EurasiaNet Eurasia Insight - Washington Seeks to Steer Central Asian States Toward South Asian Allies

EURASIA INSIGHT

WASHINGTON SEEKS TO STEER CENTRAL ASIAN STATES TOWARD SOUTH ASIAN ALLIES
Joshua Kucera 4/28/06

The United States is pushing to open up trade and relations between Central and South Asia, particularly in the energy sector, senior administration officials told a recent Congressional committee hearing.

"The opening of Afghanistan has transformed it from an obstacle separating Central from South Asia into a bridge connecting the two. And this in turn opens exciting new possibilities," Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, said in his written testimony before the committee on April 26. "Our goal is to revive ancient ties between South and Central Asia and to create new links in the areas of trade, transport, democracy, energy and communications."

Energy, however, was the field where the most specific policy goals were laid out. "Perhaps the greatest potential benefits of intra- and inter-regional collaboration lie in the energy sector," said Drew Luten, acting assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID will soon launch a $3.3 million initiative to help foster the regional electricity market linking power-starved Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to hydroelectric and other power plants in Central Asia, particularly Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The Regional Energy Market Assistance Program will last two years and focus on building a reliable transmission system in Afghanistan, as well as putting in place the legal framework necessary. "Within the next few years, we expect to see private investment lead to the establishment of a 500 kilovolt power line transmitting much-needed electricity from Central Asia across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India," Luten said.

US officials also emphasized their work on a trans-Caspian pipeline that would allow natural gas producers like Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to more easily ship gas via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and onward to Europe. Another aim is to improve the road network linking Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the US officials said.

Ongoing negotiations between the United States and Kyrgyzstan over the use of the Manas air base were also discussed during the congressional committee hearing. James MacDougall, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Eurasia, said the Pentagon hoped to reach a deal with Bishkek within the next two months. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev recently announced that Kyrgyzstan would seek a massive rent hike for the US use of Manas. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

MacDougall said the United States is looking at other countries around the region where an alternate base might be established: "There are other options we could pursue, we certainly are looking into those, we’re talking to other countries, but it [eviction from Manas] would be a significant loss to our operations," he said. He declined to offer specifics about other potential countries willing to host an American base. "The implications of us having to leave, or terminate operations at, Manas would be significant. � This [Afghanistan] is a landlocked country and we require � refueling and basing rights somewhere in the region," he said.

The officials denied that there was a geo-strategic struggle going on between the United States, Russia and China for influence in Central Asia. Instead they framed new efforts to orient the region to the south as diversification. "We don’t see a competition between [the United State and] Russia and China," Boucher said. "A lot of what we do here is to give the countries of the region the opportunity to make choices � and keep them from being bottled up between two great powers, Russia and China."

Nevertheless, the officials’ comments were clearly coordinated, and indicated a unified strategy to orient the countries of Central Asia toward states in South Asia with close ties to Washington.

Consider the vision of the region’s future that Boucher laid out in his written testimony: "Students and professors from Bishkek and Almaty can collaborate with and learn from their partners in Karachi and Kabul, legitimate trade can freely flow overland from Astana to Islamabad, facilitated by modern border controls, and an enhanced regional power grid stretching from Almaty to New Delhi will be fed by oil and gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and hydropower from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan." Russian soldiers in Kyrgyzstan and Chinese oil companies in Kazakhstan are conspicuously absent from this picture.

But one regional expert suggested that US reliance on opening energy trade to the south might not be enough to counteract the pull of China and Russia. "No matter how enlightened, US policy will only have a marginal effect of minimizing Russian or Chinese presence in the region, as geography (even without the addition of geopolitical pressure) gives each more leverage," said Martha Brill Olcott, a Central Asia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The hearing was held by the Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia of the House Committee on International Relations. Only two of the 18 members of the subcommittee attended.

Editor�s Note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

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