by Ahmed Rashid
Afghanistan had held Central Asia in a tight embrace for centuries. The territory comprising modern day Tajikistan, southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan was one contiguous territory for centuries, ruled intermittently by amirs or kings in Bukhara or Kabul. The Amir of Bukhara depended on Afghan mercenaries for his army. Persecuted tribal chiefs, bandits and mullahs sought sanctuary in each other's territories, crossing a non-existent border. (Thus Tajikistan's decision in 1997 to hand over the Kuliab airbase in southern Tajikistan to Ahmad Shah Masud so he could receive military supplies from Iran and Russia, was but a continuation of these past linkages.) Afghanistan's contiguity with Central Asia came to an end after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the Soviet Union sealed its borders with its southern Muslim neighbours. The reopening of these borders in 1991 heralded the start of the new Great Game.
Afghanistan today borders Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan but only Turkmenistan has large energy resources. Along the Pamir mountains Tajikistan's five million people share a rugged 640-mile border with Afghanistan, which is divided by the Amu Darya river. A quarter of Afghanistan's population is Tajik. More Tajiks are scattered throughout the other CARs and another 200,000 live in China's Xinjiang province. The only major ethnic group in Central Asia which is not of Turkic origin, the Tajiks are descended from the first Persian tribes who inhabited Central Asia between 1500 and 1000 BC, but were later pushed to the peripheries by a series of Turkic invasions from Mongolia.
In ancient times, Tajikistan was the military and economic centre of the region. It acted as a gateway for the Silk Route and for Turkic invaders who rode west into Iran, Russia and Europe and south into Afghanistan and India. Russia annexed the northern part of present day Tajikistan in 1868 and it became a part of the province of Russia-controlled Turkestan. As the Great Game intensified, the British and Russians demarcated the border between Afghanistan and Central Asia in 1884, when Russia annexed southern Tajikistan.
After Stalin created the five CARs in 1924–25 by arbitrarily drawing lines on a map, he handed over Bukhara and Samarkand, the two major centres of Tajik culture and history to Uzbekistan, creating a rivalry between the two Republics which has simmered ever since. Modern day Tajikistan represents none of the population or economic centres of ancient Tajik glories. Stalin also created the Autonomous Region of Gorno-Badakhshan in the Pamir mountains, which contains 44 per cent of the land area of Tajikistan but only 3 per cent of the population. While the Tajiks are Sunni Muslims, Gorno-Badakhshan contains various Pamiri ethnic groups many of whom are Shia Muslims. They include the Ismaelis, a Shia sect and followers of the Agha Khan, who also inhabit the contiguous Badakhshan region of Afghanistan.
A few months after the 1917 Revolution, Muslim guerrilla groups sprang up across Central Asia to resist the Bolsheviks. These rebels were called Basmachis by the Bolsheviks, a derogative term meaning bandit. The movement stood for Islam, nationalism and anti-communism. Sixty years later the same inspiration motivated the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan. Determined to undermine Soviet power, the British helped the Basmachis in 1919, by paying Kabul's rulers to send camel caravans of arms and ammunition to the Basmachis. Thousands of Tajik Basmachis took refuge in northern Afghanistan as their struggle continued until 1929, when they were finally crushed by the Bolsheviks. In another replay in the 1980s, the USA encouraged the Afghan Mujaheddin to cross into Central Asia and attack Soviet army posts. And in reply Soviet troops in Afghanistan frequently called the Mujaheddin ‘Basmachis’.
Tajikistan remained an underdeveloped, poverty-stricken Republic on the Soviet Union's periphery. Its budget depended on subsidies from Moscow. After 1991, tensions between Uzbeks and Tajiks and intra-clan rivalries within the Tajiks erupted. The resulting civil war (1992-97) between the neo-communist government and an array of Islamicist forces devastated the country. Once again thousands of Tajik rebels and refugees found refuge in northern Afghanistan, while Tajik government forces were backed by Russian troops. President Boris Yeltsin declared in 1993 that the Tajik-Afghan border was ‘in effect Russia's border’ and the 25,000 Russian troops stationed there would be defending Russia.6 It was a reassertion of Moscow's role in Central Asia.
Ultimately the neo-communist government and the Islamicist opposition in Tajikistan agreed to a UN-brokered peace settlement, but neither side had been able to promote a national identity for the fragmented Tajik clans. These internal cleavages and the fact that it ‘lacked an indigenous intelligentsia to elaborate a nationalism linking the people to the land and each other’, left the country vulnerable to influences from Afghanistan.7 Both sides in the civil war eventually co-operated with Masud, who to many Tajiks became a symbol of Tajik nationalism as he battled the Taliban. The Taliban added to Masud's image by accusing him of trying to divide Afghanistan and create a ‘Greater Tajikistan’ by joining Afghanistan's Badakhshan province with Tajikistan. Masud denies such aims. For Tajikistan the Taliban represented an Islamic fundamentalism at odds with the moderate, Sufi spiritualism of Central Asia while Pashtun expansionism was at direct odds with Tajik aspirations.
In Uzbekistan Islamic militancy, partly fuelled by Afghanistan, is the most serious challenge to President Islam Karimov. The Uzbeks – the most numerous, aggressive and influential race in the region – occupy today's Islamic heartland and the political nerve centre of Central Asia. Uzbekistan has borders with all the CARs and Afghanistan. Its principal cities of Samarkand and Bukhara have played host to countless civilizations over 2,500 years and became the second centre for Islamic learning after Arabia. Medieval Bukhara contained 360 mosques and 113 madrassas and even in 1900 there were 10,000 students studying at 100 active madrassas. The 250-mile long Ferghana valley, with its long associations with Islamic learning and militancy such as the Basmachis, is the richest agricultural region in Central Asia and the centre of Islamic opposition to Karimov.
The Uzbeks trace their genealogy to Genghis Khan's Mongols, one branch of which, the Shaybani clan, conquered modern-day Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan in 1500. Mahmud Ibn Wali, a sixteenth-century historian, described the early Uzbeks as ‘famed for their bad nature, swiftness, audacity and boldness’ and revelling in their outlaw image.8 Little has changed in the Uzbek desire for power and influence since then. Uzbekistan is the largest CAR with a population of 22 million. And with some six million Uzbeks living in the other CARs – forming substantial minorities in three of them (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan) – Karimov has ethnic allies to pursue his agenda of dominating the region. Some two million Uzbeks live in northern Afghanistan, the result of migrations before and during the Basmachi rebellion. Another 25,000 Uzbeks live in China's Xinjiang province.
Well before Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, Moscow and Tashkent were cultivating Afghan Uzbeks to create a secular Uzbek-controlled ‘cordon sanitaire’ in northern Afghanistan that would resist any Mujaheddin takeover. For nearly a decade that policy was successful. General Rashid Dostum controlled six provinces and with military aid from Moscow and Tashkent, held off the Mujaheddin and later the Taliban. Karimov meanwhile led the attempt to forge an anti-Taliban alliance amongst the CARs and Russia after 1994. However, with the fall of Mazar in 1998, Karimov's policy collapsed and the Taliban were now Uzbekistan's immediate neighbours. Since then Uzbekistan's influence in Afghanistan has waned considerably as Karimov was unwilling to back Masud, a Tajik.
Karimov has also tried unsuccessfully at throwing his weight around in Tajikistan, where 24 per cent of the population is Uzbek. In 1992 Karimov gave military support to the Tajik government in its crackdown on Islamic rebels. By 1996 when peace talks were under way between the antagonists, Karimov attempted to force both sides to give a greater role to the Uzbek minority by supporting local Uzbek uprisings in northern Tajikistan. Karimov remains opposed to the Tajik attempt to make a coalition administration between the government and the rebels, because it would show the Islamicists in a good light – a lesson that would percolate down
to Uzbekistan's own frustrated population.
Karimov runs a tightly controlled, authoritarian police state and cites the civil wars in Afghanistan and Tajikistan as justification for repression at home. The most significant opposition to Karimov has come from underground radical Islamic groups, some of them Wahabbis, entrenched in the Ferghana valley. Many of these Uzbek militants studied secretly in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan or trained in Afghan Mujaheddin camps in the 1980s. Subsequently they developed links with the Taliban.
Karimov has passed the most stringent laws of all the CARs against Islamic fundamentalism, from restricting madrassa education to the growth of beards and has blamed all unrest on the Wahabbis, a blanket term which Uzbek authorities increasingly use to describe all Islamic activism. But with half of Uzbekistan's population under 18 years of age and widespread unemployment and inflation, unrest amongst Uzbek youth is growing. The social and economic dissatisfaction amongst young people is unrecognized by the regime. Even though Uzbekistan may be the most powerful state in Central Asia, it faces the most intense political and religious polarization. Karimov's failed forays into Afghanistan and Tajikistan have only encouraged Islamic militancy.
Nevertheless, Uzbekistan is a major player in the new Great Game. It produces sufficient oil and gas for domestic consumption and will soon be an exporter. Initially Uzbekistan was ignored by the oil companies who scrambled to sign contracts with Tashkent's neighbours. Karimov was both jealous and envious of their success in attracting foreign investment, even as he refused to loosen state controls on the economy to attract Western investors. As Tashkent becomes an energy exporter it will have a vested interest in trying to influence routes for pipelines that benefit Uzbekistan, but it will also act as a spoiler in its determination not to see its neighbours prosper and thus become more influential in the region.
Afghanistan's 500,000 Turkmen population also arrived as a result of the 1920s civil war in the Soviet Union. The first migration into Afghanistan was by the Esari tribe in the early nineteenth century, who were followed by the Tekke tribe after their revolt against the Bolsheviks failed. Turkmenistan is a desolate land of desert and mountains inhabited by the nomadic Turkmen tribes, who fiercely resisted but eventually succumbed to Persian, Turkic and finally Russian conquerers. Before the nineteenth century, borders were meaningless for the Turkmen who migrated freely across the region. Some 300,000 Turkmen still live in Iran, 170,000 in Iraq, 80,000 in Syria and several thousand in Turkey.
The Tekke, the largest Turkmen tribe, began to resist Russian advances into their territory in 1870 and wiped out a Russian army at the oasis fort of Geok Tepe in 1881. Six thousand Turkmen horsemen were killed a year later by a Russian retaliatory force. In 1916 the Turkmen under the charismatic leadership of Mohammed Qurban Junaid Khan began another long and bloody resistance against first tsarist Russian and then the Bolsheviks which continued until his defeat in 1927, when he took refuge in Afghanistan.
Throughout the Soviet era Turkmenistan was ignored by Moscow. The Republic had the highest unemployment rate, the highest infant mortality rate and lowest industrialization of any Soviet Republic apart from Tajikistan.9 As Moscow invested in the oil and gas industry in Siberia, Turkmenistan's potential oil reserves were ignored. Nevertheless 47 per cent of Turkmenistan's revenue in 1989 came from the sale of 3.2 tcf of natural gas to other Soviet Republics. The breakup of the Soviet Union turned Turkmenistan's customers into impoverished, independent states who could not pay their bills. ‘We have no idea now who will buy our gas and how they will pay for it,’ Foreign Minister Avde Kuliyev told me in December 1991.10
Turkmenistan's dilemma was that it was sandwiched between Iran which was unacceptable to the USA as a pipeline route; Afghanistan which was trapped in civil war; and Russia which wanted to limit Turkmenistan's gas exports to the West because they competed with Russia's own exports of Siberian gas. By 1992 Ukraine, Armenia and then even Russia refused to pay their bills for Turkmen gas imports. Moscow had a stranglehold as all Turkmen gas was pumped through the vast former Soviet pipeline network that was now owned by Russia. President Niyazov shut down gas supplies to his neighbours after Turkmenistan accumulated over US$1 billion in unpaid bills and Turkmen gas production slipped to 0.73 tcf in 1994, less than a quarter of what it was five years earlier.
Although the USA was determined to isolate Iran, Turkmenistan could not afford to do so, as Iran offered the nearest and most accessible outlet to the south and the sea. Adroitly Niyazov wooed the USA while seeking Tehran's help in developing road and rail links. In December 1997 the Iranians completed construction of a 119-mile-long gas pipeline between the Korpedzhe gas field in Western Turkmenistan to Kord-Kuy in northeastern Iran. The Turkmen gas that flows through it is consumed in northern Iran.11 This pipeline is still the only new pipeline built between Central Asia and the outside world after nearly a decade of trying.
Niyazov also courted Western oil companies to build gas pipelines that would free him from the Russian pipeline network. In April 1992 Turkmenistan, Turkey and Iran agreed to build a gas pipeline to Turkey and on to Europe which would cost US$2.5 billion. That pipeline never got built and subsequently saw several variations as the US tried to block any route through Iran. Finally, in February 1999, Turkmenistan signed another agreement, this time with a US consortium, to build a Turkmenistan–Turkey gas pipeline which would go under the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and avoid Iran.12
As Niyazov saw his economy crumble he sought alternative export routes. On the drawing boards in 1994 were plans for a 5,000-mile-long oil and gas pipeline eastwards to China that would cost over US$20 billion, but the project is still only in the feasibility stage.13 Also in 1994 Bridas, the Argentinian oil company which had concessions in Turkmenistan, proposed building a gas pipeline that would cross Afghanistan and deliver gas to Pakistan and India. The US company Unocal with support from Washington proposed a similar pipeline in 1995. The battle between the two companies to build this pipeline, which is explored in the next two chapters, sucked in the Taliban and the other Afghan warlords. Thus Afghanistan became the fulcrum of the first battle of the new Great Game.
Weak and impoverished and with no military force to defend its long borders with Iran, Afghanistan and its rival Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan opted for a foreign policy of neutrality. This gave the Turkmens the justification to keep their distance from Russia and avoid being sucked into the economic and military pacts that arose out of the break up of the Soviet Union. Neutrality also allowed Ashkhabad to avoid taking sides in the Afghan conflict, which angered Moscow and Tashkent as Turkmenistan refused to join the anti-Taliban alliance. Ashkhabad had provided the communist regime in Afghanistan with diesel fuel until Kabul fell in 1992. It proceeded to do the same for Ismael Khan who controlled Herat until 1995 and later the Taliban. While the Turkmen Consulate in Herat maintained good relations with the Taliban, its Consulate in Mazar did the same with the anti-Taliban alliance. Turkmenistan was the only CAR that wooed the Taliban rather than confronted them.
Like his Central Asian counterparts, Niyazov was a severe autocratic ruler, allowing no political opposition, censoring the media and maintaining state control over the economy. He developed a crude personality cult in the Stalinist mode, with his portraits and statues on display everywhere. An entire government department was set up to disseminate the President's pictures. Niyazov, like his rival Karimov, was an orphan. Both were bought up in communist orphanages and joined their respective Communist Parties at an early age, rising to become Secretary General well before independence. Their education, upbringing and loyalties lay with the defunct communist system but they both learned to play the new Great Game with skill.
No country in the region has benefited more from the break up of the Soviet Union than Turkey. Russia has been Turkey's most potent enemy for centuries. From the late seventeenth century to World War One, Turkey and Russia fought over a dozen wars and this rivalry had prompted Turkey to join NATO and try and become a m
ember of the EU. However, the independence of the CARs suddenly awakened Turkey to its much older historical legacy.
Until 1991 Pan-Turkism – the idea of a Turkic homeland stretching from the Mediterranean to China – was a romantic dream espoused by a few Turkish scholars and barely figured in Turkey's foreign policy agenda. Suddenly, after 1991, Pan-Turkism became an achievable reality and an integral part of Turkey's foreign policy. Turkish dialects were now spoken by an accessible and vast contiguous belt that stretched from Istanbul across the Caucasus and Central Asia to Xinjiang in China. The CARs saw Turkey as a model for their economic development – Muslim but secular – while Turkey desired to expand its influence in the region and become a major player on the world stage.
Turkey began to send massive aid to the CARs and the Caucasus – starting direct flights to their capitals, beaming TV programmes via satellite, offering thousands of scholarships to students, training their diplomats, soldiers and bankers and initiating an annual Pan-Turkic summit. Between 1992 and 1998 Turkish companies invested more than US$1.5 billion in the region, becoming the single largest state investor. Turkey also realised that to be effective in Central Asia it had to placate Russia which it did by buying Russian gas and expanding trade with Russia, which rose from US$1.9 billion in 1990 to US$4.1 billion in 1997.14 In 1997, the EU's rejection of Turkey's membership angered the Turks, but also pushed them into forging closer ties with the USA, Russia, Israel and Central Asia.
Turkey has become a major player in the new Great Game. Its need for energy and desire to expand its influence prompted successive Turkish governments to push for becoming the principal route for Central Asian energy exports. In the summer of 1997 the USA and Turkey jointly sponsored the idea of a ‘transportation corridor’ for a main oil pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan through Georgia and the Caucasus to Turkey's Ceyhan port on the Mediterranean. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan would be encouraged to feed their oil into this pipeline. This, the USA argued, would give the expensive and lengthy Baku–Ceyhan route the necessary oil volumes to make the project financially viable.15 The USA wanted Turkmenistan to build a gas pipeline under the Caspian Sea which would then run along the Baku–Ceyhan corridor to Europe.