Southern watch: Russia's policy in Central Asia.

• Author: Trenin, Dmitri
• Position: Foreign Policies Toward the Region

With regard to Central Asia, as well as globally, Russia has dropped all ideological claims. Neither Soviet modernization nor the czarist mission civilisatrice inspire the present ruling elite in Moscow.

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Contemporary Central Asia is a product of the Soviet Union's disintegration. If the USSR had survived the 1990s, the independent nations of Central Asia would not exist. Although Russia's influence in this volatile region remains significant, the strategic foundations on which it was established have shifted. Whereas Moscow once defined its interests in Central Asia in terms of lucrative trade routes and buffer zones with other great powers, and later as a laboratory for Communist and anti-imperialist ideology, new interests have now emerged.

With the end of the Cold War, Russia no longer perceives its most pressing security challenges as emanating from the West. The former East-West rivalry is growing increasingly meaningless as Moscow seeks to boost its standing as a European power. The threats Russia has faced over the last twenty years, from Afghanistan to Tajikistan to Chechnya, has led its leaders to see the North-South axis as a major source of insecurity. Meanwhile, the discovery of abundant oil deposits in the Caspian Region and the construction of pipelines across Russian territory have caused Russia to re-evaluate its economic interests in the region.

In the context of the global war on terrorism, Russia has come to see itself as a shield for the West, bearing the brunt of the militant Islamic threat amassing in Central Asia. The events of 11 September 2001 and the U.S.-directed overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan have underscored the importance of military, diplomatic and intelligence cooperation between Russia and the West in building stability in Central Asia. In the coming years it will be imperative for Russia to play a pivotal role in this project.

A TROUBLED HISTORY

Central Asia was one of the last territorial acquisitions of the old Russian empire, absorbed between 1800 and 1900, and one of the last to break away from the disintegrating Soviet Union. During their imperialist drive of the 19th century, the Russians extended their power to Turkestan, as it was called under Russian rule, pitting them against the British in the famous Great Game. While military commanders fought to win new lands for the czar and diplomats extolled the virtues of Russia's mission civilisatrice, the merchants of Moscow dreamed of their own overland "passage to India." (1) Eventually, after a few skirmishes, the world's two greatest empires, Britain and Russia, reached an accommodation, leaving Afghanistan as a buffer zone between them.

The czars, however, had too little time to integrate Turkestan properly. The Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 sought to foment a worldwide revolution by appealing to the "toilers of the East" as well as to the "proletarians of the West." To them, Turkestan became another front in the battle against Western imperialism and its local feudal underlings. It was there that the Soviets had their first taste of the Muslim guerilla warfare that would haunt them at the end of the 20th century. Not until the mid-1930s were the last of the basmachi, as these guerillas were called, finally defeated and driven into Afghanistan.

Central Asia was a testing ground for the universality of Communist ideology. Soviet leaders hoped that successful modernization of the region would be a powerful stimulus to galvanize ideological support from the peoples of the Third World. Yet the reality was far different--at least from the 1960s onward--from the picture of successful modernization presented to visiting Asians and Africans. True, there was a degree of Soviet-style modernization, but feudal norms and habits eventually came to coexist with Communist rhetoric. The five Soviet republics carved out of the former Turkestan--Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan--occasionally and pejoratively referred to in Moscow policy slang as the "stans," became a Soviet backwater.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Afghan war from 1979 to 1989 refocused Moscow's attention on the Muslim world, including its Soviet enclave. The notion that, 60 years after the Bolshevik revolution, any part of the USSR could be anything but Soviet was anathema to Communist ideologues. The Afghan experience was sobering for Moscow; its humiliating failure to create a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul against the assorted bands of mujahedeen despite a massive military intervention resulting in heavy losses sustained by the Soviet army led to the emergence of an "Afghan syndrome," articulated by such slogans as "Never again!" (2)

The Soviet failure in Afghanistan helps to explain why Russia, the former dominant power in the region, initially saw the emergence of five new states south of its border with equanimity, if not apathy. In their struggle against Gorbachev's USSR, Boris Yeltsin and his supporters sought to cut themselves loose from the "Asian millstone" as they prepared to set sail toward the West. The loose post-Soviet community, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), was founded in Minsk in December 1991 by the three Slavic republics, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Later, after much prodding from the Central Asian leaders, who sought autonomy within the USSR but not secession from it, the CIS expanded to include "the Asians." Despite this, the May 1992 Tashkent Collective Security Treaty (CST) divided the Soviet Union's military assets and apportioned national quotas under the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) without laying the foundation for a new alliance. Post-Soviet integrationist projects, such as the CIS Economic Union or the more comprehensive Eurasian Union proposed by Kazakhstan's president Nazarbayev, invariably fell flat with the Russians. Moscow was not interested in schemes that would turn it, once again, into a donor for its less developed partners.

What followed changed Russia's historical pattern of interests and actions. Having contracted substantially in territorial terms, Russia retreated, at least strategically, from Central Asia. Moscow, however, does not see the region as a landlocked backwater. Caspian oil has opened it up to the outside world, and Muslim extremism and international terrorism have transformed it into a battleground on which Russia and the West find themselves on the same side. This has led President Putin to conclude that the Great Game is not so great after all, and that the new environment requires new alignments. This former playground for imperial ambitions is likely to become an area of cooperation, where the West, and what remains of the Cold War "East," seek to jointly address new and unorthodox challenges from the south.

THE SHIFT IN THE STRATEGIC AXIS

Even with the shock of 11 September 2001, this considerable strategic shift did not occur overnight, but rather as the result of a series of escalating conflicts. The civil war in Tajikistan commanded Moscow's attention in 1992, driving local ethnic Russians away and threatening to attract Russian garrisons. Ostensibly a struggle for power between the communists and democrat-backed Islamists, the war was actually a conflict among the local Tajik clans. Its gruesome nature, resulting in 20,000 to 50,000 deaths and between 60,000 and 80,000 refugees out of a population of six million, gave rise to fears in Russia of Islamic fundamentalism spreading across Central Asia, toppling secular governments in a domino fashion and reaching Russia's own borders. (3) Nonetheless, the inter-clan conflict in Tajikistan remained contained for the next several years. Russia's principal concern became Tajikistan's border with Afghanistan, rather than its own southern boundary Concern soon shifted from Islamic fighters to drug dealers, who were using Central Asia and Russia as a transit route between Afghanistan and Europe. Although not ideal, the drug trade was preferable to open conflict.

The second jolt to Russia's policies came in 1996, with the takeover of Kabul by Taliban forces. After Moscow withdrew all of its support for President Mohammad Najibullah's regime, thereby dooming it, the Russians cultivated contacts with their former enemies, the mujahedeen. When the movement's leaders quarreled among themselves and let the obscurantist Pakistani-sponsored Taliban advance to the capital, Moscow was shocked. The specter of green bandana-sporting Islamic armed students advancing across Central Asia all the way to the Volga recaptured the imaginations of Russia's...