Article published August 22, 2007
SCO summit, military exercises pose challenge to U.S.
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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PRESIDENTS Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China, as well as the heads of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan met in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, last week. Afterward, they travelled to Russia to observe a Shanghai Cooperation Organization military exercise that involved 6,500 troops from the six nations in counterterrorism maneuvers. Invited observers at the summit included presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.
It isn't clear what the apparent increase in SCO activities means for the United States. There were pluses and minuses at the Bishkek summit. Iran, looking for friends in the face of recent U.S. threats of military action against it, would like to join. Mr. Ahmadinejad gave a strong anti-U.S. speech at the summit, opposing the Bush Administration's proposal to put parts of its new anti-missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, on Russia's borders. Russia would like Iran in the SCO. China wouldn't really, although Iran is an important source of petroleum for China.
Iran was not added to the SCO's membership list this time. Nor were Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia, other observer states that are reportedly interested in joining.
Another important topic at the summit was energy cooperation, a topic promoted by Mr. Putin. In that regard, oil states Kazakhstan and Russia are the haves; the others, the have-nots. Nothing was said publicly about cutting the price for oil within the SCO, but that's the sort of deal that greases the wheels of the kind of "unified energy market " that Mr. Putin is talking about.
Developments in Afghanistan were also an important topic of discussion. Member states China, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have borders with Afghanistan and are troubled by the resurgence of the Taliban and the re-emergence of Afghanistan as a drug state. Ironically, those two developments in Afghanistan cut opposite ways. The Taliban had stamped out opium production during its rule there. Opium production surged back with the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 by U.S. and Afghan forces.
The SCO has called for a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the region, a measure aimed at U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, as well as U.S. bases in the region. One of those is in Kyrgyzstan, near Bishkek, the site of the SCO conference. Uzbekistan kicked its American base out in 2005. These bases were established in 2001, after the 9/11 attack, with Russian concurrence, to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan. The Russians would now like to see them gone, the bloom having gone off the rose of U.S.-Russian relations.The other tricky equation within the SCO - which may serve to some extent to paralyze it - is that some states are predominantly Muslim and some are not. Russia is mostly Christian. China is nominally atheist, although it has a Muslim minority. The other four members are predominantly Muslim. Of the applicant members, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan are Muslim, while Mongolia is Buddhist.
Both Russia and China also have difficult, ongoing Muslim rebellions in their empires. Russia's, Chechenya, is the most virulent and bloody, very resistant to being extirpated. The Chinese one, the Uighurs in Western China, has been easier for China to keep under wraps, although it remains difficult to say whether that's because the Uighurs are less active, Chinese security forces more successful, or information about what is going on in that part of China is less easily available.
It is no accident that part of the SCO military exercise, focused on counterterrorism, took place in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Russia and China provided the bulk of the overall forces for the maneuvers.
For the United States, probably the most important aspect of the SCO at this point is that it has not been very active. It confines itself to one summit per year. The 2008 one will be held in Tajikistan; 2009's in Ekaterinaburg, Russia, which means that Mr. Putin's successor, or Mr. Putin himself if he decides to try to stay on as Russian president in spite of his pledges to the contrary, will be president of the SCO at that point. There has been a lot of talk about SCO unity and cooperation, but not a lot of walk behind the talk.
The United States can approach future relations with the SCO two ways. To some degree it can pretend the SCO doesn't exist, counting on its internal strains to continue to limit its activities and, particularly, any cooperation it undertakes that isn't in the U.S. interest. That approach has risks. Iran will continue to work on getting in. It is probably true in general that the more the four smaller 'stans and Afghanistan shelter under the SCO's wings - particularly Russia's and China's - the greater the extent to which they will draw away from the United States. That could serve as a route to separating ourselves further from the Afghanistan problem, if that is what we want to do, but with the obvious risks entailed in that course of action.
Or the United States can begin to take the SCO more seriously, ask to observe officially the next summit, in Tajikistan, and send a high-level representative to it, even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We could accredit a permanent observer mission to the SCO, visibly taking it more seriously and exploring possibilities of greater cooperation with the organization. This is probably the most sensible approach. It is unlikely that the SCO will go away, so the United States should seek more actively to work with it, to keep it from working against us.
Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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