The United States is going to finance Azerbaijan's first communications satellite, despite objections from some US-based Armenian groups that argue it could be used for military purposes.
Russia is planning some ambitious additions to its Caspian Flotilla, its top naval commander has said. Via Xinhua:
Russia would deploy new coastal missiles and warships in the Caspian Sea, Chief Commander of the Russian Navy Vladimir Vysotsky said Wednesday.
In 2011, Russia's Caspian Fleet would receive two new missile boats and three landing ships, Vysotsky told a meeting of the Maritime Board held in Caspian town of Astrakhan, adding that the fleet would receive at least 16 new warships and missile boats by 2020.
Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov added that the current fleet is "uncompetitive":
"The fleet which is currently in service in the Caspian Sea could be characterized as outdated and uncompetitive," Ivanov, a former defense minister, said at a government meeting in the Caspian port city of Astrakhan.
He said most of its 148 ships were over 30 years old.
Although Russia recently announced plans to beef up its coastal defenses around the Caspian, it has thus far not said much about plans to add any ships to the fleet. So -- assuming this comes to pass -- it's a significant move.
It's worth recalling the words of a Russian representative to a Caspian Sea meeting, just last week, in Baku:
[Golovin] stressed that "all the littoral states agree that the Caspian should be a sea of peace and friendship." "And accordingly, none of the littoral states is going to start up the arms race, or compete in the military sphere with each other," Golovin said. This is not the field of activity on which the littoral states must spend their efforts, he said.
Are the U.S.'s supply lines to Afghanistan threatened by negative U.S. government reporting on child labor in Uzbekistan? That's the contention of a two-partanalysis in Jamestown's Eurasia Daily Monitor, which will raise eyebrows among those who worry that the U.S.'s military cooperation with Uzbekistan is coming at the expense of human rights in that country. By the end of this year fully 75 percent of the U.S.'s (non-lethal) military cargo will be shipped to Afghanistan via the Northern Distribution Network through the former Soviet Union, and almost all of that goes through Uzbekistan. Or will it?...
The importance of the NDN to the Afghanistan war effort cannot be overstated given the constant interdiction of supplies through Pakistan by the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters in recent years. However, this fragile US-Uzbek relationship appears to be on the verge of possible collapse due to arcane and illogical actions by the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (G-TIP).
What that office has done is to ding Uzbekistan for using forced child labor in the annual cotton harvest. The author, Umida Hashimova, argues that this doesn't strictly fall under the rubric of trafficking in persons, and that the State Department thus "has taken up the cause of a number of anti-Uzbekistan NGOs and possibly competing cotton exporters to vilify Uzbekistan over the continuation of the Soviet-era policy of mobilizing students and government officials to assist in annual agricultural harvests."
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.
The security forces of Kyrgyzstan bear some blame for the violence last year between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan, according to the comprehensive international report on the events, just released. But for the most part, the report paints the picture of passive, rather than active, military involvement in the violence.
The role of the security forces in the events was significant. The military personnel under the command of the Provisional Government numbered 2,000. The KIC is of the opinion that had those troops been properly instructed and deployed, it would have been possible to prevent or stop the violence and to block the access to Osh city by the attackers who moved from rural areas. The failure of members of the security forces to protect their equipment raises questions of complicity in the events, either directly or indirectly. Further, some members of the military were involved in some of the attacks on the mahallas.
In most cases, the report carefully accuses the military of sins of omission, rather than commission, for not doing anything to stop the violence, the requisitioning of military equipment by the mobs or to subsequently recover the weapons that were seized in those days. Then defense minister and current MP Ismail Isakov comes in for particular censure:
Uyghur activists in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have been forbidden from traveling to the U.S. for a conference, and they say it's as a result of pressure from China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
One of the activists in Kazakhstan, Kahriman Ghojamberdi, told Radio Free Asia's Uyghur service that customs officials at the airport in Almaty surreptitiously ripped out pages in his passport, and then told him that his passport was invalid for travel:
“Obviously, it is a slander to block me from the conference by orders from China. The Central Asian countries are acting as one of the provinces of China since the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established,” Ghojamberdi said.
Four activists from Kyrgyzstan apparently had the same thing happen, and Ghojamberdi said several other Uyghurs in Kazakhstan were harassed by police and intimidated into not going to the conference:
“In the past 30 days most of my friends who received invitations from Washington to attend the congress were ‘investigated’ by Kazakh police and ‘persuaded’ not to attend the conference."
The SCO, recall, is the regional security organization consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Just a month ago, the U.S. mooted the idea of cooperating with the group, while a human rights group put out a report explaining the risks of these sorts of anti-Uyghur crackdowns in Central Asia under the auspices of the SCO.
The U.S. is showing no signs of leaving its air base at Manas, but Kyrgyzstan's prime minister, Almazbek Atambayev, has some ideas for what he wants to happen to it after the Americans go home. On an official visit to Turkey, Atambayev said that he wanted Manas to become a "public transit center," used for trade rather than military:
“Over a thousand people work at airbase,” he said. “What shall we do with them when U.S. withdraw it troops from Afghanistan? We must establish modern transit center at the place of airbase. And, as a first step toward this idea, we have agreed with Primes Minister of Turkey to open cargo flight Istanbul – Bishkek – Shanghai.”
According to him, Kyrgyzstan may become a transit country out of dead-locked country. Construction of railway from People's Republic of China to Uzbekistan will serve to this purpose. “We can make a profit on goods transit,” stressed Almazbek Atambayev.
Atambayev was clearly thinking big in Ankara, and this proposal seems to be only one part of a hazily envisioned future of a pan-Turkic/Slavic union. "I think eventually we will create a common space with Russia and Turkey, with its headquarters in Bishkek," he said. Indeed, a U.S. air base would seem to be an awkward fit then...
Is the demilitarization of the Caspian Sea still a viable possibility? Representatives of the five Caspian littoral states (Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran) just finished meeting in Baku, and their statements to the press afterwards suggested that all was peace and harmony on the sea. Via Contact.az:
The question of military activity is an important element of the legal status of the Caspian Sea, said [Azerbaijan's] Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov. "The work in this direction is going on. There are different approaches. There is an idea of demilitarization. There is an idea of regulating the activity of armed forces. Of course, we have not come yet to a common opinion," Khalafov said on April 27.
The Russian representative at the talks, Alexander Golovin, agreed:
[Golovin] stressed that "all the littoral states agree that the Caspian should be a sea of peace and friendship." "And accordingly, none of the littoral states is going to start up the arms race, or compete in the military sphere with each other," Golovin said. This is not the field of activity on which the littoral states must spend their efforts, he said.
So they say. But actions speak louder than words, and here are a few of the recent developments on the sea:
Georgia is among the locations that the U.S. is looking at to expand its facilities in the Black Sea region for transit of military cargo to Afghanistan.
Last month, the commander of U.S. European Command, said that the U.S. was looking at locations in the Black Sea/Caucasus region to "further U.S. expeditionary capability." Today I talked with Colonel William Summers, European Deployment and Distribution Operations Center Chief at EUCOM, who gave me a few more details. “The countries that we are looking at engaging with, while providing ourselves flexibility, are Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Georgia,” he said.
The main location will be Constanta, Romania, which will be used starting next month to transport cargo to Afghanistan on the Northern Distribution Network. But the U.S. is looking at further locations where it could transport materiel via ship to the Black Sea, then onward to Afghanistan by air. Georgia is difficult, he said, because the only airport in the country that has adequate facilities is Tbilisi, which would require a somewhat lengthy road or rail transit from the sea port at Poti. But it's still under consideration, he said.
The reason for the expansion is to allow the U.S. greater flexibility in case one part of the NDN becomes unusable, as well as to build relationships with the countries in the region, Col Summers said. But the amount of additional construction or U.S. forces required would be small, he added.
As Deirdre Tynan has reported, the NDN now accounts for 50 percent of non-lethal cargo shipped to Afghanistan, but the U.S. is hoping to increase that to 75 percent of that by the end of 2011. Col Summers said that NDN traffic is currently split about 50-50 between the northern leg, via Russia, and the southern leg, via the Black Sea/Caucasus. So they're going to need some extra capacity.
There still isn't much known about the proposed U.S. or Russian-built counterterror training centers in southern Kyrgyzstan. But if -- as many observers suggest -- their real, if unstated, purpose is to check the possibility of aggression by Uzbekistan, the Pentagon's participation in the project is putting it in a somewhat precarious position. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are its two closest military allies in Central Asia, and conflict between the two countries, while still not likely, is certainly possible. Where would that put the U.S.? A piece in The Diplomat discusses that question:
US officials haven’t discussed many of the details of their plans for their training base, but the United States has an obvious interest in shoring up its defence relationship with Kyrgyzstan: its Manas air base, near Bishkek, is a key transit and refuelling hub for operations in Afghanistan, and has been the subject of controversy in Kyrgyzstan, and there have been many calls to evict the base. By building a counter-terror training centre in the south, the Pentagon likely hopes to solidify its ties with Kyrgyzstan, decreasing the chances US forces will be kicked out of Manas.
But the United States is perhaps even more invested in the military relationship with Uzbekistan, which is the key node of the Northern Distribution Network, the supply line that carries military cargo to Afghanistan through the former Soviet Union.
