Publicly, U.S. officials have sought to downplay the risk from independent, homegrown terrorists.

“Homegrown Muslim extremists who have little if any connection to known terrorist organizations have not launched a successful attack in the United States,” Michael Leiter, who runs the National Counterterrorism Center, told Congress in September. “The handful of homegrown extremists who have sought to strike within the homeland since 9/11 have lacked the necessary tradecraft and capability to conduct or facilitate sophisticated attacks.”

But a recent case in Italy has some experts wondering whether radicalization patterns may be shifting, at least in Europe.

A Libyan man named Mohamed Game attacked an Italian army barracks in Milan on Oct.12 with an improvised explosive device similar to the one used to attack the London Underground in 2005. The bomb was poorly constructed, leaving the bomber seriously wounded and lightly injuring an Italian soldier.

Frederico Bordonaro, an Italian security analyst, says the case is important because Game and his two accomplices do not fit the typical profile of a homegrown terrorist.

“They were only moderately involved in local religious activities,” he writes in an upcoming article in the CTC Sentinel, a journal published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “They have no experience fighting in wars, and they do not have criminal records. As in the case of two Moroccans arrested in December 2008, the three men formed a terrorist cell independently without logistical support of established organizations.”

At the same time, he agrees with U.S. intelligence officials that these independent extremists have, up to now, been less dangerous.

“I think it can be harder to detect and track, but that it’s not more effective than the more typical radicalization,” he said in an interview. “However, we shouldn’t underestimate the danger of ‘do-it-yourself’ terrorism.”

“The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility”, wrote Lord Macaulay in 1831.
Does the nature of war change? Or does only its character do?
In light of the recent deterioration of the Afghan situation, it’s worth reading this piece written by Stanley Kober in the Guardian. It’s called “Misunderstanding modern war”.

America’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan and Iraq was to think its modern military would make winning easy
[…] in its overconfidence, the US overlooked several things.
Like Napoleon, it underestimated the resentment many people feel at foreign occupation.
Napoleon had also achieved a revolution in military affairs, and consequently he was exceptionally effective in defeating armies in battle. His invasion of Russia, culminating in the occupation of Moscow, seemed initially like a stunning triumph.
But the people did not submit, and he had to abandon Moscow. With his army in retreat, his allies deserted him. He lost the war and was sent into exile.
Napoleon thought the message of French democracy would be welcomed. When France began to send its armies abroad following the revolution, its leaders thought they would be greeted as liberators. “It will be a crusade for liberty,” confidently proclaimed one of its leaders, Jacques-Pierre Brissot.
Not everyone was convinced. “No one loves armed missionaries,” responded Robespierre. But his caution, which proved prescient, was overruled.

There are two types of historians: the vivid historian or butterfly and the technical historian or caterpillar. The former believes that complete history is neither possible nor desirable. Selection is necessary, and proper selection distinguishes good historians from bad ones. Facts are unimportant in themselves but are used to find underlying principles. The latter puts a premium on the discovery of new facts, letting interpretation take care of itself. While the technical historian’s truths are too small, the vivid historian’s truth is too big. The differences between the two types, in part temperamental, are also based on the periods in which they work; non-modern historians tend to be technical and modern historians vivid because the former are faced with a scarcity of sources, the latter with an overabundance.

Ihor Ševčenko, Two Varieties of Historical Writing, “History and Theory”, 8, October 1969, 332-345.

E’ in uscita per Guerini e Associati la mia monografia sulla geopolitica anglo-americana dalle origini ai nostri giorni.

Dalla quarta di copertina:

La disciplina geopolitica si occupa dell’influenza della geografia sul carattere politico degli Stati, sulla loro storia e sulle loro istituzioni, e soprattutto sulle loro relazioni politico-strategiche. È anche, però, il frutto di una cultura e di una visione del mondo influenzate dalle rappresentazioni geopolitiche. In quanto tale, la riflessione geopolitica risente inevitabilmente degli interessi nazionali e diviene ispiratrice di «grandi strategie».
Comprendere la tradizione geopolitica anglo-americana è quindi importante per l’analisi della politica estera statunitense e delle strategie della NATO. Ciò è tanto più vero alle soglie del secondo decennio del XXI secolo, in una fase in cui Washington e l’asse euro-atlantico, seppure indubbiamente dominanti sul piano tecnologico-militare, sono più che mai condizionati dai mutamenti geopolitici in atto, dall’Eurasia orientale al Medio Oriente, dall’America latina all’Africa.
Questo volume presenta al lettore italiano i principali autori del pensiero geopolitico anglosassone dalle origini ai giorni nostri, attraverso l’analisi dei testi teorici e della loro influenza politico-culturale. Particolare attenzione è rivolta al pensiero dei classici (Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman) e a quello dei loro eredi nel periodo dalla Guerra fredda. Infine, lo studio prende in esame le diverse scuole scaturite dalla rinascita della disciplina, in tutto il mondo anglofono, nel tardo Novecento.

Very interesting paragraph taken from the annual “Strategic Survey” published by London’s IISS. Every now and then, someone asserts that nation-states are dead and geopolitics obsolete. Now, almost in the year 2010, can we say that these fancy predictions were accurate? The answer is a resounding NO.

Moving into 2010, many of the ambitious foreign-policy agendas and practices established by Western powers in the previous decade and a half appear in retreat. What appetite will there be for the ‘nation-building’ projects that were thought at once strategically necessary and morally desirable? The efforts in Iraq are bound to become modest. Those in Afghanistan, especially as the economic crisis continues and the magnitude of the challenge becomes ever more evident, will naturally become minimalist, at least in comparison to the original design. New projects seem unlikely to be undertaken and would have trouble garnering public support except in the most exceptional of circumstances. What appeals for humanitarian intervention will be answered? The so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ has been advanced as an international imperative, though often with Western impetus, in the face of acts of genocide or equivalent natural tragedies. A sense of natural human charity persists even in times of grave economic crisis. But tragedies in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere have not resulted in the concerted international action for which so many campaigners have pleaded. The static or declining military budgets of European powers place limits on expeditionary capacities already stretched by operations thought to be of strategic vital national interest. Rising powers in Asia, and elsewhere, are still more reluctant to ‘interfere in the internal affairs’ of others. The survivability of doctrines like the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention will depend on countries outside the West adopting them more fully than has heretofore been evident.

The intellectual habit in the West has recently become to align national or alliance strategic interests with the delivery of a global public good. It may be that budgetary constraints and the disillusions of recent experience will inspire more political leaders to move from the poetic towards the more prosaic end of the strategic spectrum: defining goals more crisply in terms of clear national interest rather than acts of wider strategic charity. Emerging countries may need to move in the other direction and find some way to define the advance of a wider public good as in their national interest. Rising powers, if they are truly to rise, will only achieve genuine prominence if they are to shape the wider order in which they live. This rebalancing will take time, and may not have wholly beneficial effects. In some areas, like climate change, it may be that Western powers will continue to provide the impetus for an effective global regime, though one will not emerge without key participation from the bigger rising powers. But other causes will need champions from emerging power centres. As time passes, the limitations on Western and US foreign and security policy may become more evident. Domestically Obama may have campaigned on the theme ‘yes we can’; internationally he may increasingly have to argue ‘no we can’t’.

Why the hurry?. Interview for RFERL on the Caspian summit without Iran.
Update on the summit:

Berdymukhammedov’s statement cited the “bright future” of pipeline projects to export Turkmen gas. A pipeline to China is due to start operating at the end of this year. It should eventually pump some 40 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas annually. The Turkmen president also mentioned a proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project that would export slightly less gas (some 27-33 bcm annually).

Berdymukhammedov added that Turkmenistan, with the fourth-largest gas reserves in the world, has sufficient reserves to supply the European Union-backed Nabucco pipeline project (31 bcm annually).

But Berdymukhammedov avoided mention of gas supplies to Russia or of plans to repair a gas pipeline linking the two countries that was damaged by an explosion in April.

The Turkmen government has blamed Russia for the explosion, which happened as Russia’s Gazprom was pressing Turkmenistan to lower the price for its gas supplies. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was due to travel after the talks to Turkmenistan, where he would have more opportunity to address bilateral issues.

The Pri-Caspian pipeline project — planned to bring Turkmen, Kazakh, and Uzbek gas to Russia via a pipeline along the northeastern Caspian coast — was also notable for its absence from Berdymukhammedov’s statement. All four countries agreed to that project in 2007, but there has been little movement of late aside from Kazakhstan’s pledge on September 11 that it would start laying sections of that pipeline in 2010.

The Turkmen statement was released to mark the “Day of Oil, Gas, Electrical Workers and Geologists” in that country.

But the fact that it coincided with the Caspian talks suggests it was an effort to give the Turkmen president extra leverage in talks with his three counterparts at the summit.

Of the three projects mentioned by Berdymukhammedov’s office, only the Western-backed Nabucco project would involve any of the other three countries represented in Kazakhstan (Azerbaijan via a yet-to-be-built trans-Caspian pipeline).

Excluding Iran

The leaders had said in their opening statements that no major decisions on use of the Caspian would be made in the absence of the only littoral state not in attendance, Iran.

Tehran was not invited to the talks and complained bitterly this week about its exclusion.

Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, suggested there are many topics that the four leaders from Caspian states also allied within the CIS can discuss more effectively without non-member Iran.

Interview for RFERL on the hypothesis of a gas cartel.

It’s enough to send a chill, figuratively and literally, down the spines of energy consumers: the creation of a cartel of natural-gas producers. It would be an organization akin to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the body so many blame when the price of gasoline starts to rise.

“A gas cartel, should it see the light, would mean that producer countries would augment their power even more and that they could have a stronger say on gas prices,” says Federico Bordonaro, a senior analyst with equilibri.net, an Italian-based analytical group specializing in risk assessment.

A “New Great Game” of Geopolitical Control Surfaces in Russia’s Old Backyard. An analysis written by Nadya Ivanova for Circle of Blue, with bits of my interview on the energy issues of the South Caucasus and Caspian regions.

Last December, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) completed an intensive seven-year project to understand the ecological dynamics of the Kura-Araks. NATO convened scientists from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan to propose technical solutions for ecological restoration and cleanup.

The campaign, which also involved technical experts from the United States and several European Union (EU) nations, aimed to be more than a classic environmental initiative. Instead, NATO and OSCE focused on the river basin and its cleanup as a tool for using science, collaboration and strategic investment to design solutions to equally important competition over energy and diplomacy that might thrust the South Caucasus into an international conflict.
Reducing those conflicts is essential to cleaning up the river basin and to resolving the important issues that wrack the strategic region, where the EU, U.S. and Russian spheres of influence coalesce over politics, energy and diplomacy.

Article by Bruce Pannier for RFERL with bits of my interview on the subject:

It’s been an up-and-down year for the Nabucco natural gas pipeline.

Just as work on the long-stalled project seems set to finally begin, some shift — usually at the hand of Russian energy giant Gazprom — alters the commercial landscape and Nabucco’s chances appear to recede.

But the pipeline’s supporters have just selected a big name in European politics to help push the project toward realization — Joschka Fischer, the former head of Germany’s Green Party and the country’s foreign minister from 1998-2005.

Fischer faces some serious obstacles in jump-starting Nabucco — the would-be cornerstone in Europe’s drive to kick its Russian energy habit, which has failed to attract commitments from suppliers and consumers alike.

Not least among them is the fact that Nabucco’s rival pipeline projects have a powerful lobbyist all their own — Fischer’s former boss, ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has spent four years on the payroll of Russian energy giant Gazprom.

RFERL’s “Power Vertical” delivered an interesting comment on Stratfor’s geopolitical analysis of the global recession.

The report begins with statistics showing how the global recession is affecting various countries and then moves on to an interesting, geography-based explanation of why the recession is, so far, more than four times worse in Russia (change in GDP of negative 9.5 percent over the last 12 months) than it is in the United States (a decline of 2.6 percent).

Stratfor’s analysis of the United States – how its geography, including the world’s largest mass of arable land and a generous inland waterway system that promotes open and cheap domestic trade, produced a resilient and flexible political and economic system – is intriguing reading.

Geography may not be “destiny”, but it certainly has an influential say about it…

As Peter Zeihan wrote in the Stratfor’s report:

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intracoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.

This reminds me about Spykman’s lesson: Size per se is not strength, but potential strength. Size, topography, and location, if taken together and analysed in their mutual relations, allow an observer to “get the really big things right enough”, as Colin S. Gray said about Mackinder’s geopolitical works.

Article written for ExploringGeopolitics.

Spykman’s in-depth analysis of geography’s political-strategic significance constitutes an excellent introduction to the methodology of geopolitics.
. . . Probably, the most interesting part of Spykman’s theoretical geopolitics is the one devoted to the significance of location for a state’s power potential. “The location of a state may be described from the point of view of world-location, that is, with reference to the land masses and oceans of the world as a whole, or from the point of view of regional location, that is, with reference to the territory of other states and immediate surroundings. The former description will be in terms of latitude, longitude, altitude, and distance from the sea; the latter will be in terms of relations to surroundings areas, distances, lines of communication, and the nature of border territory . . . “A complete description of the geographic location of a state will include […] an analysis of the meaning” of the facts of location, since while the latter “do not change, the significance of such facts changes with every shift in the means of communication, in routes of communication, in the technique of war, and in the centers of world power, and the full meaning of a given location can be obtained only by considering the specific area in relation to two systems of reference: a geographic system of reference from which we derive the facts of location, and a historical system of reference by which we evaluate those facts”.

Analysis by Bruce Pannier for RFERLwith bits of an interview of mine.

Duncan Wood for Treasury and Risk:

Political risk can be devastating. Ask the mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that have been forced over the past two years to renegotiate their contracts. Ask HSBC, whose headquarters in Istanbul was wrecked by a terrorist attack in 2003. Ask the hedge funds that bet Brazilian stocks would tank after firebrand left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003, then suffered heavy losses when the exact opposite happened.

Companies have always faced these kinds of risks: terrorism, civil unrest, regulatory change, the seizure of assets. But the exposure has never been as great as it is today, argues Christa Davies, CFO of Aon Corp., the global risk-management consultancy and insurance brokerage based in Chicago: “People are doing business in more countries—and a more diverse range of countries—than ever before. They might have operations on the ground, or they could be exposed through their supply chains, by sourcing product components or services in certain locations, or simply through the customer base. It absolutely has to be a core consideration in the way people run their business.”

… “while companies have a formal, rigorous approach to the management of other exposures, like currency risk or business continuity, they usually tackle political risk on an ad hoc basis.”

Simply said, political risk refers to political decisions unduly affecting businesses. However, in many occasions political decisions are caused by geopolitics, that is, by the country’s position both in the global and in the regional political system, and/or by its internal ethnic, religious, and territorial configuration.
Therefore, a thorough understanding of political risk must encompass geopolitics.

Intervista per Radio Radicale sul vertice di Praga e la questione del “Corridoio Sud”.

I wrote in 2005 that Pakistan’s geopolitical importance was on the rise. I considered mainly Pakistan’s position (a strategic link between the Middle East’s Arabian Sea region, South Asia, and Central Asia) and its value for China and the US from a security point of view, especially in terms of maritime power and strategic route. Especially the US cannot afford to see Pakistan disintegrate, because such a development would likely trigger a shift in the region geopolitical orientation (from a pro-Western to an unknown but probably anti-Western alignment).
I also considered the Pakistan-India problem to be a key issue: Pakistan’s destabilization may add to Indo-Pakistani tensions and could potentially trigger a new conflict, which, because of the two states’s nuclear capabilities, is among the most dangerous ones in today’s international relations.

Now, four years later, it is clear that the possibility of a progressive disintegration of Pakistan is to be taken seriously.
In the early 2000s, US geopolitical analyst and geographer Saul B. Cohen launched the hypothesis of a “Pashtunistan” taking shape as a result of US destruction of the Taliban regime and serious instability in Pakistan’s remote regions. This would have triggered a major geopolitical change in Central-South Asia, with Afghanistan and Pakistan de facto disintegrating.
The hypothesis might have seemed too bold, but some of the world’s most important newspapers now utilize the concept.

The situation is confused and it’s not at all clear if it is possible to speak about a “talibanization” of the country. What is sure is that Balochistan, Waziristan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are caught in a struggle, in which both ethno-religious and territorial aspects are concerned.

Pepe Escobar wrote on May 9 for Asia Times that

Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon’s. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan’s area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, it accounts for less than 4% of Pakistan’s 173 million citizens. Balochs are the majority, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the provincial capital, is considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon […].

For the US, the Afghan operation has become the “AfPak” issue. Max Hastings, in today’s Financial Times, explains the problem clearly:

It is frustrating for the US government to be making strategy for a battlefield while knowing that the strategic outcome will be decided on another one. The current redeployments in Afghanistan are taking place in the knowledge that Pakistan matters much more. The most important change in the thinking of Washington and its allies over the past year derives from recognition they are fighting the wrong war, or at least running a sideshow.

The purpose of the 2001 US invasion was to deny sanctuary to terrorists based in Afghanistan. Yet al-Qaeda today plays only a marginal role in that country, while being deeply rooted in Pakistan. Western forces find themselves engaged in an ill-defined campaign to stabilise Afghan tribal society, while being unable to use troops across the border, where most Pakistanis are bitterly hostile to the US. […]

The most obvious feature of the Afghan war in the months ahead is that it will become, in the phrase of indiscreet US soldiers, “re-Americanised”. The Americans perceive Nato as lacking both means and will to grip the situation. The most important priority for Washington is to determine exactly what its soldiers hope to accomplish, rather than making it up as they go along.

The result is that Pakistan is even more a geopolitical crux today than it was four years ago. It has incresingly attracted US military energies from the Afghan theatre. It has also forced India to re-focus its attention on the Pakistani militants issue after the Mumbay attacks. And it will take a long time before the situation becomes clearer. Expect the AfPak problem to dominate the US foreign policy agenda for the rest of this year and to impact the debate on NATO’s future.