The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has played a variety of roles in the ten years of its existence -- a proto-military alliance, a counterbalance to U.S. presence in Central Asia, an instrument for cracking down on dissidents across borders. The organization, it seems, is still finding its identity, and is still the subject of a lot of curiosity and suspicion. The Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted an event today discussing where it's headed. Some takeaways:
-- While the focus of the SCO so far has been on security, it is trending toward a more economic orientation or, as one of the speakers, Alexander Cooley, put it, "a regional goods provider." Cooley suggested that could include using the SCO as a mechanism for providing Russian and Chinese technical aid, in a model comparable to the US Agency for International Development, to poorer SCO members like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; using the organization as a clearinghouse for large-scale investments in strategic infrastructure projects in Central Asia; or to use it to manage the various oil and natural gas pipelines from Central Asia to China on issues from security to pricing.
Turkey has said it would be willing to host an office for the Taliban, in the hopes that would help advance a peace process ending the war in Afghanistan. From the AP:
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that he talked last month about hosting a Taliban office with Burhanuddin Rabbani, a visiting former president of Afghanistan who leads a peace council set up by the Afghan government to work toward a political solution.
“We discussed in detail their request to (establish) such an office and said that we are ready to do everything possible for this process,” Davutoglu said Monday on a trip to Hungary. “If there is such a demand, Turkey will help with full capacity.”
Officials from Afghanistan had previously talked about such a possibility, but Turkey has been publicly silent on the issue until now. Having such an office in a non-neighboring country would obviously make it much easier to come to a political settlement of the war in Afghanistan (and presumably would reduce the chances of dealing with fake Taliban leaders).
In a report (pdf) last month (flagged by the AP), the Century Foundation said some Taliban members were interested:
Turkey has hosted joint "urban warfare" exercises with troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan, comprising sniper and anti-tank units from the three countries. A video, apparently from the exercise:
The number of troops was small -- apparently 128 -- but the meaning of the exercise was more political than operational. Turkey has long been NATO's point of contact for relations with Pakistan, and Washington and Brussels have been trying to get Turkey to help build relations between the militaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. So this exercise -- agreed upon at a summit between the three countries in December -- is a step in that direction. From the Pakistan military press service:
It is pertinent to mention here that this is the first time that a Trilateral Exercise among the three countries is being conducted on the Turkish soil .It will play a pivotal role in cementing close military ties between the countries in the realm of combating the menace of terrorism and extremism being spearheaded by the inimical forces.
For all the hand-wringing about Turkey's "shift to the East," things like this are a reminder that Turkey is uniquely positioned to manage NATO's relations with countries to its east.
The "most important" interest for the U.S. in Central Asia is the support of those countries for the war in Afghanistan, a top U.S. diplomat said yesterday. Robert Blake, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, testified before a Congressional committee, and in his written testimony (pdf) highlighted the Afghanistan connection:
The President’s Fiscal 2012 budget request includes a 6% decrease in funding for the region compared to budgeted levels for Central Asia in FY 2010. This decrease reflects our commitment to a lean, strategically targeted budget that will advance our interests in Central Asia. The most important of these is the support of Central Asian states for international efforts in Afghanistan.
Blake highlighted what the various Central Asian countries are doing to help the effort in Afghanistan, including Kazakhstan's scholarships for Afghan students, Uzbekistan's and Turkmenistan's provision of electricity to northern Afghanistan, and of course the Northern Distribution Network and Manas air base.
Those concerned about the danger of drugs and militants in Central Asia know that all roads lead to -- or through – Tajikistan, the impoverished failing state on Afghanistan’s northern border. In recent weeks, apprehensions about the country’s sieve-like borders have been stirred up in Moscow and Washington alike. Can the two find enough mutual ground to cooperate on border security in the region, or will mistrust keep them at odds?
In Russia, the latest alarm bell sounded two days ago, when Semyon Bagdasarov, a member of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, said the Tajiks are not keeping Afghan drugs out of Central Asia -- and, by extension, out of Russia -- and should either hand control of the Afghan border back to Moscow, or suffer the consequences.
“Either we go back there and there is control of the situation, or it is time for us to introduce a visa regime with Tajikistan,” the Avesta.tj news service reports Bagdasarov as saying. (By some estimates, as many as a million Tajiks work, legally and illegally, in Russia. Moscow raises the specter of a visa requirement from time to time, usually when it is pressuring Dushanbe for some concession.)
Bagdasarov’s insistence that Russia take more responsibility for the porous, 1,300-kilometer border is not surprising. He’s said as much before. But chatter in favor of a return of Russian troops (who guarded the border from tsarist times until 2005) is growing louder. The fashionable position in Moscow seems to be that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the sick men of Central Asia, cannot provide adequate security.
Uzbekistan President Islom Karimov is escorted by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld through an honor cordon and into the Pentagon on March 13, 2002.
The U.S. initially sought to use Uzbekistan territory to conduct air strikes and land operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, balked. That's according to the documents that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has declassified and posted on the internet. In a memo (pdf) written by Rumsfeld on October 5, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, he reported that:
The GOU [Government of Uzbekistan] had opened its airspace for U.S. military aircraft for whatever purpose. It had agreed to [REDACTED]. It had opened one base for U.S. military aircraft and personnel to carry out search and rescue operations. What Uzbekistan had not agreed to was any use of Uzbekistan's territory by U.S. troops to conduct "land operations." For this reason, the request the United States had made to mount [REDACTED] could not be accommodated. Furthermore, no airstrikes could be carried out by U.S. forces from Uzbekistan's territory. At this point, Karimov said twice quite emphatically that the latter questions were "not ripe" now for agreement.
Well, those are a couple of tantalizing redactions, aren't they?
Rumsfeld also says that Karimov was eager to help the U.S. militarily, because he was concerned about the influence of both Russia and of radical Islamist movements in Uzbekistan. But he wasn't eager for it to be public:
Karimov said that it would be impossible for U.S. military operations in Uzbekistan to be kept confidential. However, he asked that we attempt to hold our discussions in confidence.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has offered to send more troops to Afghanistan, on top of the 950 or so soldiers that are already there. Reports Civil.ge:
"We've offered to send more troops and for the months to come some more troops will follow from Georgia and we are willing to consider increase of our assistance in order to help the Afghan people achieve a sustainable peace and to prevent terrorists from again using that country as a base," he said.
In case the subtext -- that Georgia is doing this to curry favor with the West -- wasn't clear enough, Saakashvili spelled it out:
"For Georgia, a country of just 4.7 millions souls, whose territory is still partly occupied, such an effort underscores our determination to be a provider—and not just a consumer—of international security," he said.
He did not apparently give any other details, like how many and what kind of soldiers, and when they might go. Saakashvili was speaking at the Munich Security Conference, and Messenger.ge notices another interesting statement in his speech: “I came here to deliver one simple message: ignoring the ongoing military build-ups fuelled by well-known foreign hands can lead to future disasters." He did not, apparently, mention his sustained efforts to create a military build-up in his own country, fueled by the best known foreign hand of all, the U.S.
Messenger also quotes a Georgian military analyst who is not impressed with the proposal:
The ambitious goal of creating a "new Silk Road" on the basis of military supply lines through Central Asia appears to be continuing to make progress with the U.S. government. S. Frederick Starr, the head of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington and one of the more tireless proponents of this idea, has released a new report (pdf) on the subject, and reports that CENTCOM and the State Department are coordinating a plan:
Over the previous year the “Afghan Futures Working Group” at the U.S. Army’s Central Command (Centcom) in Tampa had been analyzing all the several dozen road and transport projects that the U.S. government had undertaken since 2002. This “mapping and gapping” exercise had as its goal to identify what had been accomplished and what remained to be done, in order of priority. To the surprise of no one, the Working Group found a disorganized series of projects lacking general leadership and coordination. The findings of this study, prepared under General James N. Mattis, Centcom’s energetic Commander, have now been shared with the State Department, which will present them at ministry-level trilateral meetings between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States on February 22-24.
U.S. European Command (EUCOM) also has been involved, holding its own conference in November 2010:
At this conference Admiral [James] Stavridis, now head of the U.S. European Command, again affirmed the view that ”we will not deliver security in Afghanistan solely from the barrel of a gun,” and endorsed the Modern Silk Road strategy for being comprehensive in scope and “a combination of international, interagency and private/public [initiatives]…We in the military are there to support [the Afghans] as we execute this comprehensive approach. That's what we’re trying to accomplish with this Silk Road oncept.”
Someone alert Thomas Friedman -- or maybe Mullah Omar: As readers of this blog probably know, Orthodox Christmas was last week, and Georgian and American soldiers got to celebrate it in Delaram, Afghanistan, where the Georgians are based as part of the international coalition. The video report below, by a U.S. Marine Corps media team, shows a remarkably well provisioned Georgian "church" inside what appears to be a U.S. military tent, complete with icons, candles, incense and an impressively bearded priest:
What does NATO expansion have to do with the war in Afghanistan? Quite a bit, according to an article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. In it C.J. Chivers discusses the "arms cascade," by which small arms make their way from richer countries to poorer ones, and rebel groups. The process is familiar to anyone who's pondered the history of a city bus in, say, Kazakhstan, that has stickers on the inside in Norwegian and Hungarian. As with public transportation, countries that upgrade their military equipment sell their secondhand equipment to countries lower down on the geoeconomic food chain. But the arms trade, of course, is a lot more secretive and carries a lot more potential for mayhem.
And in the case of the arms cascade, the causes are as much political as economic. In particular, ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries that are joining NATO get rid of their Soviet/Russian equipment as they buy Western equipment. Those surplus arms have created a glut in the worldwide market:
