Special Report, News On Sunday, The News International

Svante E. Cornell is optimistic that the removal of the Taliban and the threat that the regime was seen to pose to the Central Asian states will enable Pakistan to re-establish lost confidence in the region

The end of Taliban rule in Kabul and the Northern areas of Afghanistan brought the Northern Alliance in control of the country's border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a long-sought objective of the US-led alliance. This has put the US bases in Uzbekistan in close proximity to 'friendly territory' in Afghanistan, and may give US, British, and Turkish special forces a direct access to the heartland of Afghanistan.

While this is crucial to humanitarian relief and the war effort, it also illustrates the importance of Central Asian states' proximity to Afghanistan. But beyond being a staging point for American bases, what are the Central Asian states' interests in Afghanistan?

The first aspect of Central Asia that deserves mention is that it does not constitute a coherent region with states holding similar interests and concerns. The three states that border Afghanistan (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) are very different. Whereas Tajikistan is a poor, conflict-ridden and Persian-speaking country under Russian tutelage, Turkmenistan is a resource-rich, Turkic and primarily nomadic country that has deposited a document of permanent neutrality with the United Nations. Uzbekistan is the only truly independent state in Central Asia, with significant resources, a large population, a strategic location, and a very strong sense of national identity. Uzbekistan is feared by most of its neighbours, and has come to play the role of a regional power in Central Asia.

Independent for just ten years, the Central Asian republics have come to develop their own national interests that depend on their unique geographic, demographic, economic, and political characteristics. As far as relations to their Southern neighbours are concerned, the Central Asian states all share similar concerns, although their responses to developments in the region have varied drastically.

Central Asia and Afghanistan are intimately linked ethnically. Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmens form considerable populations in Afghanistan, Tajiks being the second largest ethnic group of the country, with more Tajiks living in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. Uzbeks are the fourth largest ethnic group, but their home is the area around the key strategic city of Mazar-e-Sharif; one of the most known, though not most esteemed, commanders of the Northern Alliance is the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum. These ethnic linkages have been a factor in the relations between Central Asia and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Some analysts have boiled the relations down to an ethnic game where Central Asia is seen to support the Persian- and Turkic-speaking minorities in the North, and Pakistan supporting the Pashtuns of the South. This is at best a highly simplified version of reality. Religious, geopolitical, and economic factors have often superseded the ethnic factor.

To Central Asia, there are two main concerns that arise out of Afghanistan, concerns that are intimately linked with these states' relations with Pakistan. The first concerns security; the second is economic.

For the Central Asian countries that have territory in or near the Ferghana valley -- that is all except Turkmenistan -- Afghanistan has been a major security concern in the 1990s. Unrest in Afghanistan contributed to the upheaval in Tajikistan that led to the civil war of 1992-97, and to the emergence of Islamic radical groups in the Ferghana valley areas of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan remains a weak state, where the government controls little outside the capital Dushanbe.

Hence the civil war in Afghanistan, and the spectre of a Taliban victory, has been Tajikistan's main concern. It was feared that a total defeat of the Northern Alliance would lead to refugee flows of Tajiks to the country that it could not handle; but moreover that the Taliban's next step would be to instigate Islamic upheavals inside Tajikistan. On the other hand, the drugs trade that has involved both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance has involved the Tajik government as well, with over a third of the country's unofficial GNP estimated to be linked to the opium trade.

Among the Central Asians, Tajikistan has like its mentor, Russia, been the staunchest supporter of the ethnic Tajik-led Northern Alliance leadership of the late Ahmad Shah Masoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani. Tajikistan recently reiterated its opposition to any Taliban participation in a future Afghan government.

Turkmenistan, on the other hand, has adopted a totally different approach. It shares a border with Afghanistan as long as Tajikistan's, though less rugged and more porous. Turkmen tribes live on both sides of the border, and Turkmenistan could ill-afford a refugee flow of hundreds of thousands of Turkmens. When the Taliban conquered Herat and the areas adjacent to Turkmenistan, the Ashkabad government assumed a very pragmatic policy, and followed the doctrine of positive neutrality that the country adopted after independence, and which, in retrospect, has served the country well.

As a result, Turkmenistan developed good functional relations with the Taliban. It provided proof that a country that didn't actively support the Taliban's enemies could establish good relations and live in peace with the radical militia. For Turkmenistan, the Taliban never constituted a major threat. Quite to the contrary, the Turkmens tried to deal with the Taliban to have their large natural gas resources exported through Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan saw Afghanistan as a much greater threat. Coping with a religious revival in the Ferghana valley with sectarian and radical violence attached, Tashkent saw the Taliban conquest of Afghanistan as bad news. As the Taliban sheltered the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) which most likely tried to assassinate the Uzbek president in 1999 and subsequently launched two military incursions into southern Central Asia in 1999 and 2000, Uzbekistan felt directly affected by the turmoil and radicalism emanating from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Uzbeks were well aware that the IMU operated on Tajik territory and that Russia was utilising the IMU threat to restore Uzbekistan's dependence on Russia for security purposes. Still, the IMU obviously operated in Afghanistan thanks to its leaders' connections to the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, and thus the Taliban were a direct security threat to Uzbekistan.

Although Kyrgyzstan has no border with Afghanistan, it was perhaps even more affected than Uzbekistan, since it is a much weaker state and since the IMU incursions mainly took place on its territory.

On a more general level, Central Asian leaders increasingly came to realise that their separation from Afghanistan in the Soviet era had been artificial, and that Afghanistan formed an integral part of their region. Their security could not be dissociated from the situation in Afghanistan.

This was also true in economic terms. One of the major features of Central Asia is that it is landlocked. Uzbekistan, for example, is doubly landlocked since all its neighbours are landlocked; goods traveling between Uzbekistan and the high seas must pass through at least two other countries. During the Soviet era, the harbour used by Central Asia was Riga on the Baltic coast; this was a decidedly illogical solution dictated by political terms.

Both geographically and historically, Central Asia's most logical route to the seas is through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian sea. A significant part of the Silk Route in fact went across this route. This fact was soon realised at independence, and the issue of opening up transportation links for goods as well as energy resources in this direction was gradually recognised. However, these problems have not been resolved and Central Asia remains poorly connected to the world markets.

Afghanistan's civil war in the early 1990s acted as an obvious impediment to the restoration of these historical trade routes. The utter anarchy during Rabbani's tenure in Kabul made it impossible to conceptualise the drawing of pipelines, or the use of road or rail resources through Afghanistan. In this context, the arrival of the Taliban to power led to hopes that Afghanistan would stabilise and become a possible transportation route.

In fact, the hope of access to Central Asia was one of the several reasons that Pakistan extended its diplomatic support to the Taliban movement at its emergence in 1995.

However, the Taliban's policies that alienated and isolated the movement from the world community, and its inability to effectively control the entirety of Afghanistan's territory, dashed the hopes of a stabilised Afghanistan.

Worse, the perception of the Taliban as a serious threat to Central Asian states also affected Central Asia's relations with Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan's support for the Taliban, and the Taliban's support for the IMU led to a perception in Central Asia, heavily fuelled by Russian propaganda, that Pakistan was pursuing an Islamic agenda in Central Asia and covertly seeking to overthrow the secular governments of the Central Asian republics. Relations between Pakistan and Central Asia plummeted, and mistrust for Pakistan has spread in the region.

In this light, the events in the last two months provide new opportunities. The Taliban no longer pose a security threat to Central Asia, and real efforts to reinvigorate traditional trade routes can now resume as integral parts of the economic development package for Afghanistan and the entire region. Central Asian states are well aware of the mutual economic interests they share with Pakistan. It is hence time for Pakistan to capitalise on its improved standing in world politics to rebuild lost confidence in Central Asia.

Reestablishing trust for Pakistan in Central Asia may take time, but Pakistan's geopolitical and geo-economic position cannot be ignored by its northern neighbours. Economic and trade ties are set to increase rapidly, and funds channeled to the rebuilding of road links and pipelines could speed up this process. If Islamabad, this time, keeps in mind the sensitivities of the Central Asian states, its role may gradually be restored to that of an influential regional power.