Kazakhstan Is The Latest Victim Of Hybrid Warfare

Exclusive– The US-led Western Mainstream Media is busy spinning the unprecedented violence in Kazakhstan as an “uprising” by “peaceful pro-democracy protesters” but it’s really just the latest Hybrid War to be unleashed in the world. This term has been heatedly discussed since the outbreak of urban terrorism in Ukraine popularly known as “EuroMaidan”, but mostly through the American prism of alleging that it’s Russia that wages this form of warfare. According to these so-called “experts”, the Kremlin craftily utilizes a combination of economic coercion, information warfare, “little green men”, and political meddling to advance its geostrategic agenda at the expense of others’ sovereignty.

The reality, as usual, is altogether difference since it’s the West – and particularly the US – that’s waged Hybrid Warfare for decades through those means but also via a new cutting-edge model that I exposed in detail in summer 2015. At that time, I published a book about this at the People’s Friendship University of Russia (widely known by its Russian acronym as RUDN) that was also reviewed by the Russian Diplomatic Academy.

Titled “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change”, it can be read in full free of charge here. It was even cited twice by the NATO Defence College later that year on page 2 of their November 2015 research paper on “Russia’s Renewed Military Thinking: Non-Linear Warfare and Reflexive Control” and page 10 of their December 2015 book about “NATO’s Response To Hybrid Threats“. My book compares the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine to prove that they represent a new model of warfare by the US that attempts to transition weaponized protest movements (Color Revolutions) into Unconventional Wars (terrorism), with this phased sequence itself being Hybrid War.

This model relies on the external exacerbation of preexisting identity conflicts in the targeted state – political, socio-economic, religious, regional, and historical – to generate anti-state sentiment that can then be directed towards the formation of mass protests against the government at a politically convenient time. That moment is referred to as the “trigger event”, which is usually an election or a controversial decision such as Kazakhstan’s preplanned removal of fuel subsidies.

Most Hybrid Wars evolve into their final form after some time. It usually takes the state’s kinetic response to rioters and their provocative attacks against the security services to trigger that into happening. The police’s justifiable response is usually misreported and decontextualized through manipulative footage to claim that it represents a “disproportionate response to peaceful pro-democracy protesters by an authoritarian regime”. This narrative is then amplified worldwide by the Western Mainstream Media in order to legitimize actual acts of terrorism against the state on that false basis, which is usually when the Color Revolution begins to morph into an Unconventional War.

Hybrid Wars require significant socio-informational infrastructure prior to being hatched, which is where NGOs (including those that are organized by Western governments and can therefore more accurately be described as GONGOs or government-organized NGOs) come into play. These operations work on recruiting Color Revolution cadres and convincing the population to at the very least not try to stop the regime change campaign once it’s unleashed if they aren’t convinced to directly participate in it.

This new method of warfare weaponizes protest movements and their phased evolution into Unconventional Wars in order to advance one, some, or all three of the following goals: regime tweaking, regime change, and/or regime reboot. The first-mentioned refers to pressuring the targeted state into undertaking unilateral concessions, the second is self-explanatory, while the third can lead to the de facto internal partition of the country through its “Bosnification” into quasi-independent parts. Having established the basics of Hybrid Warfare, it’s now time to explain why what recently took place in Kazakhstan is unquestionably an example of this model in practice.

While it presently remains unclear exactly which foreign governments or organizations were involved in the latest events there and for what particular ends, there’s no doubt that they waged a Hybrid War on Kazakhstan. The state’s preplanned removal of fuel subsidies gave the organizers sufficient time to plot their campaign. That decision served as the trigger event for predictably provoking protests that were then exploited for Hybrid War purposes.

Somewhat surprisingly, the state gave in to the protesters’ demands by almost immediately reimposing price controls and even extending them to include other social commodities and utilities. That “regime tweaking” represented a success for the proto-Color Revolution that hadn’t even fully formed by the time that happened. In seemingly normal circumstances, that would have thus been the end of this particular pressure campaign, but the organizers decided to transition it into an Unconventional War instead through the innumerable acts of terrorism that followed. President Tokayev eventually claimed that over 20,000 armed and highly trained terrorists attacked his country’s largest city of Almaty alone.

This was a curious development that broke from the established Hybrid War pattern since there wasn’t even a superficial attempt made to justify this campaign’s near-instantaneous evolution on the usual pretext that the security services disproportionately responded to “peaceful pro-democracy protesters”. That very strongly suggests that the timing is connected to the larger geostrategic context, specifically the talks between the US and Russia over de-escalating tensions in Europe.

That doesn’t in and of itself imply that the Biden Administration approved of the Hybrid War on Kazakhstan even if American intelligence agencies and perhaps other Western ones too were organizing this Color Revolution for a while already. After all, those events didn’t derail the scheduled talks, and neither Kazakhstan nor Russia accused the US of any covert involvement. One would have assumed that they’d have done so if there was any reason to believe that the Biden Administration signed off on this campaign and that the planned security talks would have therefore been affected, which is why a more detailed interpretation of this conflict’s unexpected transformation is required.

The US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) are divided between anti-Chinese and anti-Russian factions that spar with one another over which Great Power constitutes their country’s greatest strategic threat. The anti-Chinese faction seems to the one with the most power right now as one of former US President Donald Trump’s most enduring legacies. This is evidenced by incumbent US President Joe Biden mostly continuing his predecessor’s respective policies.

Furthermore, Biden has done more to pragmatically manage relations with Russia than Trump was able to achieve as proven by last summer’s Geneva Summit with President Vladimir Putin, their two phone calls last month, and this month’s security talks. He was able to accomplish this after inheriting the prevailing anti-Chinese “deep state” faction that Trump bequeathed him and decisively working to (however imperfectly) mitigate the subversive influence of its anti-Russian rival. The US’ grand strategic aim appears to be to cut a deal with Russia in Europe that could then enable the Pentagon to redeploy some of its forces from there to the Asia-Pacific in order to more aggressively “contain” China.

The anti-Russian “deep state” faction opposes this for ideological reasons, hence why they’ve leveraged their extensive influence network across the Baltic States, Poland, and Ukraine in an attempt to sabotage those security talks. They’ve thus far failed, though, which could provide an explanation of why the Color Revolution in Kazakhstan suddenly transformed into an Unconventional War despite the absence of its usual “police brutality” pretext for justifying this evolution.

To elaborate, the subversive anti-Russian “deep state” faction might have intended for the Hybrid War on Kazakhstan to be their last-ditch desperate attempt to offset the scheduled security talks between the US and Russia aimed at de-escalating their tensions. Their strategic calculus could have been that the Kremlin might have overreacted to what happened in that neighboring fraternal nation by either politicizing the security talks or outright pulling out of them. At the very least, any public accusations of American involvement could have created the opportunity for the anti-Russian “deep state” faction to push their agenda of pressuring US officials to pull out of the talks on that pretext too.

They of course failed if that’s indeed what motivated them to order the surprise transformation of the politically successful anti-reform Color Revolution into a terrorist-driven Unconventional War despite not having any “publicly plausible” pretext for doing so as was earlier explained. In any case, it’s clear that some powerful force bucked the Hybrid War trend for reasons that have yet to be fully identified, but that this anti-state campaign ultimately failed in all respects.

Bearing in mind the strategic insight shared in this analysis, it’s arguably the case that what just transpired in Kazakhstan is an example of my Hybrid Warfare model in practice whereby a Color Revolution evolved into an Unconventional War against the targeted government. It’s actually a perfect manifestation of everything that I warned about six and a half years ago, having even pinpointed Kazakhstan as a possible target on page 18 of my book. It’s important for observers to acknowledge the Hybrid War on Kazakhstan since this helps put those chaotic events into their appropriate strategic context. Kazakhstan wasn’t the first victim of Hybrid Warfare, and it certainly won’t be the last.