Taking stock of Central Asia.

• Author: Olcott, Martha Brill
• Position: Assessing the Central Asian Republics

The region may be changing less than a cursory glance would suggest. Russia's influence in the region was waning steadily well before the September 11 attacks, while the influence of the United States in the region had been steadily on the rise.

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One man's loss can be another man's gain, and it seemed this might be the case with the Central Asian states in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In assembling a coalition for the war on terrorism, the United States reached out to a number of national leaders with whom Washington previously had limited interaction, promising that the United States would be more attentive to their problems in return for their support. United States policy makers spoke of more assistance, and the leaders of most of the states in the region recommitted themselves to the goals of economic and political reform.

Many, including this author, saw this as a chance for a new beginning for the Central Asian states, an opportunity for the leaders of the region to distance themselves from the mistakes of the past decade. The ouster of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network changed the security environment in the region. So too did the international campaign to dry up the funding provided to terrorist groups by international Muslim charities.

All of this provided these states with the very breathing room that they previously claimed they lacked and that had prevented further economic and political reforms. It also brought them a much desired recommitment by the principal multilateral organizations, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), to devote more resources to help these states work through the problems of economic, political and social reform. Many of the region's leaders hoped this would mean more grants in aid and debt relief than before.

The Central Asian leaders also had great hopes that the reconstruction of Afghanistan would work to their direct short- and long-term economic benefit. They hoped in the short run they could profit from the supply and the transit of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, and that in the long term the opening of new transit routes across Afghanistan would spur foreign direct investment (FDI) in their region. Easy access to the ports of Pakistan would substantially shorten the time needed to move goods from Central Asia to Europe and Asia and would make goods manufactured in the region more competitive. Turkmenistan in particular hoped to finally be able to ship its gas freely to market, across Afghanistan to Pakistan and even India, a potential windfall for a land-locked energy producer forced to ship to market across the territory of competitors.

At its inception, the war on terrorism looked like it would mark the beginning of a major geopolitical shift in Central Asia. The establishment of two new U.S. airbases in the region, located outside of Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and in Khanabad-Karsi in Uzbekistan, implied that Washington was replacing Moscow as the security guarantor in the region. This increased U.S. presence seemed to diminish China's role as well.

From the point of view of many American and European observers, this change was a positive one. They thought it would free the Central Asian states to pursue independent foreign policies. There was also some hope that the Central Asian states would use the leeway created by Russia's withdrawal to try to address more effectively a number of unresolved regional problems, such as the shared water system and partially delineated national boundaries.

Resolving some of these issues would alleviate many of the major security threats facing these states and could prove to be a stimulant for greater regional cooperation in areas of trade and economic development. As much as the leadership in the Central Asian states was committed to the idea that each country had to define the expression of its autonomy, the realities of geography and the region's relative physical isolation meant that all would gain from greater cooperation.

More than one year after the beginning of the war on terrorism, many of the hopes for a new beginning in Central Asia appear to remain unfulfilled. Some of the blame lies with the international community, which has been slow to provide funds, but most of the responsibility lies within the states themselves.

HAVE GEOPOLITICS CHANGED?

The region may be changing less than a cursory glance would suggest. Russia's influence in the region was waning steadily well before the September 11 attacks, while the influence of the United States in the region had been steadily on the rise.

The United States seems unlikely to reduce its presence in Central Asia in the near future. Washington is sure to want to preserve its ability to achieve quick response times in Afghanistan. The bases in this region are consistent with the new security doctrine of the Bush administration, which calls for the maintenance of U.S. military outposts abroad. (1) The United States has also signed a long-term security partnership with Uzbekistan, which seems at a minimum to ensure continued U.S. commitment to the reform of that country's military. (2) Moreover, the United States is slowly extending similar offers to the other Central Asian states, and it has increased spending on upgrading border security and improving narcotics interdiction throughout the region. At the same time, it is clear that U.S. interests in the region seek to serve more wide-ranging strategic goals. Washington's courting of these states is designed to compel them to fulfill U.S. interests, and assistance is offered with little expectation of actually solving most of the region's political and economic problems. If in the first few months of the war on terrorism Central Asia's leaders thought that coffers of foreign assistance from Washington would be placed at their feet, they now have few illusions about how much U.S. aid to expect. There has been a dramatic increase in U.S. foreign assistance, but it still represents a fraction of the needs of these states.

It is also clear that Russia does not intend to be fully eclipsed in Central Asia, a goal that seems to coincide with the foreign policy priorities of many of the states in the region as well. If anything, the relationships between most of the Central Asian states and Moscow are better today than they were before the United States opened their bases, because now these ties are being integrated into the far more complicated strategic landscape of the region.

Well before September 2001, Russia was being overshadowed in the region by the United States and by the Central Asian states' own broader engagement with other European and Asian states. For the last several years, the cash-strapped Russian government has been able to do little to help the various states of the region meet their most pressing problems. Russian nationalists and intellectuals may have clung to the opinion that Russia's historic destiny was still inextricably tied to these former colonies, but those making and implementing Russian policy concentrated on more practical goals.

Since coming to power in December 1999, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to make virtue out of necessity, working to redefine the Kremlin's relationships with its near neighbors in Central Asia and grounding it in at least a public show of more mutual respect. Unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia's second president was not a former Politburo member, nor even a Kremlin insider, so he has not been party to the traditionally strained relations between senior party officials in Moscow and their Central Asian colleagues. By contrast, long a rival of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin came to the Russian presidency with a strong sense of neo-imperial if not imperial ambition and a long history of often strained relationships with his seemingly more passive Soviet-era colleagues from Central Asia.

Even under Yeltsin, however, at virtually every point when tough choices had to be made, the Russians opted for non-engagement. Consider, for example, the question of supporting the ruble zone, which Moscow began to dismember in July 1993. (3) Had the Russians been willing to continue to subsidize the price-support structure of the Central Asian economies, all but Kyrgyzstan would have stayed in the ruble zone. However, economic reformers strongly believed that underwriting the fiscal climate of the Central Asian states would sacrifice the cause of Russian reform for the attainment of more ephemeral neo-imperialist goals.

The policy pursued toward those persons considered stranded Russian nationals provides another strong example. During the early Yeltsin years, Moscow vigorously insisted that local Russian populations should be offered dual citizenship: local citizenship to allow them a share of the division of state assets, and Russian citizenship to afford them Moscow's protection. Nonetheless, little came of this campaign. (4) Local Russians either left or accepted de facto second-class status--even in Kazakhstan, where the first Russian settlements were more than four hundred years old. (5)

Even more telling is that Russia's level of military engagement and cooperation with these states has also steadily diminished from its peak during the Russian intervention in Tajikistan in late 1992. The Tashkent Collective Security agreement (CST) seemed dead after the Uzbeks themselves pulled out in February 1999. Russia was also expending diminishing resources to try to ensure that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) became a viable multilateral institution after strong-armed reluctant states like Georgia and Azerbaijan joined in the early 1990s. (6)

Nonetheless, the U.S.-led war on terrorism gave the Russians an excuse to...