Man cannot live by sausage and vodka alone

From Russia's middle class - a growing problem for Putin by Gleb Bryanski (Reuters, December 9, 2011):

"There are two things (lacking in Russian politics). The first one is a mass liberal party. Or, to put it more precisely, a party of irritated urban communities," the Kremlin's chief domestic policy adviser, Vladislav Surkov, said this week in an interview with a prominent Russian journalist.

"They should be given parliamentary representation," Surkov, the Kremlin's "grey cardinal" who created Russia's tightly controlled political system, said in the interview, which appeared on journalist Sergei Minayev's blog.

But the Kremlin's plans to promote a middle-class party before last Sunday's election to the State Duma, the lower House of parliament, broke down when its leader, metals tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, departed from the script.

After apparently backing his rise to the leadership of the small pro-business party Right Cause, the Kremlin pulled the rug from under him in September, with Surkov orchestrating the removal of Prokhorov and his supporters.

Prokhorov likened Surkov to a puppet master and said the Kremlin had "privatised" the political system.

"Surkov does not understand that all of a sudden, thanks to the high oil price, there is middle class in Russia," said Oleg Tinkov, owner of retail bank Tinkov Credit Systems.

"We are no longer happy with the pact 'Sausage in exchange for democracy'. We spend one or two months a year abroad, we speak three languages and we think," he said.

Late Russian general and politician Alexander Lebed once said most Russians did not care who they were ruled by as long as they could buy six kinds of sausage and cheap vodka. Those days, it seems, are over.
[...]

Gleb Bryanski has been filing reports on Russia for Reuters since 2009. His knowledge of the country and its politics shines throughout his December 9 report (with great editing by Reuters correspondent Timothy Heritage (another Russia Hand).

The report makes it clear that Putin is just one of the players in the unfolding political drama in Russia. Ironically Putin's greatest detractors among American political conservatives would find more in commmon with his views of the urban liberal intellectual elite -- what he calls "the goatee beards" -- than they might want to admit. That is, if they bothered to get informed on what's really happening in Russian politics. They have created out of Putin, and indeed out of all of Russia, a two-dimensional cartoon that has no basis in reality.

On keeping Pakistan's NATO supply route

I don't bother to observe Halloween on October 31 because it's Halloween 365 days a year in Washington. We have fiends, real fiends, running amok here.

Thousands of NATO troops in Afghanistan have been maimed and killed because their lives are worth less than geostrategic games as far as the 'Get Russia' crowd in Washington and European capitals is concerned. Because of this factions in Washington -- including the U.S. Department of State and factions in the Pentagon -- still call for placating Pakistan's junta even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Pakistan's military/ISI has been supporting and even orchestrating attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Untold billions of dollars wasted and stolen because the Get Russia crowd would prefer NATO's ISAF supply convoys go through Pakistan rather than Russia-friendly countries in Central Asia.

Now, with their backs to the massive wall of evidence that American tax money is paying Pakistan's military/ISI to murder and maim Americans in Afghanistan, the fiends have the nerve to argue that Pakistan is too nuclear to be allowed to fail.

By God, there must be a way to cut the umbilical cord that ties the United States of America to Europe including the United Kingdom. The cord is strangling Americans. And the NATO alliance's ambitions against Russia are getting America's finest young men killed and maimed in Afghanistan for no good reason, and making the war in Afghanistan unwinnable for the United States.

The above is by way of introduction to the following quotes from a November 28, 2011 Associated Press report in TIME headlined Afghanistan: Fire from Pakistan Led to Attack:

NATO has built a stockpile of military and other supplies that could keep operations running at their current level for several months even with the two crossings closed, said a NATO official closely involved with the Afghan war, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

NATO once shipped about 80 percent of its non-lethal supplies through Pakistan. It has reduced that proportion by going through Central Asia. It could send more that way, but that would make NATO heavily dependent on Russia at a time when ties with Moscow are increasingly strained.

Yes, thank you, we already know.