As the U.S. and NATO prepare to pull their troops out of Afghanistan starting in 2014, everyone is wondering how to keep the country -- and its neighbors -- from the instability that seems inevitable. And the preferred strategy seems to be regional integration: the U.S. is convening a regional conference in Istanbul next month to coordinate strategies with Afghanistan and its neighbors, of which the U.S.'s new Silk Road Strategy is one component. Russia, too, is promoting the CSTO as the security component of what promises to be a larger, regional diplomatic effort including Pakistan, China and other neighbors.
But as an excellent analysis by George Gavrilis in Foreign Affairs suggests, the countries surrounding Afghanistan are not likely to be too invested in any regional coordination:
The real problem is the fact that, at best, Afghanistan's neighbors are strange bedfellows -- Iran, China, and Uzbekistan are anything but models of multilateralism. As Afghanistan's insurgency worsened in 2006, for example, Iran ratcheted up its war on drugs at the Afghan border and sent legions of intelligence operatives into Afghanistan. The enhanced border controls were helpful in putting pressure on Afghanistan's illicit opiate trade and making up for the Afghan government's lackluster counternarcotics initiatives. But they hardly made the case for multilateralism; Iranian officials regularly complained that their efforts saw little follow-up from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Turkmenistan's government paid lip service to multilateral peace initiatives, but, at one point in 2007, it might have secretly donated food, clothes, and fuel to Taliban fighters in return for their moving further into Afghanistan's interior and away from the Turkmen border. Finally, China will not increase its economic and political footprint in Afghanistan as long as it means becoming an insurgent target. Indeed, the vast majority of China's billions of dollars' worth of investment in Afghanistan is sunk in the Mes Aynak copper mine, south of Kabul, where the U.S. military provides free security.
And those are the better cases. Pakistan and Tajikistan are directly invested in Afghanistan's failure. For years, Pakistan's security agencies have fomented chaos in Afghanistan to maintain strategic depth against India. And Tajikistan's ability to collect lucrative international development aid is greatly owed to its proximity to dysfunctional Afghanistan. Tajik officials regularly present international donors with long lists of "win-win" cross-border development projects that, they insist, must be built on their side of the border. This means that Afghanistan accrues no benefits until much later, if at all. So even as Afghanistan's neighbors eagerly talk up solving common problems such as the drug trade, extremism, and poverty together, they have each found ways to live with and even profit from Afghanistan's debilitated state.
The way around this, Gavrilis suggests, is to work bilaterally with the "more agreeable" of Afghanistan's neighbors. It's a testament to Afghanistan's plight that that small group includes Iran. It also includes Uzbekistan, he writes:
Despite Uzbekistan's disappointing unilateralism, it does at least allow electricity and nonlethal supplies to transit across its territory en route to Afghanistan. Uzbekistan's role after the U.S. troop drawdown in 2014 is undefined, and the United States should encourage it to relax its notoriously closed borders so that Afghan goods have ready access to Eurasian markets.
And he suggests pressing China to "rein in" Pakistan and contribute more to security in Afghanistan.
Obviously, those solutions are fraught with difficulty. But the fact that they're more realistic than airy notions of regional cooperation suggests the road ahead for Afghanistan and Central Asia is going to be very rocky.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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