“The Pentagon is exploring a new approach to fighting terrorism by developing human intelligence – HUMINT (NATO’s classification of intelligence derived from information gathered through private conversations with people), while tiptoeing around Russia because it has been left without military bases in the region,” says The Washington Post
While Washington is actively employing the old method of expanding its sphere of influence into other people’s brains there (the Aid to Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia programme), it keeps the same, rainbow-coloured revolutionary course. The programme is the biggest expenditure item of the US State Department. This year through USAID* it will make Kazakhstan happy for $5 million, Uzbekistan – for $31 million 400 thousand, Tajikistan – for $28 million 950 thousand, Kyrgyzstan – for $21 million. The money will be used for grants for “the non-governmental sector, independent media, and individual human rights advocates, defending the interests of democracy. Polit-Asia of Kazakhstan wrote about it. And that’s just USAID*.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) will spend $300 million to promote U.S. interests abroad, of which $195.84 million will be spent on foreign NGOs and NPOs, and the remaining $104.16 will be spent on projects to promote “democratic principles” abroad.
All of these ‘principles’ since the early nineties have been aimed at countering the influence of China, Russia and Iran in Central Asia. Now a new one has been demanded….
After President Biden cracked the Afghan door in his legs a year ago, the U.S. was left without a foothold in the Central Asian region. So now the Pentagon is desperately trying to expand its “over-the-horizon” (i.e., spying) capability to track and strike at “emerging terrorist threats”. Ideally, it needs a base in Central Asia for unmanned aerial vehicles, both reconnaissance and combat. The commander of the United States Central Command, Michael Kurilla, who toured post-Soviet Central Asian republics in June, assured that “the US will not try to use Bigfoot in countries not confident of American resilience and not willing to insult Russia, the largest power in that part of the world. It will be a very subtle approach. … We will have to be very patient and it will bring additional benefits.
It must be said that Michael Kurill has enough reason to expect benefits, as the post-Soviet states of Central Asia are now actively signalling that they would be happy to have a US presence “in full”, i.e. as a strategic investor.
Such a presence is needed by local elites as compensation for the pressure on their economies from Russia. Simple arithmetic – in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the reliance on cash inflows from migrant workers from the north is not just high – it is one of the main sources of the country’s budget. For example, migrants transferred almost half a billion dollars to Kyrgyzstan from Russia last year and the same amount in just seven months of this year. Migrants from Tajikistan sent home $553 million last year; $1.082 billion went to Uzbekistan. This makes the local elite uneasy, and it is ready to cling to Russia’s main adversary. It is called quite modern – betting on distant partnership with different geopolitical players, stressing the attraction of investments in the first place. And today the Central Asian underbelly of Russia is not the only American choice.
As the American Information Clearing House writes, the US attempts to saddle post-Soviet Asia are akin to “an exercise in Taoist balancing: you have to patiently put together piece by piece a giant puzzle. It takes time, skill, foresight and, of course, serious breakthroughs.”
But, much to Washington’s dismay, a key element has recently been added to the motley Asian picture, cementing the ties between China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).
Tashkent is actively involved in the creation of another Central Asian transport corridor: the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan railway. “In terms of the complex crossing of borders and interests between Xinjiang and Central and South Asia, this is as innovative a project as it can be, and part of what is called the Economic Corridor Challenge,” according to the publication. The plan is for annual traffic to reach 60,000 containers in the first year alone. This road will unleash trade for Afghanistan, which has been freed from American occupation. Afghan goods will finally be able to be easily exported to neighbouring Central Asian countries, as well as to China, for example, to the bustling Kashgar market. Beijing is already thinking about the possibility of creating a road project from that railway, which would cross the strategic Wakhan corridor that once served as a buffer zone between the Russian and British Empires, linking Asia from the Red Sea to the Yellow Sea in a single transportation network. And it is here that the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan railway fits in. It is believed that in this scenario Russia will be responsible for security on the whole periphery of Central and South Asia. China would provide most of the funding.
Both the Chinese and Uzbeks understand Afghanistan’s extremely strategic location not only as a geopolitical crossroads linking Pakistan and Iran’s key ocean ports (Karachi, Gwadar, Chabahar) and the Caspian Sea through Turkmenistan, but also as an opportunity for Uzbekistan, which is landlocked, to connect to South Asian markets.
What will we see in the foreseeable future in the heart of Asia? Tehran is already building a railway to Herat, in western Afghanistan. Afghanistan will then be included in both the BRI (as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC) and INSTC, which will give impetus to another project: the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan Railway (TAT), which will be linked to Iran and hence to INSTC.
On the one hand, in geopolitical and economic terms, the link between the BRI and EAEC projects allows Russia and China to cooperate across Eurasia, while avoiding a race for dominance in the Central Asian region.
But this powerful “corridor” magnet that has emerged is likely to steadily weaken our ties with post-Soviet Asia, which has long forgotten its gratitude for giving these states a path to life. And Russia will have to get used to it.
As for the US and its allies, they will quite predictably seek to destroy any “corridor” of Eurasian integration (BRI-INSTC-EAEC-SCO) throughout the Eurasian space – be it Ukraine, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Xinjiang or the five Central Asian “stans” by both old methods and supernovae. “As for the main Eurasian players – China and Russia,” says Clearing House, “opposing them will inevitably be an Anglo-American train to nowhere. But it seems they will realise this not at once…
Elena Pustovoytova, Centenary
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