The possible scuppering of Kazakhstan's planned deployment to Afghanistan appears to be a result of genuine parliamentary opposition to the move, heightened by the still-mysterious and probably unrelated bombing in western Kazakhstan. That's the analysis of Roger McDermott, a very knowledgable source on Kazakhstan military issues, writing in Jamestown's Eurasia Daily Monitor.
McDermott suggests that it was the combined effect of public opposition to the deployment -- in particular by veterans of the Soviet Afghan war -- and the apparent terror attacks:
In isolation, such campaigning stood little chance of success. What no official had foreseen was an unexpected terrorist incident in Aktobe, on the country’s Caspian coast....
The confluence of several factors, partly predictable and unforeseen developments, influenced senators to draw back from approving the bill. In the hiatus between announcing the agreement and seeking to conclude the ratification process, explanations offered to the wider society did not eliminate the misperception that Astana may become a direct combatant.
McDermott adds, however, that the parliamentary rejection is "neither final nor outright." There is a provision in the country's constitution which requires decisions like this to be made by a joint session of parliament, not by two separate votes by the two houses:
It appears that Kazakhstan has gotten cold feet about its proposed deployment of four officers to Afghanistan. Last week, the upper house of the parliament rejected the bill authorizing their deployment, but that move seemed like it could have been a bit of political theater. Now the lower house of parliament -- which approved the bill a month ago -- has now said it won't support the bill. RIA Novosti quotes one member of the lower house, Nurtai Sabilyanov:
"Given the opinion of the senate and the public, the Majilis [lower house] will return the agreement to the government and it will have no legal effect because of the non-ratification by parliament," Sabilyanov said.
Majilis ratified the agreement with NATO on May 18 but the upper house turned the bill down on June 9 pending a decision from a joint parliamentary session.
"We must not send [our] military to Afghanistan, it is clear to all," he said.
Another MP, Tasbay Simambayev, wrote in the government newspaper Liter that senators "breathed a sigh of relief" when the bill was voted down: "Our country should not be dragged into someone else's wars." His piece (not online, via BBC Monitoring) focused on the threat of terror that Kazakhstan would expose itself to. But there also was an intriguing reference to "ambiguous reaction from our close partners":
Many arguments were voiced in favour of the need to increase the Kazakh military's combat experience, that we need a closer cooperation with the North Atlantic alliance, that we are bound by agreements and so on. But the point is that no international, foreign policy activity should harm Kazakhstan's reputation and security.
Kazakhstan's proposed deployment of a handful of officers to Afghanistan has hit a snag; the country's upper house in the parliament has rejected the bill to send the troops, a couple of weeks after the lower house approved it.
RT quotes a couple of parliament members who suggested public opinion was part of the reason:
Astana should not get involved in the military activities in Afghanistan, said Svetlana Dzhalmagambetova, a deputy of the upper house. “The Senate has taken a right decision not to ratify the bill on sending troops,” Interfax quoted her as saying. Deputies had heated discussions in the parliament’s committees, the deputy said.
Now that the US is considering withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, it would be unacceptable for Astana to send servicemen after refraining for so long, Dzhalmagambetova noted. The move would tarnish the country’s reputation as a peaceful state, she believes.
Another senator, Tasbay Simambaev, said during the meeting that Kazakhstan had all the grounds to reject the ratification. The country should maintain a balanced foreign policy and neutral position, he stressed. Public opinion was also against the agreement with NATO, he said.
But Kazakhstan's parliament is generally regarded as a mere rubber stamp; all of its members are from the party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. So there's likely something more behind it. I asked my EurasiaNet colleague Joanna Lillis for her take on the politics of the issue, and she had several theories:
1. it's pure political theater, meant to make it appear as if the parliament does actually have a say. In this case the bill might be reworked slightly and would pass again.
The Pentagon agency responsible for getting supplies to US troops in Afghanistan has been quick to touch base with newly appointed ambassadors in Central Asia. Two recent meetings play into the theory that Washington lets the decade-old war dictate the shape and scope of its diplomatic activity in the former Soviet republics near Afghanistan. Perhaps, though, new rules for transparency in government tenders will do some good in one of the world’s most corrupt regions.
Krol reportedly said, “It’s important for USCENTCOM, US Transportation Command, DLA and any other entity that has an interest in the Northern Distribution Network [NDN] to coordinate their operations.”
Likewise, before Pamela Spratlen, the new US ambassador in Bishkek, even landed in Kyrgyzstan she had an April 20 meeting with Thompson to be reminded just how critical “embassy support” is because DLA does “business in Kyrgyzstan in support of military operations in Afghanistan.”
While DLA oversees the running of the NDN through some of the most corrupt countries imaginable, it’s the Department of State that usually finds itself on the receiving end when things go wrong.
Georgia appears to be planning to add at least 625 additional soldiers to the 925 it already has in Afghanistan, according to a statement from the White House. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili yesterday in Rome, and according to the official White House account of the meeting, "The Vice President expressed his appreciation to President Saakashvili for Georgia's significant new contribution of forces to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, which will make Georgia the largest non-NATO contributor to ISAF."
Civil.ge does the math, and finds that the top current non-NATO contributor is Australia, with 1,550 troops. So that presumably means that Georgia is planning to top that:
It means that Georgia, which currently has 925 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them stationed in Helmand province, has to send additional more than 625 servicemen to exceed Australian troop number and to become the largest non-NATO contributor to the ISAF mission.
There's really not much to be said about Saakashvili's devotion to the West and its security organizations that hasn't already been said. But in a terrific analysis of the U.S.-Russia reset in The Nation, Stephen Cohen provides some useful context. In particular, he notes the blatant hypocrisy in Biden and Saakashvili's respective description of the "sphere of influence" in Georgia:
Armenia's announcement this month that it was tripling its troop commitment to Afghanistan raised some eyebrows. It has no NATO aspirations, and has largely thrown in its strategic lot with Russia, as evidenced by the agreement it recently signed allowing a large, decades-long Russian military presence in the country.
But the newest trend in Eurasian geopolitics is multi-vectored foreign policy (i.e., trying to balance relations between various big powers rather than becoming dependent on a single one), pioneered by Kazakhstan but now increasingly deliberately employed across the region. And that means that even faithfully pro-Moscow states like Armenia have to hedge their bets a little. Thus, Armenia's contribution of two extra platoons (81 soldiers) to help guard the airport in Mazar-e-Sharif, bringing its troop contribution to a total of about 130. As Deputy Defense Minister David Tonoyan told Mediamax:
First of all, this step is based on Armenia's interests in accordance with the multi-layer and initiative foreign policy of our country, and demonstrates our particular place in the world order after the "cold war".
And he played down suggestions that cooperating with NATO in Afghanistan was somehow incompatible with Armenia's membership in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, emphasizing the CSTO's cooperation with ISAF in Afghanistan:
When Washington's "it" think tank, the Center for a New American Security, published a report (pdf) today called "Beyond Afghanistan: A Regional Security Strategy for South and Central Asia," I dug in, expecting some serious discussion of the Northern Distribution Network, the instability in Tajikistan, the possibility of a "New Silk Road" and so on. But instead, the ex-Soviet states were almost entirely ignored in this "regional strategy." The report focuses on Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, calling Afghanistan's other neighbors "influential but ultimately less vital actors." The short section on Central Asia was written, probably tellingly, by an intern.
As far as it goes, that's probably a correct assessment. Afghanistan is obviously central to the U.S.'s interests in the region now, Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan is clearly a huge issue, and Pakistan's relationship with India is the key to untangling that. By comparison, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, to say nothing of the other Central Asian states, are secondary players (though many boosters, for example Fred Starr, argue otherwise). On twitter, one of the report's authors, Andrew Exum, defended the de-emphasis of Central Asia: "The key question is how much of a *priority* should CA be for policy-makers given other, competing priorities." And it's hard to argue with that.
Remember when everyone from this blog to the Taliban was making a big deal of the news that Kazakhstan was sending some troops to Afghanistan? Well, that may have been a bit premature. It turns out that the Kazakh contingent will number... four:
"Under the agreement signed by Kazakhstan and NATO, the republic is going to send four servicemen to work at the ISAF headquarters in Afghanistan ... which means that we are not sending a contingent of the military forces, but we are joining in the international effort to help the Afghan government and parliament to ensure security and restore the peaceful life in this country," he [Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Askar Abdrakhmanov] said.
Those four, my colleague Joanna Lillis reports, include "two military analysts, one epidemiologist and one logistics expert." That's six less servicemembers than Luxembourg has deployed, and the same number as Iceland, which doesn't even have a military.
The Taliban, in their statement, bragged that "the dispatch of a few hundred troops will not change the fate of the invaders who are already on their way to defeat. Nor they will turn the defeat into victory." And if a few hundred troops wouldn't turn the tide, four desk jockeys certainly won't.
Kazakhstan's decision to send troops to Afghanistan has elicited a quick rebuke from the Taliban, which warns that the deployment "will leave a long-term negative impact on relations between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan and the region."
The statement accuses Kazakhstan of kowtowing to Washington:
[I]t seems from the abrupt and impetuous decision of Kazakhstan that rulers of that country have shown impetuosity and hastiness in taking the decision. They have focused on protection of American interests instead of taking into account the aspirations of their people and the regional interests.
And it calls Kazakhstan ungrateful for the Afghan jihadis' role in ensuring its independence:
Kazakhstan obtained its liberation and got an identity after the collapse of the former Soviet Union at the hands of the Afghan people. In a way, they ( must) remain obliged to the blessing of the Afghan Jihad and struggle. Still, if they have opted to take part in the war of the illegitimate occupation of Afghanistan, it will be their historical perfidy and an act of impetuosity politically.
Kazakhstan apparently has decided to send a contingent of troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, several news agencies have reported. From Reuters:
An unspecified number of Kazakh soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan on six-month missions with the International Security Assistance Force, in line with a bill passed by the lower house of parliament. The document did not say when the first Kazakh contingent would be going.
The government of Kazakhstan appears to not be trying to make a big splash with the news. The parliament's press service mentions the news only at the bottom of a very long account of yesterday's doings in the lower house of parliament (in Russian):
And today, the Chamber heard the report of the Vice-Minister of Defense Aset Kurmangaliyeva with Majlis member Ualikhan Kalizhanova, and voted to adopt the draft of the law "On Ratification of the Agreement in the form of an exchange of notes between Kazakhstan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to participate in the activities of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan." The bill was approved.
It would be worthwhile to know whether the soldiers being sent are those of the U.S.-backed KAZBRIG peacekeeping brigade. KAZBRIG has gotten off to a slower start than intended, so this would be a sign that at least some small part of the brigade is ready for overseas deployment.
