Afghanistan and Central Asia

Yesterday, Stephen Blank of the US Army War College wrote at Eurasianet that U.S. aid and relations in Central Asia are likely to scale back further.  Though U.S. interest in the region is high, financial constraints are appearing to dictate a lessening of aid and assistance to Central Asian states.

For Central Asia watchers, there have been many previous intimations of this state of affairs.   Here are a few:

A. Non-participation in common economic goals
1. The U.S. has not appeared to have shown any public interest in Kazakhstan’s work toward developing a common economic space within Central Asia, a project that surely would help these states economically and which the U.S. should be interested. 
2. The main U.S. interest in the development of the Asian Development Bank’s CAREC plan, comes from a highly-respected but non-governmental think tank, The Brookings Institution.

B. Short shrift in handling local controversies
There has also not been sufficient will to resolve the controversies connected to Ganci Air Force Base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.  In June, the U.S. sent two officials in two weeks to make plain the U.S. position on the air force base, but that intervention had all the symptoms of surgical strike: a quick descent, a painful but short interlude, and little or no further discussion.  This top-down approach in a region so close to a War Zone, in a Developing Democracy with Contentious and Lively Elements, may solve an issue, but it will not sustain a relationship.  I covered these events less than eight weeks ago: On June 7, with  Secretary Gates’ visit to Kyrgyzstan, about Ganci, and then the second strafe, June 11, during Undersecretary Boucher’s visit to Kyrgyzstan.   Now, as Mr. Blank reports in the above-linked article, Secretary Gates has publicly solicited European and Asian assistance in U.S. goals for Central Asia.

C. Oil diplomacy instead of state diplomacy
Oil diplomacy means, not that the U.S. is only interested in hydrocarbons, but that they are leaving diplomacy and Westernization to the oil companies to accomplish.  Sometimes this works out: independent oil is a savvy diplomatic arm.  The U.S. could not, for instance, aid Azerbaijan in the time of its greatest need (the early 1990’s) due to funding embargoes put in place by U.S. Congress during the Nagorno-Karabakh war.  The oil companies essentially maintained U.S. presence at that time.  However, though oil diplomacy is more comprehensive and enlightened than most analyses suggest, it is not as comprehensive as oil diplomacy plus state diplomacy.   The best example of this missed U.S. opportunity continues to be a slow, meager start in Turkmenistan.

In comparison, both Russia and China have developed comprehensive diplomatic strategies that embrace constructive development plans,  Over the next two or three years, we should expect that U.S. influence in Central Asia is greatly diminished.  This is a large and regrettable mistake, and one that was committed long before today.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Central Asia General, States & Regions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.