- LIMITED DISSEMINATION US//1; ATTN:
The Diplomat Talk of allowing its airstrips to be used in a military strike against Iran thrust Azerbaijan into the spotlight. It doesn’t want to be there.
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The article attracted impassioned rebuttals from officials and observers alike. But the question remains: how did Azerbaijan get sucked into the controversy over Tehran’s nuclear plans in the first place?
Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel developed in earnest 20 years ago, and have grown significantly in depth and scope ever since. With bilateral trade currently hovering around $4 billion, Azerbaijan is Israel’s top trading partner among Muslim states, and the second largest source of Israel’s oil after Russia.
Conversely, Israel represents Azerbaijan’s second largest oil customer, and via the Ashkelon-Eilat Trans-Israel Pipeline, a crucial transit point for Azeri oil flowing to Asia’s growing markets. Israeli companies have also made no secret of their stake in the country’s other key, non-energy sectors, including agriculture and communications. However, it’s the military-defense aspect of bilateral cooperation that has kept Iran on its toes of late.
Israel began modernizing Azerbaijan’s ragtag army after its six year, undeclared war with Armenia led to the loss of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and seven neighboring districts. On February 26 of this year, Baku and Tel Aviv inked the latest in a series of arms deals, this time to the tune of $1.6 billion, on the basis of which Israel Aerospace Industries would supply Heron and Searcher drones, anti-aircraft and missile defense systems over the coming months and perhaps years.
This closeness represents everything that relations between Iran and Azerbaijan ought to have been right from the start, given both nations’ deep historical ties. Azerbaijan was a Persian satrapy under the Achaemenid, the Parthian and the Sassanian empires, and the Shiite Safavids credited for laying the foundations of modern Iran were mainly ethnic Azeris, a sub-branch of the Turkic peoples. Only after Iran was twice defeated by the Russians in the 19th century was it obliged to renounce the half of the Azeri homeland located north of the river Araxes.
This disjuncture largely stems from the overwhelming secularism brought on by 71 years of Soviet rule (1920-1991) and Azerbaijan’s palpably pro-West, pan-Turkic and anti-Iranian outlook, especially under former President Abulfaz Elçibey and his Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan, a factor that prompted Iran to support Christian Armenia during the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
South of the Araxes, Tehran remains acutely sensitive to potential Azeri irredentism stoked by the existence of independent Azerbaijan, despite the fact that its own Azeris – a fifth to a quarter of all Iranians including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (who is half-Azeri) – are generally well integrated.
Baku has for its part accused Iran of supporting radical Shiite elements, including the now outlawed Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, as well as the Talysh ethnic minority inhabiting the border areas. Nationalist rhetoric has also sharpened with calls for the country to be rechristened “North Azerbaijan” as opposed to what some view as the “occupied” South.
Both Israel and Iran have repeatedly accused each other of using Azeri territory as a base for covert operations, and the Azeri authorities haven’t held back from publicly linking a number of locally arrested individuals with Iranian intelligence.
All this suggests that an Israeli “staging ground” may not be that farfetched, despite a 2005 Baku-Tehran non-aggression pact and official insistence – most recently by President Ilham Aliyev during a cabinet meeting – that Azerbaijan would never allow its territory to be used against its neighbors.
However, while Azerbaijan is eminently suited to Israeli interests, the costs of a potential Iranian backlash toward Baku are unbearable for three key reasons.
First, Azerbaijan suffers from the tyranny of proximity, with 611 kilometers of porous common border on Iran’s northwestern doorstep. Geographically, Azerbaijan’s capital and much of its population and energy infrastructure are concentrated in the flatlands just beyond the Talysh mountains and Iran’s formidable but not impassable Alborz range. Baku is located less than 200 kilometers from Parsabad in Iran as the crow flies, and little more than 300 kilometers from the border along an axis suitable for the projection of ground forces.
Iran’s relatively modest naval and aerial could incapacitate Azerbaijan’s critical energy infrastructure – the country’s lifeline – before being neutralized. Priority targets might include various pipelines or the crucial Sangachal terminal. Indeed, the fact that the entire pipeline corridor lies underground may give Tehran greater incentive to target the terminal instead.
Second, Azerbaijan’s geopolitical environment and the region’s interlocking energy interests greatly raise the costs of a long-distance military alliance targeting an immediate neighbor. The BTC and BTE pipelines were designed to traverse Georgia and Turkey, two of Azerbaijan’s closest regional allies. In Georgia’s case, a third, Baku-Supsa pipeline also begins at Sangachal terminal.
This makes Turkey the key transit point on the East-West energy corridor leading onwards to European markets. However, since it also heavily relies on Caspian hydrocarbon imports and earns an estimated $200 million per annum on BTC transit fees alone, Ankara has little interest in having Azerbaijan invite retaliation on its energy sector.
Moscow, the region’s preeminent power, continues to view the Caspian basin and the south Caucasus as part of its Soviet-era sphere of influence and is therefore wary of any development that might further diminish its toehold. A direct Israel-Iran faceoff would almost certainly draw the U.S. military into the fray. But the consequences could be worse for Baku if proof of complicity leaks out. And, pipeline routing disputes aside, all five Caspian littoral states – Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan – share an obvious interest in ensuring energy stability.
Given what’s at stake, Baku has been careful about pursuing an independent but “balanced foreign policy” with its neighbors. Geography, after all, is immutable, unlike long-distance alliances.
Third, Azerbaijan’s leaders have been consistently clear about their top national priority, which is the “restoration of territorial integrity.” According to the 2007 National Security Concept, Armenia’s ongoing occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts represents the “major determinant of the country’s security environment and…a key factor in the formulation of the National Security Policy.”
Baku’s military buildup and defense pacts should therefore be regarded chiefly through this prism, with Iran being relevant at this level only insofar as it supports Yerevan.
Given the geopolitical constraints, frequent official references to “shared strategic interests” between Tel Aviv and Baku are in all likelihood restricted to the former’s energy security and the latter’s defense posturing vis-à-vis Armenia, even if both governments clearly benefit from containing Iran. What’s more, Baku essentially views its Israeli relations as a means of cementing patronage from the West and in particular Washington.
Azeri officials have been frank about the role of the Israeli lobby in counteracting the influence of the Armenian lobby in Azerbaijan’s favor. This paid dividends when President George W. Bush eventually waived Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which stipulated assistance to the 15 former Soviet republics barring Azerbaijan (because of its conflict with Armenia).
While the Azeri national security concept also prizes “integration into European and Euro-Atlantic structures,” some of Baku’s positions within the Islamic world and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – such as recognition of a Palestinian state – and the mere absence of an embassy in Israel after twenty years of diplomatic relations corroborate this balancing act.
Above and beyond all this, though, the simple fact that a potential Israeli staging ground in Azerbaijan is no longer a secret puts this quite out of the question. The “leak” conveyed in the article may have served its purpose if, according to former U.S. diplomat John Bolton, it was indeed “part of the [Obama] administration’s campaign against an Israeli attack.”
At the end of the day, while the Azeris can ill-afford to be part of an Israeli strike on Iran, Baku may still tolerate some degree of covert activity as long as Azeri national interests aren’t mortgaged as collateral. This would be of little consolation to Israeli strategists if not for parallel listening posts widely believed to exist in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkmenistan and even elsewhere in coordination with the United States.
But more importantly, this also means that a conflict with Iran may be much less likely to spread to the strategically sensitive Caspian region. Or at least, not by way of the “northern” Azeris.
Kevjn Lim is an independent writer and a contributing analyst with Open Briefing: the Civil Society Intelligence Agency. CONTINUE Reading Full Story HERE...
http://the-diplomat.com/2012/05/12/israel%E2%80%99s-reluctant-friend/
Double Life of a CIA Agent inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran:
Israel, Iran Eye Baku
By Nima Khorrami Assl
The Diplomat - December 28, 2011Religious, cultural, and historical links notwithstanding, the Republic of Azerbaijan has had a difficult relationship with neighboring Iran ever since its independence in 1991. But tensions have reached new heights in the last couple of year years.
This was no clearer than it was on August 9 this year, when Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of Iran’s armed forces’ Joint Staff Command, warned Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev that he would face “a dark fate” should he continue to expand ties with Israel.
The statement prompted the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry to deliver an official protest to the Iranian Embassy in Baku, as well as to arrest three members of the banned Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, which Baku claims is funded by Tehran. Last month, meanwhile, Baku accused Iran of being behind the stabbing of Azeri writer and journalist Rafiq Tagi. And last week, the director of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting office in the Azeri capital, Ahmad Kazemi, was denied entry into Baku, and was forced to leave Azerbaijan the same day.
Tehran has for its part accused Baku of fomenting divisions within its large Azeri population, which is estimated to number between 20 to 25 million, with the majority residing in northwestern Iran. On August 13, Tabnak, an Iranian news website, revealed what it called an “Azerbaijani plot” to foster ethnic conflict in Iran’s northwestern provinces, including the dissemination of anti-Iranian programs by Azerbaijani TV and radio stations. Equally alarming for the authorities in Iran is the decision by the Aliyev government to include several Iranian provinces, including Ardabil, Qazvin and Hamedan, as parts of a “Greater Azerbaijan Republic” in school textbooks.
Compounding Iranian fears is Israel’s key role in Azerbaijan’s energy and defense sectors. Iran is deeply concerned over growing Israeli and Western investments in the Azerbaijani energy sector, seeing such developments as a major threat to its own economic interests. Unable to compete with and/or attract Israeli and Western technology and capital for tapping abundant Caspian natural resources, Iran has resorted to a policy of intimidation in order to discourage foreign investment in the Azerbaijan offshore sector. Tehran’s efforts in this are greatly enhanced by the fact that maritime disputes between the five littoral states of the Caspian Sea remain unresolved, allowing Iranian gunboats to make several incursions into what the Azerbaijani government considers as its territorial waters.
This comes at a time when Tehran is nervously watching the expanding military and intelligence cooperation in the region. Surrounded by U.S. troops in the south, east, and west, Iranian officials tend to perceive the deepening military ties between Jerusalem and Baku as the latest element in a Western plan to completely encircle Tehran. Ultimately, Iran views Israel’s effort to develop a military industrial complex in Azerbaijan as a long-term plan to open up a new front for a possible military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities should the need arise.
The problem for Baku is that, strategically speaking, it’s impossible for Azerbaijan to forgo its ties with one of these countries in favor of the other. The recent Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, as well as the Azeri elites’ concern over the perceived “Islamization” push by Ankara, are of particular concern for Baku, and it’s these two developments more than anything that have added extra value to Azeri-Israeli relations. This was underscored in a January 2009 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan, which said that President Aliyev was uncomfortable with the pro-Islamic and pro-Palestinian stance of Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.
But Iran is no ordinary country for Azerbaijani strategists. The two states share a 600 kilometer land border, while an estimated 85 percent of Azerbaijan’s population is Shiite. These two realities allow Iran the potential to cause real trouble for authorities in Azerbaijan and provide it considerable opportunities to destabilize the country. Certainly, there have been reports that Iran has an active religious network operating in Azerbaijan that it could utilize to undermine the Aliyev government.
Azerbaijan is fully aware of Tehran’s capacity for mischief making and so has refrained from crossing Tehran’s “red lines,” including by deciding against opening an embassy in Jerusalem. But this is unlikely to be enough to prevent ties between the two countries entering a period of even more heightened tension, not least because the Tehran-Tel Aviv rivalry for influence over Azerbaijan is intensifying by the day.
Iran and Israel have been playing a cat-and-mouse game in Azerbaijan for more than a decade, one that utilizes the businesses, diplomats, citizens and spies both countries have in Azerbaijan. With growing regional uncertainty, there’s now an extra incentive for both Tehran and Jerusalem to continue building on their already well-established networks in Baku. How the Aliyev government – stuck in the middle – will respond, remains to be seen.
Nima Khorrami Assl is a security analyst at Transnational Crisis Project, London. His work has appeared in The Guardian and Foreign Policy Journal, among other publications. CONTINUE Reading Full Story HERE...
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