China, The United States, and the Future of Central Asia

U. S. -China Relations, Volume I

David B. H. Denoon

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479810864
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first of a three-volume series on the interaction of the US and China in different regions of the world, China, the United States, and the Future of Central Asia explores the delicate balance of competing foreign interests in this resource-rich and politically tumultuous region. Editor David Denoon and his internationally renowned set of contributors assess the different objectives and strategies the U.S. and China deploy in the region and examine how the two world powers are indirectly competitive with one another for influence in Central Asia. While the US is focused on maintaining and supporting its military forces in neighboring states, China has its sights on procuring natural resources for its fast-growing economy and preventing the expansion of fundamentalist Islam inside its borders. This book covers important issues such as the creation of international gas pipelines, the challenges of building crucial transcontinental roadways that must pass through countries facing insurgencies, the efforts of the US and China to encourage and provide better security in the region, and how the Central Asian countries themselves view their role in international politics and the global economy. The book also covers key outside powers with influence in the region; Russia, with its historical ties to the many Central Asian countries that used to belong to the USSR, is perhaps the biggest international presence in the area, and other countries on the region’s periphery like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India have a stake in the fortunes and future of Central Asia as well. A comprehensive, original, and up-to-date collection, this book is a wide-ranging look from noted scholars at a vital part of the world which is likely to receive more attention and face greater instability as NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

The Outside Powers

4

Both Epicenter and Periphery

U.S. Interests in Central Asia

ANDREW KUCHINS AND SHALINI SHARAN

Introduction

The strategic landscape of Eurasia is rapidly changing, and Central Asia is literally at its geographical epicenter.1 More than twenty years past the collapse of the Soviet Union, one can agree with Vladimir Putin’s recent pronouncement that the “post-Soviet era is over” in Eurasia. This period was marked by a reluctant Russian strategic retreat, and geopolitical competition that was usually framed as Russian interests contesting those of the United States and the West in a modern version of the nineteenth-century “Great Game.” A new and wider set of emerging powers in Eurasia contends with U.S. and Western interests, and the regional states have matured as independent states themselves. Further, a new generation of elites is coming to the fore in Central Asia whose memory of the Soviet Union grows more distant. How the Central Asian states will manage their domestic transition challenges and which international partners and institutions they will view as most efficacious in promoting their national interests are very uncertain today. What is clear at this point is that all five Central Asian states are pursuing various forms of multi-vectorism in their foreign relations, and although Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are fragile states, all five Central Asian nations after more than twenty years of sovereignty more confidently assert their interests with others.

The collapse of the Soviet Union more than twenty years ago also ushered in a new era in Eurasian geopolitics. Covering a vast landmass and rich in resources, the newly independent Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have presented successive U.S. administrations a variety of foreign policy challenges. Efforts to promote market democratic reforms have been met with entrenched resistance from authoritarian rulers. Ethnic clashes, endemic corruption, and economic crises have rendered the region fragile and volatile. There is also tremendous diversity economically, politically, socially, and culturally from relatively wealthy Kazakhstan to impoverished Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which makes devising a coherent Central Asian strategy more difficult.

While greater regional integration would likely provide economic and security benefits, deep distrust, ethnic conflicts, and a heightened sense of sovereignty in the wake of more than a hundred years of tsarist Russian and Soviet policies of integration present major roadblocks to cooperation. Nevertheless, the region’s strategic location at the crossroads of rapidly growing Eurasian powers including China, India, Russia, Turkey, and Iran, its mineral and energy wealth, and its proximity to Afghanistan have forced U.S. policy makers to spend much time developing strategies to deal with the region.

The inflection point in U.S. policy toward Central Asia was 9/11 and America’s war on terror, which embedded it in the region vis-à-vis the war in Afghanistan. The Central Asian nations emerged as geostrategic partners in the war by providing military bases and other assistance. Later they provided additional crucial logistical support as key partners in the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) and are now important players in devising a regional long-term strategy on Afghanistan. Robert Blake, former assistant secretary for South and Central Asian affairs, outlined in January 2011 the Obama administration’s priorities in engaging Central Asian partners as key to the long-term strategy in Afghanistan: “Cultivating broad and long-lasting relationships with the Central Asian countries is the only way to ensure a common understanding and gain their long-term support for our efforts in Afghanistan.”2

Since the announcement in December 2010 of a gradual drawdown of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan by 2014, the Central Asian political elites have been and remain very nervous about the return of the Taliban to Afghanistan and growing terrorist threats and instability crossing their borders, as they experienced in the 1990s. The memory of the Soviet Union’s rapid withdrawal and subsequent regional instability remains fresh. Three countries of the region, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, share a long and porous border with Afghanistan, and broader regional cooperation will be essential to achieve any success in longer-term stabilization of Afghanistan. Violence in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 demonstrated that regional security organizations, including the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), are very limited in their capacity to guarantee regional security.

U.S. tensions with Pakistan and Iran are high, placing greater importance on the Central Asian countries in stabilizing Afghanistan, particularly its northern regions. This also gives the Central Asian countries greater leverage in dealing with Washington. India, Turkey, and China are becoming increasingly important players as well. This emerging multipolarity in the region will necessitate a deft and strategic multi-vectored U.S. policy approach that emphasizes long-term support for the region, as a December 2010 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report stated: “The U.S. role in Afghanistan is changing, but Washington should repeatedly stress that its engagement is not ending.”3 Budgetary pressures in Washington as well as the Obama administration’s new defense strategy calling for greater focus on the Asia-Pacific, however, naturally send regional elites the message of U.S. retreat. To counter this, Washington must effectively engage Central Asian states’ desire for U.S. and Western cooperation to heighten their sovereignty and balance Chinese, Russian, and other interests. The 2014 deadline makes achieving progress on regional security, political cooperation, and economic cooperation an urgent priority; the dismal recent historical record in Central and South Asia on this score fuels the growing chorus of naysayers and skeptics in and outside the United States who doubt that much success can be achieved.

In May 2012 the United States, after long negotiations, reached a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan, which commits Afghanistan to provide U.S. personnel access to and use of Afghan facilities through 2014 and beyond. The agreement provides for the possibility of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014, for the purposes of training Afghan forces and targeting the remnants of al-Qaeda, and commits the United States and Afghanistan to initiate negotiations on a Bilateral Security Agreement to supersede our current Status of Forces Agreement. The United States will also designate Afghanistan a “major non-NATO ally” to provide a long-term framework for security and defense cooperation. This agreement was a step in the right direction, but it also left many points ambiguous, such as the number of U.S. military to remain in Afghanistan after 2014 and the level of future assistance.4 The United States and Afghanistan successfully negotiated a Bilateral Security Agreement in 2013, but despite the landslide approval of the agreement at a December 2013 Loya Jirga, President Karzai refused to sign it, saying that it should be left to his successor (Ashraf Ghani was elected in the spring of 2014). This extended uncertainty has frustrated the Obama administration and further complicates the implementation of the post-2014 U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

But it is impossible to discount the deep fatigue in U.S. policy-making circles with Afghanistan. Regardless of rhetorical promises and partnership agreements, even the most optimistic observers—and there are few optimists left regarding Afghanistan—must realize that Washington’s commitment to Afghanistan could drop off dramatically in the coming years.

Regional Security Architecture: NATO, the SCO, and the CSTO

NATO’s emphasis on security in Central Asia since 2001 has provided the opportunity for more cooperation in the region. The Central Asian states’ logistical support through bases and overflight rights beginning in the fall of 2001 have been crucial to NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. However, U.S. needs for basing and logistical support for the Afghan war make these bilateral relationships much more transactional than strategic. More recently, since early 2009, the most significant contribution made by the Central Asian states has been in facilitating the NDN. The value of the NDN was highlighted in November 2011, when Islamabad cut off transit through Pakistan for several months in response to a U.S. drone strike that resulted in twenty-four deaths.5 The existence of the NDN also made President Obama’s decision to deploy secret forces to take out Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 less risky from the standpoint of continuous supplies for U.S. forces.

At its peak in 2011–2012, the NDN transported about 40 percent of all cargo for operations in Afghanistan (more than 50 percent of nonlethal supplies), and about 70 percent of the NDN freight enters through Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has been critical because of its rail network that extends to the Afghan border, infrastructure relied upon in the 1980s by the Soviets to support their troop presence in Afghanistan. This transit corridor has made Uzbekistan a key partner of the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan became a U.S. strategic partner in 1995 and has had a tumultuous relationship with the United States since then. The U.S.-Uzbekistan Strategic Partnership Document was signed in 2002 expanding military, security, economic, and humanitarian cooperation, and U.S. military forces were granted access to the Karshi Khanabad base.6 Later, after the United States harshly condemned the Andijan crisis, the Uzbeks expelled the United States from the Karshi Khanabad military base in 2005.7 After 9/11 the relationship has changed but continues to be shaky, mainly due to human rights concerns in Washington. The Uzbek support for the NDN was announced by Karimov in 2008 and has been the pivot for further cooperation between the two nations based on mutual interests. Despite these concerns, in January 2012 the United States extended the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) waiver for military sales to Uzbekistan.

Kyrgyzstan and the history of the Manas air base/transit center epitomize the essential logistical role Central Asia plays in the Afghan war as well as the challenges of working with fragile security partners under considerable domestic and foreign pressures. Kyrgyzstan is also the only Central Asian country to host both a Russian and U.S. base, often using one as leverage against the other. The Manas facility, established in 2001 during Askar Akaev’s tenure, has been central to U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Following the ousting of Akaev, the Bakiev government in 2005 sought to renegotiate the basing agreement. Condemning the leasing agreements as fraught with corruption, Bakiev issued sharp criticism of the way revenues from leasing were surreptitiously divided among the ruling elite. The rhetoric was partly an attempt to garner support for his fragile regime, which was seeking legitimacy among the public.8 This was taking place around the same time that the United States was struggling with policies in Uzbekistan, thus strengthening Bakiev’s leverage with Washington. Bakiev was successful in closing a new deal at more than three times the previous rent, but several years later, in 2009, when the Russians sought to entice him with a $2 billion assistance package to deny U.S. access to Manas and failed, he was also overthrown amidst a great deal of controversy over Manas. The U.S. presence in Manas and the many controversies over corrupt contracting procedures over the past decade united diverse political factions in Kyrgyzstan to oppose its continued operation, and finally in 2013 the United States agreed reluctantly to shut down its operation in 2014 as the U.S. troop withdrawal runs its course.

Tajikistan, the most vulnerable and fragile of all Central Asian states, allows the use of Dushanbe int...