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Russian-Chinese pact a 'great game'
victim
By Sean Yom
(Posted
with permission of Foreign
Policy In Focus)
Oil-rich, politically
turbulent Central Asia finds itself at the center of a
new great game of power politics. Both China and Russia,
the two dominant powers of mainland Asia, regard this
subregion of transitional states as part of their "near
abroad." Since September 11 and the ensuing war on
terrorism, Central Asia's geopolitics have been further
complicated by the new military presence of the United
States, whose troops are now stationed in China's and
Russia's backyard.
Prior to the US-led military
campaign, Russia and China were attempting to seal their
strategic dominance over the region, courting the
Central Asian governments into closer military,
economic, and political relations. Sino-Russian
interests and their vision of the region's political
future have been severely shaken by the new US military
and diplomatic initiatives in Central Asia. The entrance
of another great power in the game of regional
geopolitics almost certainly will affect the viability
of a recently established entity called the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) comprising Russia, China,
Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Established one year ago, the SCO emerged as the
institutional representation of the Shanghai Five, an
informal, little-known security alliance that since 1996
included all the SCO members, except for Uzbekistan. In
its first year of existence, the nascent SCO concerned
itself primarily with security issues at its founding,
the six countries pledged to combat the "three evil
forces" of terrorism, extremism, and separatism - a
thinly disguised reference to Islamism.
Russia
and China, who spearheaded the group's formation,
intended to make the SCO a military-political alliance,
one that would fashion a new regional security
architecture. From its founding, however, there has been
hope that the SCO would eventually forge mutually
beneficial economic and political ties among its
members. Members discussed the possibility that the SCO
could also encompass trade, investment, cultural, and
technological components in the future. The organization
has applied for UN recognition and has approached
Mongolia, Pakistan, and India for prospective
membership.
Yet with respect to the US-led "war
on terrorism," the SCO has been conspicuously silent - a
silence that many observers interpret as a sign of the
organization's state of turmoil and indecision. When the
group signed its official 26-point legal charter in St.
Petersburg on June 7 this year, Western diplomats
largely regarded the SCO a stillborn organization - an
ineffective young alliance made yet more irrelevant by
the recent injection of US troops into the heart of
Central Asia. The SCO could not, for example, marshal
any military response to the terrorist presence in
Afghanistan. Moreover, much to the alarm of Moscow and
Beijing, its Central Asian members, particularly
Uzbekistan, wholeheartedly welcomed US troops onto their
soil. In short, the SCO's inability to mount a cohesive
strategy toward Afghanistan reflected its dismal failure
as a security mechanism.
Clearly, the SCO enters
its second year with a poor showing. However, it is too
early to dismiss it as a regional player. And as some
observers note, the very eagerness of the US to dismiss
the SCO betrays America's own wide-ranging and newly
ambitious interests in Central Asia. The evolution of
the SCO will reflect the political realities of Central
Asia, which in turn are torn by three different vectors:
Sino-Russian relations, US interests in the region, and
the ongoing violence of Islamist militants.
Russia and China were the engines driving the
SCO's creation, and therefore have the most at stake in
its survival. Over the past six years they have engaged
in increasingly tight relations, cooperating on issues
like border demilitarization and trade; the June 2001
"Good-Neighborly Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation"
was the first formal treaty of friendship between the
two in decades. The SCO fused Moscow's long-standing
quest to control the near abroad with Beijing's ambition
to slowly build a multipolar world in which it is an
influential player. Both of these powers envisaged the
organization as an instrument to carve a safe rear from
foreign encroachment in their geopolitical backyard, a
way to exert dual hegemony over Central Asia.
However, the war on terrorism brought an
American rapprochement with Russia that has troubled
Chinese leadership. The May Treaty of Moscow, followed
by the creation of the NATO-Russian Council, raised
considerable disquiet in Beijing, which worried that
Russia would be pulled into the orbit of the West and
hence would no longer invest in the SCO. President Jiang
feared that this would marginalize China and weaken its
relative position vis-a-vis the
Beijing-Moscow-Washington strategic triangle. However,
Moscow still maintains strong ties with its eastern
neighbor, with which it shares a border of 4,600 miles.
Bilateral trade is greater with China than with the US;
the Chinese military also buys more than $1 billion in
Russian arms annually. Diplomatically, both countries
stand together on such issues as their opposition to US
National Missile Defense and to their zero-tolerance
approach to Islamist and separatist movements. Thus,
despite Putin's newly accommodating relations with the
Bush White House, it is unlikely that Russia will drop
its interest in building the SCO as a way to exert
influence on its southwestern border.
A powerful
American presence in Central Asia will, however,
necessarily compromise the SCO and reconstitute the
region's political future. The US holds two primary
interests: first, it has long eyed the area's rich oil
and gas reserves, and American companies are eager to
develop this wealth; and second, it desires tactical
ground to observe on-the-ground political developments
nearby, especially in South Asia. A strong presence in
Central Asia could leverage its political influence in
shaping Indian-Pakistani relations, for instance,
particularly at a time when the US is building stronger
military ties with both countries.
Not
surprisingly, the US has laid the foundation for a
long-term presence by nurturing close partnerships with
the Central Asian states. Economic assistance to these
states has drastically risen (aid to Uzbekistan nearly
tripled this year alone), and the State Department has
toned down its usually stringent criticisms of their
poor treatment of human rights. However, it is not clear
what lasting imprint any American presence will leave
beyond closer diplomatic and economic relations with the
Central Asian states. Although its military bases in
Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan may
eventually be closed as this theatre of the war on
terrorism winds down, plans have been drawn for future
military cooperation and training exercises with these
countries. The continuing US presence will likely serve
to lure the Central Asian states away from Moscow and
Beijing. Additionally, having American forces stationed
within the Central Asian states themselves and so close
to Russia and China - US troops in Bishkek, Tajikistan
are only 200 miles from the Chinese border - effectively
nullifies any regional security framework the SCO had in
mind.
The third and final factor that will shape
the SCO's future is the ongoing struggle with political
Islam. Although the war in Afghanistan retrenched
Islamist radicalism, it did not eliminate it, and in
fact it may have multiplied the threat by dispersing
Islamist groups into hiding across Central and South
Asia. Indeed, the precise danger of Islamism is what
binds the regional security policies of the SCO
countries together. All its members share growing unease
with Islamist-styled militancy or separatist movements:
China faces its perennial Uighur problem in Xinjiang;
Russia uneasily conducts its war in Chechnya while also
tightly clutching the restless Muslim provinces of its
underbelly; and Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan
struggle with violent groups fermenting in the volatile
Ferghana Valley, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Islamic Freedom Party). While
some of these groups have been decimated by the US
campaign - for instance, IMU's leader Juma Namangani was
reportedly killed in Afghanistan earlier this year, and
many of its fighters were captured - the threat of
militant Islamist movements has been projected far
beyond any real capacity they possess to genuinely
challenge the Central Asian states' integrity.
The SCO governments will continue to engage in
hard-line tactics to squelch any rumblings of Islamic
radicalism. For the Central Asian states, this means
harassing or imprisoning even moderate Muslim leaders,
monitoring all religious groups and sustaining a regime
of secularization within civil society. As should now be
self-evident, such a response sustains an ebb-and-flow
cycle of Islamist violence. Brutal repression alienates
unemployed youths who are already dislocated by the lack
of economic opportunities and disillusioned with the
persistent institutional failures of their governments
to provide even the barest semblance of a just,
efficient state. Consequently, Islamist militant
networks easily recruit more fighters; in turn, the
appearance of more fighters spurs governments to
maintain the repression. In Chechnya and Xinjiang, for
instance, persistent low-level violence by Islamic
separatist groups spurs Moscow and Beijing to harshly
suppress the ethnic Muslim population, enabling militant
groups to add to their militant ranks without
difficulty.
The future of the SCO will reflect
three different dynamics - Sino-Russian relations, US
presence in Central Asia, and the response to Islamist
movements. The emergence of a new multilateral
organization to address transnational issues should be
regarded as a positive step forward in the pursuit of
regional peace, stability, and progress. In the end, its
contribution to these goals will essentially depend on
the degree to which the individual interests of the two
great powers who are founding members of the SCO
contradict or complement the somewhat different set of
interests that the US brings to Central Asia.
Sean Yom is a research associate at
the Carnegie council on ethics and international affairs
and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In
Focus
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Part 1: The rules of
the game 
