Steve Quayle News Alerts

October 6, 2003

Things seem to be unraveling rather badly for US President George W. Bush these days: Iraq and Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction, Arab-Israeli peace efforts, North Korea's nuclear posturing, the economy, credibility and authority of the administration itself, all combining to undermine the 2004 electoral campaign. And far away Central Asia, an energy-rich region once ruled by the Soviet Union where the Americans are now extending their imperial footprint, is starting to emerge as Russia starts to flex its muscles there once again.

It is a region simmering with ethnic and political rivalries, deepening unrest under autocratic regimes, Islamic extremism and competition for its energy wealth. But beyond this lies the recent emergence of an evolving alliance between Russia, China and India, all nuclear powers, all grappling with Islamic extremism and all deeply concerned about the unilateralism of the United States and its doctrine of pre-emption.

China, too, is interested in expanding its sphere of influence into Central Asia, and is becoming increasingly active there. But it is Moscow's new drive to reassert itself in the region that defines the emerging potential for confrontation between the Bush administration and its putative post-Sept. 11, 2001 allies. Russia and the US began sparring over control of the oil and gas riches in the Caspian Sea basin in the 1990s, and still are. But the 2001 attacks on the US and Bush's decision to go after the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan completed the transformation of Central Asia from a geopolitical backwater to a strategic arena.

Following the suicide attacks on the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin, against the advice of many of his military chiefs, allowed the Americans to deploy forces in the Central Asian republics to go after the Taleban and Al-Qaeda. For the first time, it put US forces in Russia's backyard on at the very least a semi-permanent basis.

The Russians didn't do much for some time, but last December they began moving some military forces back into the Central Asian republics, and on Sept. 23, 2003, Putin watched in Moscow as his defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, signed an agreement with his Kyrgyz counterpart, Esen Topoyev, that allows Russia to deploy air force combat jets at the Kant air base just outside Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. That reasserted, symbolically at least, Russia's military influence in a traditionally turbulent region that many in Moscow fear is being absorbed into the US orbit.

The deployment was one of the most significant outside Russia's borders since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Ivanov hailed the agreement as "the first and the only purely Russian military base that we have opened in the 13 years of the existence of the Russian Federation."

The Russians also plan to deploy combat air units in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan's southern neighbor, in the near future. These bases, entirely under Russian jurisdiction, will also need air defenses, involving further Russian military deployment. The Russian Defense Ministry has said these bases will fall within the orbit of the Commonwealth of Independent States' rapid reaction force, with the move intended to bolster security along Russia's southern flank with its Central Asian neighbors.

This hardly constitutes a major threat to the US forces spread out across the region, and which appear to be there on a long-term basis, irrespective of what transpires in Afghanistan. But it is clear that the Russian deployments reflect the deep suspicions harbored by Moscow, and not just by Putin's generals, of American intentions in Central Asia.

Moscow wants to keep its hands on the region's vast energy resources. China, too, has its eye on the region and its resources on its western flank. Beijing is particularly interested in Kyrgyzstan, where it would like to establish a military presence of its own to bolster its campaign against Muslim Uighur separatists in the troubled western province of Xinjiang.

The stability of the province is vital to China since it sits on, by conservative estimate, at least 150 billion barrels of oil. The Chinese have penetrated the Krygyz security services and hopes this will eventually produce the influence Beijing seeks there - and that means keeping the Americans, and their Israeli friends out of Central Asia.

Stemming the Islamic tide is also vital for Russia, locked in a seemingly unending conflict in Chechnya and witnessing increasing penetration of other autonomous republics in the Caucasus, particularly Dagestan, by Islamic radicals. Russian leaders fear a chain reaction among the country's 20 million Muslims.

"In the long term, the threat of Muslim insurrection in Central Asia could well become more serious," the US Heritage Foundation said in a recent paper on the region. "The ruling regimes "suffer from a lack of legitimacy and are bereft of democratic process. With economic reforms spluttering or stalling, corruption is running rampant, GDPs are flat, and living standards are abysmally low. These conditions provide fertile ground for Islamic radicals, who are busily recruiting and training the next generation of jihad warriors.

"Russia believes it must fight the Islamists in the deserts of Central Asia or face them in northern Kazakstan, where many ethnic Russians reside - Russia finds its options limited. It can either face the instability in Central Asia on its own or bring in China as a partner."

None of this augurs well for the region, strategically located at the crossroads between Europe, China, Russia and Iran, or the effect these developments will have in the Middle East. Indeed, it was significant that once the Bush administration decided to go to war in Afghanistan, Central Asia became the responsibility of the US Central Command, which covers the Middle East, the Gulf, parts of East Africa and Southwest Asia.

Central Asia is also bordered by another nuclear power, Pakistan, and a potential nuclear power, Iran, which adds to the unease, with the Bush administration locked in a looming confrontation with Tehran over its allegedly clandestine drive to acquire nuclear arms. Washington is also at odds with Russia on this since Moscow is building a nuclear reactor for Iran at the Gulf port of Bushehr.

The relations of Russia, China and India with the US have improved greatly since Sept. 11, but all these powers remain suspicious of the Bush administration and view a unipolar world as a threat to their interests. In particular, they see controlling the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia as a major US objective, one which they cannot tolerate.

Russia signed a treaty of friendship with China in July 2001, the first such pact between the two Eurasian powers since 1950 and clearly driven by concern about US policies. Shortly before that, Russia, China and four Central Asian states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - announced the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to confront radical Islamic fundamentalism and promote economic development. All this pointed to a profound geopolitical transformation for Central Asia, Russia and China, with Moscow and Beijing as the decision-makers in the region.

Russia is the driving force. In recent months its moves to re-establish greater control over what Moscow terms its "near abroad" has accelerated. In August, Putin visited Samarkand, the fabled capital of Uzbekistan, in the first high-level meeting in over two years. Since the Soviet breakup, Uzbekistan has done much to distance itself from Russia and shown an increased willingness to work with the US. It secretly cooperated with US intelligence before Sept. 11, allowing the Americans to fly surveillance aircraft into neighboring Afghanistan in their hunt for Osama bin Laden.

After Sept. 11, it was used for operations by US Special Forces. The Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, recently acknowledged that his country and its neighbors had erred by seeking to distance themselves from Russia and agreed to boost trade with Moscow. Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, has spearheaded the Russian drive by signing long-term deals with all five former Soviet republics to buy up huge volumes of gas.

Also in August, Russian forces held military exercises with Tajikistan, where it has maintained a force of some 20,000 troops since the Soviet collapse, primarily to guard the border with Afghanistan. Russia's Nezasisimaya Gazeta daily newspaper reported in July that Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov has been offered $1 billion in US aid in exchange for refusing to let the Russians set up a military base there.

That followed a visit by Russian military delegation headed by General Alexander Morozov, chief of staff of Russian land forces, to discuss establishing the Russian 201st Motorized Division as Russia's "fourth military base" in Tajikistan.

Kazakhstan, which sits on much of the Caspian oil and where US and Israeli influence has been growing, indicated on Sept. 25 that it may join Russia, Greece and Bulgaria in building a $700-million oil pipeline from the Bulgarian port of Burgas on the Black Sea to Alexandropolis on Greece's Mediterranean coast. This would rival a Clinton-era project to build a Caspian oil pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean terminal at Ceyhan, on which work started earlier this year.

"Moscow's goal is to concentrate Russian and Caspian oil and gas into a single pool under Russia's physical and political control," analyst Vladimir Socor wrote recently in the Russia and Eurasia Review.

Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, has covered Middle Eastern affairs for years and is a regular contributor to The Daily Star

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/04_10_03_e.asp