The United States in Central Asia: Going, going…

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PASSENGERS at Manas, Kyrgyzstan’s main airport, might think they have landed in an occupied country, to judge by the dozen or more hulking grey warplanes on the tarmac emblazoned with “US Air Force” along their fuselages. But these monsters will only be around for a few months more.

America uses Manas as the gateway for almost every soldier coming into or out of its war in Afghanistan (see picture). But by the end of next year, it will have wound down its war there. Meanwhile, Russia is throwing its weight about in its Central Asian former backyard. It as much as promised Kyrgyzstan $1.1 billion in military aid and a debt write-off of nearly $500m if the Americans go. As a consequence, Kyrgyzstan’s leaders are evicting them from Manas in July.

This marks pretty much the end of more than a decade of direct American involvement in Central Asia. America’s strategic need for the former Soviet republics on Afghanistan’s northern frontier is fading. So is Western influence in the region, leaving plenty of room for other players to fill the void, notably Russia and China. Still, America is leaving Manas sooner than it would like.

American officials like to claim that they will be leaving a legacy behind. It would, said Hillary Clinton in 2011, when she was secretary of state, be in the form of a “new Silk Road”. An “international web and network of economic and transit connections” would link South and Central Asia via Afghanistan. Yet the proposal has yielded little. A senior Kyrgyz official scoffs at one of the project’s signature concepts, a line to export Central Asian electricity to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We have an electricity shortage here. We don’t need this,” he says. The idea looks unlikely to get off the ground.

Unlike the Americans, China puts its money where its mouth is. During a whirlwind tour of Central Asia this autumn, President Xi Jinping proposed his own “Silk Road economic belt”. He sealed the idea with tens of billions of dollars in road, rail and pipeline projects, all of them leading to China.

China’s money in Central Asia is welcome. The region will feel the pinch as NATO’s operations wind down in Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the poorest countries in Central Asia, will be hardest hit. Gas-rich Uzbekistan, the hub of NATO’s so-called northern distribution network, will also take a knock. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan will lose lucrative fuel contracts.

In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, the prime minister, Jantoro Satybaldiyev, cannot say how the country will make up the annual $60m in rent from Manas, nearly 3% of the national budget, or the additional $80m spent by the base each year. The IMF warns of economic “headwinds”. Bear in mind that Russia does not always deliver on its promises of help.

Americans insist that considerable military aid—often labelled as being for “counter-narcotics”—will continue to help Central Asian governments. But such aid does little for America’s reputation among those who care about the region’s atrocious human-rights record or its rotten governance. In Tajikistan, for example, the same elite troops who received over $3m in 2012 killed tens of civilians that year in a mysterious operation the government refuses to discuss. Alexander Cooley, an expert on the region at Barnard College in New York, says it is the price of American expediency.

In 2005, after the Americans criticised Uzbekistan for massacring hundreds of civilians in Andijan in the east of the country, the Uzbek government told them to vacate their base at Karshi-Khanabad. With America needing Central Asian logistical support for its operations in Afghanistan, expediency was understandable.

Less understandable is that, in four of the region’s five countries (Kyrgyzstan, a struggling democracy, is the exception), American aid budgets are shrinking, including for language training and other education. The stinginess does not help to sustain or spread American influence.

What of business prospects drawing Americans into the region? Kazakhstan, where the largest oilfield outside the Middle East is expected to be operating soon, remains the most attractive of the Central Asian economies. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are energy-rich but opaque. Investment there requires a huge appetite for risk. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are as plagued as their neighbours by corruption and unpredictability, but have less to offer in terms of business potential.

A senior American official promises that the military will not abandon Central Asia after leaving Afghanistan. The trouble is that American military aid helps dictators consolidate their power, leaving entrenched authoritarian regimes running shoddy states, rather than countries resilient enough to face threats from Afghanistan or to allow legitimate opposition from within.

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