The Bush Administration in Central Asia

Central Asia, June 8, 2001 [ 14:18 ]
By Gregory Gleason, TCA

ALMATY. (TCA) -- Washington's foreign policy is deeply rooted in the values, principles of American mentality and is therefore not subject to change by individual administrations. Yet some American presidential administrations do introduce shifts in policy emphasis, shifts that are particularly significant in times of crisis.

For the past decade the states of Central Asia have been involved in a massive enterprise to transform their political and economic institutions. While there was much that was positive in the communist era, there were also many problems that resulted from the social and economic experimentation of seven decades of party rule.

Keeping the good while rejecting the bad has been more difficult than many people anticipated. Yet each of the Central Asian states was making reasonably good headway under difficult conditions. In different ways and at different rates, the states were struggling to come into sync with international standards while remaining faithful to the best cultural traditions of Central Asia.

However, in the past three years the efforts of the Central Asian states to join the broader international community have been threatened by another legacy of the Soviet past, the unresolved conflicts of the Afghanistan war.

Beginning with the Hujand uprising in November 1998 and continuing through the assaults by Juma Namangani's irregular military formation during the past two summers, the political atmosphere in Central Asia has changed dramatically. Only a few years ago the central policy question was how to open the borders fast enough to attract investment and technical expertise. Now the central policy question is how to close the borders fast enough to keep out the contagions of terrorism, religious extremism and organized crime.

Central Asia's revolutionaries claim that their goal is to sweep away the Central Asian governments they regard as illegitimate remnants of the Soviet-era and establish an Islamic Caliphate uniting the Moslem faithful throughout Central Asia. What is at stake is a competition for hearts and minds throughout the Central Asian Islamic crescent, from Chechnya in the west to Xinjiang in the east.

As Tajikistan's Emomali Rahmonov recently noted, when the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989 and then when the Soviet Union collapsed just two years later, Tajikistan was forced into the role as a buffer state, absorbing from Afghanistan a contagion of violence and brutality that threatened to sweep throughout Central Asia and beyond. The 1997 Peace Accord in Tajikistan brought the Tajikistan domestic conflict to a legal conclusion, but it did not eliminate the causes.

Today the fear of insurgency and political instability is imperiling the modest gains of a decade of national consolidation in Central Asia. Confronted by religious and political extremism, terrorism, and national separatism, the governments of the region have redoubled security measures and imposed new constraints upon domestic political opposition. The counterinsurgency measures instituted by the governments have the goal of neutralizing terrorists and bandits. But the governments' programs have cast a wide net, rounding up terrorists and criminals but also ensnaring legitimate critics as well as many perfectly innocent victims.

The Bush Administration's Response

The Bush administration came to power in the U.S. offering to restore a sense of purpose, dignity, and compassion to American government and encourage a new realism in foreign policy. America's foreign policy has traditionally been a blend of realism tempered with idealism. Realism means above all honesty about a state's goals and the means it will use to achieve those goals. Idealism means the protection of values and virtues even when that might not be the most expedient policy of the day.

Earlier American policy toward the former Soviet states had been criticized as too obscure in its objectives and too willing to compromise in the means that it used to achieve those objectives. Responding to this criticism, the Bush administration set out with a fresh commitment to the idea that American interests must come first, but mutually advantageous policies would always be attractive. Like all American administrations, the Bush administration underscored the deep American commitment to the inalienable rights of the individual to dignity, fair treatment, and civil protections.

In practice, the most visible aspect of the Bush administration's initial policy toward Central Asia was a new emphasis on political stability and regional security. But the increased attention to security problems in Central Asia predated the Bush administration. In the last years of the Clinton administration, Washington's tendency to "search for and take credit for success" was already being replaced by broader strategic thinking, more in line with promoting enduring American principles than merely seeking today's convenient pragmatism.

Washington's Central Asia specialists, having focused for two years on the Caspian Basin Initiative, were awakened by the terrorist attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa in August 1998. In the wake of the Embassy bombings, the U.S. launched an unsuccessful attempt at retaliation against the al Qaeda terrorist organization and its chief strategist, Osama bin Laden. These events focused Washington's attention on the military advances of the Taliban and the swelling availability of cheap Afghan heroin in Europe and the U.S. Central Asia moved upward in the hierarchy of Washington's crowded and complex priority list.

During the early years of the Clinton administration, requests for security assistance from Central Asia had been routinely rejected on the grounds that they were likely to encourage the heavy-handed traditions of the security services in the region. But by 2000 the situation had changed. In March 2000 CIA director George Tenet visited the Central Asian capitals of Astana and Tashkent. FBI chief Lois Freeh followed the next month. Shortly thereafter Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made an official visit to Central Asia. The commander of the U.S. Army's Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, was the next high-ranking official to visit Central Asia followed by Stephen Sestanovich, the Special Advisor to the Secretary of State.

These high level meetings were followed by a series of bilateral commitments for technical assistance and joint military exercises. The State Department hosted a regional Central Asian Counter-terrorism Conference in Washington in June 2000 focusing on counter-terrorism cooperation but also emphasizing the idea that national strategies needed to be based on the rule of law and respect for human rights if they were to succeed as long-term efforts to curtail support for terrorism.

Just as the Bush administration was taking office, the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated. Worsening social and economic conditions led to yet another mass exodus of refugees as Afghanis fled fighting, drought, and economic isolation. A new, harsher set of economic sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council took effect on January 20, 2001, the day that the Bush administration came into office. The UN sanctions, sponsored jointly by the U.S. and Russia, called upon the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to an American court where he had been indicted on charges of terrorism. The sanctions called upon Afghanistan to stop promoting terrorism and to take steps to curtail opium production and trade. UN Security Council Resolution 1333 forbade arms shipments and military assistance to the Taliban, froze financial assets of the Taliban, and essentially brought to a halt all non-humanitarian air traffic in Taliban controlled parts of the country.

At the same time, the Bush administration reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to a political solution to the Afghanistan problem. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in May 2001 announced an increase in emergency humanitarian relief to Afghanistan, bringing the total humanitarian aid during the first six months of the Bush administration to $124 million, already far exceeding the $114 million in aid provided during 2000. The U.S. continued to be the largest single provider of humanitarian assistance to the country.

With security affairs specialist Condoleeza Rice appointed as the President's new National Security Advisor and veteran Afghan specialist Zalmay Khalilzad appointed as the new architect of South Asian policy at the National Security Council, the resolution of the "Afghan problem" was moved to the top of the list of Washington's foreign policy priorities in international security.

Playing a careful balancing act between what Washington calls "engagement", that is realist support for the recognized governments in power, and the protection of human rights, meaning support for the protection of civil rights of even those who may oppose the rule of those recognized governments, will not be an easy task in Central Asia.

The road ahead is not clear. But some things are easily predicted. Neither of the two sponsors of the UN Security Council sanctions--the U.S. and Russia--is likely to become directly involved in intervention as a means of resolving the Afghan problem. Support for proxies or intermediaries in "Great Game" intrigues is also apt to be viewed with a great deal of suspicion and apprehension. In the world of electronic globalization, state secrets are often yesterday's news.

There will be appeals to provide weapons to the Northern Alliance in its counter-struggle against the Taliban. But cooler heads are apt to prevail in seeking a less heroic but more durable solution. The weapons that are now fueling the flames of conflict are primarily from Pakistan and Iran. The key to exhausting the war-fighting capacity in the region will be the effectiveness of the UN sanctions against the arms trade and the drug trade which finances it.

The stakes are high. Central Asia has again become, in the phrase coined fifty years ago by the scholar Owen Lattimore, the "pivot of Asia." The area lies at a juncture of key trade routes of the 21st century. The region is rich in oil and mineral wealth. It is a region that is likely to be a fulcrum of geopolitical change over the next few decades driven by the rising and falling fortunes of the Great Powers as Russia recedes and China and India advance.