As this blog has been insisting, regional ties are the answer to many of Central Asia’s problems, rather than the West or even Russia. This Radio Liberty article describes how the State Department groups the post-Soviet Central Asian states together with the South Asian states in a long-term effort to promote ties between US-friendly states like India and Kazakhstan in opposition to a Russia orientated space. This is interesting and ambitious, though I am not sure Russia’s importance can ever be truly superseded for its neighboring states.
Still, plans for Kazakhstan providing uranium for India’s nuclear power plants and progress on a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline are exciting. Any de-leveraging of Russian power in the region is a good sign for the countries. As the article concludes, Kazakhstan will chair the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) in 2010 and India continues to search for energy sources, so the State Department’s vision may indeed be anticipating the links between Central and South Asia. However, the article fails to see that it is precisely the political vacuum in Pakistan and Afghanistan that makes Russia the stronger geopolitical partner for a long time to come.
