The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst

The U.S. has started to formulate and implement more comprehensive policies for Central Asia. The deepening involvement in the war in Afghanistan is the principal, but not sole cause for this policy initiative. Russia’s attempts to impose its hegemony upon Central Asia and oblige the U.S. to recognize it have triggered a reaction in Washington. Likewise, China’s completion of the pipeline to Turkmenistan and major investment projects in Central Asia forced the U.S. to devise new ways to enhance its energy and economic profile there as well. As a result, in early 2010, we now see the elements of a new and stronger policy initiative towards Central Asia.

The Turkish-Armenian protocols signed last year in Zurich raised concerns that the perspective of Georgia’s decreased significance as a transit country for Armenia may boost nationalist demands around the Armenian minority in Georgia and cause new instability. While the protocols may not materialize in the foreseeable future, thus never inducing visible change in Yerevan’s policies, developments observed since the activation of Turkish-Armenian negotiations suggest that in case of full normalization Yerevan may attempt more assertive policies to uphold the cultural rights of Armenians in Georgia, without supporting their political demands and calls for autonomy.

Dmitry Rogozhin, Russian representative to NATO, and General Boris Gromov, a general who fought in Afghanistan, recently published an open letter about NATO in The New York Times. NATO was presented as an alliance lacking a will to fight, where especially the Europeans members were ready to cut and run in Afghanistan. They concluded this would be a great disaster and that the West should remember that the USSR had defended “Western civilization” at large in Afghanistan. Still, the U.S. should not expect much cooperation from Russia. A considerable segment of the Russian elite continues to be quite suspicious of U.S. intentions and its general ability to pursue realistic policies in Afghanistan.

The U.S.-Kyrgyz negotiations on opening a military center in Batken have raised controversial security and geopolitical considerations that might become momentous for the Fergana Valley and Kyrgyzstan’s multi-vector foreign policy. Kyrgyzstan entertains legitimate concerns about its poorly protected borders that have seen activities of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and drug trafficking networks extending from Central Asia to Europe. But amidst intensified water and border disputes, competition of great powers, an enhanced ability of the Central Asian states to influence regional dynamics, U.S. plans to withdraw from Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan’s own unstable domestic position, the center might well spur militarization of the region.