Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

[burjuin]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Armenian Air Force:

[Mos]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Interesting development, maybe Azerbaijan will strive to become part of CSTO?

Azerbaijan: US Military Ties with Baku are Stagnating - Experts
April 25, 2011 - 2:07pm, by Shahin Abbasov

Azerbaijan
US
Arms and Defense
Geopolitics

Azerbaijan’s recent move to indefinitely postpone joint military exercises with the United States is a sign that bilateral strategic ties are stagnating, analysts in Baku believe. Some wonder whether the social-network-inspired unrest that has swept the Middle East and North Africa, and which has also touched Azerbaijan, played a role in Baku’s decision.

Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on April 20 announced the postponement of “Regional Response-2011,” without citing a reason. The joint military exercises had been scheduled for May 15-25. Last year, Baku also pulled out of similar exercises.

Asked to explain the reason for the move, Defense Ministry representative Eldar Sabiroglu told EuraisaNet.org that the ministry is not involved in politics – a turn of phrase that indicated that the postponement was not the ministry’s decision. Sabiroglu also insisted that the exercises had not been cancelled, saying that the maneuvers, instead, “are postponed for an uncertain term.”

“We intend to continue military cooperation with the United States,” he added. The US Embassy in Baku declined to comment on the exercises’ indefinite postponement.

Military analyst Jasur Sumarinli suggested that this latest postponement is part of a trend by Baku to downgrade US military cooperation. In February 2011, the Azerbaijani government unilaterally cancelled consultations with the United States on security matters, local media outlets reported. Parliament has also not ratified the second part of the cooperation plan signed in March by the US European Command and Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense.

“It would be fair to say that, at present, there are not any activities in the military area between the United States and Azerbaijan,” said Sumarinli, editor-in-chief of the Mil.az news agency.

Last year, tensions surrounding a potential Turkish-Armenian rapprochement and the absence of a US ambassador to Baku were cited as reasons for ditching the exercises. This year, there is fresh reason for discord -- Western criticism of the police crackdown on unsanctioned street demonstrations in Azerbaijan. Amid the turmoil in the Middle East, such statements make officials in Baku wonder on what side its Western allies are betting, analysts say.

“Baku does not have an answer yet to the question about the US and European attitude towards Azerbaijan in this context,” said pro-government political commentator Mubariz Akhmedoglu, the president of the Center of Political Technologies and Innovations.

Experts in Baku believe that Azerbaijani officials are inclined to use the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process as a gauge of Western loyalties. In an interview with the Russian TV channel Rossiya-24 in early April, President Ilham Aliyev reproached Western states for alleged “double standards” on the issue. The United States and France, along with Russia, are co-chairs of the Minsk Group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe entity that oversees Karabakh peace talks.

“When we saw that the UN Security Council’s resolution on Libya is being implemented immediately, but four resolutions on Nagorno-Karabakh are not implemented during 17-18 years, of course, it raises the question -- why? What is the reason for being so fast [with Libya] and so passive in the case of Azerbaijan?” Aliyev asked.

Meanwhile, in an April 25 interview with the Russian newspaper Moskovksiye Novosti, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov heaped praise on Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev for “personally” getting involved in attempts to broker a lasting Karabakh settlement.

"He is genuinely trying to find a common ground for the process not to freeze, not to lose traction, but to move forward,” Mammadyarov commented.

And, like a Greek chorus, Azerbaijan’s parliament, controlled by President Aliyev’s Yeni Azerbaijan Party (YAP), has sounded the refrain. At parliament’s April 15 session, YAP deputies complained that the United States and European Union were not doing as much as they could to push for Karabakh peace.

Political analyst Sulkhaddin Akper, who heads the Azerbaijan-Atlantic Cooperation Association, a Baku-based think-tank, believes the single-most important factor in Azerbaijani officials’ decision-making calculus is Russia: Given the memory of Russia’s 2008 blitz against Georgia, Baku is wary of doing anything that would inordinately rile the Kremlin.

Sumarinli, the military expert, shared Akper’s view. “Military cooperation between Baku and Washington is stalling,” he said. “Baku does not want to anger Russia and keeps canceling exercises, but the United States does not show enough persistence.”

Baku’s desire to not to anger Moscow would seem to preclude any possibility of Azerbaijan hosting a US military facility. According to congressional testimony given in March by Adm. James G. Stavridis, the head of US European Command, the United States is currently looking for a logistics base in the Caucasus that would help maintain a steady flow of supplies to US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Stavridis cited the establishment of a “Black Sea/Caucasus en-route location to further U.S. expeditionary capability” as among the European Command’s top priorities in 2011.

“Russia is not irritated much with the US military cooperation in our region,” Akhmedoglu said of the canceled military exercises. “But, in the meantime, of course, Baku should be careful in its actions after August 2008.”
Editor's note:
Shahin Abbasov is a freelance reporter based in Baku and a board member of the Open Society Assistance Foundation-Azerbaijan.

[londontsi]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

.

This is interesting, but one must not forget/ignore the Israeli element.
US may have already sub-contracted its interests to Israel.
US will not give up "its interests" that easily.


They already have listening posts towards Iran etc.

[Vardan]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Interesting development, maybe Azerbaijan will strive to become part of CSTO?

What is their interest to join the CSTO? None. It even shook our avatage because they could not attack us, I'd say they could soon become a NATO member

[Mos]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

What is their interest to join the CSTO? None. It even shook our avatage because they could not attack us, I'd say they could soon become a NATO member

Reason they might want to become CSTO member is because it would balance the Russian military support, as the Caucasus is Russia's backyard and they are rather scared of Russians after the 2008 Georgia war. In my view, they are to scared to join NATO, afraid that they will follow the same fate as Georgia.

[Mos]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

.

This is interesting, but one must not forget/ignore the Israeli element.
US may have already sub-contracted its interests to Israel.
US will not give up "its interests" that easily.


They already have listening posts towards Iran etc.

Well remember that these exercises wear meant to be between US armed forces and azeri armed forces. The Israel military cooperation is through Israeli defence companies, of course related to their national military but still not the same.

[burjuin]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

On the frontline:

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

U.S.-Azerbaijan Military Exercises Back On?
April 25, 2011 - 12:55pm, by Joshua Kucera

The news last week that Azerbaijan had unilaterally and without explanation put off planned military exercises with the U.S. led many commentators, The Bug Pit included, to conclude that the exercises weren't going to happen. But that may have been a hasty conclusion. The exercises appear to be back on the table, as U.S. Ambassador to Baku Matthew Bryza met today with the Azerbaijani Minister of Defense, Safar Abiyev. And according to the defense ministry, among the topics discussed was the date to hold the exercise.

On Friday, a defense ministry spokesman argued that there was no political reason for postponing the exercise, but didn't offer any other reason:

“We have expressed our position on this issue. There is no obscurity. May be, everything will be solved.

We don’t see any necessity to give a political color to this situation and to create a problem from it. Unfortunately, we face with such attempts”, said spokesman for the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan, Lieutenant-Colonel Eldar Sabiroghlu answering APA’s question on the postponement of US-Azerbaijan joint military exercises.

Sabiroghlu said that the Defense Ministry was not engaged in the politics, and declared its concrete position to the organization’s temporary stop of the exercises: “Basing on the bilateral military cooperation, we continue our cooperation in other directions now”.

See, there's no obscurity at all! So wait, why was the exercise postponed again?

One Azerbaijani analyst has a theory: Baku is just responding to a conspiracy, jointly organized by Washington, Yerevan and -- yes -- Tehran, to discredit Azerbaijan, including by filming the arrest of a mother and her little daughter. Even by the standards of Caucasus conspiracy theories, this one is a doozy. From the newspaper Ekho, via BBC Monitoring:

"Azerbaijan has itself postponed the military exercise, and this has happened before too," the director of the Centre for Political Innovations and Technologies, Mubariz Ahmadoglu, told Ekho. "Azerbaijan is feeling under pressure taking account of the developments in our region. Especially now that the USA has been committing provocations against Azerbaijan and most likely, it has been doing so purposefully, in accordance with a plan drawn up by US officials."

Ahmadoglu said that US ambassador to Azerbaijan Matthew Bryza had been supporting Armenians and trying to portray Armenians in a more favourable light than Azerbaijanis. He also accused the USA of involvement in the publication of a video depicting the police detaining a woman with her little daughter at the 17 April opposition demonstration in Baku. At the same time, Ahmadoglu said that the video had been recorded by a media close to Iran, Ekho reported.

"I suppose that the USA has ill intentions vis-à-vis Azerbaijan and it is acting either on instructions from Armenia or in tandem with Iran," Ekho quoted the analyst as saying. While Iran and the USA regard each other as enemies, they maintain some contacts, Ahmadoglu said. Therefore, America is trying to hold the drills in order to provoke Iran, he added: "America offered the military exercise to Azerbaijan in order to irritate Tehran. Therefore, I am confident that Azerbaijani officials acted correctly by cancelling the military drills."

"The current state of relations between Azerbaijan and the USA leaves much to be desired, and the Americans are to blame for that. If these people get more reasonable and pursue more noble goals, our country will never reject them," Ahmadoglu concluded.

So was Baku's original intent to cancel the exercises, and now they're backpedaling? I can imagine that whoever in the U.S. military is organizing this exercise is wondering if it's all worth it -- last week's announcement was less than a month before the exercise was supposed to start. Whatever you want to say about the U.S. military, you can't accuse them of not planning. It can take me a month to arrange an interview with one official. So to reschedule an exercise with U.S. soldiers in another country is likely being seen as a massive hassle by the folks at the Pentagon.

Anyway, we'll keep following this saga.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/63359

[Mos]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Just typical Azeri hysteria. Unless the whole world is kissing their a*s, they think everybody is against them.

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

April 24 in a military unit in Turkey killed by Armenian
PanARMENIAN.Net - April 24 in a military unit stationed in Kozluk, Batman Province killed 25-year Sevak Balkrchi Shaheen, an Armenian by origin. On the death of the soldier is different and contradictory information. In one of the military reports said that he was "killed by another reckless handling of weapons." According to another version, the Armenian was going to shot with a pistol. As written in jiyan.org Vartan Estukyan after the assassination of Hrant Dink's death Sevak was yet another confirmation of the Armenian Genocide, and now we must write "1500000 +1 +1".
Two years ago, Sevak wrote in Facebook: «I have reason to fear. My life is in danger. "
In a military unit, where killed Sevak Balkrchi under investigation, was appointed forensics.

/ Panarmenian.net /