Western Policy in Central Asia: Values or Geopolitics?

by Anatol Lieven

The change from Soviet rule to independence has not resulted in a flourishing of democracy for the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In the following commentary, Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowent for International Peace, argues that U.S. policy-makers may have to choose between pursuing perceived strategic interests or patiently fostering long-term improvements while losing geopolitical influence over the region's current regimes.

hroughout the 1990s, the rhetoric of U.S. policy toward the Caucasus and Central Asia was based on the promotion of "independence and democracy," and the assumption that these two things were in some way one and the same. This assumption has proved an ideological construct with no necessary connection to reality.

Many of the dissidents who protested against Soviet rule — especially in the Caucasus — revealed themselves early on as national chauvinists, putting an extreme version of their nation's perceived interests far ahead of democracy and human rights, let alone minority rights. Following the failure of these 'national democrats' in Georgia and Azerbaijan in 1991-93, power returned to the hands of old communist elites in these countries. In Central Asia, power never left their hands. Today, the ruling systems in the region range from a deeply corrupt semi-authoritarianism, as in Georgia, to ruthless dictatorship, as in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

“If desire for access to energy, hostility to Russia, fear of Islamic radicalism, or a combination of all three lead to increased U.S. interest in the region, then commitments to regional regimes may be made with no reference whatsoever to these regimes' behavior. ”

In some of these states, the human rights situation under independence is considerably worse than it was under Soviet rule. To judge by figures kept over the years by Human Rights Watch, Uzbekistan today may have four times as many political prisoners as the whole of the former Soviet Union in the early 1980s. In these circumstances, the language of U.S. representatives about these countries being "on the path to democracy and the free market" rings increasingly hollow, at least as far as the short-to medium-term is concerned — and beyond that, who can say?

As a result, U.S. policymakers in the region are faced with a growing dilemma. If they put support for democracy and human rights first, they risk undermining ostensibly "pro-Western" regimes and driving them into the arms of Moscow. If they decide to play by the same rules as Moscow, and support regimes in the region with no reference to their record on human rights, they risk the same dangers that in the past have cursed similar U.S. policies elsewhere in the world. The United States could be implicated in major crimes, and, should the regimes crumble, the hostility of the local populations would be directed against the USA as well. As several regimes move in the direction of what could be very messy succession disputes, this issue could rapidly become a very real one.

So far, this has not become nearly as acute a U.S. dilemma as in Central America or the Middle East, for the simple reason that the U.S. presence and U.S. interests in the region are much smaller. Nonetheless, U.S. officials have already felt constrained to be much less forthright in their descriptions of the Georgian and Azeri election processes than the facts would require. In Uzbekistan, U.S. criticism of human rights abuses has fallen far short of U.S. rhetoric over considerably lesser abuses elsewhere.

What effect the new U.S. administration will have on U.S. policy toward these issues is not yet clear. If U.S. interest in the region greatly diminishes, then Washington will presumably feel less constrained to support existing regimes or to deceive itself into thinking that these somehow represent long-term democratic progress. On the other hand, the new administration is clearly far less committed to the promotion of democracy and human rights than its predecessor. If desire for access to energy, hostility to Russia, fear of Islamic radicalism, or a combination of all three lead to increased U.S. interest in the region, then commitments to regional regimes may be made with no reference whatsoever to these regimes' behavior.

Certain voices for example have advocated making Uzbekistan in effect America's "regional policeman" for the area — exactly the role supposedly played by the Shah in the Persian Gulf. Tendencies in this direction could perhaps be increased by the new balance of both power and ideology between the State Department and the Pentagon. Under General Colin Powell, the State Department is unlikely to be seeking new areas of U.S. involvement, and, in the case of Russia's bloody war in Chechnya, it has already demonstrated a willingness to speak out over human rights.

The new Pentagon, however, may be a good deal more ambitious in its policies or at least its rhetoric. A leading role for the Department of Defense would also be encouraged by the fact that it has so much more money than the State Department, something already apparent in the way that Partnership for Peace and other military programs have gained precedence over civilian ones in Central Eurasia. The increasing way in which senior U.S. military figures are intervening in areas traditionally reserved for diplomats has already been demonstrated in differences over policy toward Indonesia — as has the fact that the military often have a very different set of attitudes when it comes to human rights.

A "securitization" of U.S. policy in this way, which would only be justified if truly vital U.S. interests were threatened in the region, would bring with it serious risks. Up to the present, most ordinary people in this region have had little reason to be grateful either to their own elites or to the West, and good reasons to remember the Soviet Union with nostalgia. Not only have living standards, health, employment, and personal security all plummeted, but in many places people are even less free than they used to be.

But while the West may be seen to have failed in its goals, these goals are still generally seen as noble ones. The West is not at present seen by most people (with the exception of Islamic radicals) as deliberately malignant — and that could change if the West ends up openly supporting repression. Finally, to play by Moscow's rules on Moscow's former turf seems inherently unwise. Moscow's capacity both for effective manipulation and for consistent cynicism and ruthlessness in this region greatly exceeds the West's, both because of greater experience and because in the end the region matters a great deal more to Moscow than it does to the West.

Even geopolitically speaking, Western values in this region should be seen as an asset, not a weakness. Over time, the success of the Western political and social model will go on exerting an influence for good, but the West should no longer have any illusions that these values can be quickly and widely implemented as far as the states and societies of the region are concerned.

Western NGOs have always known what Western diplomats in the 1990s tended to forget: that helping in the transformation of deep-rooted political, social, and cultural behavior patterns is usually an agonizingly slow process with many reversals. It is well worth doing; but it operates according to a time frame completely different from that which governs the search for short-term geopolitical advantage.

Anatol Lieven is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D. C.

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