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Abstract: This article presents a comprehensive survey of the most significant economic and security issues in contemporary Central Asia, including an analysis of their evolution since 1991, up to publication in 2001, as well as an evaluation of their future prospects at that time.Contents:
Suggested citation for this webpage:
Robert M. Cutler,"Economics and Security in Central Asia," Harvard Asia Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 4–12; available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/download/html/ar01haq.html>, accessed 15 November 2024.
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Geography puts Central Asia at a crossroads of global economy and security. At the height of the Roman Empire, the territory of present-day Uzbekistan was astride the transcontinental trade routes between China and the West. The first Turkic state was established in present-day Mongolia in the middle of the sixth century. From the eighth to the twelfth centuries, Islam expanded into the Caucasus and Central Asia from Arabia in the southwest. Next the migrations came from the northeast, with the Mongol invasions during the 1200s and 1300s, while other Turkic peoples came to Central Asia at the same time. Subsequently, Muscovy (Moscow) consolidated its rule and prepared to expand into the Caspian region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the northwest.
Today, the region is only re-acquiring its historical position as a stage across which there sweep vast waves of people and goods from nearly all directions of the compass. It opens to China and the rest of Asia in the east, Iran and Afghanistan and the rest of the Islamic world to the south, and Russia and the "new Eastern Europe" to the north and west. If the southeast is the only direction of the compass from which world-historical waves have not rolled over Central Asia, this is because the Himalayas block mass international migration; however, they have not been a barrier to influences from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the south or from China in the east. Indeed, broadly speaking, "the East" has, since the fall of the USSR, come once again to signify the broad belt of culture stretching from North Africa to the Pacific that it was under the British Empire: the old Near East, which we now call the Middle East; the old Middle East, which we now call Southwest and Central Asia; and the Far East, which we now call the Asian–Pacific Rim.
The identification of what we today call Central Asia is relatively new. In the pre-Communist Russian Empire, "Central Asia" referred to the Asia that was part of the Empire. In the Soviet period, the term "Middle Asia" was used in Russian to refer to four of the five Asian republics (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) but not Kazakhstan, reflecting Moscow's strategic and geopolitical perspectives, including Soviet Russian claims of various sorts on northern Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea littoral. By contrast, the same term "Middle Asia" in Turkic languages has historically referred to lands populated by the broad swath of Turkic-speaking people eastward up to Mongolia, including China's Xinjiang province, which the native inhabitants to this day call "Eastern Turkestan". Indeed, from the standpoint of demography and physical geography, Central Asia includes northern Afghanistan as well as western China. Following the Tashkent summit in January 1992, the term "Central Asia" was generally adopted to refer to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. This article focuses on these five countries. Since it is impossible to consider them in a vacuum, the discussion of regional security contexts ranges a bit more widely.
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One good approach to understanding present-day economic and security problems in Central Asia is to begin with Uzbekistan, the most populous country in the region, with 26 million inhabitants. The country's median age is in the low 20s, making the country ripe for heavy growth. By the year 2010, the population will explode to between 30 and 35 million,[1] and most of the growth will occur in regions unlikely to experience job creation. The effects of population growth on the environment, the economy, and the potential for increased tension have already been visibly negative. The country's economic stagnation is at the root of the region's most acute security problem. Therefore, the economic background conditioning this security problem needs to be briefly set out.
That economic background began with deepening crisis in the early 1990s throughout Central Asia. This came to a head in spring and summer of 1993, when questions of trade and payments among the former Soviet republics became increasingly acute. During this early period, the republics negotiated many agreements for currency and financial cooperation that were successively overtaken by events. The issue of the ruble zone's status was brought to the fore by the fact that banks in these new states continued to issue credit denominated in rubles, for which they were not financially accountable. Continuing subsidies from Moscow to former Soviet industrial plants in the newly independent states only increased the acuity of the ruble-zone crisis.
In September 1993, Kazakhstan and Russia signed an accord to unify the monetary systems of the two countries. Russia would assume responsibility for Kazakhstan's foreign debts in return for title to Soviet assets on Kazakhstani territory. Uzbekistan almost immediately sought to join this cooperation, and in September 1993, a multilateral agreement on a new ruble zone was signed that included these three countries plus Armenia, Belarus, and Tajikistan. However, Kazakhstan left this ruble zone within two months, forced out of it with the other former republics by Russia's requirement to deposit, in Moscow, gold and hard currency reserves equivalent to roughly half the total volume of rubles in circulation in the given former republic.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan almost immediately introduced their respective national currencies, the tenge and the som, and initiatives for trade and economic policy coordination between the two countries began to take shape. The treaty that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan had signed in late June 1992 on friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance was deepened at a January 1993 meeting in Tashkent, so as to provide for the creation of a single unified economic space. Kyrgyzstan joined that space at the end of April 1994, establishing the Central Asian Union (CAU), which sought to develop multilateral cooperation in the economic and financial sphere. A trilateral development bank was established to that end.
In need of setting Kazakhstan's bilateral relations with Russia in a multilateral context, so as to rally other partners to increase leverage, Kazakhstan's President Nazarbaev proposed in 1994 to create an Euro–Asiatic Union (EAU). The idea behind this initiative was that the CIS was moribund and bogged down in peace and security matters and that another organization (a "natural development" of the CIS that would not supplant it) was required to promote deeper financial integration and economic cooperation across the former Soviet area. Nazarbaev specifically excluded from eventual EAU membership those states involved in civil or international military conflict. The initiative for the EAU was stillborn when Uzbekistan, testifying to its differences with Russia, declined to participate. In addition, another reason for Uzbekistan's refusal to participate in the EAU was the competitive nature of Uzbekistani–Kazakhstani relations, based on the long and complex cultural history between the two ethnic groups these states represent. This is one of the reasons why the country sought designation from Washington as the "strategic partner" of the U.S. in Central Asia in 1995. When Kazakhstan was also designated a "strategic partner" in 1997, Uzbekistan President Karimov's response, in 1999, was to join the GUAM (Georgia–Ukraine–Azerbaijan–Moldova) entente, turning it into GUUAM.
Economic circumstances in the mid-1990s intervened to drive a wedge between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. An extremely poor cotton crop in Uzbekistan in 1994 led Tashkent to impose currency-exchange restrictions, which in turn effectively stymied CAU-based cooperation. What has most retarded the development of the CAU still to this day has been President Karimov's refusal to lift all controls on the convertibility of Uzbekistan's national currency. The banking system in Uzbekistan has not been adequately reformed, and the IMF has for several years suspended assistance to the country although it still maintains a mission in Tashkent.
Kazakhstan, in contrast to Uzbekistan, accepted all recommendations made to it by the IMF, including those related to macroeconomic policy in particular. The country has completed its banking system reform, and is set to experience real economic growth, although a very significant portion of the population remains in very dire straits as a
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result of the hardships of the last decade. This poverty is spread throughout the country but is especially felt in the heavily populated and ethno-nationalist south, traditional home to the Greater (or Elder) Horde, one of the three large Kazakh social and political formations that for centuries governed the nomadic ethnic group's life. One of the most impoverished areas in this already poor region is around the city of Kzyl-Orda, which suffers from the desiccation of the Aral Sea.
Although the Aral Sea's degradation directly affects only Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, its waters rise in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. Because the issue of water management affects all states of the region, in theory it has the potential to become a focal point for economic cooperation throughout Central Asia. Several years ago, the United Nations held a conference about the Aral Sea in Nukus, Uzbekistan. This conference was to concentrate on sustainable development and on providing clean water and health care to the region. However, President Karimov used it to suggest resuscitating an old Soviet-era mega-project, which his water management ministry had never really abandoned for its own bureaucratic reasons, to divert Siberian rivers to the Aral Sea. The Nukus initiative continues as an international technical-scientific study project with participation by highly qualified experts from the West. However, its practical effects were limited by the somewhat transparent use of the conference by regional leaders to justify their efforts to obtain general international aid. Moreover, the "Nukus episode" illustrates how even attempts to address the water problem are enmeshed in Uzbekistan's regional diplomatic competition with Kazakhstan. Relations with Turkmenistan are also strained by competition for this scarce natural resource.
Karimov politically marginalizes the two ethnic groups most affected by the ecological disaster, the Karakalpaks (a separate group also composed of Turkic Muslims) and the Khorezm Uzbeks, who speak a nonstandard dialect. Karakalpakstan, which formally has autonomous republic status within Uzbekistan, is located on the lower Amu Darya, where the river empties into the Aral Sea. The population is about 1.3 million people with a population density of about 10 per square mile. It is more rural than Uzbekistan as a whole, and some parts of the region have no urban centers at all. Yet its population is much younger than the national average, and the rate of population growth is very high. The shrinking of the Aral Sea and the consequences of the long-term use of chemicals for irrigation in agriculture have made Karakalpakstan one of the poorest and most environmentally devastated parts of Uzbekistan if not the former Soviet area altogether.
Solving these problems requires rationing the use of water among the states of the region. Yet it is difficult to foresee a diminution of water usage, since altogether 45 million people depend economically upon the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers. Cutting cotton production would be one possible solution, especially since Central Asian cotton harvests are late, crop failures are widespread, and climate can be problematic because the growing regions are the furthest of all, worldwide, from the equator. However, domestic political and economic interests militate against this, particularly since cotton production generates hard currency in the short term and has become central to Karimov's import-substitution development strategy.
It is impossible to evoke ecological and environmental issues without lamenting most unequivocally that vast majority of the population throughout the region have scarce access to the basic needs of food, shelter, and medical care. Ensuring sufficient supply of economic and political resources to the population would have been difficult enough for any newly independent state. This is even more difficult in Central Asia because there were no well-established institutions of governance or pre-existing national economy, that could, for example, even absorb and channel in a regularized fashion the large revenue streams that immediate energy development and export would have created.
What was left of the Soviet social safety net after Gorbachev's reforms soon disappeared, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that only pre-existing social networks (some elaborately developed from traditional forms and surviving even through the Soviet era) remained to take up the slack. In Tajikistan's civil war, for example, the basic cleavage was not between communists and Islamists, or even clans per se. The civil war was, rather, a conflict between regions, based on opposing identities. Clans have not been irrelevant, but the real issue is the opposition among social networks that developed under Soviet administration. In the early 1990s, these provided the organizational basis for furnishing security goods after the Tajikistani state apparatus fell apart under conditions of general economic deprivation. Tajikistan is thus a sort of Central Asian "worst case" exemplifying the most extreme results of the privatization of that public good called "social order".
As bad as things were a few years ago, they are now worse and disaster threatens. There are two reasons for this: drugs and disease, the latter including, but not limited to, AIDS. The illegal drugs now afflicting populations of many former Soviet republics, and not just in Central Asia, are several, but heroin is the one that invites most attention. The rate of heroin use has soared in the last several years, mainly since the Taliban conquest of Kabul. It is well known, and has been for some time, that much agriculture in Afghani-
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stan is given over to poppy cultivation because this is a highly profitable cash crop with guaranteed demand.
Statistical evidence on disease abounds. Temirtau is a city in central Kazakhstan, less than one hundred miles from the new capital Astana. It is, in fact, the city where Nazarbaev started his political career in 1967 as a local administrator. Reports indicate that whereas the percentage of the population that was HIV-positive was in single digits in 1997, this figure has soared to about forty per cent. If space permitted, I could multiply such statistics and personalize them with individual anecdotes to bring home to the reader the weight and tragedy of this misery in human terms. But for this article it must suffice it to say that the sector of population most affected is that of working age, and that there is a great deal of social denial that complicates prevention.
The implications of this phenomenon on prospective rates of economic growth follow inexorably, and those on potential effects on political stability still more inexorably, when one considers that the population itself will increase in absolute terms while the general productivity of the working-age cohorts will decline along with their health. The cynical view that if enough people are ill, then no one will be left to destabilize the regimes, is mistaken. Macroeconomic performance figures will probably improve in coming years in at least some of the countries concerned; however, such statistics should not be ingested unsalted. If there is one thing that the Stalin experiment taught Western economists, it is that macroeconomic figures are not always reliable indicators of microeconomic well being.
The possibility of efficient development and export of Central Asia's energy resources seemed at one time to promise economic and social progress. However, this has been complicated by technical difficulties in the exploitation of the resources, as well as by the complexity of political maneuverings. In Central Asia, Turkmenistan (mainly natural gas with some oil) and Kazakhstan (mainly oil but a good deal of natural gas) are the two countries with significant amounts of energy to export. Uzbekistan (some natural gas) also has some quantities.
All these countries share the problem that their only available export pipelines run through Russia. Turkmenistan, for example, with some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world, exported nearly 85 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in 1991 but only 13 bcm in 1998 and 23 bcm in 1999. Throughout the 1990s, it has haggled with Russia over price and periodically suspended exports over such disputes, only to be reminded by a foreign-exchange earnings crunch that it has no other major customer.
A planned pipeline under the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, which would have continued through Georgia to take Turkmenistani gas into hard-currency-paying Turkey, fell through earlier this year for several reasons. First, Azerbaijan made a huge offshore gas discovery in the Shah-Deniz field and wanted more of the pipeline volume than Turkmenistan was willing to relinquish. In fact, the Shah-Deniz consortium now has plans under way to pipe its own gas alone to Turkey. Second, President Niyazov imposed unacceptable conditions on the consortium that would have built it, including a huge signing bonus. However, such a bonus was unlikely, inasmuch as the U.S. Department of Justice had recently begun an investigation of the relationship between Mr. James Giffen and President Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan.[NOTE02] Third, Niyazov just tried to play too many ends against the middle, talking now with the trans-Caspian consortium, now with the Russians, now with Iran, and even with China. He juggled uncertainties for so long that the audience packed up and went home, leaving him with the Russians. Capital for the construction of a pipeline through Iran is nowhere to be found; and the pipeline to China is simply unrealistic.
The construction of a pipeline from Kazakhstan's Tengiz oil deposit, across southern Russia to the port of Novorossiisk on the Black Sea was recently completed. This was long sought as a way to get Tengiz oil to market. Yet it remains to be seen exactly how much Kazakhstani oil Moscow will let into the pipeline. The Russian regions in the area want to include some of their own production in the throughput, and Russia's recent offshore discovery in North Kashagan, which is still to be developed, is a natural for the Novorossiisk pipeline. Some Kazakhstani production goes to central Russia via the Soviet-era pipeline through Samara. However, both the Tengiz oil deposit and the Karachanagak natural gas deposit still await reliable transport to market in large quantity. Proposed oil pipelines from Kazakhstan through Iran via Turkmenistan, and across Central Asia to China run into the same problems as similar pipelines proposed for Turkmenistani gas.
Uzbekistan's diplomatic concern with South Asia is conditioned by its geopolitical situation and by the country's close inter-ethnic relations with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In the early 1990s, the civil war in Tajikistan represented, for the Uzbekistani government, an external threat that could lead to domestic unrest because ethnic Uzbeks constitute about a quarter of Tajikistan's population and dominate the northern part of the country. Samarkand and Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, are historical centers of Tajik settlement and influence. The figure sometimes given, of a five per cent Tajik component in Uzbekistan's population, is but
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an artifact of Soviet census procedures. The actual figure is several times higher than that.
The Uzbek "ethnic reach" into neighboring countries is matched by its neighbors' sensitivities to Uzbek influence, which can sometimes seem overbearing. For example, Tashkent has on several occasions sent its troops across Kyrgyzstan's and Kazakhstan's border to conduct exercises, without seeking permission to enter the respective territories. One-seventh of Kyrgyzstan's population is ethnic Uzbek, and Uzbekistan is the pre-eminent power in southern Kyrgyzstan, which is linked to the northern part of the country only by air routes.
The question of Islamic militancy in Central Asia leapt to international attention when a series of bomb attacks hit Tashkent in 1998. The attention intensified when the area of Batken, Kyrgyzstan was taken by forces under the command of Juma Namangani, an Islamic militant, in the summer and autumn of 1999. Central Asia as a whole began drawing closer to Russia as the year 2000 began, partly in response to these events and partly out of recognition that Russia was the only diplomatic power actually prepared to dispatch troops to the region to quell the insurgent forces. As it became clear that President Vladimir Putin was willing to take concrete action in support of his stated objective to restore his country's prestige and diplomatic status, this rapprochement with Russia deepened. Central Asia was a natural place for Putin to begin to reassert, by practical steps, a Russian sphere of interest. Already as Prime Minister in 1999, he had responded favorably to Kyrgyzstan President Akaev's request for assistance in the Batken episode.
In early 2000, Putin, as head of the CIS newly elected by its Council, signaled a new special security relationship with Uzbekistan. The two countries have had ambiguous relations for the whole of the last decade. After eliminating Islamic parties in the Ferghana Valley in 1989, President Karimov of Uzbekistan sent troops to fight in Tajikistan's civil war in the early 1990s, a period when Russia could neither define nor assert an interest in Tajikistan. Different Russian Army military formations supported different sides, each for idiosyncratic reasons, but Uzbekistan had well defined interests and acted on them.[NOTE03] By the time post-Soviet Russia got around to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan had played its military role there. Tashkent tried to distance itself from Moscow throughout the 1990s by undertaking autonomous diplomatic initiatives in Central Asia and turning to the United States as a "strategic partner". However, since summer 2000, partly because Russia is the only major country willing to send troops to assist Uzbekistan's fight against Islamic insurgency, relations between the two countries have once again drawn closer. These relations are also economic and so include, for example, renewed Russian purchases of Uzbekistan's natural gas, which are in tandem with Russia's increased gas purchases from Turkmenistan as well.
Russia's re-assertion of influence in Central Asia represents a move to fill what appears from Moscow as a security vacuum. It is part of a broader Eurasian trend in Russian foreign policy that includes the development of limited strategic cooperation with China. In fact, China has stealthily become deeply involved in Central Asian affairs. This development may be traced back to one of the more interesting security initiatives in the region: Kazakhstan's attempt in the 1990s to organize a Conference on Interactions and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), with a view towards subsequently establishing a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Asia (CSCA). The Conference seeks neither to organize a collective security regime nor to reproduce the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in the Asian theater. In the conception of Kazakhstani diplomacy, the CICA is a conference where states have the opportunity to discuss problems and organizational mechanisms to assure security in all domains.
Several preparatory meetings were held in view of convoking the CICA. These meetings revealed three essential difficulties with the initiative. First, the geographical scope of the participating countries was ill-defined. Second, and related to the first, there was concern with duplicating the activities and functions of other organizations and structures. Third, the heterogeneity of the Asian countries themselves, including cultural differences, rendered the overall initiative more difficult by complicating the discussions of nonmilitary issues. The U.S. declined an invitation from Kazakhstan in the mid-1990s to participate in the CICA's Executive Organizing Committee. However, Russia and China both accepted. The serious development of security and economic ties between the two countries, including their rapprochement around "anti-superpower" rhetoric, may be dated from their cooperation in that forum. CICA itself continues its activities, and in September 1999 the foreign members of the participating countries agreed a "Declaration of Principles", of which the significance may in retrospect come to rival that of the 1975 Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. CICA itself has also devolved issue-specific cooperation to what are effectively spin-off formations, of which the Shanghai Forum (previously the "Shanghai−5") is one.[NOTE04]
China and Russia have undertaken a rapprochement over the last decade that makes Central Asia a region of common interest. Yet their designs are not held in common. Russia looks southward from the Eurasian landmass and sees Central Asia as a traditional sphere of influence and buffer zone against social and political chaos. China looks westward from
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the Pacific Rim and sees Central Asia as a springboard to the greater Caspian/Black Sea meta-region, opening onto Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Europe. Xinjiang is the platform providing the run-up to that springboard. China's aim is to make Xinjiang a "pole of attraction" for economic development, linking the South Caucasus and Asia Minor to the Chinese Pacific Rim via transportation infrastructures passing through Central Asia.
The Central Asian countries, since they are the ones actually in region, have themselves a more intensive international agenda than either China or Russia. It is dominated by three combined security and economic issues: energy development, counter-insurgency, and economic cooperation. Russia is deeply involved in all three throughout the region. China is the only other country also involved in all three, though not so deeply as Russia. China's attempts to promote energy development in Central Asia have mostly foundered but not for want of trying. Its energy cooperation with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan is tending to increase but remains still at very low levels due to a general lack of capital. Long before the Shanghai Forum was convened to intensify anti-Islamic security cooperation among its members, China had successfully pressured all these countries to abrogate their international treaty obligations with respect to treatment of refugees, and to return summarily to China any Xinjiang Uighurs found in their territory, even though Uighurs are perhaps the Turkic people in the region least likely to harbor Islamic-militant sentiments. As for economic cooperation, China does not have the wherewithal to engage in foreign direct investment to any great degree but is seeking to piggyback its political influence upon Japan's significant investments.
China's demographic policy causes increasing social tensions in the region. There is evidence of an officially sanctioned policy to encourage emigration by young ethnic Han males to Kazakhstan in particular, where they acquire land and marry local women, much to the discontent of young Kazakh males. Unofficial estimates put the level of this illegal immigration at several hundred thousand. Since the population of Kazakhstan is now about 15 million, and half of these are male, of whom we may assume half to be of working age, we may estimate that even only 350,000 young Han males would represent one-tenth the size of the corresponding ethnic Kazakh population. This is rather more than a drop in the bucket.
Even Iran and Turkey, which form a perennial trio with Russia where the Central Asian security questions are concerned, are potentially influential in only one of the above-enumerated issue areas, energy. Turkey's international position declined along with the strategic importance of the Bosphorus in the late 1980s, but the situation in Central Asia in the 1990s was greatly to its advantage. Turkey's relations with Central Asia are of three kinds: cultural, economic, and political. Cultural initiatives involve the spread of the Turkish language and of the Latin alphabet. Economic relations include cooperation for development of infrastructure and building-construction.
Iran's relative lack of diplomatic and economic resources means that even its attempts to promote energy cooperation with the Central Asian countries have foundered. Nevertheless, there is a confluence of interests between Iran and China on energy policy, as both seek to counter the various Russian and Western pipeline plans with alternative options. Iran also finds its interests coinciding with China's on such ethno-nationalist related issues as ethnic policy in Xinjiang, the resolution of the conflict in Tajikistan, and anti-Taliban policy. The result has been a diplomatic distancing of China from its long-standing friend Pakistan.
Recently, Pakistan's regional policy has itself undergone an important shift, with direct implications for Central Asia. In May, General Pervaiz Musharraf, for the first time, publicly stated his country's rationale for supporting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He specifically invoked the close ethnic ties between Pakistan's influential Pushtuns, who are his country's second largest ethnic group, and Afghanistan's Pushtuns, who are their country's largest ethnic group.[NOTE05] This strategy, which we may call pan-Pushtunism, implicitly regards Central Asia as a Pakistani hinterland. In such a strategy, Pakistan seeks to carve out a sphere of influence in Central Asia by penetrating it through military proxies whose ethnic composition draws attention to the Pushtun "fact" in South Asia in general, and in Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular. Seeking to co-opt his own country's ethno-nationalist Pushtuns, Musharraf does not concede security interests in Afghanistan to any other country. This policy, which has weakened Pakistan's credibility as a fair arbiter of the Afghanistan conflict, is therefore rightly called dangerous.
This pan-Pushtun policy is manifested in the summer and autumn of the year 2000. At that time, the Taliban-abetted Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) sent fighters across Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan into eastern Uzbekistan and the Ferghana valley. There they set up a network of bases and supplies as well as communications lines for agitation and propaganda work during subsequent months. This IMU operation coincided with the Taliban's successful drive inside Afghanistan to capture the city of Taloqan, the headquarters of the Northern Alliance that opposes the Kabul regime. The ensemble of these events has served to take out of political deep-freeze the (still less than likely) proposal to
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build a pipeline for Turkmenistan's natural gas across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Even more significant, after the Taliban victory in Taloqan, first Karimov and then Nazarbaev received Musharraf in their respective capitals and articulated a more conciliatory line towards the Taliban regime in Kabul.
However, these means are unlikely to palliate the threat to the Central Asian regimes from Islamic militancy in the region. It is unclear whether Uzbekistani rapprochement with Pakistan and conciliation with Afghanistan will produce pan-Pushtun self-restraint. Even if the Afghanistani government (and by implication their Pakistani allies) limit their logistical support for the IMU, the latter is neither entirely under their control nor the only Islamic-militant organization in the region, although it is the only important one having at present a strategy of armed confrontation. The Hezbollah group in the Ferghana Valley is no less militant for refraining from immediate combat. The Hizb-e Tahrir group has a longer-term, more studious approach to propagating Islamic influence that seeks to penetrate the political institutions with "agents of influence," so as to establish later a regional Islamic Caliphate. The group nevertheless concedes the eventual necessity of armed struggle but parts company from the IMU concerning the latter's present tactics.
The IMU is still the most immediate threat, yet President Karimov of Uzbekistan has boxed himself in over the last decade by eliminating options for both himself and those who stand against him. This he has done through his uncompromising eradication of all opposition, including Islamic-oriented groups that might have articulated platforms for peaceful change within a tolerant political system that they would have been thereby brought to support as a system. However, the unambiguous failure of economic reform in the country has only immiserated members of what middle class the country has left. The alienation of this middle class has been compounded by such political measures as increasingly draconian restrictions on civil rights and the summary arrest and detention of thousands of citizens on suspicion of Islamic sympathies.
The danger to President Karimov in Uzbekistan is not necessarily that a force of Talibanesque sympathizers will conquer his capital Tashkent, although a few armed clashes have already occurred within a hundred miles of it. Rather, his ever-increasingly authoritarian rule may be undermined by a militarized crisis of civil control in one or more of the outlying provinces, triggering a crisis of political authority among the elites and especially the sub-elites in Tashkent and the regional centers, upon whose allegiance his authority rests.[NOTE06] Since the political institutions in Uzbekistan have no legitimacy independent of Karimov's personal authority, such a challenge to his pre-eminence could, if successful, produce a vacuum of political power. Such a vacuum could then spread throughout the country as regional prefects and notables shift their loyalty or, to forestall their own downfall, proclaim their autonomy locally by decree. Counter-elites in Tashkent may seek to seize the commanding heights of the existing political regime in such a crisis, but here is no future guarantee of their success in being able to command anything in the country from those heights.[NOTE07]
The outlook is both better and worse in Kazakhstan. Economically the Central Asian country most interdependent with Russia, it is four times the size of Texas with less than three times the population of the District of Columbia. Mass social mobilization capable of overtly threatening the regime's balance is unlikely. However, the ethno-nationalist and relatively densely populated southern region of the country exerted a continual pull on Nazarbaev's policies throughout the 1990s. Family and clan structures continue to be strong there. Nazarbaev himself is from the south but from one of the minor clans. That is one reason, among several, why he moved the capital from Almaty to Astana (formerly named Aqmola) in the center of the country. Influence from sub-elites in the south is responsible for his discarding in practice a "civic-nationalist" approach to Kazakhstani state identity. He has continually had to balance among the different clan interests from this region.
The worst-case scenario in Kazakhstan is rather like that in Uzbekistan, with presidential rule becoming imperiled by the loss of allegiance of counter-elites and sub-elites. However, this scenario in Kazakhstan holds still deeper implications for the region. Already the north and east of the country, which have long been heavily settled by ethnic Russians, have made local political moves towards autonomy and, possibly, separatism. These moves have been repressed but not crushed. There is a great deal of discontent in the oil-rich west of the country, because the president's prefects have had their eye on their constituency in Astana by which they are appointed, rather than the local population who view them as interested interlopers who send the energy revenue out of the region instead of improving local conditions. The
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center of the country is largely desert.
Islamic sympathies have the best chance in southern Kazakhstan, where they would be most dangerous. The population is highly impoverished and retains cohesive forms of social organization inherited from the Kazakh cultural past.[NOTE08] The south of the country continues to have rich agriculture, providing structures of political organization focused on the management of irrigation systems (like other great civilizations of the East), as well as significant urban conglomerations, such as the industrial city of Shymkent, which have already witnessed demonstrations of popular unrest over social conditions.
It also contains the historic city of Turkestan, which carries great weight in the popular consciousness. The Turkestan area, not far from the Ferghana Valley, is historically the cradle of empires in the region. It has been the central political and economic region of the Western Turkic empire (late 6th and early 7th centuries A.D.), the Kharkhanid Empire (960–1210, the first Turkic Muslim state), the Mongol state of Chagatai (13th–15th centuries), the Kokand khanate and the Kazakh Elder Horde (18th–19th centuries), as well as the short-lived Kokand republic (a pan-Turkic state that was born and died in 1917). Should the Islamic-militant movements now threatening Uzbekistan make propaganda and breakthroughs in southern Kazakhstan, the historical city and region of Turkestan would exercise a strong pull on historically informed social consciousness. This region is the rich under-belly of Kazakhstan, and its demonstrated popular disaffection would signal a threat to the country's political and social integrity. It is probably the area ultimately targeted by the strategists among Islamic militants in the region.
Continual low-level civil conflict is foreseeable, especially given the impoverishment of populations throughout the region. Kazakhstan should begin to experience economic growth in the near future, but it is not certain that this will trickle down to the society at large. The country suffers from such serious corruption that virtually none of the large World Bank grants from the early 1990s, targeted at modernizing the south's irrigation system, actually reached the region. Kyrgyzstan, once seemingly on course to becoming a model of tolerant pluralism in the region, has succumbed to the ascendance of incentive structures grounded in the specific interests of particular elite groups, coupled with increased political intolerance, over a general sense of the common good that would be linked to more liberal lines of political development.
Tajikistan is comparatively stable but has few hopes for significant economic development in the near future, and its security concerns are threatened now not only by the crucible of the Ferghana Valley but also by the Taliban conquest of northern Afghanistan up to their common border. Turkmenistan is politically stable, thanks to the iron fist of Turkmenbashi ("leader of the Turkmens") President Saparmurat Niyazov. On the economic side of things, however, his domestic policies make it unlikely that the people of Turkmenistan will experience any economic benefit from the development and export of the country's energy resources. Finally, as explained just above at greater length, the economic stagnation in Uzbekistan tends to cast its long-term political stability into doubt.
In the late twentieth century, it became evident that regional international systems may be organized around littorals (e.g., Asia–Pacific Rim) as well as continentally. The events of the last decade have shown the proliferation of this emergent characteristic of international politics. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there are now self-organized regional systems around the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea. Looking at a demographic map of Central Asia, what strikes the eye is how large a central part of the region is desert. Central Asia, therefore, although a continental entity, is itself a sort of littoral as well. It is a regional demographic littoral surrounding a mainly barren regional center. The populated areas are not closely connected enough for something like an Albanian-style insurrection to pass, as like a wave, from one to another, thus threatening the region's political constellation.
To be sure, the population is largely so concerned with obtaining the means to sustain physical existence on a daily basis, that such a threat is at present peripheral. However, this population will grow, become more educated, and demand greater control over the circumstances of their lives. Underground Islamic-based education is already being propagated throughout the region by the Hizb-e Tahrir group.
The failure of state-based integration may be compensated for by just such a kind of transnational societal integration. We will not know until it bursts out, seemingly unanticipated. If this occurs, it may take a generation, but the forerunner is already evident in the Ferghana Valley. The states in the region are largely unable to counter such a development on their own. Rather, it is Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and perhaps India and Turkey, whose interplay, not only in the geopolitical space but also in the issue-area space, will condition, but not determine, the region's future. The United States has until now abnegated a serious role, and Europe will be pre-occupied with consolidating its enlargement for at least the next decade or two. Low-profile "private" and voluntary groups from the West, in for the long haul and operating at the grass-roots level, may play a crucial palliative and intermediary role.
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[Note 1]. Five of the eight most densely populated provinces in the former Soviet area are in Uzbekistan, including the capital region Tashkent. The others are Andijan, Ferghana, Namangan, and Khorezm.
[Note 2]. Giffen, an American industrialist-turned-lobbyist/advisor now based in Almaty, is publicly reported, based on Swiss bank documents, to have possibly contravened U.S. law by playing a role that facilitating exactly such types of fund transfers to leading Kazakhstani politicians.
[Note 3]. Karimov used the conflict in Tajikistan as an excuse to suppress domestic political opposition beginning in June 1992. He also cited other foreign developments, such as the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, to justify the suppression of political rights.
[Note 4]. The Shanghai Forum includes Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Participants in CICA include these five, plus Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the Palestinian administration.
[Note 5]. However, the Pushtuns are not a majority of the population, they account for forty per cent of it.
[Note 6]. "Sub-elites" are middle-level administrative and political personnel who transmit instructions from the higher, authoritative decision-making elite to the lower executive levels, and who report back to the former on the results of the latter's implementation.
[Note 7]. "Counter-elites" are elites who represent themselves as alternatives to the elite in power, whom they usually seek to replace. On infrequent occasion, a coherent and self-conscious sub-elite can, in the absence of actual counter-elites, itself act as a counter-elite and become the new ruling power. An example is in the April 1974 Portuguese overthrow of Salazar's fascism, which had systematically prohibited all political opposition. There, a cohesive and repesentative collection of army majors and captains, long disenchanted with the regime's unending colonial wars in Africa, proclaimed a National Junta of Salvation and the old regime collapsed without bloodshed.
[Note 8]. Ethnic Kazakhs remained nomadic with traditional cultural structures until only a few decades ago, when Stalin collectivized their animal husbandry and forced them to settle into sedentary lifestyles.
Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
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