Common exercise, different goals (US in "unipolar moment")

[Flabbergasted]

Source: IHT

Common exercise, different goals
By Yu Bin


In mid-August, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes Russia, China and Central Asian states, conducted a multi-state military exercise in central Russia, code-named "Peace Mission 2007." The SCO allowed some 80 nations to observe the drill - but not the United States, an omission that was widely noted.

The exercise prompted some analysts to suggest that Moscow and Beijing are not merely creating their own "space," separate from that of the West, but are poised to shape this regional security group into a military alliance. Such speculation would be rash.

Washington's perspective on the SCO is divided: On one hand, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought close to SCO peripheries. But as the world's only regional security group that does not include direct participation of the United States, SCO is also a distant force for the world's sole superpower, still in its "unipolar moment."

The Peace Mission 2007 exercise - involving some 4,000 troops and 1,000 pieces of large armament, including 80 aircraft - was the first SCO exercise to involve the armed forces of all of its member states: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

China sent 1,600 troops and 45 aircraft, the longest force-projecting operation ever for the Peoples Liberation Army. SCO members dispatched their best units and practiced with more integration - generals gathered in the same situation room; all units interfaced through a Russian communication mechanism, and commandos of different states boarded and dropped from the same helicopters.

Despite many such firsts, Peace Mission 2007 was a far more realistic application of SCO's military power to its declared anti-terrorist goal than for any other purpose. Unlike Peace Mission 2005, held in China, no strategic bombers participated.


Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/17/opinion/edbin.php