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Afghanistan as a land bridge
By C. Raja Mohan
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A cooperative endeavour to build pipelines and transport corridors in the region with Afghanistan as a key transit nation will help reinforce the efforts to have a moderate regime in Kabul.
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WITH THE diplomatic effort to establish an interim authority in Kabul completed in Germany, the focus now shifts to the quick delivery of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, which has seen nothing but war for nearly two decades. The plans for immediate relief and long-term reconstruction in Afghanistan are expected to be one of the largest international efforts in recent memory.
Afghanistan desperately needs this assistance. The rich western nations owe it to themselves and the Afghan people not to leave the country in the lurch this time. After the Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, America and the West celebrated their victory over the Soviet Union and turned their backs on Afghanistan.
The Bush Administration has given firm commitments that the United States will not walk away from Afghanistan this time. Although Washington remains reluctant to get directly involved in ``nation-building'' in Afghanistan, it is likely to mobilise the United Nations system and the international community in a big way to put Afghanistan back on its feet.
While international commitments to stay engaged appear credible at the moment, it is important to underline the fact that Afghanistan will not be able to thrive on aid alone. Nor will it be realistic to expect that the generosity of the international community will last very long. Along with the aid for relief and reconstruction, there must be a strategy to help the Afghan people help themselves. This requires a basic concept for long-term growth and prosperity. And that idea will have to be based on Afghanistan's unique location as the land bridge between the subcontinent, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Afghanistan's history is testimony to its special position on the ancient Silk Road that for centuries connected Europe and Asia and helped move people, goods and ideas across continents. The Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban and the exquisite arts of the Kushans symbolised the importance of Afghanistan on the cultural highways of a bygone period. Returning Afghanistan to that pivotal role is an objective that must inform the international efforts to reconstruct it. This would call for a fundamental reversal of Afghanistan's isolation from the international community in the last 200 years.
In the 19th century Afghanistan shut itself down. To avoid colonisation and prevent the Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Great Game from undermining its sovereignty, it de-linked itself from the world. A nation which once linked Europe and Asia shunned engagement with the European world. Afghan rulers banned their people from travelling on railways. As the British built railroads in the subcontinent right up to Peshawar and the Russians brought rail links down to Termez on the Amu Darya or the Oxus, Kabul was determined not to let the rail lines penetrate its interiors. Kabul saw railroads bringing unwanted foreign influence and making Afghanistan vulnerable to European marauders and soldiers. Afghan isolationism continued into the mid-20th century despite occasional internal efforts to modernise the nation.
The Soviet military intervention at the end of 1979 smashed forever the remoteness of Afghanistan and brought it to the centre stage of global geopolitics. But the Russian communists failed to deliver the much needed modernisation or integration with the world. And Pakistan's intervention during the 1990s produced the Taliban and its anti-modernist ideology. As the international community grapples with the future of the war-torn nation, a deliberate integration of Afghanistan into the regional and global economy will be essential to positively transform the nation.
Today in a world that is globalising, Afghanistan must be encouraged to rediscover its natural propensity to serve as a bridge between different people and cultures. In encouraging commerce and energy flows across Eurasia and in providing the much needed access to transportation corridors from inner Asia to the Indian Ocean, it can earn sustainable revenues and create modern infrastructure. The country's limited natural resources and its subsistence level agriculture are unlikely to lift Afghan society towards growth and prosperity. But natural gas pipelines and transportation corridors connecting energy rich but landlocked inner Asia with consumption centres in Asian rimlands and overseas could bring substantive riches to Afghanistan.
In recent years, the Great Game metaphor has been reinvented to describe the contest to exploit the natural gas riches of Central Asia and transporting them across Afghanistan. The U.S. energy company UNOCAL's failed efforts to build a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean have already acquired mythical proportions. The company with apparent backing from Washington in the mid-1990s had made a substantive bid to encourage the Taliban.
First, UNOCAL's assessment that Afghanistan can be a thriving ``transit'' country remains a sound one. The country has no other realistic alternative to moving its economy quickly forward. Second, a conflictual approach to building these pipelines is unlikely to work. The intense competition among the U.S., Russia and Iran to shape the pipeline politics of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea was bound to be counter-productive. The U.S. sought to cut the Russians and Iranians out of the pipeline routes. And Moscow and Teheran in turn were determined not to let other plans succeed. But the U.S., Russia and Iran have now cooperated, openly or tacitly, in ousting the Taliban. If they can extend the cooperation towards an efficient exploitation of the Central Asian natural gas resources, it should be possible to move away from the metaphor of the Great Game. The biggest beneficiary of such a shift will be Afghanistan. A network of gas pipelines and highways crisscrossing Afghanistan could connect the former Russian republics of Central Asia with the energy markets in the subcontinent, and link the gas grids of Iran and inner Asia. The pie is large enough to ensure a stake for each of the key players.
A cooperative endeavour to build pipelines and transport corridors in the region with Afghanistan as a key transit nation would also help reinforce the efforts to build a moderate regime in Kabul. Only a modernising and outward-looking Government in Kabul can fully exploit the natural advantages of Afghanistan as a land bridge. It is also important for a bridge state to remain in harmony with its neighbours and not allow hostile activity on its soil against other states. Equally important is for the neighbours not to disturb the tranquility of the bridge state through which so much beneficial commerce could flow.
The biggest obstacle to creating a Eurasian land bridge in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan. For the last decade Pakistan has nursed ambitions not only of creating a pliable regime in Kabul, but also to eventually gain control over the Afghan land bridge. But the romance in Pakistan in recent years about finding strategic depth in Afghanistan and exploiting its geopolitical location have come to a disastrous end. Pakistan, however, will be able to take advantage of the political geography of the region only if it is ready to transform itself into a ``bridge state''. The attempt of the international community must be to encourage Pakistan to become a transit state along with Afghanistan. The U.S. success in Afghanistan will depend on the ability to transform Pakistan into a state that is in harmony with its neighbours, sheds its obsession with gaining more territory and seeks prosperity through open borders and expanding trade linkages.
India has viewed with some suspicion the various proposals for trans-border pipelines within its Western neighbourhood. India needs to see these pipeline projects - that connect it with Iran through Pakistan, or integrate Central Asia to the Indian market through Afghanistan and Pakistan - as vehicles to transform the region. As the biggest economic force and the largest consumption centre for energy, India has a natural say in how these projects are structured. Instead of stepping back, India should leverage these projects to nudge the badlands to its west in a positive direction.
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