The 78-day U.S. and NATO air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, Operation Allied Force, allowed the Pentagon to construct the mammoth Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and within ten years to incorporate five Balkans nations into NATO. It also prepared the groundwork for U.S. Navy warships to dock at ports in Albania, Croatia and Montenegro.
Two years later the attack on Afghanistan led to the deployment of U.S. and NATO troops, armor and warplanes to five nations in Central and South Asia. The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has also contributed to the Pentagon's penetration of the world's second most populous nation, India, which is being pulled into the American military orbit and integrated into global NATO. The U.S. and Israel are supplanting Russia as India's main arms supplier and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently returned from India where his mission included "lifting bilateral military relations from a policy-alignment plane to a commercial platform that will translate into larger contracts for American companies." [25]
With the quickly developing expansion of the Afghanistan-Pakistan war into an Afghanistan-Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia theater, NATO warships are in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean and the U.S. has stationed Reaper drones, aircraft and troops in Seychelles. [On the same day as the London conference on Afghanistan a parallel meeting on Yemen will be held in the same city.]
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq the Pentagon gained air and other bases in that nation as well as what it euphemistically calls forward operating sites and base camps in Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In less than a decade the Pentagon and NATO have acquired strategic air bases and ones that can be upgraded to that status in Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania and Romania.
Global NATO And Militarization Of The Planet
The January 26 Chief of Defense session of NATO's Military Committee with top military leaders of 63 countries attending - while the bloc is waging and escalating the world's largest and lengthiest war thousands of miles away from the Atlantic Ocean - is indicative of the pass that the post-Cold War world has arrived at. Never in any context other than meetings of NATO's Military Committee do the military chiefs of so many nations (including at least five of the world's eight nuclear powers), practically a third of the world's, gather together.
That the current meeting is dedicated to NATO operations on three continents and in particular to the world's only military bloc's new Strategic Concept for the 21st century - and for the planet - would have been deemed impossible twenty or even ten years ago. As would have been the U.S. and its NATO allies invading and occupying a Middle Eastern and a South Asian nation. And the elaboration of plans for an international interceptor missile system with land, air, sea and space components. In fact, though, all have occurred or are underway and all are integrated facets of a concerted drive for global military superiority.
1) http://afghanistan.hmg.gov.uk/en/conference
2) NATO, Allied Command Transformation, January 22, 2010
3) http://www.isaf.nato.int/en/article/news/u.s.-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-tours-bases-outposts.html
4) Standart News, November 25, 2009
5) ACT Media, November 16, 2009
6) The Diplomat, November, 2009
7) RosBusinessConsulting/Komsomolskaya Pravda, November 10, 2009
8) Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2009
9) Xinhua News Agency, December 3, 2009
10) Agence France-Presse, January 22, 2009
11) The National, January 2, 2010
12) The National, January 11, 2010
13) Gulf News, January 12, 2010
14) World Tribune, September 30, 2009
15) Ibid
16) Hurriyet Daily News, December 30, 2009
17) Ibid
18) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 16, 2009
19) Europolitics, January 20, 2010
20) Sunday Telegraph, January 17, 2010
21) Xinhua News Agency, December 22, 2009
22) Stars and Stripes, January 16, 2010
23) Washington Times, December 3, 2009
24) China Times, December 27, 2009
25) The Telegraph (Calcutta), January 2, 2009
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