THE SCO’S FAILURE IN AFGHANISTAN
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has pursued a narrow approach toward Afghanistan that focuses on countering narcotics trafficking from that country and little else. The SCO also engages in little concrete activity regarding Afghanistan besides issuing declarations. The SCO could more effectively achieve its goals in Afghanistan if the SCO focused on developing that country’s legal economy and improving its basic economic infrastructure, including that related to transportation. Measures to promote this goal could include financing joint projects in Afghanistan, reducing barriers to SCO trade with that country, and otherwise helping integrate Afghanistan into the rest of Central Asia.
BACKGROUND: Afghanistan has been an area of collective interest by the SCO since its founding. The organization adopted its first policies toward Afghanistan shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S.-led invasion of the country and the removal of the Taliban-led government in Kabul. In January 2002, the SCO foreign ministers held an extraordinary meeting in Beijing. The resulting ministerial statement “welcomed” the Taliban’s downfall and called on regional organizations to join in eliminating the anti-terrorist networks in Afghanistan. The ministers took care, however, to emphasize the lead role of the United Nations in the post-conflict reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. They also called on the international community to respect Afghanistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to avoid excessive interference in the country’s internal affairs.
The organization gained notoriety in NATO capitals, when at their July 2005 summit in Astana, the heads of the SCO governments issued a statement that unexpectedly asked NATO governments to establish a timetable for removing their military presence from the region “considering the completion of the active military stage of the antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan”. A vigorous diplomatic response by the U.S. and its allies helped limit the damage to the loss of the bases in Uzbekistan, which was due to an independent dispute between that country and the West, unrelated to the SCO.
Since then, the SCO has focused on the surge of narcotics that are grown and exported from Afghanistan through SCO members’ territory. According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan supplies approximately 90 percent of the world’s opium consumption, making it the world's leading heroin producing and trafficking country.
In their August 2007 Bishkek Declaration on international security, the SCO leaders expressed alarm about “the threat of narcotics coming from Afghanistan and its negative effect on Central Asia” and called for “combining international efforts on the creation of anti-narcotics belts around Afghanistan”. The heads of state at the SCO’s Bishkek summit also affirmed their readiness “to participate in the efforts to normalize the political situation in Afghanistan” and “develop economic cooperation with the country”, but took no concrete action in this area.
On March 27, 2009, the Russian government hosted a special international conference on Afghanistan under SCO auspices in Moscow when it held the organization’s chairmanship. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the purpose of the conference was to consider Russian proposals to increase “the efficiency of international cooperation in the work of supporting the efforts of the government of Afghanistan in the struggle against the threat of terrorism and illegal drugs”. Another purpose of this conference was to highlight the narcotics threat the SCO members and their allies perceived from Afghanistan. The Moscow meeting occurred shortly before a UN-chaired conference on Afghanistan in the Hague on March 31, 2009. Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said that his government hoped the Hague attendees would consider the Moscow conference results when formulating their recommendations regarding Afghanistan. When he attended the Hague conference a few days later, Lavrov highlighted counternarcotics issues when summarizing the key recommendations of the Moscow conference.
Countering narcotics has continued to preoccupy SCO leaders since then. For example, at the April 23 meeting of the SCO Security Council secretaries, Russian Secretary Nikolay Patrushev stated that the SCO had an important role in countering narcotics trafficking from Afghanistan because national law enforcement agencies could not address this problem individually.
IMPLICATIONS: Despite all these declarations and common interests, the SCO’s activities regarding Afghanistan have been limited to issuing joint declarations and sharing information about drug-related developments through the Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Center and other mechanisms. Unlike the Collective Security Treaty Organization, SCO members have not engaged in collective counternarcotics operations. And unlike NATO and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the SCO has not provided joint training to Afghan counternarcotics and other law enforcement officers. The SCO members have done little to implement the action plan adopted at their March 2009 conference, which itself was quickly overshadowed by other conferences that actually raised money and launched collective projects regarding Afghanistan.
The reason for the SCO’s preoccupation with Afghan narcotics trafficking is simple. All the member governments oppose narcotics trafficking, making it an easy collective priority for the organization. The Russian government calculates that more than two million of its citizens are now addicted to Afghan-supplied drugs, and that some 30,000 Russians die yearly from using Afghan-based heroin—either through drug overdoses or through contracting AIDS from contaminated needles. The Chinese have also encouraged the SCO to assume a more prominent role in countering Afghan narcotics exports. Although China is not situated along the “Northern Route” through which Afghan narcotics have traditionally entered Central Asia, Russia, and Europe, new trafficking networks have developed since 2005 that transport illicit drugs from Afghanistan through Pakistan and Central Asia into China. In late May 2010, Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu said the volume of Afghan heroin entering China has soared in recent years and “escalates tensions” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, whose vicinity to Afghanistan makes it a popular entry route for drug traffickers.
The Central Asian governments have found that they cannot manage the narcotics threat from Afghanistan by themselves. The lax border regimes between Russia and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia facilitate the smuggling of narcotics and other contraband throughout much of Eurasia. The Afghan drug trade encourages domestic drug use and exposes their citizens to crime, corruption, drug addiction, HIV, and the other maladies associated with narcotics trafficking. To meet this onslaught, they have turned to foreign powers, especially Russia, and international organizations such as the SCO and the United Nations, to assist them. A major drug trafficking route passes from Afghanistan through Central Asia and into Russia and Europe.
In addressing Afghan counternarcotics so frequently in its joint statements, the SCO reaffirms its relevance to meeting members’ security needs. The Taliban has exploited its positions in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan to profit from the narcotics trade and used some of the resulting revenue to support other Eurasian terrorist movements, to the alarm of SCO governments. Issuing declarations is also a relatively low-cost activity since the SCO has declined to contribute combat troops or money to ISAF and instead allowed NATO and other countries to do the fighting on their behalf. Meanwhile, the SCO has yet to pursue even non-combat operations that would reduce Afghanistan drug production and trafficking. For example, the special March 2009 SCO conference on Afghanistan restated SCO complaints about the trafficking of Afghan-made narcotics, but declined to commit to provide financial or other assistance to the Afghan government to help counter the drug dealers.
CONCLUSIONS: The SCO has yet to develop institutional mechanisms to fund major economic reconstruction projects in Afghanistan or finance other forms of aid. Thanks to the membership of Russia and China, the combined GDP of the SCO members ranks third in the world economy, behind only the European Union and the United States. They could contribute large sums to Afghanistan’s economic restoration if they had the will to do so. They would also be helping their own exports by enhancing the transportation infrastructure of Afghanistan, which for geographic reasons should be an important transit country linking SCO members with European markets. In addition, the SCO has yet to pursue action to reduce trade barriers between Afghanistan and its members. Commerce between Afghanistan and the SCO remains at very low aggregate levels. Although some of these barriers are justified on security reasons—the need to prevent infiltration by terrorists and narcotics traffickers—they unduly restrain legitimate commerce given that terrorists and drug couriers can easily cross through less well protected border regions. The SCO could designate a small number of special border trading areas with Afghanistan. These could have simplified visa and preferential custom regimes as well as concentrated security monitoring to discourage illicit trafficking through the crossings.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Richard Weitz is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute. He is the author, among other works, of Kazakhstan and the New International Politics of Eurasia (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2008).
