Commentary in the Guardian: US opens route to Afghanistan through Russia’s backyard
A great new commentary about the issues facing the regions that we are interested in at Persianspeakingworld. An excerpt from the article in the Guardian featured below:
US opens route to Afghanistan through Russia’s backyard
American influence in former Soviet countries could make or break Obama administration’s new Afghan-Pakistan strategy
* Luke Harding in Nizhny Panj
* The Guardian, Monday 30 March 2009A soldier of patrols in the village of Madrassa near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Photograph: Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images
The road passes a shimmering green mountain pasture, then dips steeply to a new US-built bridge. Across the languid Panj river is Afghanistan and the dusty northern town of Kunduz. On this side is Tajikistan, Afghanistan’s impoverished Central Asian neighbour.
It is here, at what used to be the far boundary of the Soviet empire, that the US and Nato are planning a new operation. Soon, Nato trucks loaded with non-military supplies will start rolling into Afghanistan along this northern route, avoiding Pakistan’s perilous tribal areas and the ambush-prone Khyber Pass.This northern corridor is essential if Barack Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan strategy is to work. With convoys supplying US and Nato forces regularly attacked by the Taliban on the Pakistan route, the US is again courting the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Nato has already signed a transit deal with Tajikistan. It says it expects bilateral agreements with Uzbekistan “within days” and Kazakhstan “within weeks”. Pakistan will remain the primary route. But the sleepy Tajik-Afghan border crossing at the village of Nizhny Panj will become a focal point of Obama’s Afghan push.
“We used to cross the river by boat. Then the Americans built a bridge,” Rasul Nematov, 35, who lives in Nizhny Panj said. Next to his front garden, past a line of washing and a trailing vine, is a Tajik sentry tower. The Pentagon has given Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s attractive capital, $10m to beef up security on its mountainous border, a key conduit for Afghanistan’s biggest export, heroin.
Currently, only a few dozen Afghan drivers cross the bridge every day. From here they proceed to Dushanbe, filling up their Kamaz trucks with sugar and other goods. They then head home. The route goes past fields of cotton, donkeys, small boys selling fish, and willow and poplar trees, their blossom now floating across a fragrant spring landscape.
“This road to Tajikistan is good. It’s safe, quiet,” Said Muhammed, 54, an Afghan truck driver from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif told the Guardian. He added: “The problem is with the road south from Kabul to Kandahar. I don’t drive it. It’s dangerous. The Taliban dragged my friend out of his truck and set it on fire.”
But looming over the US’s latest attempt to get a foothold in Central Asia is the region’s former colonial super-power - Moscow. Formally, Russia has offered to help Obama in his attempts to deal with the deteriorating situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and last month it agreed the shipment of non-lethal supplies destined for Kabul across Russian territory. Informally, however, Russia has moved decisively to reassert its influence in Central Asia, a region it still regards as its backyard. In 2001 George Bush and Vladimir Putin, the US and Russia’s then leaders, cut an informal deal to cooperate over the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. Moscow allowed the US military to set up several bases in Central Asia.
Since then, though, the Kremlin sees itself as having been betrayed - by what it regards as US-engineered pro-western revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. It has hit back by sealing backroom deals with Central Asia’s democracy-averse strongmen. In 2005 Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, fed up with western criticism of his dire human rights record, kicked Washington out of its military base near the border town of Termiz.
Read the rest of the article HERE.