Page 2 of
2 Moscow
beckons Pakistan's Kayani By M
K Bhadrakumar
Without a presence on the
Tajik-Afghan border, Russia's Afghan strategy will
be thrown into disarray in the post-2014 period.
To be sure, Dushanbe feels encouraged that the US
is interested in having a base of its own in
Tajikistan. Indeed, there is a perceptible
stepping up of the US diplomatic activities in
Dushanbe, Tashkent and Ashgabat - key regional
capitals across the Afghan border - in the past
year. These capitals have a major role to play in
any post-2014 scenario.
Water, water
everywhere ... The US has toyed with the
idea of opening a transit route to Afghanistan via
the Caspian, altogether bypassing Russian
territory. The Western calculus is as follows: if
NATO establishes
a viable route from
Turkey across the Caucasus and the Caspian region
leading to the northern Afghanistan regions (via
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan),
Russia's capacity to dictate terms to the Western
alliance would sharply diminish and the viability
of long-term US military bases in Afghanistan will
also be firmly ensured.
Things seem to be
moving in this direction - although neither side
talks about it openly. This is one reason why the
parliamentary election in Georgia on Monday has
become a high-stakes game: if President Mikhail
Saakashvilli loses to the opposition led by
Bidzina Ivanishvilli, Tbilisi may opt for a course
correction in its close relationship with the US.
Meanwhile, in Central Asia itself,
Uzbekistan has edged close to the Turkmen ideology
of "positive neutrality" after suspending its
membership of the Moscow-led Collective Treaty
Organization (CSTO) in June. Tashkent is making a
determined effort to build up its ties with
Turkmenistan. The Western countries are actively
encouraging a Uzbek-Turkmen axis to develop (which
would also have ramifications for energy
security).
The Uzbek national news agency
disclosed last week that Uzbek President Islam
Karimov would pay a two-day visit to Ashgabat
early this week. The report said, "The agenda of
the summit includes the talks [with Turkmen
president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow] and
exchanging views on the development of
multifaceted Uzbek-Turkmen cooperation and
important regional and international issues."
The report noted that Tashkent and
Ashgabat have similar views on strengthening
regional security and stability, creating "new
effective mechanisms to intensify the negotiation
process to resolve the Afghan crisis" with the
participation of international organizations,
joint fight against threats such as international
terrorism and extremism, drug trafficking and
trans-national organized crime.
Above all,
what may cement a Turkmen-Uzbek understanding is
that the two countries share a common position on
water and energy issues in Central Asia.
Specifically, they are opposed to the present
Russian plans to assist the construction of the
Kambarata and Rogun dams in Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan.
The European Union, the World
Bank and the US back the Uzbek-Turkmen stance on
this issue. Thus, amidst the tense Uzbek-Tajik
standoff in recent months, the results of "expert
studies" in the US have just added fuel to the
fire by counseling Tashkent that if Dushanbe goes
ahead with the Rogun hydropower project,
Uzbekistan's annual "loss" would be $600 million
in terms of shortage of water for irrigation,
unemployment in the agriculture sector and so
forth.
Waiting for the
Taliban Clearly, the Russians are on the
horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, Moscow is
keen to ensure a long-term military presence in
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Bishkek and
Dushanbe are demanding in return financial
concessions and Russian assistance in building and
managing their hydroelectric projects, which are
central to their economic development.
On
the other hand, if Russia gets involved in the
construction of these projects, it will annoy
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and push these key
regional states into the Western embrace.
As things stand, the US is systematically
elbowing Russia out of the entire southern tier of
the Central Asian region bordering Afghanistan -
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Nor is
the US showing any sense of hurry to vacate its
air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.
Of course,
Washington will not seek a UN Security Council
mandate for its future plans in Afghanistan and
will prefer to enter into bilateral agreements
with Kabul. This is where the post-2014 political
alignments within Afghanistan and the calculus of
power in Kabul become a matter of great concern to
Moscow.
But Russia's capacity to influence
the ebb and flow of Afghan politics in its favor
is virtually nil. The specter that is haunting
Moscow (and Pakistan) is that the US might at some
point decide to come to terms with a Taliban
takeover in Afghanistan. The mainstream opinion
within the US strategic community is veering round
to the view that the Taliban as such do not pose
any threats to America's national security
interests and therefore Washington must
differentiate the al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
A Carnegie study last month titled
"Waiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan", in fact,
recommended a bold policy option for Washington:
After 2014, the level of US support
for the Afghan regime will be limited and, after
a new phase in the civil war, a Taliban victory
will likely follow ... Even a (relatively)
hostile new Taliban force in Kabul will be
easier to deal with because, since they will
have established their control on the Afghan
side of the border, they will be directly
responsible for key security issues.
The
desirable endgame should be a stabilization of
Afghanistan, probably with the Taliban in Kabul.
There would have to be a measure of political or
economic support from the United States because
a difficult relationship between Afghanistan and
Pakistan is very likely whatever the regime in
Kabul. That is essentially the best situation
from a US point of view. A difficult
relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan
will give the United States more leverage on
both.
At the present juncture,
therefore, from the Russian viewpoint, Kayani
becomes an extremely valuable interlocutor. As
Moscow would see it, the Pakistani military
leadership's interest also lies in forestalling
the US efforts to perpetuate a regime in
Afghanistan in the post-2014 period that attaches
primacy to American interests. Moscow apprehends -
and, rightly so - that an Islamist regime in Kabul
that comes under American influence could herald
an Arab Spring in the region and pose existential
threats to the political order in Central Asia and
North Caucasus.
In short, Moscow is
betting that the Pakistani military will play a
crucial role in the shaping up of the future
Afghan polity and given the commonality of
interests between Pakistan and Russia, the two
countries need to cooperate and coordinate their
approaches to the evolving Afghan situation.
Suffice to say, the reining in of the US
influence in Kabul in the post-2014 period has
become a shared Russian-Pakistani strategic
objective. Kayani's visit to Moscow is timely. It
is taking place even as the US-Afghan negotiations
for the conclusion of agreements relating to
long-term NATO/US military presence are due to
begin within the coming three weeks. Also, both
Russia and Pakistan anticipate that President
Barack Obama will revisit the Afghan strategy no
sooner than the November election in the US is
over.
Of course, it is possible to argue
that Moscow could be skating on thin ice. Its
dalliance with the Pakistani military leadership
will complicate Washington's sustained attempts to
get Rawalpindi to cooperate in the Afghan endgame.
The negative fallouts on the US-Russia reset could
be serious, since Moscow is audaciously
challenging the first circle of the US' regional
strategy. This is an area where even China has
treaded softly, notwithstanding its "all-weather
friendship" with Pakistan.
Far more
consequential would be the reliability of the
Pakistani military leadership as Moscow's newfound
ally in Afghanistan. The former US ambassador,
Cameron Munter, who concluded his tour in
Islamabad recently, said last week in a speech
that Pakistan is a country with a strong society
but a weak state. Russian policy is in sync with
the spirit of our times insofar as Pakistani
society is virulently "anti-American".
However, the heart of the matter is that
the Pakistani state is also simultaneously cooking
many broths in its Rawalpindi kitchen and
Grandma's Russian Borsch cannot be the main course
there.
Ambassador M K
Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.
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