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Afghanistan's newest
victimization
By Stephen Blank
Everyone who writes about Afghanistan or who
makes policy regarding it agrees that everything must be
done to prevent that country from failing and again
becoming a haven for terrorism. In addition, many of
these pundits and politicians rhetorically invoke the
need to rebuild Afghanistan's economy, trade with
neighbors and the outside world, and infrastructural
links connecting it with foreign countries.
Yet
in fact Afghanistan has once again become the victim and
object of bigger and stronger states' machinations. In
pursuing their own self-interest, conceived of in
states' traditional short-term way of acting, these
governments, in this case specifically India and Russia,
have again injured Kabul's economic prospects and made
it the object of great power games.
One of the
more promising projects for the recovery of
Afghanistan's economy and for regional cooperation was
the long-standing idea of the so-called TAP pipeline.
This gas pipeline would bring Turkmenistan's gas through
Afghanistan and Pakistan to the latter's Indian Ocean
port at Gwadar. From Gwadar, this gas would then go onto
the world markets, although the expected main buyer
would have been India, whose demand for natural gas is
expected to grow sharply in the next few years. This
planned pipeline was the subject of preliminary
discussions even under the Taliban, and since the
liberation of Afghanistan it has been pushed by the
Asian Development Bank, which has financed a feasibility
study. Turkmenistan's government even appealed to the
United Nations, hoping to enlist its development
program's support and thus investment.
Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India
would all have benefited greatly. The former would have
obtained genuine and unhampered access for its natural
gas, its main export, at real market prices. This would
give it considerable ability to resist Russian pressure
to subordinate its gas exports and thus overall economy
to Russian pressure. Pakistan and Afghanistan would have
obtained major transit fees and both countries'
infrastructure and potential for future foreign trade
deals would have benefited commensurately.
Meanwhile, India would have obtained its natural
gas as Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf
personally guaranteed that this pipeline would not
become a casualty of Indo-Pakistani tensions and that
the supply of gas would therefore be constant.
Certainly, if the most recent Indo-Pakistani
negotiations bear fruit this project could eventually
serve as a vehicle for enhanced cooperation between
Delhi and Islamabad.
However, in the meantime,
both Indian and Russian policies destroyed any
possibility of this pipeline's appearance in the
foreseeable future. India, not surprisingly, refused
even to think about having its gas supply depend on
Pakistan's infrastructure. Instead it negotiated a
comprehensive alliance with Iran encompassing both
military and economic clauses. The latter clauses
provided for gas pipelines to bypass Pakistan and go
through Iran which would then build a pipeline under the
Indian ocean outside of Pakistan's 12 mile limit. This
aspect of Indo-Irani trade is probably connected as well
to the Russian-conceived idea of a north-south trade
corridor bringing together Russia, Central Asia, Iran
and India and which is one of the showpiece projects of
Russia's international economic policy.
Another
critical policy goal for Moscow is its unremitting
efforts to set up a Eurasian gas cartel under its
leadership. For this to happen it is essential that
Turkmenistan's gas be firmly under Russian control.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Russia did
everything it could to frustrate the TAP line. In late
2002 its special services, which have very close
connections with state energy outfit Gazprom, are said
to have helped to facilitate an abortive coup against
President Sapirmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan, a ruler
whose dictatorship approaches the apogee of Stalinism or
of what Max Weber called Sultanism.
Although the
coup failed it is obvious that Moscow's efforts to
pressure Turkmenistan registered and did not stop after
this coup failed. Undoubtedly Niyazov got the message
that Moscow could and would try to unseat him if he
resisted it further. Moreover, India's refusal to
consider the pipeline and its deal with Iran reduced the
economic viability of the project to zero. Bereft of
potential buyers and under pressure, Niyazov again caved
in to Moscow and sold his gas at concessionary terms.
By doing so, he once again showed that his
concern for staying in power and for obtaining
short-term rents outweighed other considerations. But
India and Russia's policies manifested the same trend as
well. This is because these policies struck a severe
blow at attempts to provide for Afghanistan's economic
revival. Although there is no doubt that this deal
greatly benefited Gazprom and Russian economic interests
in suppressing Central Asia's economic independence and
in creating a gas cartel, it comes at the risk of
regenerating the conditions within Afghanistan that gave
rise to a security threat with which neither Russia nor
Central Asia could contend.
The same may be said
for India. Even though its efforts to wage economic
warfare against Pakistan and to carry it into Central
Asia, which Pakistan had previously viewed as its
strategic hinterland, make sense in the context of
ongoing enmity with Islamabad, the threat of terrorism
originating in a failed Afghan state is a very serious
one for India's rulers. Nevertheless they took the risk.
There is no doubt that every commentator who has
observed the surrounding area has tied stability in
Afghanistan to stability in Central and South Asia. Yet
that consideration did not deter either Moscow or New
Delhi. Indeed, it is quite possible, given their
excellent bilateral relations, that they collaborated on
this course of action to serve their individual and
converging interests in stopping the TAP line.
Perhaps neither the Russian or Indian
governments considered the possibly unintended
consequences of their actions on behalf of their
immediate national interests. Certainly the supposedly
rational pursuit of self-interest considered here could
bring about a much grater systemic and collective
irrationality by delaying the restoration of Afghan
security and thus placing all the surrounding areas at
risk.
If that does indeed happen, then few of
the current schemes for major oil or gas pipelines in
the vicinity of Central Asia will materialize because of
the greatly enhanced risk to their security that will be
presented by the relapse of Afghanistan into violence.
This episode shows the deeply rooted need for a genuine
multilateralism with regard to the immense challenges
confronting Central and South Asia. But it also shows
that despite whatever we may say about that need, few,
if any regimes, are interested in moving from rhetoric
to reality.
Stephen Blank is an
analyst of international security affairs residing in
Harrisburg, PA.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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