"It appears that for Kazakhstan, NATO, and the United States, the backup airfield will be a symbol of military cooperation between the West and Central Asia...." [13]
The month after that feature appeared, Indian political analyst M. K. Bhadrakumar wrote a column which featured these observations:
"The US is working on the idea of ferrying cargo for Afghanistan via the Black Sea to the port of Poti in Georgia and then dispatching it through the territories of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. A branch line could also go from Georgia via Azerbaijan to the Turkmen-Afghan border.
"The project, if it materializes, will be a geopolitical coup - the biggest ever that Washington would have swung in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. At one stroke, the US will be tying up military cooperation at the bilateral level with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
"Furthermore, the US will be effectively drawing these countries closer into NATO's partnership programs."
"Besides, The US will have virtually dealt a blow to the Russia-led Collective Security Treat Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)."
"[T]he proposed land route covering Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan can also be easily converted into an energy corridor and become a Caspian oil and gas corridor bypassing Russia.
"Such a corridor has been a long-cherished dream for Washington. Furthermore, European countries will feel the imperative to agree to the US demand that the transit countries for the energy corridor are granted NATO protection in one form or the other. That, in turn, leads to NATO's expansion into the Caucasus and Central Asia.
"The time may not be far off before they begin to sense that the 'war on terror is providing a convenient rubric under which the US is incrementally securing for itself a permanent abode in the highlands of the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, Central Asian steppes and the Caucasus that form the strategic hub overlooking Russia, China, India and Iran." [14]
Bhadrakumar's contentions had been verified before the fact as it were in June of 2008 when then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza delivered an address in Washington, DC called "Invigorating the U.S.-Turkey Strategic Partnership," which contained the following comments:
"Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev welcomed international investors to help develop the Caspian Basin's mammoth oil and gas reserves. Then-Turkish President Suleyman Demirel worked with these leaders, and with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, to develop a revitalized concept of the Great Silk Road in the version of an East-West Corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines."
"The East-West Corridor we had been building from Turkey and the Black Sea through Georgia and Azerbaijan and across the Caspian became the strategic
air corridor, and the lifeline, into Afghanistan allowing the United States and our coalition partners to conduct Operation Enduring Freedom."[15]
If the former Indian diplomat asserted that the military corridor from the Black Sea to Afghanistan could be transformed into a strategic energy route running in the opposite direction, the State Department's Bryza had already revealed that under the guise of solely oil and natural gas projects the U.S. and its NATO allies had long in advance of the so-called global war on terror created the infrastructure required to move troops and equipment from Europe to Central and South Asia.
In November of 2008 U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman was in the capital of Azerbaijan, on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, and said eleven days after the election of Barack Obama that "the incoming Obama administration will maintain an interest in Caspian Sea energy resources.
"It is my firm belief that this effort and this region of the world will also be a priority for the next administration." [16]
To give an indication of how far-reaching U.S. plans are for a trans-Eurasian (Caspian-to-Black-to-Baltic Seas) energy strategy to drive Russia out of the European market, Bodman's comments were delivered at an energy summit attended by the presidents and other leading officials of host nation Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine.
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