The State Department assistant secretary also emphasized the role of the recently activated Northern Distribution Network (NDN) in moving supplies, military equipment and troops to the Afghan war front from the west, promoting the concept that "The NDN increasingly offers the people of the Central Asian countries the opportunity to sell goods and services to NATO troops in Afghanistan, and we hope it can help catalyze greater trade and economic cooperation between Afghanistan and Central Asia."
The U.S. has assiduously worked to ensure that Chinese, Russian and Iranian influence in Central Asia and Afghanistan is blocked and instead promotes the economic, transportation and security integration of the region through the Pentagon-NATO Northern Distribution Network. The U.S. and NATO intend the NDN to supplant the SCO as the engine of economic and security integration in Central Asia. To date eleven of the fifteen former federal republics of the Soviet Union - all except for Armenia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine - have been incorporated into the NDN grid originating in the Baltic and Black Seas.
Washington is also exploiting Afghanistan and Central Asia to attain an even larger prize. Again according to Blake, "South Asia, with India as its thriving anchor, is a region of growing strategic and commercial importance to the United States in the critical Indian Ocean area.
"In total, the region is home to over two billion people - roughly one fourth of the world's population."
He elaborated further on the main strategic objective of the wider Afghan war when he stated that "projects with India in Afghanistan mark a small but important part of a significant new global development - the emergence of a global strategic partnership between India and the United States," as "by 2025 India is expected to become the 3rd largest economy in the world, behind the United States and China."
"Secretary Clinton and other Cabinet officials will also travel to India this spring for the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which oversees the entire spectrum of our cooperation."
Blake also reminded his audience of an initiative instituted last year and conducted under his jurisdiction: Annual Bilateral Consultations (ABCs) with all five Central Asian countries. In his Houston speech he stated, "I look forward to starting the second round of ABCs with Uzbekistan next month in Tashkent."
Blake's boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visited Uzbekistan last month - the first secretary of state to do since Colin Powell's trip there in December of 2001 - as well as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbek President Islam Karimov just returned from Brussels where NATO had invited him to visit its headquarters and meet with Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. While in the Belgian capital he also met with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barossa and Energy Commissioner G????nther Oettinger. Uzbekistan, though poor in oil supplies, is one of the largest producers of natural gas in the former Soviet Union.
Uzbekistan is, like its neighbors, assuming greater significance for the U.S.-NATO war effort in South Asia: "The airport at the Uzbek city of Navoi has emerged as a key cog in the Northern Distribution Network, a web of Central Asian rail, road and air links that funnels supplies to US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Most of the NDN supplies bound for Afghanistan flow through the railway junction at Termez, at the Uzbek-Afghan border." [3] German troops are based in Termez and across the border in Afghanistan's Kunduz province.
While Clinton was in Kyrgyzstan she, seemingly without even the suggestion of a formal agreement to the effect, assumed the extension of U.S. rights to the air base there, stating "Washington would examine again in 2014 whether it needed the Manas base."
"Clinton said Manas was the central transit point for troops from 49 countries going into Afghanistan." [4]
Her subordinate Blake's speech at Rice University also included discussion of the strategic role of Central Asia in regards to hydrocarbon extraction and transport. He claimed that the biggest and richest of the Central Asian states, Kazakhstan, "will account for one of the largest increases in non-OPEC supply to the global market in the next 10-15 years as its oil production doubles to reach 3 million barrels a day by 2020." The U.S. and its EU and NATO allies have long planned the shipping of Kazakh oil and natural gas westward to the South Caucasus and thence to Europe, both bypassing and replacing Russia as Europe's main supplier of hydrocarbons.
Western projects include the Nabucco natural gas pipeline and building a pipeline under the Caspian Sea to bring Kazakh oil to Azerbaijan where it would be transported via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey) pipeline with a connection to an Odessa-Brody-Plock-Gdansk branch running from Ukraine to Poland's Baltic Sea coast and from there to the rest of Europe.
That is, the Western-initiated Southern Corridor versus Russia's South Stream natural gas pipeline to the Black Sea and the Balkans.
In 2009 Richard Morningstar, the State Department's Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, spoke in the Czech Republic at an EU summit called Southern Corridor-New Silk Road, and asserted: "President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton share your support for the Southern Corridor and consider Eurasian energy issues to be of the highest importance."
His State Department colleague Blake also said last week: "Though often overlooked as an energy source, Uzbekistan has substantial hydrocarbon reserves of its own and produces about as much natural gas as Turkmenistan. Located at the heart of Central Asia, much of the region's infrastructure -" roads, railroads, transmission lines, and pipelines - goes through Uzbekistan, offering it a unique opportunity to expand its exports with little investment in new infrastructure."
The energy project that attracted the attention of Blake most, however, was the agreement concluded on December 11 of last year for the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) natural gas pipeline to run from the Caspian Sea littoral nation that gives the acronym its first letter to India, which was the death sentence for a competing "peace pipeline" from Iran to Pakistan, from there to India and onward to China - the $7 billion, 1,430-mile Iran-Pakistan-India gas (IPI) pipeline - that had been years in the planning but was opposed by Washington, which backed the earlier TAP (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan) and later the TAPI alternative.
The pipeline is extend over 10,000 miles and deliver 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually.
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