The Regional Dimensions to Security

Since 9/11 the security situation in Afghanistan has been among the highest, or the most significant, priorities on the global security agenda, and a prominent issue on many regional and national security agendas. To begin with, this attention was centered on the US-led operation to eliminate al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban, before it switched to the state-building process in the wake of the initial success of these military operations. From the mid-2000s, however, an increase in military resistance from a rejuvenated Taliban and other groups led to a concentration on the counterinsurgency operations of the US and International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) troops. With the United States (U.S.) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) setting a deadline of 2014 for the withdrawal of the majority of their troops, the generalized security situation in post-2014 Afghanistan, and how the Afghan state and national army will cope with full responsibility for managing and counteracting instability, has become the prime consideration. This drawdown and the ongoing insecurity and insurgency within Afghanistan have brought to the fore questions about how Afghanistan’s neighboring states and the proximate regional powers relate to Afghan security.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 and the subsequent 10-year involvement of Soviet troops in that country was one of the great crises of the Cold War. The Persian Gulf area, India and Pakistan, Soviet Central Asia and even China were affected by, became involved in, feared the consequences of or changed their policies with regard to Afghanistan. Yet one would strain to come up with an overall thesis for the war’s effects on Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the case of China, for example, the intervention only catalyzed existing trends. The Sino-Soviet split dated back to the 1950s, and Sino-American cooperation had its start earlier in the decade. The main effect of the Soviet intervention was to give Washington and Beijing something else to agree on, and to give Beijing and Islamabad something else to cooperate on. Iran, while not at all pleased with the intervention, largely watched from the sidelines, providing only lukewarm support to rebel groups. Like Pakistan, it also had to deal with a large influx of Afghan refugees. Soviet Central Asia was a separate case; on the one hand, partially mobilized to help the war effort, and on the other, sealed, to the extent possible, from events south of the Amu Darya. Yet while the war had little effect on Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the Soviet period, its legacies would become important as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was collapsing and the independent successor states were taking shape, often violently.

Afghanistan is a socially diverse country whose people hold a wide range of views about their neighbors and regional cooperation. No one single view captures the attitudes of a cross section of the Afghan population. Afghanistan’s mosaic nature is such that most of its distinct micro-societies have extensive cross-border ties with the country’s neighbors. While some among its ethnic Pashtun cluster may be well disposed toward Pakistan, many non-Pashtun groups — the Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Hazara and Aymaqs — have generally shunned Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan, especially since the collapse of the Soviet-backed government in Kabul in April 1992, and more specifically since the theocratic rule of the Taliban (1996–2001), and have looked to Afghanistan’s other neighbors for affinity and cooperation. Perhaps the most salient view on which one can rely to shed light on Afghanistan’s attitudes toward its neighbors and regionalism is to draw on what the Afghan government has expounded and formulated in the last decade.

It is doubtful that many in the West paid much attention to the reinterring of the body of the Afghan poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili on 30 May 2012, in a quiet corner of the Kabul University campus.² His body had been moved, at the request of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, from its previous resting place in Peshawar in Pakistan, as part of an ongoing process of Afghan national cultural reassertion. The life and work of Khalili — like that of Allama Mohammed Iqbal, Abdul Rahman Baba and others before them — ought to have been more widely observed, because it holds an important lesson. While for the West, the “Af-Pak” relationship is predominantly viewed through the lens of contemporary security preoccupations, for the leaderships and peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan those preoccupations are an important, but transitory element of a far deeper and more complex relationship woven from cultural, historical, economic, ethnic, religious and tribal kinship threads. It is a relationship, furthermore, from which neither party has the option of strategic withdrawal.

On 4 October 2011, India and Afghanistan signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA).¹ This is the first such all-encompassing accord inked by two countries that once stood shoulder to shoulder as nonaligned states. The initiative taken by President Karzai and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh might be attributed to both necessity and forethought. For Afghan line ministers and “palace” elites, the deal guarantees continued material support. No doubt, even comparatively modest efforts to shore up Afghan institutions are considered vital at a time when Western forces have begun their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In the last few years, an understanding of the multiple interdependencies between Afghanistan and its various neighbors to the east, west and north has become widely accepted. While Washington and many analysts recognize the crucial role of Pakistan to the regional dimensions, a fact that is reflected by the term “Af-Pak,” Iran, Afghanistan’s western neighbor, has not been considered to the same extent. Indeed, apart from frequent accusations regarding Iran’s alleged support of the Taliban, little attention has been paid to Afghanistan’s second most important neighbor. When it is considered in relation to discussions about a solution at the regional level, Iran is often depicted as a spoiler and a threat to stability and security in Afghanistan and the entire region by Western analysts.¹

Since the arrival of American led-coalition forces in Afghanistan in late 2001 for what would be an extended military operation, China has been forced to reexamine its policies toward Kabul on several different fronts. Aside from ensuring that extremist groups from Afghanistan did not threaten security in China’s sensitive far-western frontier, the changing status of Afghanistan also presented possibilities for greater bilateral diplomatic and economic engagement between Beijing and Kabul. Moreover, Afghanistan’s evolving politics over the past decade has also influenced much of China’s foreign policy in both Central and South Asia. Beijing has responded to these myriad challenges by adopting a multifaceted approach to Afghanistan and to the regions surrounding the country.

Russia’s role and importance in debates on promoting regional solutions for Afghanistan is paradoxical. Moscow is a second-rank actor in terms of its influence over the Afghan domestic situation, well behind Pakistan and Iran, and also behind India. However, it is a major actor in terms of cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in large part thanks to the growing role played by the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), but also because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989) is seen as having foreshadowed the difficulties that the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) troops have faced in the country since 2001. Moreover, the states of Central Asia, three of which border Afghanistan, are also often omitted from the regional view,¹ even though all together, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, comprise a key neighborhood in Afghanistan’s future, especially with regard to the internal balance between the different ethnic groups that make up the country. This chapter first studies the weight of recent history in shaping Russia’s multifaceted relations with Afghanistan; second, it analyzes their bilateral relations and Russia’s proposed role in shaping solutions for the country; and third, it discusses Moscow’s responses at the regional level, both within the Central Asian, and a wider context.

The current stage of the United States (U.S.)/International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) campaign in Afghanistan can be characterized as driven by the promotion of “localization,” which at the same time implies “regionalization.” This strategy is thus a twofold process. One, transfer all responsibility for stability, security and state-building to the Afghans. Two, engage neighboring countries more actively in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. Among these neighbors, the three Central Asian states — Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — on its northern border are important actors within this strategy.

As outlined in the introduction, an important component to the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) strategy for their withdrawal from Afghanistan is to call on the states neighboring or in close vicinity to Afghanistan to come together and contribute to a “regional solution.” While this assertion can be characterized as extremely vague, there, nonetheless, seems to be an implicit assumption that it would necessarily involve some form of regional framework to facilitate and manage a coordinated response. The specific purpose and competencies for a “regional solution” have, however, not been articulated. Hence, it is not clear if it is envisioned that a regional framework would be responsible for taking over the current activities of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF), primarily counteracting the Taliban-led insurgency and training the Afghan National Army. Indeed, it is not clear that there are any substantive priorities within this discourse. What, however, is clear is that the prospects for a regional framework that undertakes an active “militarized” role are extremely remote. A more generalized regional approach to Afghan security appears more viable. Indeed, there has been a notable increase in discussion among actors in the wider regional space about the need for cooperation on Afghan security and stability more broadly.

In July 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined plans for a “New Silk Road,” an international economic and transit network linking Central and South Asia with Afghanistan at its heart. As an integral part of a thriving region, Afghanistan would attract new sources of foreign investment, reap the benefits from its mineral wealth and connect it to new markets. It would provide incentives for peace and reconciliation complementing military and political efforts to end the Afghan conflict.³ Afghan policy-makers have themselves long promoted this vision in statements and documents highlighting the importance of an expansion of trade and transport to Afghanistan’s economic development. With the specter of a drawdown of Western forces, this vision of Afghanistan as a “Asian roundabout” has gained greater traction. In February 2012, President Karzai stressed that

with the rise of the continental powers of China, India and Russia, it is our location and mineral wealth that will be of central importance to the Asian continental economy. They provide the possibility for our country to become a new Asian roundabout. It is time that the 19th century politics of spheres of influence and destabilization are replaced by a 21st century politics of engagement, collective security and economic development. Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of peace after the end of conflict in any country are its neighbors.⁴

Between 12 and 21 million individuals in the world consume opiates, three-quarters of them heroin. Afghanistan is the epicenter of the traffic as the world’s largest producer of opium and its derivatives. Contrary to Burmese heroin, essentially trafficked to China, and Mexican heroin, by and large destined for the United States (U.S.), Afghan production travels to nearly all parts of the world, with the exception of Latin America. Beyond the health consequences for consumers, the stakes are political. The illegal-narcotics trade constitutes one of the main financial sources of the insurgency groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but, more importantly, it feeds criminality in the set of countries through which they transit. The attention brought by the international community to such questions heightened in the 2000s as a result of the Western military engagement in Afghanistan. The 2014 withdrawal means that the countries of the region will have to play a greater role in the management of their borders and to confront questions about their capacity to stop potentially destabilizing trends emerging from Afghanistan. Numerous international and regional structures are trying to develop and coordinate counter-narcotics actions in the so-called Golden Crescent region (Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan) and in post-Soviet Central Asia. Nevertheless they face many obstacles of various natures, and their strategic choices are often made without sufficiently considering the aims of these actions.

The final chapter of this volume brings together the key arguments made in the preceding chapters on the perspectives and approaches of states in close proximity to Afghanistan toward the security of Afghanistan and the wider region, and the transnational/regional dynamics and actors within this space. In so doing, it seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the nature of the regional dimension to security in Afghanistan. It thus begins by assessing the intrastate, state-to-state, transnational, regional, trans-regional and global dynamics that make up the security context of this space. Drawing on this assessment, it will address the second research objective laid out in the introduction: what are the prospects for and likely nature of regional cooperation on managing Afghan security and stability post-2014?