It's unclear what role public opinion plays in Kyrgyzstan's foreign policy -- I think very little -- but to the extent that it does, and if there does turn out to be a showdown over Manas between the U.S. and Russia, it's clear which side the people of Kyrgyzstan would choose. According to a Gallup poll (nearly two years old, but I'm not sure why much would have changed), Kyrgyzstanis who believe it is "more important to have a close relationship with the USA even if it might hurt relationships with Russia" totaled a mere three percent. And those who said that it was "more important to have a close relationship with Russia even if it might hurt relationships with USA": 63 percent. (About 22 percent said it was important to have close relations with both.)
Several other countries of the region were polled on the same question, and the results should be pretty sobering to U.S. policymakers: In every single country, more people believed it was important to have good relations with Russia than with the U.S. That includes Georgia, though there the proportions are closest (28 percent with Russia, 24 percent with the US, and this was before the war so presumably there has been some movement there). And the proportions of people who say their country should favor relations with the U.S. are vanishingly small in a lot of the countries: four percent in Armenia, two percent in Uzbekistan, one percent in Tajikistan, three percent in Kazakhstan.
On Monday, the US Embassy in Bishkek put out a press release saying that "The Transit Center at Manas has resumed normal operations. Refueling operations continue as usual and the transit of troops has resumed."
The biggest announcement out of yesterday's meeting between Presidents Obama and Nazarbayev was that Kazakhstan would allow overflight rights of planes going over the North Pole, then south over Russia and then through Kazakhstan and then Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan/Tajikistan. I spoke to Andrew Kuchins, a CSIS scholar who has interviewed many American, Russian and Uzbek officials about the Northern Distribution Network for a CSIS project. He pointed out that Pentagon officials were never especially interested in this polar route, that it was originally proposed by the Russians as a concrete "deliverable" that Obama and Medvedev could announce during their meeting in Moscow last July. The Pentagon would rather get permission to transit lethal cargo over its existing routes.
And yet, negotiating that extra route shortly became the top priority in the U.S.'s relationship with Kazakhstan; as one State Department official told me, "the NDN trumps everything." And it was the main achievement of the one-to-one between Obama and Nazarbayev.
My takeaway: There is an interesting behind-the-scenes story to tell about how an afterthought at the Pentagon became the top priority at the White House...
Among the many reams and terabytes of "analysis" of what Russia is up to in Kyrgyzstan and what the fate of the Manas air base there might be as a result, it's an unspoken assumption that the Russians want the Americans out, overlooking the fact that (as Russians of course know as well as anyone) the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, and by extension Kyrgyzstan, may actually be weakening the U.S. So this strikes me as particularly perceptive:
Putin is playing a much more complex game than is commonly understood. Consider the following facts:
Russia is selling us air transit rights over Russia to Kabul.
Russia is selling us freight service for mass supply movements from Baltic ports through the Russian, Kazakh, and Uzbek railway networks to the Afghan border.
Russia is selling us air transport services using their Antonov cargo planes, with Russian and other post-Soviet crews — again, to Kabul.
Putin is backing Afghan President Karzai and some warlords, as well.
The lesson to draw from these facts is this: Putin’s game is to run up the cost of the Afghan war for the US, not to drive us out. His ideal scenario is an American “forever war” in the Hindu Kush — one in which we need his cooperation to keep up the fight.
Iran's English-language state-run station Press TV has quite a scoop:
Kyrgyzstan's new leaders have said they intend to remove a US military base, which currently serves as the premier air mobility hub for the US-led forces in Afghanistan, from their soil.
What is the source of this news? It's not clear, as there are no direct quotes, and Kyrgyzstan's new leader, Roza Otunbayeva, has already been on the record saying that nothing would happen to Manas.
It also seems wise to use a bit of skepticism when considering this report from Uzbekistan, from the Uzbek-language Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran External Service, via BBC Monitoring:
Dust containing uranium penetrates into human blood, causing cancer. The dust with uranium containment has been frequent here, in Termiz since 2001 when the US-led military operations against the Taleban started in Afghanistan.
Of late, cases of illnesses with various types of cancer, especially, lung cancer, has increased in Termiz.
Though this phenomenon has officially been acknowledged, the problem itself should be studied thoroughly.
I regularly follow Press TV, and I hadn't previously seen much indication of trying to stir up anti-American rumors in Central Asia. Did this start with the whole Jundullah/Manas thing? Will be interesting to see if this continues.
There has been some speculation that Russia might be maneuvering, behind the scenes, to get Kyrgyzstan's new leaders to shut down the Manas Air Base. This analysis from RFE/RL calls attention to a visit that a Kyrgyz opposition leader made to Moscow just before the demonstrations, where Vladimir Putin expressed support for the opposition. The country's new interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, made her first phone call to Putin. And a senior unnamed Russian official told Reuters:
"In Kyrgyzstan, there should be only one base -- Russian. He said Bakiyev had failed to fulfill a promise to close the U.S. base."
Later in the RFE/RL piece, Alexander Cooley (him again) points out that it is totally reasonable for Otunbayeva to make her first call to Moscow:
Central Asia observers aren't surprised by the new Kyrgyz leadership's courting of Russia. Columbia University professor Alexander Cooley, who wrote a book about the Manas air-base dispute, says relations between Bakiev and the Kremlin had deteriorated so much, Otunbaeva's first order of business was "to make nice" with Moscow.
"It's not surprising that the first public phone call she makes is with Putin," Cooley says. "She doesn't do a CNN appearance, she doesn't call Obama."
Even before we had any idea what was going on in Kyrgyzstan, there was a lot of hand-wringing yesterday over the status of the Manas Air Base/Transit Center after the "revolution" that seems to have taken place there. That has tamped down a bit, once it emerged that Roza Otunbayeva, the new leader of the caretaker government, said that Manas would be unaffected.
Well, a little. Major Chris LeCron, executive officer for CENTCOM Deployment & Distribution Operations Center, which handles logistics of moving equipment into Afghanistan, including via the Northern Distribution Network, flags the story on his official blog, and adds a little comment:
We rely heavily on Manas, Kyrgyzstan and hope everything settles down soon. From a transportation standpoint, the air base in Manas helps as a staging base for cargo and troops.
The situation in Kyrgyzstan appears to be pretty grave, with protesters in Talas taking over a government building. It's ongoing, and to make too many conclusions just yet would obviously be premature. Still, I was struck by this paragraph in EurasiaNet's latest story:
In the evening, rumors began circulating that two planeloads of special security troops had been dispatched by the government and were preparing to move into the town center. One witness said that, despite the possibility of a clash, the crowd of protesters in Talas was growing. Many intended to stay in the square overnight.
Of course, we should be extremely cautious about rumors that emerge from a crowd of protesters. However, it's not a stretch to imagine that Kyrgyzstan might deploy some sort of security forces. And just imagine, if the government had a group of well trained anti-terror troops, those would certainly be among the most likely to respond.
And that puts the proposed US-built anti-terror training center in Batken in some new perspective. The current government in Kyrgyzstan appears more and more brazen in its efforts to maintain power. Might it use its security forces like Uzbekistan did in Andijan? (Or even a fraction as violently?) And what if those troops were US-trained? I would imagine the Americans who are in charge of the Batken center are watching this situation in Talas pretty closely.
Gallup has done a new survey of the non-NATO former Soviet countries, and found that in only one -- you get one guess which -- did more than 40 percent believe NATO to be a "protection" of their country. Yes, it was Georgia, where 56 percent of people believed NATO to be protecting their country. Azerbaijanis were the next most favorably disposed toward NATO, with 38 percent seeing it as protection, followed by Turkmenistan (36 percent), Uzbekistan (31), Moldova (30), Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan (25), Armenia (22) and Tajikistan (18). Ukraine, Belarus and Russia saw NATO even less favorably.
Apparently, most of the people in these countries see NATO refracted through the lens of their regional security issues, especially NATO member Turkey and NATO bugaboo Russia. The pollsters write:
Views about NATO across the rest of the CIS region are largely defined in terms of a country's relations with Russia and its citizens' sociocultural ties. Historically, Tajikistan has been oriented both toward its neighboring countries that share the Persian language (Iran and Afghanistan) and toward Russia, on which it depends for security and labor migration. The wars in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as Russia's constant hidden or open opposition to the United States, may influence Tajikistanis' views of NATO--and hence the organization's relatively low average protection rating of 9 percent. It is interesting to note, however, that the percentage of Tajikistanis who associate NATO with protection rose significantly between 2008 and 2009--from 5 percent to 18 percent--and potentially reflects their increased level of approval of the new US leadership (30 percent in 2008 versus 42 percent in 2009).
