Eurasia Insight:
SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION SUMMITEERS TAKE SHOTS AT US PRESENCE IN CENTRAL ASIA
Joshua Kucera: 8/20/07

The 2007 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization reaffirmed the spirit of cooperation among member states, while offering several governments an opportunity to take shots at the ongoing US presence in Central Asia.

“Stability and security in Central Asia are best ensured primarily through efforts taken by the nations of the region on the basis of existing regional associations,” summit participants said in a joint statement issued at the conclusion of the August 16 gathering in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.

Most international headlines focused on the thinly veiled swipes at Washington taken by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We are convinced that ... any attempts to resolve global and regional problems alone are useless,” Putin said. Meanwhile, Ahmedinejad, who was in Bishkek as an observer, derided the “threats of one of the [international] powers to deploy elements of antimissile systems in several areas of the world.”

The SCO, which implicitly opposes the US military and political role in Central Asia, hosted several heads of state as guests, including Ahmedinejad, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. The United States sent no representatives to the summit, and the US Embassy in Bishkek closed for two days while the summit took place.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormick could barely disguise his disdain when discussing the SCO summit, in particular the group’s decision to entertain Iran as an observer. “If they [SCO leaders] want to associate with them [Iranian officials], that’s up to them,” McCormick said just before the summit’s opening.

When several of the presidents in attendance, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, went to Chelyabinsk, Russia, to watch the final day of large-scale SCO military exercises, Putin used the occasion to drop a bombshell: Russian strategic bombers, he said, would resume regular long-range patrols for the first time since the end of the Cold War. “Starting today, such tours of duty will be conducted regularly and on the strategic scale,” Putin said. “Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.”

US officials, again, responded with pique: "If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that’s their decision," McCormick said.

The question of how to approach the SCO seems to be vexing Washington. Some hawks see the group as a nascent “anti-NATO,” but that would be an overreaction, suggested Sean Roberts, a Central Asian affairs fellow at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

“I don't think that the United States now has a coherent stance towards the SCO,” he said. “The United States should be concerned about the role of the SCO as a counterbalance for the international ideals of democratic governance in the region, but the United States really should not be concerned about the potential for the SCO to be a military bloc. The conflicting security interests of the member states … make it highly unlikely that this organization would become a military counterbalance to US interests. In particular, it is very naïve to think that the SCO demonstrates a united military position between Russia and China, which in essence are distrustful of each other.”

The major document produced by the summit was the “Bishkek Declaration,” in which the SCO pledged to increase cooperation with Afghanistan, and to create an “anti-drug zone” around the country. The declaration provided few details on what that would entail.

“While they could do much to destabilize Afghanistan, there is a limited amount of things they can do to help the country,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former top US intelligence official on Afghanistan now at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Of course, were they really to tighten the frontiers against drug trafficking … that would be significant. But even if their will is strengthened, their ability remains limited. Those who move the drugs have strong allies and, in many cases, can outgun the neighbors' security forces.”

The declaration also called for increasing cooperation on “international information security” to combat terrorism, and to change the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure. As with the Afghan initiative, few details were immediately available.

Contrary to some expectations, there was no public mention of the Manas Air Base which the US Air Force operates just a few miles from Bishkek. Manas is the only US military base in an SCO country. At its summit two years ago, the SCO called on American forces to set a timetable for withdrawal from Central Asia. But since that time the situation in Afghanistan has significantly worsened. US military officials believe that Russia, which fears Islamist extremism on its southern flank, quietly supports the base’s presence in Kyrgyzstan despite publicly opposing it. China is believed to be more seriously interested in getting the US out of Kyrgyzstan.

“In the long run, countering the US [military presence] is the more important goal [than countering Islamist extremist forces] so getting American forces out would be a gain,” said Russell Ong, a China security expert at the School for Oriental and African Studies.

No new members were admitted to the organization. India, Pakistan, Iran, Mongolia and Turkmenistan are all thought to desire full SCO membership, but Chinese and Russian officials declared in the days before the summit that no countries would be added until an accession mechanism was created. And at the conclusion of the summit, it was announced that next year’s meeting would take place in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

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