By James Rupert, an assistant foreign editor at the Washington Post. He wrote this article while on leave as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
At the end of the twentieth century, with a once-wide world shrunken into a global village, it seems astonishing that America should be called upon to establish relations with a virtually undiscovered region of the world. But following last year's breakup of the Soviet Union and the release of its Central Asian republics into the world political arena, the United States has encountered perhaps its biggest and least-known new diplomatic partner since Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay.
The steppes and deserts of Central Asia had been locked behind the walls of the Russian czarist and Soviet empires since around the time of the U.S. Civil War--long before America had become a power with global interests. Now America's interests in Central Asia's stable development are vital. The region holds vast energy resources as well as ex-Soviet nuclear weapons and facilities. Its stability will be important to the other former Soviet republics and its direction may greatly affect the Asian and Islamic worlds it is now rejoining.
Yet few Americans have considered a U.S. relationship with Central Asia. Many presume that the reportedly strong Islamic fundamentalist movement there and influence from neighboring Iran make it hostile territory for U.S. diplomacy. But there is no broad fundamentalist movement, and any hostility is largely imagined. Indeed, eight months of travel and interviews in the region, and discussions with U.S. specialists and diplomats, suggest that it is Washington rather than central Asia that is unreceptive to a productive relationship.
As a shorthand, it is useful to think of Central Asia as a region now beginning the processes of decolonization and nation building that have driven the turbulent politics of the Arab world since its independence in the decades following World War II. After more than a century of Russian rule, Central Asian muslims face the same tasks as did the newly independent Arabs: They must define cultural and political identities scrambled by colonial power; choose from among Islamic and Western models of governance that they poorly understand; and manage internal conflicts once arbitrated by an outside ruler. They must especially meet the basic needs and rising expectations of impoverished, expanding populations. They face these challenges with authoritarian political systems rife with patronage and corruption and a shattered, dependent economy that is destroying the environment of the Aral Sea basin. While there is no strong Islamic political or "fundamentalist" movement now, the soil for such a movement is as fertile in Central Asia as it was earlier in Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, and other countries where such movements now complicate movement toward liberal democracy. It is difficult to say how long the Central Asians have to make significant progress on the tasks they face before political desperation and radicalism set in.
In Central Asia, officials and citizens alike are eager for close relations with the United states; America could offer critical influence, resources, and technology. But Washington's attention to foreign affairs is substantially limited by an election-year rise in isolationism and stretched over a broadened range of difficult issues. Central Asia has no political constituency in the United States. The only voices that could draw attention to the region will be those of strategic thinkers and area specialists who understand its importance to U.S. interests. But, as numerous scholars and policy analysts have pointed out, the Bush administration tends to concentrate key foreign policy decisions at the top, muffling the voices of area specialists and limiting its own ability to work on important issues that are not in the headlines.
Even a rudimentary U.S. policy in Central Asia was delayed by Washington's unpreparedness for the Soviet collapse. As early as the mid-1980s, scholars on soviet nationalities and central Asia had hinted at the possible breakup of the Soviet Union, but officials did not plan for it. When the collapse came, Washington acted reflexively, attempting to shore up Mikhail Gorbachev's position long after he had lost any realistic hope of keeping power, rather than recognizing and accommodating the aspirations of the republics.
In particular, Washington moved warily toward the six culturally Islamic republics--five in Central Asia plus Azerbaijan across the Caspian Sea. It might have congratulated them on their independence and offered to open a broad relationship that would help them achieve their own aims while addressing a strategic, longterm U.S. agenda in the region. Instead, out of the six Muslim republics, the United States immediately recognized only two: Kazakhstan, the sole central Asian republic with nuclear weapons; and Kyrgyzstan, the republic ostensibly most committed to reform. In a narrow opening seen by man in Central Asia as condescending and vaguely biased against Muslims, Washington delayed establishing relations with the four remaining Muslim states, demanding their adherence to basic rules of international conduct, human rights, and democracy. While the intent may have been laudable, it ignored two points: The United states maintains relations with countries that routinely violate such rules; and America would ultimately have no choice but to establish full relations in the region, if only to avoid leaving Iranian diplomacy uncontested. In February 1992, Secretary of State James Baker reversed the policy and settled for promises by the Azerbaijan, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek leaders to observe the U.S. principles. Although his explanation to Congress--that the United States needed to open relations with these states because Iran was doing so--was forthright, it bolstered the message that the United States does not consider the Central Asian states important in their own right. The State Department did manage to defuse the situation somewhat by scrambling to open embassies--two in hastily prepared hotel suites--in the republics.
Except for the Tajiks, who are ethnically Persian, the ex-Soviet Islamic belt is formed of Turkic peoples: Azeris, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, and others. The broadly uniform Turkic culture and language that gave Central Asia its earlier name--Turkistan--was blended over a millennium from among the original nomadic Turks who migrated to Central Asia from the east, and the Arab, Persian, and Mongol conquerors who followed. Pre-soviet central Asia was a land of feudal or nomadic emirates whose people had little or no concept of political participation. The Soviet Union worked harder to remold the traditional Islamic societies it ruled than any of the European colonizers except perhaps the French in Algeria. Many of the changes that Moscow wrought deeply affect Central Asia's politics today.
Most significantly, Soviet policy firmly established the "nationalities" into which Central Asia is now divided. In pre-Soviet Turkistan, people had defined themselves primarily as Turkic or Tajik Muslims, identities that could have permitted the evolution of a unified polity across the region. The Soviets sought to prevent that by establishing five Central Asian republics, forcing on each a distinct "national" language and culture. It appears that strategy was a success. In hundreds of interviews in recent months, both city and village dwellers have expressed loyalty to their supranational identities as Muslims or Turks and to local identities of clan or region, but most often they have made clear that their strongest sense of affiliation is with their "national" group. National identities may have grown partly from the "national cultures" of literature and folklife that Moscow promoted to applaud and justify its rule, but mainly because each republic has become an institution serving a constituency within which it has built common interests.
Pan-Turkism, the idea that the Turkic peoples stretching from Turkey to the Xinjiang region of China must develop their common destiny, is a cultural force but has no visible future as a regional political movement. It is most popular among the more than 16 million ethnic Uzbeks, who would dominate any unitary Turkic structure in Central Asia. Turkic political unity would threaten the Russians who dominate northern Kazakhstan; therefore Kazakhs shy away. The roughly 4 million (non-Turkic) Tajiks and the Kyrgyz and Turkmens (each group with about 2.5 million people) would fear being swallowed up.
Islamic Revival
Recent reports suggesting that the vital factor in Central Asia is rising Islamic "fundamentalist" power, perhaps with Iranian or Saudi support, are simply not correct. Central Asia's Islamic revival is an indigenous movement and more cultural than political. The region's essential problem is that the Soviet collapse has left it with great aspirations but without political institutions for expressing them or a political model within which to pursue them. The Islamic revival rises from the Central Asians' most powerful aspiration: to assert the identities that Moscow suppressed for decades. Mainly, the revival does not seek state power; most people at newly crowded mosques and Islamic bookstalls say they seek Islamic influence in government by electing "good muslims" rather than by installing a theocracy.
In 1991 and early 1992, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia sought to influence the revival. But their roles are new and, given that revived nationalist feelings also spring from Central Asia's search for identity, their prospects seem limited. Saudi Arabia made the most obvious efforts, receiving the senior Central Asian clerics on pilgrimages and donating cash, computers, and Korans to the clerics' hierarchies, or "spiritual boards." Those institutions, once Soviet controlled but now largely independent of republic governments, seem focused on training mullahs, building mosques and Islamic schools, and improving people's hazy and rudimentary understanding of the Islamic faith.
Iran's visible diplomacy has been cautious. It has sent trade delegations and opened embassies in an apparent effort to build a broad relationship. Nongovernmental organizations have sent Korans, but diplomats have avoided statements that could be construed as having direct religious content. Officers of Central Asian security organs and Western intelligence reports allege Iranian financial support for some Central Asian groups with nationalist-Islamicist aims. While that support is likely, it has not yet manifested itself in either the strengthening of such groups or expressions by them of loyalty to Tehran. Pakistan has offered positions in religious colleges to Central Asian student mullahs, and delegations of mullahs and lay leaders from India, Libya, Malaysia, and Pakistan have visited local congregations.
Islam's revival has already sprouted grassroots political movements that will recruit the disaffected if Central Asian governments fail to meet basic aspirations. Such movements now find mass support only in Tajikistan and the Fergana Valley, which is divided among Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajikistan's Islamic Renaissance party mobilized thousands of people during anticommunist street demonstrations in fall 1991 and spring 1992; and Central Asia's most locally powerful Islamic political movement is in the Fergana Valley. There, in Uzbekistan's Namangan province, an organization called Adalat (Justice) seeks to enforce Islam-inspired law in villages and neighborhoods with religious remonstration, social pressure, and brute intimidation. For now, secular rule is well-rooted in Central Asia, and the Islamic movement suffers splintered leadership and a lack of institutions. But Islamic political activists already challenge government in Fergana and Tajikistan--and 5 or 10 years may well permit the development of an institutional Islamic rival for power there. If a generation is left frustrated by a failure of the secular model, all of Central Asia will likely face a challenge like that in Algeria today, 30 years after its independence.
Violence in Central Asia is manifested regularly in riots and ethnic clashes. Rather than springing from religious militancy, though, violence has generally occurred where economic frustration--often from price rises or lack of land, housing, or water--has coincided with ethnic tensions. Such violence is never far from the surface in the Fergana Valley, where Uzbeks clashed with minority Meskhetian Turks in June 1989, killing at least 100 and forcing the evacuation of more than 16,000. In June 1990, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz fought over land rights in the Fergana Valley city of Osh, killing more than 200, and villagers in the valley have also fought repeatedly over water rights. Residents of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, also rioted in 1990 following rumors that refugees from the Armenian earthquake were to be given apartments while Tajiks continued to suffer a housing shortage.
Economic dissatisfaction is intensified by the universal realization that life is better elsewhere. Soviet Tajiks and Uzbeks, for example, appear more attuned to the outside world than do their respective ethnic brethren in northern Afghanistan. Generations of Central Asians have seen the broader world through Soviet education and military service. The electronic revolution has brought pirated tapes of Michael Jackson and Madonna to urban bazaars. Possibly the best-known American among young boys is Arnold Schwarzenengger, whose bootlegged movies are played at ubiquitous "video salons." While governments that won independence in the 1950s or 1960s may have had mass populations that knew only of their traditional, village-based lives, Central Asians' glimpses of foreign affluence are likely to accelerate demands for change.
One frequent burden of decolonizing economies, rapid urbanization, has not yet begun in Central Asia. Thus far, the rural population seems firmly rooted and little inclined to flock to cities in a way that has produced impoverished, politically explosive shantytowns in many African, Asian, and Arab countries.
The political structures that must start meeting the Central Asians' aspirations are, for the most part, repainted communist bureaucracies. For decades those bureaucracies implemented Moscow's policies while they also discreetly struggled for power in what resembled a guerrilla war. With overweening force at its command, Moscow was able to win battles over who would govern and how; but it could not prevent local elites from building political patronage machines on the basis of regional, tribal, or clan ties. Those political machines largely remain in power.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a European event, driven mostly by Balts and Russians and, finally, by the voters of Ukraine. In the European republics, the people forced political change from below with what became mass demands for national sovereignty and democratic participation. In the culturally Muslim republics, political change has typically been demanded only by small groups of intellectuals who have almost never been able to generate mass followings. The one notable exception is outside Central Asia, in Azerbaijan, where the Popular Front built a fractious yet powerful coalition that forced the government to take a tough, nationalist stance insisting on continued control over Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly Armenian enclave controlled by Azerbaijan.
For now, secular rule is well-rooted in central Asia, and the Islamic movement suffers from a splintered leadership and a lack of institutions.
While Europeans escalated attacks on the very legitimacy of the Soviet government, the leaders of the Muslim republics sought only to use Moscow's weakness to assert nationalist claims--control over resources and a greater degree of national identity--that they had long sought from the center. But they also fought to maintain the Soviet structures, which preserved their power as apparatchiks, cradled their dependent economies, and provided a bargaining table at which to regulate their relations with the dominant Russians. The non-apparatchik exception was Kyrgyzstan president Askar Akayev, a physicist who unexpectedly came to power amid a feud between factions of the Communist party. Aside from Akayev and Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, Central Asian leaders showed at least qualified support for the August 1991 hard-line Communist coup attempt. When the coups' collapse doomed the Soviet structure, leaders of five of the six Muslim republics simply abandoned it, claiming political legitimacy as spokesmen for national independence, or as the only people who could maintain order. (Nazarbayev could not call for Kazakh secession from even the lame-duck USSR for fear that the ethnic Russians who dominate Kazakhstan's northern regions would themselves secede.) Central Asia's leaders have sought to legitimate themselves through popular elections, few of which (except in Tajikistan) had attributes of democratic voting or were viably contested.
As in all the former Soviet republics, the bureaucracies of the Central Asian states have little experience in responding to popular will or mobilizing popular support for policies. While the republics' leaders have met some popular demands for a reassertion of traditional and national identities, they will not be able to rejuvenate their economies without giving up essential levers of power, such as state ownership of land and industry. Even where top leaders are pressing for rapid privatization, as in Kazakhstan, entrenched elites within the administrative apparat have impeded implementation or directed new business opportunities to their relatives and political clients. Official corruption has worsened as the collapse of central Soviet authority removed the main control on republic-level officials.
The economic development required for political stability will be complicated by booming populations--more than 3 per cent annual growth in many areas--and a disastrous environmental legacy. Ignoring the fact that the Aral Sea is a closed, finely balanced watershed, Moscow designated the regions surrounding the Syr Darya and Amu Darya as a vast cotton plantation. Even nature was forced to yield to the plan. By diverting the two rivers to irrigation, the Soviets dried up their flow to the sea. Environmental specialists offer no hope for restoring the Aral Sea in the foreseeable future or even for halting its shrinkage. Windblown salt from vast stretches of exposed seabed has ruined farmland. In over-irrigated regions, rising water tables carry underground salts to the surface, with the same effect. Irrigation runoff, rich with fertilizers and pesticides, serves as drinking water for rural populations. High rates of typhoid, hepatitis, and throat cancer result. Near the Aral, mothers' milk is contaminated with pesticides and infant mortality is shockingly high--roughly 100 deaths per 1,000 births.
Central Asia must reduce its production of cotton, one of the chief sources of its hard currency, to grow enough food to feed itself and to help free water to allow recovery of the environment and economic development. Unfortunately, one of the most logical replacement crops for impoverished farmers will be opium--especially since corrupt officials, inaccessible terrain, and nearby borders will offer prime conditions for hiding and moving narcotics.
In de-Sovietizing Central Asia's economy, industries--which are concentrated in Kazakhstan--will suffer most because of their gross inefficiency and the need in many cases simply to abandon them. Unemployment was already severe in Central Asia during the 1980s and is growing. It appears to be worst in Fergana, and it can hardly be a coincidence that that valley has been the most consistent scene of violence. Central Asia's education and job-training systems were the poorest in the Soviet Union, so many of its unemployed are also undereducated. The shortage of skills has intensified as tens of thousands of relatively skilled European minorities--Germans, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians--have been leaving to escape nationalist tensions.
It has been in economic relations that Central Asia has most enthusiastically embraced its southern neighbors. While all ex-Soviet republics are desperate for development capital and any kind of productive trade, Central Asia has little hope of substantial help from the West except in the extraction of oil, gas, selected minerals, and cotton. Asian countries are not the economic engines that the West is, but Asian firms outnumber Western ones in the region, investing in tourism, cotton, leather processing, and other light industries. India, Iran, Pakistan, South Korea, and Turkey have actively sought business, hosting Central Asian presidents and trade groups. Notably, Japan for the most part has kept its distance from Central Asia, as it has from the rest of the former Soviet economy.
With budget pressures and competing demands on U.S. foreign policy, it is unrealistic to expect significant new aid for a region that lacks a political constituency in Washington. But the United States can play an important though relatively inexpensive role in promoting Central Asian stability.
The first requirement for such a role will be to respond to the basic aspirations all Central Asians share: full stature as states, practical independence, and economic development. An effective policy must express these aspirations as central goals, rather than suggesting condescendingly that America's main concern is to block the influence of Iran. Such a policy should understand that the Central Asians will naturally seek relations with Iran as a neighbor, just as two long-time U.S. allies, Pakistan and Turkey, have done for years.
Within a broad relationship stressing the Central Asians' goals, the United States should also promote its own interests. For the foreseeable future, the primary interest will be a sustainable stability that can allow an impoverished, fractious region to begin implementing economic development and political pluralism. That, of course, must go beyond the brittle stasis of conservative ex-communist bureaucracies keeping control through renamed Communist parties and KGBs. Along with those general principles, the United States will have particular interests and face particular challenges in each republic.
Uzbekistan
With close to 20 million people, most of the troubled Fergana Valley, and a border on each of the other Central Asian states, Uzbekistan will be the key to the region's stability. Largely because of Fergana, however, its stability is fragile.
Uzbek politics is a contest among five regions--Fergana, Khorezm, Samarkand/Bukhara, Surkhandarya/Kashkadarya, and Tashkent--with Fergana and Tashkent the most powerful. President Islam Karimov, from Samarkand, appears to balance the regional rivals within the former Communist party (now the People's Democratic party), which retains power as it did under Soviet rule: through patronage, repression, and price controls. Karimov stresses Uzbek nationalist symbolism but also wins support from the 11 per cent Russian minority by casting himself as the man to assure their continued security in the republic.
Karimov has expressed a desire to follow the Turkish economic and secular model, but he has had to be pushed by Tashkent elites seeking economic liberalization. Privatization of land and business has been limited. Direct American economic interests in Uzbekistan for the near future will probably be limited to cotton trade and possibly oil and gold extraction.
Karimov has allowed only symbolic political freedom in legalizing the Erk Democratic party, an intellectual-based opposition party as yet too small to challenge him. Birlik, which has (but may not control) mass political support in the Fergana Valley, and the Islamic Renaissance party, whose strength is unclear in Fergana but negligible elsewhere, are repressed. Tashkent cannot prevent opposition rallies in Fergana, however, and occasionally it has had to rely on clerics, headed by the Tashkent mufti, to help dampen periodic violence there.
Kazakhstan
With 16.5 million people, weapons facilities, nuclear missile bases, and large fossil fuel and mineral deposits, Kazakhstan is the other heavyweight of Central Asia. It is also the most distinct republic. Islam, which served for more than a millennium as a cement for the other Central Asian Muslim societies, is diluted among Kazkahs, who as nomads preserved traditional animism and ancestor worship almost intact until about 200 years ago. While Kazakhs regard themselves as Muslims, Islam must compete with their nomadic and Mongol culture and value systems. Kazakh society remains divided along regional and clan lines. Northern Kazakhstan is mostly Russian, the south mainly Kazakh.
With a delicate ethnic balance of around 40 per cent Russians and a nearly equal number of Kazakhs, Kazakhstan forms a political and cultural bridge between Russia and the core of Central Asia. President Nazarbayev envisions building Kazakhstan's economy largely as Russia's bridge to China and East Asia, and has begun reopening rail, road, and air links to China. The tie to China is political, too: A million Kazakhs live in Xinjiang, and more than 185,000 Uighurs, the main ethnic group of Xinjiang, live in Kazakhstan, where they are permitted to press quietly for Xinjiang's independence. While Nazarbayev is a pragmatist who understands the need to accommodate varied groups and permit at least formal political activity, it is not clear that he holds solid democratic convictions. He has kept the formerly communist administrative apparat largely intact, citing the danger of instability if he were to uproot it quickly--but in so doing he has allowed his economic reforms to be weakened.
Nazarbayev is backed by Russian and Kazakh political groups as an honest broker who condemns militant nationalism. He quit the Communist party and has encouraged the registration of numerous, though minor, political groups. Fears of ethnic conflict remain, however, in part simply out of recognition of the disastrous effects such conflict would have on Kazakhstan. There has been virtually no political melding of the two communities.
Although he has used missiles as bargaining chips to enhance Kazakhstan's position with Russia, Nazarbayev's commitments to secure Kazakh nuclear systems initially met with American approval. Still, in April 1992 the Bush administration declined to certify Kazakhstan as eligible for U.S. aid for dismantling nuclear arms following conflicting Kazakh public statements about the disposition of those weapons.
U.S. economic interests could grow with U.S. oil firms helping in the development of Kazakh oil fields, and Kazakhstan's considerable mineral wealth could draw Western investment. Encouraging stability in Kazakhstan will necessitate discouraging conflict between Russians and minority Muslims within Russia, a possibility that appeared likely in late 1991 when Russian president Boris Yeltsin seemed ready to crack down on Muslim separatists in the North Caucasus.
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan will likely be most important to the United States as a model of the possibilities of democratic, pro-Western development for the rest of Central Asia. Islam was adopted late by the nomadic Kyrgyz, so its influence is limited, although it is stronger in the Fergana Valley in southern Kyrgyzstan than in the rest of the country. A relatively tolerant tradition, an ethnically European population that constitutes a quarter of its 4.3 million population, and President Akayev's commitment to democracy have helped contribute to what is Central Asia's most vigorous democratic movement. But the Kyrgyz-European divide also poses the greatest threat to democratization as Kyrgyz nationalist sentiment grows and minorities flee. Akayev tries to mitigate conflict by balancing political appointments among regional, ethnic, and political groups.
After the August 1991 coup attempt, which also threatened his ouster by hard-line Communists in Bishkek, Akayev banned the party and seized its property, ending its political role. He has gone further than any other Central Asian leader in attacking the power of old elites, reforming local government bodies, and even ordering the government to cede control over the press.
Economically, Kyrgyzstan is even more dependent on its neighbors than other republics--it does not even have an oil refinery, for example. More than any other Central Asian leader, Akayev has pushed for land reforms, claiming in February 1992 that half of his country's farms had been privatized or converted into cooperatives. Kyrgyzstan has been aligned with Kazakhstan and Russia and more distant from more conservatively communist Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.
Turkmenistan
Central Asia's most politically primitive republic, Turkmenistan will have the longest road to any form of democratic pluralism. Power is concentrated in the hands of the Teke, the largest of the republic's three main tribes whose rivalry forms the basis of political contest. President Saparmurad Niyazov is highly Russified and was educated in Moscow. His wife is Russian and his children speak Russian rather than Turkmen, facts that contribute to disapproval among many Turkmens who feel that Niyazov is a cultural outsider. His administration still relies heavily on Russian bureaucrats and the republic holds many ex-Soviet troops and sensitive military installations. Repression here is the tightest in the region: Two tiny, secular opposition groups are banned, and their members are periodically arrested or harassed.
Like Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan is one of the most economically primitive republics and is thoroughly dependent on Russia. But considerable gas resources and its small (3.5 million) population offer it more hope than others have for quick economic development that might reduce poverty and promote the stability necessary for political change. Although Turkmenistan has turned to neighboring Iran for help with gas development, it would welcome a U.S. role. Few Turkmens see Iran's Shiite theocratic regime as an appropriate model for development. Further, Iran has neither particular influence nor a good popular image in Turkmenistan, largely because of longstanding conflicts between Turkmens and Iranians and because Tehran's relations with its own Turkmen minority are difficult.
Tajikistan
Tajikistan (population 5.1 million) is the most immediately unstable republic. Many young, unemployed village men are deeply traditional and impressed by the symbolism of Iran's Islamic revolution. They demonstrated in fall 1991 and spring 1992 for the ouster of the ruling Communists. Their protests appeared to be succeeding in early May as a coalition of nationalist, Muslim, and reformist groups was gaining power in Dushanbe at the expense of Communist president Rakhman Nabiyev.
Tajikistan, like Fergana, was a center of the anti-Soviet Basmachi guerrilla movement during the 1920s and 1930s. That history indicates a fierce adherence to tradition and resistance to cultural imports--one that has helped form the base for an Islamic political movement in the two regions. Tajikistan's most visible element of this movement is the Islamic Renaissance party (IRP), whose factions seek a shariat-ruled Islamic state but dispute how far to cooperate with the more moderate mufti, or senior clerics. Mufti Akbar Turadzhonzada is a leading Tajik political personality. He tells foreigners that he wants a structurally secular, spiritually Islamic state that adheres to international human rights standards. He cites Iran's violation of those standards and its political isolation from the West as mistakes to avoid. But he does not mention that vision publicly to the Islamic movement, which would firmly oppose it.
Nabiyev, a Communist leader from the Brezhnev era, had won what appeared to be rather free elections in November 1991 despite broad signs of his unpopularity. The victory illustrated the fears among European residents of an opponent backed by the IRP and the Tajik nationalist movement, Rastokhez--fears likely to be worsened by the May uprising.
Regional rivalries--born of the topography of isolated valleys--form the basis of Tajik politics. The Fergana Valley region of Khodzhent (formerly Leninabad) has dominated the power structure since the advent of Soviet rule. In the rest of Tajikistan, across a mountain divide, residents, including those of Dushanbe, have expressed resentment at what they feel is underrepresentation.
Tajiks view Iranian culture as a major resource for the strengthening of their own identity, one different from that of their Turkic neighbors. Yet, relations with Iran are ambivalent: Tajikistan's Sunni religious leaders express wariness of Iran's Shiism and have strained relations with their own Shiite minority.
No matter what direction political changes in Afghanistan now take, many Tajiks will continue to worry about possible efforts by militant Afghan fundamentalists to export their ideas. Mujahedeen guerillas in recent years crossed into Tajikistan, sometimes with Islamic literature for distribution. The Tajik KGB has charged the Mujahedeen with armed subversion, but there has been no independent evidence of significant arms flows. Tajikistan has an interest in close security ties with Russia, both for help to secure the Afghan border and as a counter to its Turkic neighbors.
The main U.S. interest in Tajikistan will be a return to political stability, under continuing threat from the republic's cultural, regional, and economic divisions. The United States also will want to ensure that the deeply corrupt bureaucracy does not seek to profit by producing opium or selling uranium supplies.
Throughout Central Asia, direct tool of U.S. policy will, of course, be limited. Currently available bilateral aid funds will have to be targeted carefully. Particularly useful U.S. roles might include providing technology and skills--especially in dry-land agricultural techniques such as drip-irrigation--that could reduce water use and help farmers shift from cotton production to a more balanced agriculture. Vocational and rural health education and water management reform require basic, low-level technology assistance that might be provided by the Peace Corps. One of Central Asia's most critical needs is to train experts who can play central roles in the transition to market economies and democratic political systems. Unmatched U.S. capacities in higher education could be especially helpful.
Central Asia is a long-isolated newcomer.
Perhaps the most obvious single U.S. policy instrument in Central Asia is Radio Liberty. In casual conversation, Central Asians cite the U.S.-funded service often enough to make clear that it is a major source of news about their own countries. Central Asian presidents, groping to understand the international arena in which they now work, have sought advice from their compatriots at Radio Liberty. The station is becoming a surrogate journalism institute for the former Soviet Union, training reporters from the republics at its Munich headquarters. Although Radio Liberty has faced temporary staffing inadequacies, increasing its broadcasts to Central Asia could be a relatively low-cost way to promote the stability and development that serve U.S. interests.
Given the limits on its foreign aid, Washington will have to encourage its European and Asian partners to take leading roles. Germany and South Korea have a special interest in aiding Central Asia because more than a million ethnic Koreans live there. The two communities were deported there from the Volga region and the Soviet Far East during World War II because Stalin distrusted them. Germany has already begun an aid program to encourage ethnic Germans to remain in Kazakhstan rather than emigrate to Germany.
Regional powers can also play constructive roles in Central Asia. The State Department seems to have heeded suggestions to promote Turkey's role in the region. Turkey's market economy and relatively democratic system can serve as a model, and its natural ethnic and cultural links to the Turkic peoples assures its interest. India's large economy, experience with the former Soviet Union, and technical skills can offer investment and development expertise. Russia should be encouraged to keep those roles that are consonant with the Central Asian's own interests, but the United states should be especially careful to not be seen as encouraging vestiges of Russia's Soviet-era "big brother" role, supervising its former colonies.
The Arab states along the Persian Gulf are particularly interested in helping their fellow Muslims in the former Soviet Union--and most of their aid appears targeted at religious development. A creative policy might seek their help in a multilateral Western-Islamic effort to provide aid and investment to address basic Central Asian economic and health problems. Such cooperation might mitigate unconstructive arguments that an inevitable and universal conflict exists between the Western and Islamic worlds, or that the two must scramble to control Central Asia's future. Recent American oped page discussions have even suggested that such a conflict might replace the Cold War as a crusade around which American foreign policy can define itself. Such a thrust to U.S. policy would be disastrous; Americans must understand that it is possible to encourage democracy in the Islamic world without casting themselves as enemies of Islam.
One effect of seeking partners is that many other U.S. policies indirectly become more relevant to Central Asia. Anything America does to enhance stability in Russia, democracy in Pakistan and Turkey, or economic liberalization in India is useful in Central Asia. So, of course, is any step to moderate Iran. The single most important element of indirect policy--especially for Tajikistan--will be efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. The Afghan war has provided Afghanistan. The Afghan war has provided a bazaar of weapons and a source of instability on Central Asia's borders, and it has blocked what is, for much of Central Asia, the most direct route to a warm-water port.
The first challenge for a constructive U.S. role in Central Asia will be to bring American attention to the region. That is hampered by a mood of isolationism and by a unique sense of futility about dealings with the Islamic world. The cycles of America's frustration and trauma in the Islamic Middle East collectively haunt U.S. policymakers as nothing else since the Vietnam war. Living room images of hostages, hijacking, and bomb wreckage have forged the attitudes of a generation of Americans. Most probably fail to understand the extent of the U.S. role in fostering the rage behind such violence and assume it is characteristic of Islam. Since most Americans have difficulty distinguishing among Muslims, the frustrations of Iran and Lebanon will obscure the potential prospects of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The case for U.S. attention to Central Asia will be made by foreign policy specialists rather than by public forces. Even within the American foreign policy and scholarly communities, though, only a relative handful specialize in Central Asia. They will need allies from the larger circle of specialists on the Arab and Islamic worlds. They also will need to gain the attention of key decision makers. Their difficulties were underlined by the December 1991 resignation of Paul Goble as State Department special adviser on Soviet nationalities and Baltic affairs, who, despite being the only prominent Central Asia specialist in a key policy position, expressed frustration at the lack of attention given to such issues.
Precisely because the world has become so small, the United States must attend to the troubled lands of Central Asia: vast, nuclearized, rich in resources yet mired in poverty. Political leadership must not ignore them, even worldly power; Central Asia is the long-isolated newcomer. But unlike Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan, it is now Asians who knock and Americans who must answer.