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Overshadowed by American media’s [unrewarded] search for Bushcapades in Europe, bloody rioting in [always peace-dispensing] Sweden, and [increasingly characteristic] general confusion at the EUrope summit, was the meeting of “the anti-alliance” in Shanghai.
Only hours before he gave a soul-reading to Pres. Bush, Russian Pres. Putin was meeting with Chinese People’s Jiang Zemin, and the rest of the illustrious gang of the Shanghai Five. These Central Asian leaders, mostly former Soviet apparatchiks, are trying to govern what Scottish geographer Sir Halford MacKinder once called “the Geographical Pivot of History."
MacKinder argued preWWII that interior Asia and eastern Europe had become the strategic center of the "World Island" as a result of the decline of sea power. And those who ruled it would rule the world. [There is some evidence that Hitler was one of his acolytes, enough of a believer to launch his calamitous invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Union.]
But it is a far cry from MacKinder’s pre-WWII world of battleships and tanks to the world of airpower — perhaps even space weapons — and the missile carrier.
Still Central Asia remains the confluence of important currents, negative threats to stability if not props for empire. What gathered in Shanghai — now formalizing their “alliance” as The Shanghai Forumn [Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan and the just admitted Uzbekistan] — hope to do is, somehow, to find ways to stabilize their rickety regimes. Their enemies, including sheer anarchy, are just about everyone — including each other since their goals are obviously contradictory.
Putin, buying into a current Moscow bumpersticker, “Eurasianism”, would like to reestablish Russian paramountcy — and keep the world’s second largest oil reserves flowing through Moscow’s hands. And he fears the growing threat by Moslem fundamentalists to the Russian Federation with its huge and growing Moslem minorities and Moscow’s unending nightmare war in Chechnya.
China wants to move development [and Han colonists] westward into the great expanses of [oil-rich] Singkiang and Tibet. It hopes officially to collaborate with the Russians and the Central Asians against the Moslem militants, even though the collision of Chinese and Russian interests in the region are legendary. Just after the conference Beijing again warned it would come down hard on its own Moslem Uighurs with their widespread contacts among fellow Uighurs in Central Asians.
Tajikstan, fighting off an internal Moslem insurgency, has been promised 3,000 additional Soviet paratroopers to fend off the Talibands fighting fellow Afghan Tajik countrymen to rule over the whole of that bloody battleground. German BND intelligence says Moscow may have another regional war on its hands with 2,000 to 3,000 Moslem militants during the summer months playing cat and mouse through neighboring Uzbekistan and Kurgystan on the Chinese border.
Kazakhstan, whose Communist-era boss Narulsultan Nazarbaev once looked to U.S. investment in his oil against renewed Russian domination, appears reconciling itself to increased Moscow ties. Uzbekistan, too, at odds with its neighbors to the extent of mining its borders, now sees the Moslem fundamentalists as a greater menace than the Russians.
Another of the former Soviet Central Asian states, Turkmenistan, with perhaps the largest untapped gas reserves in the world, has apparently abandoned hope of reaching its fellow Turks in Turkey with an underwater Caspian Sea pipeline. Its megalomaniac ruler, Saparmurat Niyazov, has pushed his cult of personality so far that he is on the verge of becoming a new prophet of Islam.
Ironically, Pakistan, which funds and supplies the Afghan Talibands as a counter to Russian domination with the hope it might combine with the majority Afghanistan ethnic Pushtoons for “greater strategic depth” in its longterm feud with India, has not yet received a reply to its request to join this jolly band. That’s despite Islamabad’s increasing dependence on its Chinese alliance for missile and nuclear technology — especially with a new drift in Washington toward warming ties with India.
U.S. strategy in the region, is more than ever, dependent on Azerbaijan, the oil and gas rich former Soviet state on the Caspian. But old, sick, Soviet Politburo hand, President Heidar Ali, despite a recent Washington announcement of a subsidy for a pipeline project to market its oil and gas through Turkey and Georgia, appears to be slipping back into the Russian orbit. Moscow probably holds the trump in mediating Baku’s No. 1 problem, the bitter feud with Armenia, long Moscow’s most loyal friend in the region.
And, of course, hanging over all this is the obvious geographical fact that MacKinder would have been the first to point out: Iran, big, potentially powerful, one of the world’s largest oil producers, is the obvious route for Central Asia’s oil and gas to market. And there, Washington is blindsided by a regime, which sponsors state terrorism and where a long awaited modus vivendi with Washington is stalled.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.