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Tropic of Chaos

Page 13

by Christian Parenti


  During the Soviet period, Kyrgyzstan’s economy was structured by subsidized integration into the greater USSR, in a pattern that one scholar called “welfare colonialism.” During the late Cold War, Kyrgyzstan became a major producer of weapons and military goods for the Red Army. But it lost those markets in the chaos of the USSR’s disintegration.

  In the eyes of Ahmed Rashid, “The salient fact about Central Asia today is that independent statehood was neither coveted nor sought by the region’s ruling Communist elites. It was thrust upon them when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Thus the region’s rulers were suddenly compelled to fabricate a new identity for their five ethnically diverse states—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—and to contend for the first time with radically differing ideologies.”17 And, one might add, new economies.

  After 1991, Kyrgyzstan became one of Central Asia’s smallest and most liberalized economies. With the sudden loss of Soviet markets and subsidies, Kyrgyzstan went to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for aid. These institutions in turn demanded an array of neoliberal reforms. The Kyrgyz political elites—high on the academic grog of neoclassical economic orthodoxy—complied more than willingly. Kyrgyzstan privatized agriculture, industry, and utilities; it moved to a freely convertible currency and removed most trade barriers. By the end of the 1990s, three-quarters of the economy had been privatized.18

  This was supposed to spur growth, but it only deepened de-industrialization: markets were now swamped by cheap foreign products that entered free of charge. Unable to compete with imports, many privatized firms were simply stripped of assets. Unemployment soared, and workers moved from cities back to the farms or out of the country. Between five and eight hundred thousand Kyrgyz now work abroad, their remittances forming an essential part of the economy. The Kyrgyz GDP fell by approximately 45 percent between 1991 and 1996 as industrial production collapsed and Soviet markets for Kyrgyz dairy products evaporated; inflation hit 1,200 percent in 1993.19 Per capita income has not yet returned to its 1989 levels, and Kyrgyz income inequality is among the worst in the region. The collapse of public services, such as health care and education, has forced people to fend for themselves. Over 20 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. More than 40 percent of Kyrgyz are poor, meaning they struggle to meet life’s basic necessities.

  Three-quarters of the government’s income from the sale of state assets went to paying off international debts. The privatization process was largely stopped and even reversed somewhat after the late 1990s. In 2010 the country had a GDP of about of $11.66 billion and (good news) an external debt of only about $3.4 billion.20 Kyrgyzstan’s mountains hold deposits of gold, rare earth, and other minerals, and its border with China means it could be pulled into the development vortex that is the PRC.

  For now, however, Kyrgyzstan’s people are mired in poverty and corruption. 21 Official unemployment is 20 percent, and with little prospect for a better future, elements of the population—its lumpenized, angry young men—turn to crime, drug running, nationalist xenophobia, and radical forms of political Islam.

  Central Asian Jihad

  The new states of Central Asia are defined by kleptocracy, despotism, dysfunction, and weakness. Over the last two decades, nonstate armed actors—ethnic warlords, drug traffickers, mercenaries, tribal militias, bandit gangs, and internationally connected terrorist networks, like Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)—have traversed the region, fought wars in it, and when pressured, moved south into the lawless regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.22

  Once economically and politically integrated and interdependent components of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian states now find themselves squabbling over previously shared resources and lines of communication and transportation. The ethnic populations that form these states’ nominal basis are also scattered across national boundaries. For example, Uzbek minorities live all across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

  No place embodies these stresses more than the heavily populated Fergana Valley. Here, the boundaries between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan bend in a convoluted pattern of political fragmentation. The area’s economic infrastructure, however, follows the natural logic of the landscape. The drainage of the Syr Darya River links the three states and peoples. The river offers a Ratzelian logic of economic integration: the water and valley offer the promise of combined hydropower, agriculture, and transportation links. But the post-Soviet chaos, ethnic nationalism of political bosses, and economic suffering brought by neoliberal shock therapy have devastated the Fergana. Today, it incubates violent combinations of political Islam and ethnic irredentism.

  We can see the future of Fergana Valley insecurity in its past. As early as 1917, local mullahs, landlords, and clan leaders in the valley and across Central Asia mounted an anti-Bolshevik resistance. These traditionalist, protomujahideen—called Basmachi, meaning “bandits,” by the Soviets—described themselves as standing for Islam, Turkic nationalism, and anticommunism. One of these bands of Muslim rebels was led by Enver Pasha, the former Young Turk, Ottoman minister of war, pan-Turkish utopian, and early abuser of Armenians who had left Turkey to fight further east. Various Basmachi forces used northern Afghanistan as a sanctuary, and those led by Ibrahim Bek were not finally crushed until the early 1930s and only then with cooperation between the royal Afghan military and the Red Army.23

  When war again broke out in Afghanistan during the 1980s, radical Islam also churned in Soviet Central Asia. An estimated thirty-five thousand Muslim fighters from all over the world passed through the Afghan war to fight for the mujahideen. Thousands more studied in radical madrassas in Pakistan.24 Through this circuitry of jihad the volunteers flowed, concentrated in the war zone on the border, where they absorbed military skills and radical ideas. Among them were Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz from the Soviet republics.

  In 1987 some mujahideen from Afghanistan—elements of the fanatic Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami—crossed into Soviet Tajikistan, attacked border guards, and rocketed the city of Panj.25 At the time, the US press wrote, “The guerrillas announced March 24 that about two weeks earlier, they had fired rockets across the Amu Daryu River into Soviet territory, killing up to 12 people.” On April 8, two Soviet border guards were killed during a second attack.26

  Five years later the region imploded. The worst and most intense civil war of that decade was the Tajik conflagration. As many as sixty thousand people were killed, and Human Rights Watch described massive ethnic cleansing campaigns. At the end of the war, elements of an Islamic resistance party joined the extremist IMU and made incursions into Kyrgyzstan’s portion of the Fergana Valley, parts of which are also controlled by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In 1999 and 2000, joint Kyrgyz-Uzbek military operations pushed the IMU into Afghanistan and then Pakistan.27

  By the summer of 2010, with Kyrgyzstan smashed by its climate-induced unrest, the IMU was rumored to be moving back into the Fergana Valley. The Kyrgyz government had lost control of much of the South of the country. As the head of the International Crisis Group, writing in the Independent , warned, “No one should underestimate the potential for large-scale ethnic violence to spread throughout the Ferghana Valley.” The region was primed for crisis.

  The drought in Kyrgyzstan finally broke in 2010. The same weather patterns that brought Pakistan to its knees brought reprieve for hydropower-dependant Kyrgyzstan. By August 2010, heavy rains had restored the water levels in the Toktogul reservoir.28 However, the Kyrgyzstan story is not over. The country remains divided, armed, and desperate. And the weather patterns upon which its hydro-dependent economy relies are increasingly eratic and very likely will become even more so as climate change intensifies.

  CHAPTER 11

  India and Pakistan: Glaciers, Rivers, and Unfinished Business

  Water Flows or Blood

  —Protest sign in Pakistan

  PAKISTAN AND INDIA are famously locked in
struggle. An important cause of this enmity is each side’s need for water. An important method in the conflict is Pakistan’s use of militant Islamist guerrillas and terrorists as proxies against India. One of this struggle’s crucial battlefields is Afghanistan.

  As climate change increases water stress in South and Central Asia, the India-Pakistan conflict, already unfolding on multiple fronts, is further aggravated. The India-Pakistan conflict is not reducible to water; nor is it caused by climate change. However, water and climate are key drivers of the conflict. As climate change brings more extreme weather, monsoon disruptions, flooding, drought, and rapid glacial melting, it plays an ever-greater role in shaping the India-Pakistan conflict.

  Water Tower Karakorum

  The India-Pakistan conflict pivots on Kashmir, in part because 90 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in the region, much of which is occupied by the Indian military.1 The conflict began in 1947 during Partition. Under the British Raj, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had a Muslim majority but was ruled by a Hindu maharajah and his court staffed by Hindu outsiders.

  The logic of partition was that India’s Muslims and Hindus constituted separate nations. The Muslim League put this forward, and the Indian National Congress reluctantly agreed to the idea of geographic separation along religious lines. That process quickly turned apocalyptic as Hindus and Muslims turned on one another; 1 million people were killed and 15 million displaced. These intercommunal conflicts were religious in name but also involved displaced and distorted class conflicts. As a scholar of that era put it, “Communalism is more than a religious phenomenon. Its social and economic overtones appear when peasants who happen to be Muslims are oppressed by Hindu money-lenders or when Muslim weavers strike against Hindu mill owners.”2

  A central element in Partition was the fate of British India’s 560 small, semiautonomous, so-called princely states. All were advised to accede to either Pakistan or India. Since the logic of Partition was that Muslim-majority areas should go to Pakistan, Kashmir seemed to belong there: it was more than 70 percent Muslim, and most of its trade links and communications lines tied it to that region. In one version of the original acronym that became the name Pakistan, the k stood for Kashmir.3 Additionally, and very importantly, “its three mountain-fed rivers, the Indus, the Jhelum (which flows through the famed Vale of Kashmir), and the Chenab, join in a single stream to descend through the Pakistan lowlands and empty into the Arabian Sea at Karachi.”4

  Indian leaders, however, saw Kashmir as a resource frontier and geostrategic asset that was too valuable to concede—remember, along with huge glaciers, it had forests, minerals, and borders with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, and China. As Alice Thorner, a leading historian of India, explained at the time, “Kashmir was conceived as both a gateway to greater Indian influence in Central Asia and a bastion of defense. India alone, it was argued, had the economic strength to develop Kashmir’s so far untapped water-power potential and mineral resources.”5

  The Hindu maharajah and his court were reluctant to yield their autonomy to either state, and a three-way stalemate ensued. Then, on October 22, 1947, Pakistan made its move. In the predawn gloom, an armed column of approximately two thousand Pashtun tribesmen—the first generation of Pakistan’s mercenary guerillas, recruited from the northwest borderlands with Afghanistan and led by a major in Pakistan’s army—invaded Kashmir. They drove sixty miles beyond the border before meeting opposition from a small force of Kashmir state troops. The maharajah’s government called for Indian military aid. As Indian troops were dispatched over the mountains by air, Kashmir’s Hindu leader finally agreed to Indian control. When Indian soldiers touched down in Singar, they found the town unoccupied but soon fought approaching tribesmen. The Pashtun had faltered in their advance, as renegade groups broke away from the main column to plunder. India soon held half of Kashmir.

  Pakistan immediately went on record as refusing to recognize Kashmir’s accession to India, and both states publicly agreed there should be a referendum on the matter. However, in private, Jawaharlal Nehru opposed the idea.6 India wanted, needed, felt it deserved Kashmir—a referendum would likely mean giving it to Pakistan. Two weeks later, India launched an assault that took two-thirds of the Pakistani-controlled territory. 7 By the middle of the next summer, Pakistan had regular military units in the fight.8

  Thus, Kashmir’s leaders went with India, while its majority Muslim population began to seethe under Indian occupation, and no referendum was held. Kashmir emerged from Partition divided and occupied. And beneath the Muslim-versus-Hindu conflict lurked the issue of water.

  Riparian Politics

  As far back as 1957, political leaders pointed to the centrality of water. Consider the comments of Hussain Suhrawardy, then prime minister of Pakistan:There are, as you know, six rivers. Most of them rise in Kashmir. One of the reasons why, therefore, that Kashmir is so important for us, is this water, these waters which irrigate our lands. They do not irrigate Indian lands. Now, what India has done—it is not threatening—it has actually, it is building a dam today, and it is threatening to cut off the waters of the three rivers for the purpose of irrigating some of its lands. Now, if it does so without replacement, it is obvious that we shall be starved out and people will die of thirst. Under these circumstances—I hope that contingency will never arise—you can well realize that rather than die in that manner, people will die fighting.9

  And so they did. In 1965 India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir. Again in 1999 the armies clashed in that region.10 India and Pakistan have conducted four wars during which Pakistan usually fared poorly. Two of them were fought over water-rich Kashmir. In 1971 Pakistan lost half its territory thanks to India. When a devastating cyclone in East Pakistan was met with a grossly inadequate government response, a secessionist movement launched a war for independence. Indian forces intervened to help them. Rebels captured ninety thousand Pakistani soldiers and helped midwife the new nation of Bangladesh.

  Consider the conflict from the Pakistani point of view. Pakistan is long and thin, sandwiched between two hostile states, India and Afghanistan. It is arid with a large and growing population, most of which works in agriculture. As such, Pakistan is one of the most “water-stressed” countries in the world, and this fact helps animate the struggle with India over control of Kashmir and Jammu. The Indus and its main tributaries rise in Tibet, travel through India into Pakistan, then descend from the cold mountains onto the hot, fertile plains of the Punjab to water the nation’s breadbasket.

  The Indus is Pakistan’s economic spine. Without the river, Pakistan’s stock of groundwater and impounded reserves would only last a month. No river, no country. And atop the river sits the enemy, India: huge, economically dynamic, politically democratic, internationally respected, and atomically armed. To the west, sitting upon the Kabul River, which drains into the Indus, is India’s unstable, often perfidious ally, Afghanistan. Afghanistan has switched from monarchy to republic, from one-party communist state to multiparty democracy, but never—except during Taliban rule—has she left India’s side. Imagine the stress this equation causes for Pakistan’s military and political elites. Pakistan is simply overmatched by India.

  Paradox of Scarcity

  Within this story of rivalry, water serves as a cause of both destabilization and, surprisingly, cooperation.11 One of the only transboundary water agreements in Central Asia is also the least likely: Pakistan and India are united by the Indus Water Treaty of 1960, negotiated under auspice of the World Bank.

  According to the treaty, Pakistan receives exclusive rights to the waters of the Indus and its main western tributaries, the Jhelum and Chenab. India is allocated the eastern tributaries of Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej.12 India can dam these rivers for power, fish from them, channel them for navigation, and so on, but it must release most of the water to Pakistan. In total, Pakistan should receive 80 percent of the waters that might otherwise reach
the Indus. In the 1950s, as the treaty took form, India clearly had the upper hand, but it needed World Bank financing to develop its economy. So, India agreed to terms that favored Pakistan.13

  Surprisingly, to date, the treaty has functioned. Why? One academic has argued that India and Pakistan cooperate because doing so is “water rational,” meaning, “cooperation was needed to safe-guard the countries’ long-term access to shared water.”14 But that tautology leaves unanswered the question: Why is conquest not water rational?

  The central issue in the treaty is India’s advantage. As the upstream riparian with the superior military, India could take more water. In fact, India could destroy Pakistan by turning the breadbasket of the Punjab into a desert. However, in the late 1950s, when the treaty was being negotiated, both countries needed World Bank financing, and only cooperation over water guaranteed that. Further, though Pakistan was in a weak position, India also faced significant constraints. Pakistan was closely allied to the United States and was part of the US-backed Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. Pakistan was also growing close to China, India’s rival. Two years after the treaty was signed, India and China even fought a brief war for control of other glacial peaks.

  Numerous other aspects of the international equation stayed India’s hand. For India to have launched an all-out war for Jammu and Kashmir and then built dams to divert Indus headwaters would have constituted an act of intolerable aggression.

  Instead, India holds Muslim-majority Kashmir as occupied territory. An intifada-like popular resistance now grips the province. During the crisis summer of 2010, Indian forces killed a demonstrator or two every few days.15 Indian officials in Kashmir are accused of ignoring “Kashmir’s significant economic troubles, rampant corruption, and rigged elections” and of intervening “in Kashmiri politics in ways that contradicted India’s own constitution.”16

 

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