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Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, and Turkmen President Serdar Berdymukhamedov pose for a picture during the Central Asia-Russia summit in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Bickering picks up steam in Russia’s backyard
Since it invaded Ukraine, Russia hasn't just been making enemies – it’s also been losing friends. Some Central Asian countries – considered part of Russia’s backyard thanks to their Soviet heritage – have begun distancing themselves from Moscow.
Tensions have been building: In October, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon told Vladimir Putin at a summit that his country needs “more respect.” At September’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov kept Putin waiting before a meeting. And last week, four of Russia’s treaty allies – Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — abstained from a vote in the UN General Assembly that demanded Moscow pay war reparations to Ukraine.
“Central Asian Republics have always wanted to be free of Russian influence. Seeing Russia falter in Ukraine, they sense their opportunity,” says Husain Haqqani, director for Central and South Asia at Washington’s Hudson Institute.
Kazakhstan is proving the boldest. Many in the region were treading carefully at first. No one had openly criticized Putin, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which depend on Russian troops for security, were particularly quiet. But it was Kazakhstan, the largest Central Asian economy, that took the lead, declaring its support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Soon after, Uzbekistan, the second-largest economy in the region, followed suit.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has had the top job for a year and was elected Sunday to a seven-year term. He has repeatedly refused to back Russia's invasion, and Astana, the Kazakh capital, has rejected the Russian-manufactured “independence” of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
The signaling hasn’t just been diplomatic. At home, Astana canceled an annual summer parade marking the World War II defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Red Army, and it banned the "Z" military symbol used by pro-Russian/anti-Ukraine elements.
Most notable, however, was Kazakhstan’s refusal to send troops to Ukraine at Moscow’s request. This was a striking move by Tokayev, whose regime was rescued from a violent uprising in January when Russian troops were airlifted to come to his aid.
Considering Tokayev’s recent moves and new electoral mandate, experts expect the leader of the richest Central Asian country to navigate further away from Moscow. “Kazakhstan, as the largest and most prosperous and influential player in the region, seems to be asserting greater strategic autonomy,” Haqqani says.
But Tokayev also faces a dilemma: Kazakhstan shares the second-largest border on the planet with Russia, an indefensible 4,750 miles. The country also houses the second-largest number of ethnic Russians after Ukraine, making up just under a quarter of its 19-million-strong population.
The invasion of Ukraine being premised on the excuse of protecting ethnic Russians is something that would make any Central Asian country with a Russian minority – which is all of them – nervous. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and Putin’s one-time stand-in, has called Kazakhstan an “artificial” country, echoing Putin’s language about Ukraine. Pro-war commentators in the Russian government and media have also stepped up their anti-Kazakh rhetoric, accusing the country of being disloyal and even hinting that it’s next in line for invasion.
Plus, most Kazakh imports and exports are dependent on Russia. Kazakhstan is the world’s 10th-largest energy producer, and 95% of its oil and gas flow through pipelines that Russia controls – pipelines Moscow has switched off at will. So how can Astana reduce its dependence on Russia without drawing its ire?
Having the right friends is important. As regional heavyweights, China and Turkey are watching this space, but they’re also showing up to bat. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have recently voiced their support for Kazakh "sovereignty and territorial integrity."
If push came to shove, China would probably not get involved directly, considering its “no limits” friendship with Russia. But Turkey, which is tied to Kazakhstan through the Organization of Turkic States and even military intelligence cooperation, would probably help out.
Diversification is key: Kazakhstan wants to avoid suffering secondary sanctions and becoming collateral damage. So Astana is seeking solutions in the form of new partners, energy routes, and diplomatic ties. Again, leading the pack are China and Turkey, both of which are bound through new investments, infrastructure, and security deals with the Kazakhs.
Kazakhstan’s smart “multi-vector” foreign policy has helped it develop inroads with China and the West in recent decades – and experts believe that’s to Astana’s advantage. While Kazakh oil and gas flow through Russia, the increasing use of tanker and rail transport links now accounts for 5% of its energy export traffic. The idea is to grow these and enhance its “Middle Corridor” to connect China with Europe, bypassing Russia entirely, but diversifying out of Russia’s orbit won't come cheap.
Can Kazakhstan escape? Russia thinks of itself as a Big Brother-cum-BFF to Central Asian states and won’t simply walk away. Moscow watches over the region through diplomatic oversight backed by military might. Regional forums like the SCO (that it co-leads with China) provide it cover, while security pacts like the Collective Security Treaty Organization grant it legitimacy. Maintaining military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, meanwhile, give it muscle.
Astana can diversify its trade and diplomacy, but the country’s proximity to Russia – compounded by political, cultural, and economic ties – means Kazakhstan will struggle to fully escape Russia’s sphere of influence.
Participants of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit.
From talk shop to regional bloc: What to make of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
As the Shanghai Cooperation Organization met last week in Uzbekistan, observers braced for impact. Would China’s Xi Jinping meet India’s Narendra Modi? (No). Would Modi meet Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif? (Also, no). Would anybody put Vladimir Putin in his place? (Modi sort of did). Would China get real with Russia over Ukraine? (Not really, though Putin did emerge as the obvious junior partner to Xi in the huddle). Amid the fanfare and the photo-ops, these developments posed larger questions: Is the SCO relevant? Does it have ‘bloc potential?’ Is it a threat to the West?
The Big Brother club? Given the exception of India, the SCO is often thought of as a talking shop of autocratic regimes. But between its eight members – China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – it represents 3.1 billion people, spans most of Eurasia, and boasts a quarter of the world’s GDP, thanks to some of the world’s biggest energy reserves. Moreover, it’s still getting bigger. Iran just acceded as a full member; Belarus is hoping to be next; and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Maldives, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Turkey have also taken the first step towards membership by signing on as dialogue partners. The SCO is also expanding to the Middle East, as Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar as well as Saudi Arabia have become partners.
What does the SCO really do?
“In terms of substantive stuff, the SCO doesn't really do much,” says Nicole Grajewski of Harvard’s Belfer Center. “It is a way for a lot of the elites in the region to justify some of their policies that might be inherently autocratic.” The SCO was founded in 2001 to stabilize China and Russia’s security and border ties with the Central Asian ‘Stans and was originally driven by China’s war against what Beijing has described as the “three evils:” terrorism, separatism, and extremism. But now, Grajewski says, it creates a focus for members to justify their harsh actions against “color revolutions” as well as defend policies for regions like Xinjiang. This makes the SCO a particularly important driver for Beijing, for it is China’s first foray into making its own multilateral organization.
But a bloc it is not. Eurasia Group’s Zach Witlin says “several of the founding members are already part of security and trade blocs … [like] the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-dominated security bloc of six ex-Soviet states that includes a commitment to collective defense.” But these existing blocs are not as effective as they might sound on paper because there is not a strong enough overlap of member states' interests, he says. Just last week, CSTO member states clashed in two separate military conflicts (Armenia vs Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan vs Tajikistan) showing how members don’t follow the letter or spirit of the bloc. Witlin thinks that even if the SCO were to replicate the region’s bloc template, there would be too many differences between members. The Indians, for instance, won’t deal with the Chinese or the Pakistanis, and vice versa, at least as far as we-are-in-the-same-security-bloc rules of engagement go.
Regardless, Beijing is taking the lead in pushing for economic union: Xi Jinping recently said that he wants to “expand shares of local currency settlement, better develop the system for cross-border payment" as well as to establish an SCO development bank. Xi also says that he wants to set up an “SCO Big Data Cooperation Center” as soon as next year, and help members with space tech. These are big plans. But they don’t portray the bigger point.
“They talk a lot,” says Harvard’s Grajewski, pointing to the lengthy statements about economic coordination, which is countered naturally by already operational frameworks like China’s BRI and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union – making both Beijing and Moscow skeptical of turning the organization into something that's more economic focused. The rhetoric, Grajewski adds, is "performative because Russia doesn’t have the means to really pursue economic integration and the regional states are averse to devolving any type of sovereignty" in pursuit of more integration.
But the SCO is driving some issues: Counterterrorism is the leading one. Afghanistan, the never-ending South and Central Asian security cesspit, kept popping up in statements this year, but the organization has graduated beyond paying lip service to action with the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS). Established in 2002, it puts members' leaders and troops in the same room and on the same training ground to counter regional separatism and extremism.
“It has to be remembered that the SCO has pulled off the near impossible through the RATS mechanism,” said Suhasini Haidar, the diplomatic editor of The Hindu, who was in Uzbekistan to cover the recent summit. She points out a major achievement: the Indians and Pakistanis last year trained together in RATS drills in Pakistan (and the Pakistanis have just confirmed that they will be training with Indian troops again next month). These are big firsts, considering the violent history between these two nuclear-armed rivals – but the exercises, premised on countering terrorism emanating from Afghanistan, could lead to larger breakthroughs between member states.
What’s the view from Washington? For Washington, the SCO is also a collective grouping of many blacklisters and almost-blacklisters. Russia and Iran are two members which top the list of America’s most sanctioned regimes. China, which co-founded the organization and houses its main secretariat, isn’t there yet, but is officially the “pacing challenge” for the US.
“The West needs to see the SCO as an alternative to its own narrative on almost every issue,” says Haidar. Emphasizing that the SCO doesn’t pretend to be a coalition of democracies, she says that the group presents an alternative spin to the Western perspective on everything: from Putin’s war in Ukraine, to Taiwan, to sanctions on Iran, but with a theme of multilateralism, not unilateralism.
“Yes, they are talk shops,” she says about the group, yet insists that the leadership, though coming from very different places and perspectives, is focused on connecting. “But they are speaking with their feet by showing up to these conferences, which means the West should see this as an important alternative to its narrative.”
Protest against the war in Ukraine outside the consulate general of Russia in Almaty.
“How do we live?” Central Asia treads carefully with Ukraine war
The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has echoed around the world, but spare a thought for the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia. All have close economic and cultural ties to Russia, but they also have reasons to be wary of what Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine.
For one thing, Western sanctions meant to cripple the Kremlin war machine could cause serious collateral damage in the region. Over the past several decades, millions of people from Central Asia have migrated to Russia in search of work. The most famous one outside of Russia was probably this guy.
Today, the money they send home keeps the region’s smaller economies afloat. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two of the poorest countries in Asia, rely on remittances for between a quarter and a third of their economies overall. Most of that comes from Russia.
But now, with sanctions projected to shrink the Russian economy by as much as 7% this year, millions of those people could be out of work. The World Bank already says remittances to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan alone will fall by up to 30% this year.
What’s more, says Erica Marat, a regional specialist at the National Defense University, there is a real fear of what could happen if large numbers of migrants or second generation citizens of Russia decide to come home looking for work. The official unemployment rate in Tajikistan, for example, is already at 7%.
“We’ve never seen such a large population returning home,” Marat says, “and everyone sort of hopes it won’t happen because it would destabilize a lot of things. It’s just a huge wild card.”
At the same time, Russia’s invasion sets a scary precedent. The sight of Putin invading a neighboring country under the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians raises some uncomfortable questions for the Central Asian countries, all of which, like Ukraine, have sizable ethnic Russian minorities of their own.
That’s especially true in Kazakhstan, where Russians make up some 30% of the population, and are heavily concentrated in northern regions that border Russia. Prominent Russian officials have in the past questioned whether Kazakhstan is even a real country at all — an echo of Putin’s views on Ukraine.
Within the region, everyone is treading carefully, but some more so than others. No one has openly criticized Putin, of course. And Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – both of which also depend on Russian troops for security — have kept particularly mum.
But energy-rich Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the region’s top two economies, have sailed a little closer to the wind, declaring support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sending aid to the country directly.
Kazakhstan, for its part, even refused a Russian request to send troops to Ukraine — a striking move for President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, whom Russia saved from a popular uprising just months ago.
In part, says Marat, that could be because Tokayev wants to demonstrate, however carefully, that he is not in fact totally beholden to Moscow. Kazakhstan has always prided itself on having a “multi-vector” foreign policy — carefully balancing its ties with Russia, China, and the West. It may also be a shrewder play to attract Western businesses that are fleeing Russia but wish to stay in the region.
Overall, the Central Asian states are in a kind of limbo — waiting to see how bad the economic fallout in Russia is, and how far Putin really tries to go in Ukraine. Everyone understands that they are now living with a new and more internationally isolated Russia, says Marat, but it’s a Russia that they are still tied to in many ways.
The prevailing mindset right now, she says, is an anxiously pragmatic one: “How do we live?”
Russia Vladimir Putin takes part in an emergency session of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) Collective Security Council meeting on the normalization of the situation in Kazakhstan on Monday Jan 10, 2022.
Kazakhstan & The West Wing in a G-Zero world
The popular 2000s American political drama TV series The West Wing is famous for, among other things, its mostly accurate — albeit idealized — portrayal of the inner workings of US foreign policy. In the final season, outgoing President Jed Bartlet deploys American peacekeepers to stop a war between Russia and China over unrest in… Kazakhstan.
Right now, the Central Asian country is reeling from the worst political turmoil since it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991. But the current crisis is so far playing out quite differently from the TV war script — in a world that’s a lot more G-Zero than it was in 2006.
First, the international peacekeepers are (mostly) Russian. Days after violent protests that began over a rapid fuel price hike and now looks like a failed coup attempt, embattled President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev feared for his survival and for the continued loyalty of the security forces. With his back against the wall, Tokayev did exactly what Putin hopes the leader of any former Soviet republic will do when in trouble: call the Kremlin, and ask for help. Russia’s leader instantly obliged, sending 2,500 troops to restore order in Kazakhstan.
Putin also got to remind everyone that Russia has its own NATO, the six-member Collective Security Treaty Organization, which for the first time agreed to dispatch CSTO troops to a member country at its request. All it took was the green light from Moscow, which in the past turned down pleas for intervention from Armenia last year and from Kyrgyzstan in 2010.
This time, though, Putin gave his consent. Tokayev now owes Putin, and the world got the message that Russia will step in to prop up Moscow-friendly leaders in neighbors facing mass unrest. Indeed, the Russian leader loves to protect fellow strongmen who need to watch their back; he supported Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020, when the Belarusian dictator was in a pickle over popular protests against his sham re-election.
(Meanwhile, all of this happens just as Russia is playing hardball with the US, demanding Washington guarantee that NATO will not expand further into former Soviet territory while dangling an invasion of Ukraine — Putin’s other playbook to get what he wants when intervening directly costs him too much.)
Second, Russia and China are quite chummy these days. Unlike almost going to war on aughts American TV, they now have a common interest in standing up to "the West." Xi Jinping, for his part, is happy to let Putin do the dirty work and get all the credit in Kazakhstan — as long as Kazakh oil, gas, and minerals keep flowing to resource-hungry China (and the Russians remain willing to cooperate if tensions arise in Central Asia).
China's hands-off approach to the crisis is also par for the course for Beijing, which prides itself on non-intervention in the domestic affairs of any country (like Russia, unless it's invited to). What’s more, Xi has bigger fish to fry at home: zero COVID, a sluggish economy, and his own future leadership.
Russia-China relations have always been tricky, and there’s a trust limit. They have clashed over borders in the past, and Moscow is perennially worried about being dwarfed economically by its more populous neighbor. But right as the US wants to push back against authoritarian states, the two most influential ones are closing ranks — in this case by endorsing Tokayev.
Third, the US is watching from the sidelines. In 2006, when The West Wing wrapped up, then-President George W. Bush would have seized the moment to nudge Kazakhstan toward democratic reform. After all, Bush viewed the earlier popular revolts in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan as opportunities for democratic reform — events that Russia now derides as "color revolutions."
But those days are long gone. The US is now too preoccupied with its own democratic erosion, and even if America had any influence in Kazakhstan, there’s little public appetite for more foreign entanglements, especially after the Afghan withdrawal debacle. Washington’s strongest statement to date on the Kazakh crisis was a thinly-veiled and vanilla jibe at Moscow, which responded with a healthy dose of whataboutism.
The West Wing ended in 2006 with the US military keeping the peace between Russia and China in Central Asia. 2022 starts with Russia and to a lesser extent China calling the shots in a region that's become an afterthought for the US. Talk about a G-Zero world.
Taliban 2.0: Afghanistan on the Brink (US AWOL)
Few people know more about the Taliban than journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, who wrote the book on the group — literally.
In the months after 9/11, his critically acclaimed 2000 study Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia became a go-to reference as the US geared up to invade Afghanistan and knock the militant group from power.
Now, twenty years later, with the US out of Afghanistan and the Taliban back in charge, Ian Bremmer sat down with Rashid to learn more about the Taliban today in a GZERO World interview.
How much has the group changed since the days of soccer-stadium executions, television bans, and blowing up world heritage sites? How should the rest of the world deal with them?
Don’t believe the “Taliban 2.0” hype. Rashid says that despite Taliban pledges to moderate their treatment of women, minority groups, and the press, hardliners in the movement are winning out right now. And there’s little chance of the Taliban stamping out other terrorist groups who helped them fight the Americans all these years.
But the deepening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan means the West has to engage somehow. “It’s important that the West differentiate between recognition, which should not be on the cards for the time being,” he says ”and preventing millions of Afghans from starving to death.” For Rashid that means global donors should step up with money for humanitarian and food relief measures administered through the UN.
If not, a huge new refugee crisis could be brewing. And the timing couldn’t be worse. Afghanistan’s neighbors like Pakistan and Iran are ill-equipped to handle fresh migrant flows, Rashid says, and more distant destinations like the EU are politically hostile to refugees these days.
The US isn’t only gone, it’s AWOL. Amid all of this, Rashid warns, the US doesn’t seem to have a strategy.
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