The Foreign Service Journal, April 2003

political reforms, which would bring with them stabil- ity, a degree of prosperity and security. But because reforms would also tend to undermine the personal political regimes of those nations’ lead- ers, they proved highly resistant to U.S. efforts to pro- mote political and economic change. Some countries, particularly Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, made consid- erable progress toward a market economy. However, even there, the benefits of economic reforms have been tempered by widespread corruption, which has exacerbated societal inequality and undermined domestic stability. Political reform has proved even more elusive. Suffice it to say that none of the Central Asian states has had a peaceful transfer of power, and all but one (Tajikistan, whose last Soviet-era leader died shortly after independence) are governed by the same rulers they had before the Soviet Union broke up. So, by the end of the 1990s, Central Asia was seen not as an opportunity for U.S. policy, but as strategic quicksand: further involvement was fraught with the danger of entanglement, but abandonment of the region to its own devices raised the prospect of failed states and geopolitical dominoes. New Urgency, Old Dilemmas Central Asia was saved from political oblivion by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since then, all five states have become U.S. allies in the war on ter- rorism. Their proximity to Afghanistan and ability to accommodate U.S. requests for basing or access — unencumbered by the shifting tides of domestic pub- lic opinion and electoral fortunes — proved useful assets at a critical time. In return, they have enjoyed growing economic assistance, enhanced international stature and unprecedented access in Washington. There is no dispute that the United States and its Central Asian partners share the same adversary — militant Islam — and the same objective: preventing it from spreading further and destabilizing the region. Toward that end, U.S. military success in Afghanistan has resulted in a greatly improved security environ- ment in Central Asia. The removal of the Taliban regime has meant that the region’s various militant movements no longer have a ready base of operation under the protection of a friendly government. Furthermore, the war against the Taliban regime produced a new defacto coalition: the United States, China, Russia and Iran had all come to see the Taliban as a major threat to their interests. Thus, the American success in defeating the Taliban benefited China, Russia and Iran. Still, the U.S. presence in Central Asia undoubtedly fuels suspicions in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran about U.S. interests and intentions in the region. But at the same time, their suspicions are accompanied by rueful recognition that none of them was able to provide for the region’s security since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and that a security vacu- um in Central Asia is in nobody’s interest. Yet experience cautions that the very factors that make the five Central Asian states such agreeable partners in the near term are also the chief obstacles to U.S. cooperation in the long term. Despite stepped-up U.S. involvement in Central Asia, the region is steeped in authoritarianism and corruption. All five regimes, to varying degrees, are corrupt and averse to the kinds of reforms that are tied to U.S. assistance and that represent the essential precondi- tions for long-term stability and security. Equally damaging, all five leaders are using American support as a personal endorsement of their regimes, and see the U.S. presence through that prism. For that reason, they would like Washington to continue to manage the region’s security, while leav- ing the task of managing domestic stability to the regimes themselves. This is clearly not a desirable sit- uation for the United States. The United States runs the risk of finding itself in the unenviable and unsus- tainable role of the region’s gendarme. If local regimes fail to maintain their own domestic stability, their and their neighbors’ security is likely to erode, thus raising the specter of U.S. involvement in domes- tic policing operations as a means of ensuring region- al security. Toward Realistic Objectives So is the United States facing a familiar cycle in Central Asia, where stepped-up involvement will once again lead to unfulfilled expectations, mutual recrim- inations and disappointment? It is easy to construct such a pessimistic scenario. But U.S. policy toward the region need not be a prisoner of the past. The first step toward a viable policy in Central Asia is to understand that the region’s problems are long- F O C U S 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 3