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The New Great Game in Central Asia
Geopolitics in a Post-Western World
By Alexander Cooley
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137813/alexander-cooley
AUGUST 7, 2012
In the last decade, the world has started taking more notice of Central Asia. For
the United States and its allies, the region is a valuable supply hub for the
Afghanistan war effort. For Russia, it is an arena in which to exert political
influence. For China, it is a source of energy and a critical partner for stabilizing
and developing the restive Xinjiang province in the Middle Kingdom's west.
Some commentators have referred to Washington, Moscow, and Beijing's
renewed activity in the region as a modern iteration of the Great Game. But
unlike the British and Russian empires in their era of competition and conquest,
the Central Asian governments are working to use renewed external
involvement to their sovereign advantage, fending off disruptive demands and
reinforcing their political control at home. Accordingly, the Central Asian case
today is not a throwback to the past but a guide to what is to come: the rise of
new players and the decline of Western influence in a multipolar world.
The first lesson to take from China, Russia, and the United States' involvement
in Central Asia is that it has strengthened the hand of rulers, who have been able
to play the suitors off one another to extract economic benefits and political
support where possible. Most dramatically, in 2009, President Kurmanbek
Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan, host to the Manas Transit Center, initiated a bidding
war between the United States and Russia by threatening to close the base. He
extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from both sides, in the form of a
Russian assistance package and a renewed lease at a higher rent with the United
States. Since 2008, the United States also has paid transit fees, about $500
million annually, to the Uzbek and other Central Asian governments to ship
equipment bound for Afghanistan through the Northern Distribution Network.
The same dynamic is playing out elsewhere. The availability of alternative
patrons has made U.S. strategic engagement more expensive everywhere, both
in terms of dollars and politics. In 2008, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa
refused to extend a ten-year lease of the U.S. base at Manta, after having been
offered $500 million to upgrade the facility by a Hong Kong port operator.
Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has observed that in
post-revolutionary Egypt the United States has continued to provide assistance
in return for overflight rights and access to the Suez Canal, even as U.S.
leverage over the country diminishes. And during Pakistan's seven-month
fallout with Washington, in which it closed Afghanistan-bound supply lanes,
Islamabad publicly demanded an increase in transit fees and courted China.
Eventually, U.S. officials reportedly agreed to release $1.1 billion for the
Pakistani military from the Coalition Support Fund to get the route back open.
The second lesson is that regional multipolarity has eroded Western economic
influence. Over the last decade, China has emerged as the leading economic
power in Central Asia. Chinese assistance there, as in Africa and other
developing regions, is not easy to categorize; it is usually a hybrid of foreign
aid, investment, and emergency standby loans. Beijing has skillfully relied on a
unique mix of these economic instruments with each of its Central Asian
neighbors. In 2009, it signed loans-for-energy packages with energy-rich
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. These loans secured supplies of oil and gas or
equity in local producers. Meanwhile, Beijing has undertaken major new oil and
gas pipelines to take the Central Asian energy eastward. These packages mirror
similar loans-for-energy deals with Angola, Brazil, Ecuador, Russia, South
Sudan, Sudan, and Venezuela.
Central Asian elites have grown increasingly hostile to the West's values
agenda -- promoting democracy and human rights -- and are now able to push
back against criticism.
In the poorer countries of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Beijing has become a
major investor and development assistance provider, focusing on power
generation, transmission, and transport, including roads and railways. Prior to
the 2012 SCO Summit in Beijing, the Export-Import Bank of China was already
Tajikistan's leading single creditor. Its holdings of the country's overall foreign
debt are now projected to reach 70 percent. Most Western commentaries have
welcomed Beijing's regional assistance and investment, since Central Asian
infrastructure remains in a state of chronic disrepair and Chinese upgrades
should improve cross-border regional links and spur regional development.
But China's donor role also poses a number of challenges that Western officials
seem reluctant to publicly acknowledge. China's lack of monitoring standards,
its unconditional aid, and its direct dealings with regimes reduce the
transparency of its projects. In Tajikistan, for example, a new private offshoreregistered company now charges tolls on the highway linking Dushanbe and
Chanak, which was built mostly with Chinese funds, making it practically
unaffordable for lower-income Tajiks. Meanwhile, China does not coordinate
with other internationals in Bishkek or Dushanbe and its lending and assistance
in Central Asia simply dwarfs existing commitments from other international
sources. This summer, China announced that it would provide $10 billion worth
of financing for infrastructure projects in the region. If enacted, the program will
make China the region's leading foreign investor by a wide margin. At the same
time, the conditions of U.S. aid, which is now a small and declining source of
regional funds, will become less meaningful.
New economic patrons are playing similar roles in Africa and the Middle East.
In mid-July, at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, in Beijing, Chinese
President Hu Jintao pledged an additional $20 billion in loans to Africa over the
next three years, seeking to secure new energy supplies. He also pledged to
refrain from insisting on conditionality, as Western countries often impose -something he referred to as "the big bullying the small." As with Central Asia,
social and political programs -- training for tens of thousands of African
officials; 18,000 new scholarships for African students -- will accompany these
economic packages.
In the Middle East, traditional international lenders, such as the United States
and the European Union, now face competition from Gulf funders, especially
from wealthy Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Doubts remain
about these countries' commitment to follow through on their multi-billiondollar pledges of assistance. Even so, just as Angola and Tajikistan have
leveraged Chinese loans to eschew Western lenders' demands for reforms, so,
too, have authorities in post-revolutionary Egypt used the prospect of securing
funds from the Gulf as leverage against the IMF. Such new forms of assistance
are reorienting the region's economic development away from the West, and the
United States now lacks the soft power to check the growing power of these
new rival patrons.
The third lesson is that Central Asian elites have grown increasingly hostile to
the West's values agenda -- promoting democracy and human rights -- and are
now able to push back against criticism. The war on terrorism gave these
regimes cover to build up their security services and clamp down on opposition.
China, Russia, and the United States colluded with Central Asian security
services to render terrorist suspects, without due process hearings, to and from
the region. The United States claimed that the war on terrorism could not be
constrained by international law. Russia and China embedded their
extraterritorial actions in new regional legal frameworks such as the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization's Anti-Terrorism Treaty.
Central Asian elites regularly malign the West for practicing double standards
on human rights, insisting that Western violations of human rights be as much a
part of a dialogue as their own infractions. New regional media outlets spotlight
the seeming contradictions of U.S. policy in different countries, further
diminishing U.S. credibility and magnifying the costs of a hypocritical policy.
Meanwhile, Central Asian nations have hidden their political shortcomings by
hiring Western public relations firms and by restricting the activities of foreignfunded NGOs. In response to the wave of color revolutions in the mid-2000s
that swept entrenched leaders with ties to the Kremlin out of power, Central
Asian new and entrenched leaders alike enacted restrictive registration and
funding laws to curtail the activities of Western-sponsored NGOs. In these
efforts, they had strong support from Moscow and Beijing.
Similarly, Egypt's recent clampdown on groups such as Freedom House and the
National Democratic Institute has made for a tricky political environment for
Western NGOs in Egypt. And in countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Ethiopia,
Ecuador, Panama, Russia, Uganda, and Vietnam, governments have recently
stoked the fear of foreign interference to justify new legal crackdowns on civil
society organizations.
Meanwhile, the Central Asian states have created organizations that mimic the
form, but not the function, of democratic election monitors. Since 2005, for
example, both the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States and the
SCO have sent election monitoring teams to the region; their observers have
delivered glowing assessments of obviously flawed Central Asian elections.
Tellingly, these new election monitors do not publish mission guides, nor have
they signed onto the United Nations' 2005 Code of Conduct for International
Election Observers. By so doing, such groups have undermined Western-backed
monitors and the substance of their work.
Some commentators have called on U.S. and European policymakers to jettison
their criticism and engagement on values issues to remain relevant as
international partners in this emerging multipolar world. Yet, along with U.S.
military and economic might, engagement on values is the very thing that has
distinguished the Western-led international order -- despite all of its welldocumented inconsistencies and shortcomings. Moreover, it is the prospect of
Western engagement that confers developing countries leverage in their own
uneasy dealings with emerging powers such as Russia and China. Downgrading
or dropping normative commitments to Central Asia, as in other areas, in the
interests of geopolitical pragmatism would signal Brussels and Washington's
taming by the post-Western world, not its successful engagement with it.