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2 Afghan bridge exposes huge
divide By M K Bhadrakumar
Some 2,300 years ago, a dignitary from the
Western world came to the foothills of the Pamir
Mountains, and he wondered how he and his army
would cross the mighty Oxus River to reach the
Hindu Kush.
That was when Alexander the
Great paused in Bactria to rest his exhausted army
and allow the winter to pass, before heading
toward the Indo-Gangetic plains in the summer of
326 BC to
invade India. The great
warrior finally decided to sew up the leather
tents and use them as floats to cross over to
Afghanistan.
Last week, the US Army Corps
of Engineers plugged the gap in Alexander's
logistics by building a bridge across the Pyanj
River to connect Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The
poignancy of the occasion was obvious. US
President George W Bush made it a point amid the
distractions over Iraq to send a cabinet-level
official to be present at the bridge opening
ceremony on August 26 in Tajikistan.
What
is the significance of a 670-meter bridge?
Previously, a sporadic ferry service connected the
Tajik town of Nizhny Pyanj with the Afghan town of
Shir Khan Bandar. The torrential river currents
didn't allow the ferry to operate for months at a
stretch when the ice and snow melted in the Pamirs
and flooded the tributaries. But the new bridge
can easily handle as many as 1,000 trucks per day.
Strictly speaking, US Secretary of
Commerce Carlos Gutierrez didn't have to come all
the way to witness the commissioning of the US$37
million project. But the US administration
evidently regarded this as a showcase project.
Gutierrez said the bridge would become "the widest
connection between Afghanistan and the rest of the
world". That was an interesting enough diplomatic
statement - relating Afghanistan to its northern
neighbors.
But more important, he went on
to describe the bridge as a "physical and symbolic
link between Central Asia and South Asia". Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, who was present, took a
step further ahead and called it a link that
"unites Central Asia with Southern and East Asia".
China enters the podium.
Great game
accelerating It is extremely rare that the
geopolitics of an entire region comes to be
encapsulated within a single occasion. To be sure,
the ceremony on the banks of the Pyanj River
provided a movable feast for politicians,
diplomats, the media and strategic thinkers alike.
Anyone even remotely interested in the Great Game
took note.
It was a microcosm of the
highly complex calculus of the politics of Central
Asia. Three things became clear.
First,
the Great Game in Central Asia not only shows no
signs of abating, but it is actually accelerating.
Second, Washington is pressing ahead with its
"Great Central Asia" strategy, no matter the
fluidity of the Afghan (and Pakistani) security
situation. Third, Washington has knowingly
facilitated an efficient access route for China
that leads to the markets in South Asia and the
Persian Gulf. Here, the conventional wisdom among
the strategic thinkers concerning Sino-US
rivalries in Central Asia takes a beating.
The United States has not cared to hide
the fact that the primary objective of the bridge
over the Pyanj was to provide Tajikistan with a
transportation route to the outside world that
bypasses Russian territory. But Tajikistan's trade
with Afghanistan amounted to a paltry US$25
million last year. Tajikistan is not a great
manufacturing center and is unlikely to be one in
the near future, though it is rich in precious
metals and minerals. It has a subsistence economy.
With mountains accounting for 93% of its
territory, one potential export item would be
electricity and water resources, but Tajikistan
doesn't need a bridge across the Pyanj to export
those.
Of late, the Great Game, which has
been keenly pursued in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan, has spilled over into Tajikistan and
Turkmenistan. The transfer of power to a new
leadership in Turkmenistan after the death of
Saparmurat Niazov last December opened a window of
opportunity for the US to contest the lead role
established by Russia and China in accessing the
country's vast resources of natural gas.
That is the new great-power rivalry
brewing in Turkmenistan. Simply put, the US wants
the new Turkmen leadership to take a serious
second look at the 10-year-old idea regarding a
trans-Caspian gas pipeline for the European market
via Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey, which would cut
down Europe's growing dependency on Russian energy
supplies.
But what is unfolding over
Tajikistan is indeed 19th-century Great
Gamesmanship - "foreign devils on the Silk Road".
Briefly, in October 2002, then-US secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld made a tactical error of
judgment in choosing to set up military bases in
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. During a memorable
visit by Rumsfeld to Dushanbe, Tajik President
Emomali Rakhmon ostentatiously spread a Soviet
army map in front of him and made an open offer
that Washington could pick and choose any of the
military bases that the Soviet army had built.
Rumsfeld was not interested.
But hardly
five years has passed and the geopolitics of
Central Asia had changed so dramatically that
Rumsfeld, now a pensioner, must be ruing his error
of judgment. With the rupture of US relations with
Uzbekistan after the uprising in Andizhan in 2005
and the descending anarchy in Kyrgyzstan after the
"Tulip Revolution", Tajikistan's importance has
increased as a gateway to Central Asia for the US
influence entrenched in Afghanistan.
Tajikistan's strategic importance needs no
repetition - it is a corridor leading to the
turbulent Ferghana Valley; it borders China's
Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region; it is a hotbed
of militant Islam; it is an oasis of Iranian
(Persian) culture; it controls the region's
watersheds; it is a principal route for the drug
traffickers from Afghanistan; and it is the
furthest post-Soviet military outpost for the
Russian armed forces on the territory of the
former Soviet Union.
Over and above, of
course, Tajikistan is integral to the
stabilization of Afghan politics. There are more
ethnic Tajiks living in Afghanistan than in
Tajikistan itself. Tajik nationalism can also be a
potent weapon in the hands of Uzbekistan's
adversaries.
America's 'Great Central
Asia' strategy Thus, for any number of
good reasons, prying Tajikistan from the orbit of
traditional Russian influence has become a key
objective of US diplomacy. Washington is pressing
Japan and the European Union to take interest. EU
foreign-policy chief Javier Solana visited
Dushanbe last week.
The thrust of the
United States' so-called "Great Central Asia"
strategy is to pull Tajikistan toward Afghanistan
by the scruff of its neck, as it were, in an
effort to draw the Central Asian region itself
incrementally toward the South Asian countries -
with Afghanistan acting as a hub, or a revolving
door. With the consolidation of US strategic
influence in the recent years in the South Asian
region, Washington estimates that its skillful
midwifery in Central Asia has a fair chance of
success.
The US has brought in financial
institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank (ADB) to explore the possibility
of funding trans-regional projects aimed at
strengthening the infrastructure and communication
links among the countries of the Central/South
Asian region.
Russia has taken serious
note of the United States' Great Central Asia
strategy, and signaled that it will resist the
alleged US policy to "detach" the Central Asian
countries from Russia's sphere of influence.
Equally, Chinese commentators have taken exception
to Washington's strategy, which in essence aims at
stimulating
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