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30 Apr, 2009 09:12

ROAR: Russian Opinion and Analytics Review, Apr.30

ROAR: Russian Opinion and Analytics Review, Apr.30

This Thursday ROAR follows Russian newspapers’ response to the new Afghanistan policies announced by the West and presents an opinion on Russia’s role in the world by the leader of the Libyan revolution.

KOMMERSANT writes in the article titled ‘Pakistan squeezing the Taliban out of itself’ that the advance of the Pakistani government troops on the territories held by the Taliban are directly caused by the unusually strong wording used by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the recent Congress foreign policy hearings. The Head of the State department then said that the Pakistani government is yielding more and more territory to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and letting them grow in strength and numbers.

The paper says that Clinton allegedly hinted at a possible Taliban take-over of Pakistan as a nation, to which the Pakistani ambassador responded that it will never happen.

The current hostilities began, says the paper, after the Taliban decided to test the limits of its earlier agreement with the government of Pakistan by occupying several towns and a city outside their designated zone, while the US continued urging Pakistan to get tough on the Taliban.

VREMYA NOVOSTEI quotes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who has called the area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border the most dangerous ‘cauldron of terror’ where future terrorist attacks are brewed and no government control exists.

The paper says the Prime Minister’s vision of the future formed during his visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan and presented to the British parliament yesterday does not differ much from what the US and its allies have been trying to achieve for the whole duration of the war: the building of a more democratic and stronger Afghanistan and gradual transfer of power and enforcement responsibilities to the local authorities.

That may be the best option from the point of view of democracy and nation building, says the paper, but among British and American generals and politicians there is a new sentiment which is now on the rise: they think it may be too late – or too early – for nation building, and that the task of the moment is to inflict as much damage upon the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as possible by military means. In the best case scenario defeat them entirely, and only then time may come for nation building. So far, they insist, there is no possibility of improving the situation in Pakistan. The main objective then should be the military engagement of the Taliban and the limiting of their access to the West.

The same paper, VREMYA NOVOSTEI, publishes an article by the leader of the Libyan revolution Muammar Qaddafi who writes that the eastward expansion of NATO repeats the path taken two hundred years by Napoleon, and that it may end in the same way.

The Libyan head of state says that Western armies have always tried to march eastward to Russia and they were always defeated. In the current situation when Russia remains a nuclear superpower protected by its triple nuclear shield of strategic missiles, strategic bombers and submarine-based ballistic missiles, any attack may trigger an all-out nuclear war in which there will be no winners.

Provocations against Russia as well as the attempts to contain Russia present a threat to world peace and are pregnant with a large-scale nuclear war which no one alive today wants to happen. The West, he says, and especially the US often in the past based their Russia policies on inaccurate data and analysis coming from unreliable sources, on information biased with the personal interests of the informers.

Who in the West would have thought, says Muammar Qaddafi, when they were supporting Kosovo’s independence that the fever of it will reach Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia? The intelligence, on which the whole concept of the Iraq war was based, proved to be full of disinformation and false insinuations. Most of that data had been supplied by the traitors of their peoples who wanted badly to please the US intelligence community.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union there is no need for any expansion of NATO, writes Qaddafi, unless the real goal of the alliance is the occupation of Russia and the rest of the world.

The US, he says, as a global state, to whose prosperity many peoples of the world have contributed, deserves its role as the seat of the UN and the Security Council. However, today America participates in every act of aggression perpetrated in the world. That endangers everyone in the world, and first of all it endangers the US itself.

Aggression and provocation begets violence. Modern Russia, says the Libyan leader, if provoked, will not defend a certain ideology as the Soviet Union did. It will defend its own right to exist. It will defend itself as a nation. It will fight for its people’s right to live. Nowadays, an attempt to pursue the same policies towards Russia that, in the past, were pursued towards the Soviet Union may turn out to be suicidal.

Evgeny Belenkiy, RT.

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