To Tajikistan’s Rescue -- Don’t Everyone Rush at Once

International concern over what’s passing through Tajikistan’s sieve-like borders continues to grow: drugs? guns? Islamic militants? This week, several foreign officials rushed to Dushanbe to sound the alarm, anticipating the dreaded NATO drawdown in neighboring Afghanistan. But while the Americans, the Russians and even the Europeans simultaneously bemoaned the challenges of keeping illicit goods and bad people from crossing into ex-Soviet Central Asia, their conspicuous lack of joint meetings suggested that cooperation -- official statements notwithstanding -- is not a priority. 

Moscow, which patrolled Tajikistan’s 1,300-kilometer border with Afghanistan from tsarist times until 2005, is signaling it would like to lead an international coalition there – but without the West’s help, thank you very much. At a conference in Dushanbe, Nikolai Bordyuzha, the secretary general of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, said CSTO members should tackle the threat together “because problems which emerge on this border then echo on the territory of the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other CSTO member states," Interfax-Kazakhstan reported. 

NATO, he suggested, should finish what it started in Afghanistan and keep the situation there from poisoning neighboring countries.

The Americans were not invited to the party, but put on a friendly face. The day Bordyuzha was speaking in Dushanbe, US Ambassador Kenneth E. Gross took a road trip to southern Tajikistan to inspect a US-built bridge across the Pyanj River (one that a senior Russian official says facilitates drug trafficking). On the trip, far from the CSTO meeting, he declared Washington is cooperating with Moscow to secure the border, RFE/RL reported, no details provided.

Moscow, by the way, has been negotiating in recent weeks to continue supplying border guard advisors to Dushanbe. Russia denies, despite some opinions to the contrary, that it wants to retake control of the Tajik-Afghan frontier, but frankly, since Tajikistan took over, security has not exactly improved: A recent US government report says large sections of the border, a favorite gateway for drug traffickers, have been abandoned due to “logistical difficulties.” 

Days before the CSTO meeting, Pierre Morel, the EU’s special representative for Central Asia, slipped quietly in and out of Tajikistan to hold a meeting with President Emomali Rakhmon and other officials. He left after issuing a dry pronouncement on the need to cooperate on border security, but without -- as far as publicly available reports go -- chatting with the Americans or anyone from the CSTO. 

Dushanbe is eager for assistance, but in a strangely schizophrenic way: Sharaf Faizulloyev, the deputy commander of Tajikistan’s border guards, insisted that his country could protect its own border, but would welcome European help if it were forthcoming. Moreover, he was happy to submit an estimated budget.

Guarding the border costs tens of millions of dollars per year, Faizulloyev said. And that’s quite economical: If barbed wire were installed along the country’s perimeter, he added, that would cost $1 million per kilometer. Reuters points out that “Tajikistan, which also borders China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, has a total 4,000 km (2,500 miles) of frontier.” 

“Of course, nobody is going to put barbed wire along the entire border,” Faizulloyev conceded. 

But, if somebody wanted to, they would have many locations to choose from: Tajikistan’s border with Kyrgyzstan has plenty of holes as well. Russian representatives in Bishkek last week proposed building a regional border-monitoring center in Kyrgyzstan, possibly near the site of a proposed American anti-terrorism training center that President Roza Otunbayeva announced earlier this month. That project has also roused no talk of Russian-US cooperation and, on the contrary, seems unlikely to win the necessary support in Bishkek and Moscow.