Eurasianet: Central Asia: Can Expanded Trade Pacify an Unsettled Region?

Hillary Clinton’s new emphasis on the “New Silk Road” reflects how much is changing in Eurasia.  The need for Central Asia’s minerals and the infrastructural improvements in the region that make them more accessible have brought the Americans to the point of inventing – rather appropriating -- an old name for the world’s growing focus on Central Asia.  It’s not exactly a new idea; it’s been around for a long time.  But it reflects the necessity that if the world’s growing economies are to be fed they cannot ignore the abundance of resources in Central Asian grounds.  

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64419

Published on EurasiaNet.org (http://www.eurasianet.org)

---

Central Asia: Can Expanded Trade Pacify an Unsettled Region? by Joshua Kucera October 31, 2011

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked quietly and diligently during her recent trip through Central and South Asia to lay the groundwork for a regional stabilization plan, dubbed the “New Silk Road.” The vision sees expanded trade as the balm that can heal the region’s wounds.
The New Silk Road aims to stimulate regional trade between Afghanistan and its neighbors. At its most ambitious, it envisions Central Asia as a trade hub between Europe and Asia, as it was in the days of the old Silk Road. Clinton promoted it on her recent trip through the region [5], including stops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In the coming weeks, she will continue to make a diplomatic push to enlist allies' support for the vision.
As Clinton sees it, commodity and energy exports have the ability to lift regional economies. Trade, in turn, could naturally suppress Islamic militant tendencies. “Turkmen gas fields [6]could help meet both Pakistan’s and India’s growing energy needs and provide significant transit revenues for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tajik cotton could be turned into Indian linens. Furniture and fruit from Afghanistan could find its way to the markets of Astana or Mumbai and beyond,” Clinton said about the Silk Road strategy during a September speech at the United Nations.
As yet, there are few details on how the United States can make its regional trade vision turn into reality. Washington has identified up to 40 infrastructure projects that could be part of the plan, according to a US government official, and will also work to reduce legal and procedural barriers to trade, like onerous and corrupt border-crossing procedures. Clinton will attempt to gain allied support at two upcoming conferences, one November 2 in Istanbul and another in December in Bonn, Germany.
The United States needs to quickly develop an implementation plan if the strategy is to succeed, said S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington, DC. Starr cautioned that the State Department's version of the plan, as he saw it so far, needed to focus more closely on the “software” or border regulations, rather than on infrastructure. He also saw a need to develop a plan for short-, medium- and long-term projects. He proposed starting with relatively easy-to-implement but high-profile projects like truck convoys along a few key corridors. “Skeptics abound,” he told EurasiaNet.org. “We must prove to them that the United States can deliver tangible results that positively affect peoples’ lives, and do so in the short term.”
Starr has promoted a Silk Road vision [7] for several years. The State Department has long been wary of the plan, with officials initially dismissing it as unworkable. But it began to gain favor last year at US Central Command, and its commander at the time, Gen. David Petraeus. Since Marc Grossman became President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan[8], replacing the late Richard Holbrooke earlier this year, the State Department has come around to support the strategy.
Speaking in Islamabad on October 21, Clinton said: “We want to advance together the vision of a New Silk Road, which would increase regional economic integration and boost cross-border trade and investments between Pakistan and all of her neighbors.” The next day in Tajikistan, Clinton said she discussed the strategy with President Imomali Rahmon and “appreciated the president’s enthusiastic support for this vision.” In Tashkent she discussed the strategy “in some detail” to President Islam Karimov, according to a senior State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Doubts remain about the strategy's feasibility. The State Department, in its public statements on the plan, has highlighted a handful of existing or proposed projects on which the New Silk Road could be modeled, including a free-trade agreement signed last year between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline [9]. Skeptics note that the Pakistan-Afghanistan agreement, which was laboriously, personally brokered by Holbrooke, hasn’t yet been implemented. And implementation appears unlikely in the foreseeable future, due to strained bilateral relations. In a similar vein, versions of the TAPI pipeline have been on the drawing board since the 1990s, but insecurity in Afghanistan has scared away companies that might have the capital to complete the project.
With US and NATO troops scheduled to depart [10] by 2014, the security situation is likely to decline even further, a problem that the Silk Road plan's boosters acknowledge. “We have continued insecurity and instability in Afghanistan,” Sham Bathija, senior economic adviser to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, said at a recent conference in Washington on the strategy. “Yet we have no choice but to forge ahead.”
The Silk Road project may be making too many geopolitical assumptions, especially in the area of diplomatic relations among regional states, suggested George Gavrilis, an expert on Central Asia and borders at the Washington, D.C., think tank The Hollings Center. He noted that many of the countries in the region seem locked in persistent diplomatic spats with their neighbors; Pakistan with Afghanistan and India, Uzbekistan with Tajikistan [11] and Kyrgyzstan. Trade agreements are fragile and vulnerable to political difficulties, as evidenced by the fact that the border between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan has been closed for 18 months, following last summer's violence in southern Kyrgyzstan. The border only reopened this week. “I love the idea [of the New Silk Road] but I just don't see how it can be implemented,” Gavrilis said.
Another potential pitfall is the cost of infrastructure projects. “Unless the job is funded, it ain't going to happen,” said Juan Miranda, Director General of the Central and West Asia Department of the Asian Development Bank, which is a supporter of the project and has been carrying out a related infrastructure project, the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation, for several years. “So we have to think about that and it will be a challenge.”
Obama administration officials are mindful of a domestic political environment that is opposed to new government spending, has emphasized that it doesn't plan to allocate a lot of money on the Silk Road project. “With governments all around the world facing economic challenges, we have to focus on ways to make this work with limited government support,” said Robert Hormats, undersecretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, in a recent speech. “So, for the 'New Silk Road' vision to realize its potential, it is critical that the Afghan government and its neighbors take ownership of the effort.”

Editor's note:  Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East. He is the editor of EurasiaNet's Bug Pit blog.

2010 © Eurasianet

Sober reflections on Doomsday in the Arctic Ocean

"The doomsday [scenario] would be competitive resource wars. As climate change gets worse, people will be pushed to get more resources to run their air conditioners and so forth. My prediction is that we are still going to be addicted to oil (when the main icecaps melt) and these resources are going to be extracted by the most powerful lot - which would include Russia, the US and China." Paul Wapner

The Doomsday scenario is a pathetic joke – but only up to a point. We can only pity those who believe they can predict the coming of Christ [a strange view for Christians who claim to believe the Bible, given that it clearly says that “no one knows” and “it is not for you to know”], but to scorn the trends for humanity on a finite earth whose resources are limited is equally foolish. The trajectories of many indicators are unpromising: population growth, unremitting demand for fossil fuels, persistent insurgencies demanding more access to the good things of life, the readiness of great powers to fight for control of resource-rich lands, melting icecaps, rising seas. These and other conditions in the contemporary world call for sober assessment of what’s ahead. How is the world to avoid a wholesale meltdown? This is no time to gloat over the folly of those who try to set a date for the end of the world.

Consider for instance the prospect of the opening of the Arctic Sea to international concourse along with access to possibly huge amounts of oil. Shouldn’t that be good news? Well, not as the various interested parties see it. Yesterday, the day that according to Harold Camping was supposed to be Doomsday, Chris Arsenault published in Al Jazeera a report on what the recent WikiLeaks reveal about the foreseeable future for the Arctic. [Click on the title above for a link to the source.]

WikiLeaks: A battle to 'carve up' the Arctic: Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice - opening new areas to oil exploitation, cables indicate.
Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 May 2011

Energy experts estimate that the Arctic contains more than one fifth of the world's petroleum [GALLO/GETTY]
It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources.

"The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."

Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.

Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".

Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.

'Resource wars'

"The WikiLeaks cables show us realpolitik in its rarest form," says Paul Wapner, director of the global environmental politics programme at American University in Washington. "Diplomats continue to think of this as a zero sum world. When they see exploitable resources, all things being equal, they are going to approach them through a competitive nation state system."

The cables come to light at a time when academics and activists fear resource scarcity, particularly over dwindling oil and drinking water supplies, could lead to new international conflicts.

Sir David King, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, called the invasion of Iraq "the first of [this century's] resource wars", warning that "powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others".

In 2007, Russia planted its flag 4,000 metres below the Arctic Ocean, in an attempt to claim that its continental shelf, the geological formation by which claims are measured, extends far into the frozen zone.
"Behind Russia's policy are two potential benefits accruing from global warming, the prospect for an [even seasonally] ice-free shipping route from Europe to Asia, and the estimated oil and gas wealth hidden beneath the Arctic sea floor," noted a 2009 cable articulating US beliefs.

Presently, the Russians are far ahead of the US and other Arctic countries to take advantage of what will happen offshore, says Bruce Forbes, a research professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. "The cables confirm what we as scientists already know; [global warming means] the Arctic is not just this hinterland, as it is portrayed in the mainstream media."

In its 2010 Quadrennial Defence Review report, the Pentagon stated: "Climate change and energy are two issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment." . . .

[For more, click on the title above.]

Egypt: State power where there is no place to hide

Affairs in Egypt are of interest not only because of the human rights issue — the Egyptian people rising up spontaneously to demand democracy and an end to autocratic rule – but also because it is a kind of paradigmatic illustration of the relation between geography and the devices of popular coercion. Lately, as soon as scholars try to define the relation of systems of power to geography, they are accused of geographic determinism. Such attacks veil important issues. It is true, as some argue, that societies live in imaginary worlds of their own fabrication; but it is also true that societies deploy their imaginative “worlds” in social and material affairs that have their own properties, no matter what is thought or said about them. This is why it is useful to examine how power is constituted in geo-ecological settings, because those settings have properties that set limits on what can be usefully imagined for the exercise of power, that is, usefully deployed to coerce populations in real situations. Egypt is a kind of paradigmatic example of how the geo-ecological world constrains the range of options for those who must live in it. The essential conditions of life for the Egyptians is the Nile River and the deserts that abut it.

Egypt is essentially a society dependent solely on the Nile River – solely, in the sense that outside of the range of the river human habitation is nearly impossible. There is the river where humans can cultivate the land and beyond it there is desert where no one can live. Escape from the sown is virtually impossible. Historically Egypt has been ruled by small military coalitions who have exercised control of the peasant populations who had nowhere to flee. Coalitions that could control traffic up and down the river and the populations of the sown areas along it have been ruled millions for millennia. There have been changes of government according to rules of succession or by coups d’etat but the many popular uprisings in its history have failed because the populations of the country have been easily accessible.

This is why the current popular movement in Egypt, with thousands demanding democracy and the rule of law, is exceptional and truly [possibly] revolutionary.

But there is a contradiction in modern autocratic systems. Autocratic regimes must have an entrepreneurial/ bureaucratic class to manage societal affairs in the modern world. Such an entrepreneurial / bureaucratic class has to be educated; it must acquire knowledge of the wider world so as to be competent to engage with the wider world. But the education of such a middle class, the creation of a sizable body of individuals whose horizons are wider than the affairs of every day life, introduces them to social currents elsewhere. It is hardly surprising that such a body of people would demand rights that a dictatorial regime refuses to give. And in Egypt that body of individuals is large, and perhaps as many of half of them are under 25. They have yet to experience the brutal hand of an autocratic state.

It seems to me that the modern history of Egypt is the story of occasional confrontations between the demands of the entrepreneurial / bureaucratic class for more rights and the demands for obedience and conformity by those in power. The more intense the clashes became the more shrill became the calls to rebellion – until they were silenced by excessive repressive measures. Waves of public discontent were punctuated by periods of intense repressive measures deployed against key public opponents. In this context extreme ideologies of rebellion have taken root: the ideas of Hassan al-Bannah who founded the Muslim Brethren in 1928 spawned numerous radical activities; the social critique and moral appeal of Sayed Qutb set in motion the Islamist movement of the last forty years. But only elsewhere, for the radicals had to regroup outside of Egypt, as conditions within the country allowed virtually no activities against the regime. There have been many public demonstrations – but brute power crushed them, for the only escape was flight from the regime of the Nile.

What frightens me about the situation in Egypt now is that the populations, excited as they have been by the public display of their shared resentment of the Mubarak regime, have not yet discovered how far an autocratic regime will go to stay in power. The Chinese students who demonstrated on Tiananmen Square on behalf of a more open society had no idea that the Chinese regime would respond so cruelly. The Iranians who rose up in frustration at the state-sponsored hijacking of the national election in 2008 had no idea how far the Ahmadenijad / Khamenei regime would go to stay in power. In both cases widely supported demonstrations were crushed brutally. Had these regimes learned from the experience of the Shah of Iran who fled rather than further brutalize his own people? The regime that followed him has been careful never to flinch. Has Mubarak learned something from the sudden flight of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunisia? What we have yet to see in Egypt – despite the demonstrations, despite even President Obama’s clear demand that a change must take place “now” – is any serious indication that Husni Mubarak is really going to give up power.

We may never see it happen, now that his administration has mounted an organized response to the demonstrations. Loyalists on horseback and camelback are being deployed with whips against the demonstrators. Mubarak and those before him never held their positions by popular suffrage; he is unlikely to give it up. Pharaohs need not care whether they are liked.