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Over the past sixteen years, the international community has gone from seeing the independence of the Central Asian states as primarily a source of security threats to an area that is potentially a real strategic prize, despite the proximity of the region to Afghanistan and that country’s seemingly endless civil war and internal confusion.
Much of the change in perceptions comes from the increased knowledge of the region’s energy reserves. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have enough oil and gas to become serious swing providers, especially for states that are now dependent upon shipments from Russia or those who would like to decrease their dependence upon Persian Gulf suppliers.
The changes in the international community’s assessment of the importance of the Central Asian states are also partly the result of a significantly altered global security environment after September 11, 2001. The U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq shook up of the status quo in much of the broader Middle East, including Iran and Turkey. It also led to a worsening of relations between Russia and both the U.S. and Europe, where most countries (the U.K. excluded) initially opposed the U.S.-led invasion, but who have subsequently refrained from public criticism of the ongoing war effort. In this environment, the Central Asian states appear less fragile than in their first years after independence, especially given the added importance of their oil and gas reserves.
However, excluding efforts in the commercial sector, the international community’s engagement in Central Asia has been in fits and starts, with limited resources offered to help the Central Asians tackle the serious challenges the region faces. This is unfortunate, as the area continues to harbor serious long-term security risks. Many of these relate to the incomplete nature of both economic reform and political institution-building, which has resulted in a buildup of unsolved problems in each of the Central Asian countries.
From the very first days of independence, Central Asia’s leaders looked with to the U.S. with the hope that Washington would somehow take to their cause in a fashion roughly analogous to its embrace of the politically transformed states of the former Warsaw Pact. Although they recognized that they would, by necessity of their shared geography (and their landlocked nature), maintain close ties to Russia, each leader wanted to develop a unique international face for his country.
Ironically, however, it was the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan which dealt the U.S. its greatest blow to its influence in the region because Central Asian and Russian leaders believed that Askar Akayev’s ouster was the result of U.S. support for pro-democracy groups in Kyrgyzstan. The success of the Rose revolution in Georgia and the Orange revolution in Ukraine had made all of the former communist party functionaries in the Soviet successor states feel at risk from what they understood to be “machinations” in Washington. This made all of Central Asia’s leaders more willing to accept various forms of political advice from Kremlin strategists and, after the fall of Akayev and the May 2005 tragedy in Andijian, they began much more systematic security cooperation as well.
No longer do the Central Asian states view themselves as sharing an extensive list of security goals with the U.S. or NATO countries. From the Central Asian perspective, Russia’s ambitions appear containable for now - especially since continued U.S. and E.U. pressure is likely to keep Moscow paying commercially competitive prices for Central Asian gas and China’s potential hegemonic behavior seems a long way off. Most importantly, both Russia and China share the Central Asian leaders’ sense of what is and what is not good statecraft, and do not accuse them of advancing policies which create the very security risks that all agree must be alleviated. This is in contrast to Western criticism of strong-handed techniques on the part of Central Asian security establishments that, Western governments claim, only aggravates the security problems they mean to alleviate.
It is for this reason that four of the five Central Asian countries are active members of the Moscow-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Only Turkmenistan, due to its avowed doctrine of “positive neutrality,” is not a member, although this too could change as Niyazov’s successor reconsiders the country’s foreign policy stance. The CSTO states have also increased their security cooperation under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), engaging in joint military exercises of unprecedented scale in the summer of 2007 that focused on recapturing a small city from the control of Islamic terrorists.
The U.S. continues to have an airbase in Kyrgyzstan, although there is growing public pressure for its removal—some of this likely coming with instigation from various political elements in Russia. The Germans, meanwhile, were able to remain in Uzbekistan even after the U.S. was asked to leave and NATO forces have some limited basing facilities in Tajikistan as well.
However, the heyday of U.S. military influence in the region, and likely that of NATO as well, does seem to have passed for the foreseeable future. This may result in lessened access to Western authorities for the purposes of intervention and even in order to give timely and useful advice regarding whatever security threats the region may find itself confronting.
Martha Brill Olcott
Senior Associate
