Afghanistan and Central Asia

Gee, I hate when I’m wrong.  I was rooting for Kazakhstan and OSCE chairmanship, but I didn’t think they’d get the chance after Rakhat-gate blew into the stratosphere.  But they have it, which, as I said, and against most of the reactions, I think is a good thing. 

As noted in a great backgrounder by Daniel Kimmage at RFERL, OSCE directors postponed a vote last year until two days ago.  Delay only allowed Mr. Nazarbaev & Co. to focus their efforts on the bid.  And the effort paid off.  The decision is made–but the controversy is not over.  And there’s good reason for it.

What does the OSCE do?
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is a member organization comprised of 56 states in Europe, Asia, and North America.  It generally seeks to develop relationships relating to security issues and trade, and has centres or representatives in each of the Central Asian capitals.  Security issues include some conflict prevention and reconstruction in frozen conflict areas across the Caucasus (e.g., the Minsk Group on Nagorno-Karabakh) and several missions in the Former Yugoslavia.  They are perhaps best known for election monitoring in Central Asia.  Issues such as terrorism, human trafficking are addressed under both trade and security–what the OSCE calls “complex security challenges”.   Trade cooperation includes items such as “open skies agreements” which coordinates standards for air traffic and airport safety standards.  It’s one of the most valuable international forums.

The OSCE has periodic summits and inbetween these summits, yearly Ministerial meetings.  Other committees meet weekly–in short, a busy set of places for diplomacy, headquartered in various European capitals (The Hague, Helsinki, etc). 

What’s the problem with Kazakhstan as OSCE chair?
Three things, falling loosely into two major categories of democratization and transparency.  

One, unfree and unfair elections.  The OSCE is determined to advance clean elections across former Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries. 
Two, the many deaths of muckraking journalists and opposition candidates.
Three, a state-owned press–or if not exactly state-owned, state-controlled.

What’s right about Kazakhstan as OSCE chair?
One, a lot of energy supply: that’s oil, gas, uranium, and diplomatic energy.  Europe needs to make nice with Kazakhstan as the best alternative to the Russian Federation for the extractable assets.  At the same time, Kazakhstan understands Russia in a different way than Western Europe does–and has a nice close relationship.  OSCE chairmanship increases Kazakhstan’s multilateral ties to European states and helps them in intervention–or before intervention is needed, adding a little juice to their ability to talk to Russia.  Very strategic.
Two, the EU has been blocking emerging states from associations that they want, for not being pristine enough.  Sometimes the pedestal upon which the EU has erected its house just seems to high for cooperation.  Electing Kazakhstan to OSCE leadership helps the EU look more accessible and may stimulate more dialogue.
Three, the different leadership provides a voice for those states whose concerns are a little different than those of Western Europe–security, drug traffic, and insurrection, for instance–and perhaps a different complexion on trade arrangements.  It may just get resolution of frozen conflicts into a new place across the Caucasus–and wouldn’t that be nice? 

So,  the OSCE member states can make this a win-win for everyone–sticking up for transparency and elections as always and making this a reputational issue for the new chair.  At the same time, they could stop talking for a minute and listen to some of the things that Kazakhstan may have to say, and increase their range of knowledge.  I’m for it–not that things can’t go wrong, because they can.  But I’m for it because a whole bunch of things can also go very right.

Further Reading:
OSCE Fact Sheets (all 12) on a portal page
Steve LeVine says bad idea for the OSCE
Human Rights Watch says Kazakhstan’s chairmanship is undeserved
U.S. does not oppose, back in October
Murdered journalists in Central Asia at Registan.net

Photos: I can has cheezburger.com for the cat: Rebecca Hitherby (hitherby.com) for the great drawing which makes me think of the journalists who have been killed in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states; and bugleband.com for the samovar, uh, trophy.

Gazprom agreed on November 27th to hike its price for Turkmenistan’s gas: from USD 100 per cubic meter (cum) to USD 130 starting January of 2008.  In July of 2008, Gazprom will start paying USD 150 per cum, through December,  when the price will undoubtedly change again.

This is a long overdue for Turkmenistan, and puts the Ukraine into an immediate price-hike situation.  We should expect a little drama in January, with a Belarusian pipeline crisis this past January and a Ukraine crisis the year before.  Ukraine has always had subsidized prices from Gazprom, but on the back of Turkmenistan’s non-competitive price negotiations with the Russian monopoly.

Doing the Math:
The current market price for natural gas in the U.S., according to the USDOE’s Energy Information Administration, is USD 6.07 per million cubic foot; at the various major U.S. spot markets, it’s higher: somewhere between USD 7 and USD 9.  Using conversions (1 cubic meter =35.315 cubic feet) we get a prices something like this:
Current Gazprom price for Turkmenistan’s gas: USD 100/cu m x 1 cu m/35.315 cu ft = USD 2.83/cu ft
January price: 130/35.315 = USD 3.68
July price: 150/35.315 = USD 4.245

Turkmenistan’s price/market price (using USD 7, because it’s low to middle)
2.83/7 = 40.4% of market price.

Ukraine
Ukraine is paying, according to Mr. Mityayev, about USD 30-35 more per cu meter than Turkmenistan’s Gazprom price–less than a dollar more per cubic foot.  3.83/7 = 54.7% of market price in the United States. 

Political economy
Once you look at this, it surely seems that Gazprom is not the enemy to European and Ukrainian gas supply, does it?  More like Gazprom is Turkmenistan’s enemy to prosperity, or–playing hardball for Ukraine.  But of course it’s more complicated than that: Gazprom completes Russia’s dollar diplomacy with Ukraine and with Turkmenistan, essentially doling out favors such as price hikes to Turkmenistan and the hammer on Ukraine, which is living if not exactly a charmed life, an opportunity to grow its industry on a borrowed power structure–to which it is ultimately beholden.  Beware deep discounts, my friends and neighbors.

Russia is also backing up its relations with Ukraine with increased bilateral trade, which grew 40% on Non-Gas items between January and September, to USD 280 million. Russia’s assiduous courting of Turkmenistan has brought dollars to this impoverished state, the most critical of all its needs.  New pipeline infrastructure may also be in the offing. 

The Trans-Caspian gas line, which would link to Azerbaijan and ultimately European/Western gas markets may still be in negotiation, but has been delayed for awhile.  Not only does it mean competition for natural resources, but it has the potential to change some power structures in the Former Soviet Union.  It also has the ability to make Turkmenistan more of an international player–less at the mercy of one monopoly buyer.  For this reason, the U.S. and the EU and the oil majors have reasons to keep this long-standing idea in mind–and the implications of it as well.

Photos: trashcities.org; amazon.com 

Last week, Time published a story by Laura Blue based upon the findings of Spain’s DARA on the Humanitarian Response Index, a new tool for discovering efficiency in international aid.  Time’s headline was “U.S. ranked low in HRI” , which gets that American competitiveness going.  On the other hand, it’s probably more important to see what it is we want out of our aid packages and see how it fits into performance instead.

The index rates 22 countries, including the European Commission (the U.S. came in 16th, for you competitors out there) and is based upon the “Principles and Good Practices of Humanitarian Donorship” (2003), which include “Alleviating suffering according to need, irrespective of political goals”.

What are these “political goals?”  The UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) blog recently discussed differences between kinds of aid, as administered by different government agencies for different purposes:

For a long time, the development aid community has worked to ring-fence aid and ensure that it is used specifically for ‘poverty reduction’. Historically, this has its roots in the often well-founded fear that ‘they’ would use ‘our’ money to further geo-strategic political or commercial interests that could only loosely be described as developmental – supporting some states, punishing others, using aid money to fund repression, diverting aid money to help rich country companies, and so on.  

Aid flexibility
According to Blue, the top state donors (the Scandinavian states, of course, with Sweden at the top) send cash funds and “follow up predictably as long as projects pass their regular parliamentary reviews”.   Cash is a lot more flexible than say, U.S. agricultural surplus from the farm subsidies, because it covers a lot more contingencies and can be moved electronically.  Yes, you have to move goods and services even with cash–but you can buy the actual service or good that you need instead of “making do” with what’s at the warehouse.  Furthermore, using cash may not get you the cheapest article, but it saves on distribution expenses–and with energy costs going up, that’s an increasingly serious factor. 

The other way that the U.S. funds is through earmarks, which give a kind of budgetary control but is also not so flexible: for instance, building a kick-butt bridge with good engineering on budget, but having a more limited, time-consuming process for authorizing natural disaster relief–when speed is of the essence.  Reputationally, the U.S. was slow on the tsunami effort and on-the-spot with the Pakistan earthquake–so you have to factor in averages and improvements–and also–who is friends and who isn’t, which may be part of the problem.

Cooperation, accountability
Time’s Laura Blue writes:

The U.S. scores high grades collaborating with non-profit organizations, and excellent grades promoting accountability — second only to the E.U. 

Accountability is really important: any dollar hitting those hidden ruler bank accounts instead of programs is just plain waste, graft, and encouragement of corruption. 

As for cooperative, pan-agency efforts, the ODI article notes that the U.S. is developing a “Tranformational Diplomacy”, the UK and Canada a more integrated approach, the EU’s regional approach:

On the one hand, attempts have been made to map the boundaries between different actors and define better the rules of engagement when they find themselves engaged on the same terrain: such is the case, for example, with the military and humanitarian communities. On the other hand, donors have recognised the need for a more integrated approach, for example by creating special funds which are jointly owned across Government.

On the person-to-person level:
Unlike the DARA HRI index, survey responses were generally more favorable to the U.S. than the hard-data indicators, but Blue’s article also stated that the survey ranks U.S. aid lowest in perceptions of “neutrality” and “independence” from political and strategic considerations.

It’s this last one which has caused so much trouble for NGOs in Central Asia and Russia, and it forces us to consider goals and dilemmas: how can one structure outcomes if one doesn’t have a plan?  Should hte object be “friendship” or should it be democracy?  What are the requirements of friendship and collaboration?  The U.S. public gives its government grief if it funds a dictator. Yet trying to change a dictatorship through NGO activity increasingly backfires in Eurasia. 

Example: Uzbekistan
So let’s use the example of a real-life state: one that’s not very cooperative with the U.S. or Europe or its neighbors, and is central in geography-ah, Uzbekistan.  They had a dismal human rights record even before the Andijan Massacre, and the U.S. was giving that kleptocracy aid money for democratization, water reform, economic transition, and the use of the Kharsi-Khanabad Air Force Base.  After the Andijan Massacre, the EU and the US sanctioned Uzbekistan and/or were kicked out of the state.  We now have no influence over outcomes over there. 

Uzbekistan’s subsequent isolation is a major barrier to the economic health of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the integrated road and power grids of the Asian Development Bank’s CAREC plan, and many other great initiatives.  But we’d have to “cosy up to a dictator” to get some part of that through.  It’s pretty clear that the elites are going to benefit first, as well.  It’s a dilemma on so many fronts:

1. The tight economic environment in Uzbekistan is making it more imperative to use child labor to pick cotton–although, they weren’t exactly giving it up before–but there’s scarcely a chance to say a word to anyone that counts.  A new European boycott against Uzbekistani cotton products might be effective–but the poor will still be poor.  In fact, they’ll be more poor. 

2. The country is slated for another unfree and unfair election–not that it wasn’t unfree, unfair before, but we have no election monitors there this time.   

3. Would untied aid allow us to get a little tied aid in?   These are the questions that citizens of every country need to consider: just how are their countries slating aid and to what purpose?  How are we defining aid goals–and are those goals the right ones? 

Comments would so add to this discussion–

Further reading:
Joseph Nye’s Soft Power
USDOS Transformational Diplomacy
Asian Development Bank’s CAREC program: a great program for Central Asia
The United Nations on Tied Aid

Yesterday, RFE/RL posted a great article on “Securing an Outcome” which explains a lot about how elections can be skewed and “unfree” by Western democratic standards.  Most of them are reminiscent of Tammany Hall New York: the use of patronage to buy votes/ensure loyalty, stuffing ballot boxes, absentee votes, registering dead people as live voters, and so forth.  In all of vast Russia tomorrow, only 280 election monitors will be present.  It’s not enough.

Last month, I attended a talk at the Wilson Center on “Russia and the United States in Eurasia“.  The speaker, Nikolai Zlobin, noted that Russia’s Mr. Putin was under some sub rosa diplomatic pressure to run again from leaders of other transition states: because his observance of term limits jeopardized the non-observance of those limits in other places.  We should not forget that besides the obvious retention of power issues, there are other concerns: Russia’s internal stability , and stability in Central Asia, remains a top priority.  Whether stability is furthered by keeping dictators on, however, might be a mix of reality and perception.

Questions of manipulated perception and election criminality also concern us this week with Uzbekistan.  RFE/RL also reported an official poll in Uzbekistan that says people are satisfied with the opportunities and governance in their state.  Oh, sure: that would be that over-one-year delayed election with an unfree press most of the time and a press blackout right now–a large number of young people emigrating for economic purposes to Russia and Kazakhstan . . . and yet, these polls, fictional or not, may help Mr. Karimov reassure voters whose apathy must be extreme–or whose anger is too dangerous to show. 

Further reading:
A history, hardly complete, at Wikipedia: electoral fraud

Photo: Election.ca–A canadian ballot box; and, irregulartimes.com