Page 1 of 2 Russia-India ties sour in Central Asia
By Peter Lee
Unsound strategy, mutual mistrust and opportunism are combining to frustrate
the efforts of Moscow and India to blunt China's soft-power push into Russia's
"near beyond" - the oil and gas-rich former Soviet republics that line the path
of the ancient Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's doorstep at Xinjiang
province.
Russia's unwelcome efforts to cobble together a Central Asian security bloc and
claim a central role in a new, multi-polar Euroasian security structure have
been the main stumbling block to advancement of its interests in the region.
It has not received a lot of help from India's opportunistic decision to play
the "Great Game" on the cheap - piggybacking the military
and diplomatic presence of Moscow and Washington in selected pro-Russian and
pro-Western states in Central Asia to score points off its rivals China and
Pakistan.
Perhaps the most remarkable news in a year of Eurasian overreach by India was
the revelation that New Delhi had been considering the establishment of an
Indian Air Force base in, of all places, Mongolia.
But the most significant development was perhaps the thwarting of India's
signature piece of air-base diplomacy - in the tiny but suddenly crucial nation
of Tajikistan - thanks to Chinese resistance and Russian mistrust.
In many ways, the Russia-India strategic partnership looks like a bad marriage,
with each side using the relationship to wrangle over, attempt to obscure, and
unwittingly reveal their inadequacies.
The clearest sign of Russia's failure to gain traction for its diplomatic
initiatives in Europe and Asia was perhaps the desperately effusive welcome it
gave to India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in December.
Manmohan was promised delivery of the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov,
which has been languishing in Russian hands because of a dispute over the cost
of upgrading it for delivery to India. In return - though the sequence of quid
pro quo may have gone the other way - India agreed to exercise its new
privileges under its US-brokered nuclear deal to buy four civilian nuclear
reactors from Russia.
The joint communique issued at the summit endorsed a key Indian aspiration -
permanent membership on the UN Security Council - and extolled the virtues of
an alphabet soup of multilateral talking shops from the Group of 20 to BRIC
(Brazil, Russia, India and China), RIC (Russia, India and China) and the
relatively unheralded "Heiligendamm - L'Aquila Process" - that acknowledge
India's growing international stature.
It also pointedly advocated Indian membership in two organizations that have
demonstrated a marked unwillingness to welcome New Delhi: the Shanghai
Cooperative Organization (SCO) and the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
forum.
Students of geography will note that there is no clear justification for
including India in either organization. SCO addresses the security and
integration issues across common borders affecting Russia, China, and four
"Stans" created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. APEC is a regional
grouping designed to expedite reduction of the trade barriers erected by the
notoriously protectionist economies on the western side of the Pacific Rim.
Beyond irking Beijing and creating an additional counterweight to China - which
is undoubtedly the decisive voice behind the scenes arguing for exclusion of
New Delhi from the SCO and APEC - Russia's endorsement of India's desire to
push its way into these two fora appears to represent an attempt to gain
vitally needed support from a credible, emerging superpower for Moscow's
faltering security doctrine.
In December, Russia published a long-gestating draft treaty, the European
Security Treaty, meant to replace the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
as the mechanism for managing disputes on the continent. The response from the
West has been resounding silence, and it appears that NATO - composed largely
of states that hate, fear, or mistrust Russia - will remain Moscow's nettlesome
interlocutor on the continent.
Russia has also promoted the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO),
composed of a hodge-podge of ex-Soviet states and Stans, as a kinder and
gentler successor to the Warsaw Pact. Moscow wishes that the CSTO would be
recognized by its members and the outside world as a valued and pre-eminent
mechanism for injecting responsible Russian power into security issues on the
fringes of the former Soviet empire, especially Afghanistan.
Russia has been laboring with scant success to leverage its potential utility
on Afghanistan into Western recognition of the CSTO. The United States and NATO
members have instead concentrated on bilateral negotiations with Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The existence of the CSTO is barely acknowledged.
In its dealings with the ex-Soviet states, Russia is still haunted by the
shovel-to-the-back-of-the-head foreign policy legacy of the USSR. Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin succumbed to the urge to respond to Georgia's
admittedly over-the-top provocations (and the West's high-handed orchestration
of the independence of Kosovo) with overwhelming force in 2008.
Russia won the war but no overt backing from ex-Soviet states. The two
breakaway statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have, aside from Russia,
attracted diplomatic recognition only from Nauru, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and
"Transnistria", itself an unrecognized pro-Russian breakaway republic carved
from Moldova.
Moscow also suffers from the resentment and suspicion of the Central Asian
Stans and beyond over its attempts to build a culture of dependency on Russian
military might and arms sales.
India - Russia's largest arms customer - has endured legendary difficulties in
its arms dealings with Moscow, culminating in the case of the Admiral Gorshkov
- the long-promised (initial agreement was made early in 2004) but endlessly
withheld aircraft carrier whose purchase price inflated from less than US$1
billion to well over $2 billion after the contract was signed between Moscow
and New Delhi. Russia's anxiety has increased exponentially as India enjoys its
new strategic partnership - and the potential for arms sales - with the United
States instead.
While Russia struggles with its diplomatic isolation and tries to enlist the
support of India, it is confronted with the apparent success of a Eurasian
regional grouping centered on China - the SCO.
There is an undeniable security element to the SCO, which was formed in part to
assist the rulers of the newly independent Stans in resisting both US-sponsored
color revolutions such as the Tulip Revolution that eventually roiled
Kyrgyzstan, and brutal Islamicist insurgencies such as the seven-year revolt
that plunged Tajikistan into civil war - and ensure that governments, forces,
and ideologies inimical to China's control of its restive Muslim autonomous
region of Xinjiang did not take root in the region.
The Western commentariat appears obsessed with Central Asian blocs, possibly as
a threat to the US franchise as manager of the dominant NATO bloc, and
periodically denigrates the SCO for its lack of cohesion and fearsome regional
muscle that, in its view, renders the SCO unworthy of engagement.
However, the point of the SCO is multi-lateral economic and security
integration that creates a profitable, stable, and strategically friendly
backyard for China, not to expend political and diplomatic capital in a futile
attempt to weld the bickering central Asian Stans into a monolithic pro-Beijing
bloc.
China has resisted calls to use the SCO as the basis for a military alliance.
Undoubtedly, its considerations are shaped by awareness that any military
organization would be dominated by the Russians and attract the overwhelmingly
hostile interest of the US. In any case, it would be virtually impossible to
get the disorganized and mutually bickering Stans to agree on any security goal
beyond suppressing internal threats to their current leadership - the only task
for which the increasingly undemocratic republics have shown any real interest
or aptitude.
Finally, China is very anxious to keep a lid on things in Central Asia and
avoid escalated conflicts that might provide inspiration, strategic space, and
fighters and materiel to the aggrieved Uyghur separatists of Xinjiang.
The SCO has a permanent security office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, of the
Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure, known by its unfortunate acronym of RATS,
which is designed to assist the member states in combating the "three evils" of
terrorism, extremism and separatism.
Beijing's vision for Central Asia, of course, involves using its geographic,
economic and financial strengths to demonstrate the advantages of stable,
pro-Chinese regimes to the nervous rulers of Central Asia.
At the October meeting of SCO prime ministers, China's Wen Jiabao reiterated a
pledge of $10 billion in loans to member states to help them ride out the
global financial crisis.
China's extensive economic penetration of Central Asia is a matter of public
record.
The eyes of the world - at least the Eurasian gas pipeline-obsessed world -
were riveted on the bank of the Amu Darya River on December 14 as the leaders
of China, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan turned the valves
ceremonially commissioning a pipeline that will carry 30 billion cubic meters
per annum of Turkmenistan gas over Uzbekistan and Kazahkstan to Xinjiang and,
from there, onward to China's heartland.
It is a big, multi-national project - built at a cost of $7.3 billion and 1,833
kilometers long - whose success is attributable to China's diplomatic finesse
and financial muscle in Central Asia.
An oil industry observer nicely illustrated the distinction between promoting
regional integration and assembling a geopolitical bloc, in pointing out that
Turkmenistan now has a major alternative outlet to Russia's contentious and
overbearing Gazprom to move its gas to market - and Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
will also be able to piggyback their product onto the pipeline. This was noted
in the article "China's gas supply from Turkmenistan" published on December 28,
2009, by Hurriyet Daily News:
The additional bargaining power
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan gained from diversifying their energy
export routes, thanks to the Chinese assistance, strengthens their political
and economic independence and reinforces regional stability and security and
that achievement deserves recognition.
Russia's riposte to the
effectiveness of China's SCO-based penetration of Central Asia appears to be to
assert the existence of an existential narcotics and Islamicist security crisis
in Central Asia, one that can only be resolved with recourse to Russian
military muscle.
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