'The Great Game' comes to South
Asia By M K Bhadrakumar
Travelers to Bukhara in Uzbekistan seek
out an obscure, ill-lit, vermin-infested dungeon
not far from the palace in which Arthur Conolly,
British intelligence officer of the Sixth Bengal
Light Cavalry, was confined for over six months
before Emir Nasrullah Khan ordered his execution
in June 1842 on charges of spying for the British
Empire, and had him buried in an unmarked grave in
the town square.
Conolly had set out from
Calcutta (now Kolkata) on his perilous mission of
espionage and intrigue - and, it so happened, he
was also the person to coin the term "Great Game".
This was the nearest that India came to the
classic great game.
That is, until last
Thursday, when a meeting of the Indian cabinet
announced its decision that
India would join the US-backed
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline
(TAP) project. The TAP would stretch from the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border to Multan in
Pakistan, and up to the borders of western India.
The project is estimated at US$3.5 billion.
The Indian Petroleum Ministry, which
recommended the TAP to the cabinet, was obviously
promoting the business interests of Indian
petrochemical companies. But, according to Indian
media reports, Delhi also took into consideration
that the TAP would be "in tune with the latest US
strategic thinking for the region".
There
is nothing ambivalent about the "latest US
strategic thinking for the region". It is clear
for anyone who followed the proceedings of the US
Congressional hearings in Washington on April
25-26 on "US Policy in Central Asia: Balancing
Priorities". In a nutshell, the hearings were
devoted to Washington's so-called "Greater Central
Asia" policy. The new thinking resulted from a
policy review in Washington following the collapse
of the US regional policy in Central Asia in the
recent past.
At its summit meeting in
Astana, Kazakhstan, last June the six-member
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO -
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Russia, Tajikistan
and Uzbekistan) called on the US to set a timeline
for the withdrawal of American troops from the
Central Asian region.
Additionally it
ignored an American request for observer status
and proceeded to consider requests from Iran,
India and Pakistan to join the body. Acutely
conscious of the US's marginalization, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice undertook a tour of the
Central Asian capitals in October to make a
first-hand assessment of how US diplomacy could
have gone so horribly wrong. The "Greater Central
Asia" concept was born out of this
self-assessment.
Returning, Rice ordered a
revamp of the Central Asia desk in the State
Department by merging it with the South Asia
Bureau. But this was more than a knee-jerk
reaction involving personnel changes. It also
reflected new thinking. The US has built up an
unprecedented level of influence in the South
Asian region in the recent years. Rice estimated
that the South Asian countries would serve its
interests if they only could be persuaded to play
a proactive role in Central Asia. Equally, the
Central Asian states should be made to rethink
their deepening involvement with SCO.
Washington would be essentially nibbling
away at the SCO at no real cost to itself, by
simply flagging in the Central Asian political
consciousness a "South Asia option". The ultimate
nightmare for US regional policy would be if the
SCO were to grant full membership to Iran,
Pakistan and India. Iran is manifestly keen on SCO
membership. So is Pakistan. Western capitals have
prevailed on Moscow (for the time being, at least)
to factor that any SCO membership for Iran at this
juncture would be regarded as a provocation in
Washington.
The SCO foreign ministers'
meeting in Beijing last week decided to take a
"pragmatic and constructive" stand on the issue,
even as the SCO invitations to the heads of
states/governments of the observer countries to
attend the forthcoming SCO summit meeting on June
15 were dispatched.
Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmedinejad and Pakistan President General
Pervez Musharraf have since accepted the
invitation. Washington is at a loss to fathom what
really happened. US State Department spokesman
Sean McCormack asked Russia to give explanations.
"I've seen press reports on it, and we want to
have certain explanations," McCormack said.
The Congressional hearings in Washington
last month threw into relief these criss-crossing
tendencies in a highly complex "tournament of
shadows" (which is how Russians call the Great
Game) - and the US's policy response. Testifying
at the hearings, assistant secretary of state for
the newly created Bureau of South Asian and
Central Asian Affairs, Richard Boucher, claimed a
paradigm shift in the region's strategic landscape
had taken place, and "exciting new possibilities"
had opened up.
Boucher claimed Afghanistan
had reached a level of transformation that it now
acted as a "bridge" connecting Central and South
Asia rather than posing an "obstacle" separating
the two. He painted a fascinating panorama:
"Students and professors from Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan]
and Almaty [Kazakhstan] can collaborate with and
learn from their partners in Karachi and Kabul,
legitimate trade can freely flow overland from
Astana to Islamabad, facilitated by modern border
controls, and an enhanced regional power grid
stretching from Almaty to New Delhi will be fed by
oil and gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and
hydropower from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan."
In political terms, Boucher admitted, "a
lot of what we do here is to give the countries of
the region the opportunity to make choices ... and
to keep them from being bottled up between two
great powers, Russia and China." But the leitmotif
of any grand US geostrategy will always be the
region's immense energy reserves.
Boucher
said, "Our vision includes new energy routes that
will ensure the next generation of South and
Central Asian entrepreneurs have access to the
resources they need to prosper. We want to give
South Asians access to the vast and rapidly
growing energy resources in Central Asia, whether
they are oil and gas in Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan, thermal power in Uzbekistan, or
hydropower in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan."
"This vision is within our grasp. Within
the next few years, we expect to see private
investment lead to the establishment of a 500
kilovolt power line transmitting much-needed
electricity from Central Asia across Afghanistan
to Pakistan and India."
Clearly, the
ultimate profitability of the Baku-Ceyhan (BTC)
oil pipeline (from Azerbaijan through Georgia to
Turkey), which has cost US$2 billion to build and
still needs expansion, may depend on the volume of
Kazakh oil on this route. But Kazakhstan is
fighting shy of committing to a Trans-Caspian
pipeline, which the US is seeking, for linking the
BTC with Kazakh oil fields. Simply put, Kazakhstan
will not ride roughshod over Russian interests.
In a virtual riposte to Cheney's recent
criticism of Russia, Kazakh President Nurusultan
Nazarbayev said on Saturday after a meeting with
President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, "This kind of
Russia, the powerful Russia, the Russia that
speaks out as a world power, is important to us,
Russia's partners and strategic allies, in many
ways, from all possible viewpoints."
Boucher would be wrong to assume that
Kazakhstan was desperately seeking new transit
options. Cooperation with China is already
allowing Kazakhstan transit options. Similarly, he
overlooks that any export of hydropower from
Tajikistan in the foreseeable future would
inevitably involve the Russian companies Rusal and
UES, which are already the major players in the
current power projects in that country.
As
for TAP, will the US be in a position to push the
project through? The main issue is Turkmenistan's
gas reserves. China recently contracted to begin
moving up to 30 billion cubic meters of Turkmen
gas annually in 2009 via a Central Asian pipeline
system. Russia's 25-year agreement with
Turkmenistan signed in April 2003 envisages its
right to purchase up to 100 billion cubic meters
of Turkmen gas annually. Most American analysts
say that Turkmenistan's gas production is not
sufficient enough to fulfill the contractual
obligations to Russia and China.
Besides,
transport is the greatest challenge so long as
conditions remain unstable in Afghanistan and
until such time when India-Pakistan relations
reach a certain level of mutual trust and
maturity.
The US strategic thinking
remains obsessed with minimizing the Russian and
Chinese presence in Central Asia. The strategy is
fundamentally flawed in so far as it lacks the
dynamism and creativity that can only come out of
positive energy. It overlooks what is apparent to
the naked eye.
The US, in effect, having
lost its petty squabbles and having been slighted
time and again in the Central Asian capitals, has
evacuated itself to South Asia, bringing with it
the entire baggage of the Great Game. From the
South Asian perspective, Washington may prove to
be putting spokes in the wheel of the region's
promising cooperation with the SCO.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
over 29 years, with postings including India's
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
(Copyright 2006 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
