The totalitarian streak in the US

During the Cold War, the economies and cultures of the two great protagonists were not that different. The US adopted a "totalitarian" mobilization of resources to win the struggle. The fragmentation of US society today, the departure from the healthy "semi-totalitarian" arrangements of the 1930s-1950s, makes the US increasingly unable to prevail in any new struggle.

Central Asia
Mar 1, 2007

COMMENT
By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy was among the very few of his speeches that have attracted world attention. Putin attacked the West, mostly the United States, and the strength of his speech led a number of Russian and Western observers to believe that Russia and the US have engaged in a new cold war. But a close analysis indicates that neither Russia nor the US actually has such plans.

The hedonistic and corrupt Russian elite who keep their capital in US dollars and euros - and who would gladly discard friendly Belarus because it demands cheaper oil - hardly are in a confrontational mood. But while this point is too apparent to be discussed, the possibility of the US engaging in a new cold war requires further scrutiny.

The Cold War has been studied for a long time, and quite a few pundits have promulgated it as a mortal struggle between "communists" and "capitalists", with ideology the key. This explanation does not account for the actual US-communist military alliance in China, starting with US president Richard Nixon's 1972 visit.

Another approach notes the small difference between the US and the USSR in geopolitical posture, suggesting that the Cold War was not so much an ideological conflict as a traditional power struggle between two empires. But the similarities, usually ignored, between the US and the USSR go much deeper and are related to socioeconomic and political practices. It is the US totalitarian streak that made it possible for the US to stand against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War evolved not just from World War II but from the entire socioeconomic culture of the 20th century. Modern war is a long exercise that puts pressure on all aspects of society and requires massive government engagement in both political and economic life. It requires emphasis on the "real" economy - production of goods, not profitability (mostly the interests of private shareholders), and even less what is called "service", the foundation of the economic "bubbles" of today.

It requires a socioeconomic discipline where the state's interests are paramount but there is a broad social-security net. The rudiments of this system emerged in various European states during World War I, with no Marxist or Bolshevik influence after 1917. The Great Depression reactivated the trend and led to the rise of states with many similarities with totalitarian regimes; Franklin D Roosevelt's USA was one of them.

Especially in the left and liberal American mind, there were two Roosevelts. One was the benign president who started a policy that would be developed by liberals and the left: regulation of financial institutions, subsidies for agriculture, the minimum wage, Social Security. The other was a madman who made "mistakes" such as sending hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans of Japanese descent to camps.

But this was one Roosevelt, and his policy was similar to that of other totalitarian rulers of the era. Indeed, the Nazis had a centralized economy, discarded profits for "real" production, and engaged in long-term planning for permanent war. They also combined repression, not just for outsiders but for insiders - ethnic Germans - with an increasing safety net for a majority of the people.

The vast majority of Western pundits would proclaim that the masses demonstrate special vigor fighting for regimes that guarantee "liberties". But the opposite is true. It is not regimes of Western liberal "liberties" - the policemen of property that have little or no interest in the well-being of the majority - but regimes that play the role of a tough but protective parent who, regardless of abuses, would never abandon its "children". This feeling pushed the army of the Reich to the suburbs of Moscow; the same feeling pushed Russian and American soldiers to Berlin.

The basic socioeconomic arrangements of World War II survived during the Cold War era. In the US, the state continued to be actively engaged in economic arrangements. Business emphasis was on the "real" economy and continuous, actually planned, improvement of quality of goods. This continued to be combined with continuous state control and harsh repression; in fact, McCarthyism was not much different from Stalinist policies. The same "totalitarian" streaks in US political/economic culture provided the state with the support and dedication of the majority. This made it possible to sustain the bloody Korean War and a range of crises and plans for generations ahead to stand against Soviet pressure.

The very similarities between socioeconomic elements of the United States and the Soviet Union provided the US the strength to confront its major Cold War adversary. But the collapse of the USSR was seen not as a great lottery win with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev but as a legitimate reward for the differences between the US and the USSR, not the similarities.

So the aspects that made the US similar to the USSR and 1930s-1950s America were discarded or minimized. And this makes the repetition of the Cold War, the generation-old conflict that required the exertion of efforts of an entire nation, impossible.

Most clear is the virtual disappearance of long-term planning and often the ignoring of actual results. Energy self-sufficiency has been regarded as essential for geopolitical/economic viability. But practically nothing is done about it despite years of talk. Concern with "real" production has almost disappeared.

The struggling automobile industry, a cornerstone of America's "real" economy, tries design, promotion campaigns, reduction of workforce and, of course, pressure on the government to protect it from "unfair competition". No real effort is made toward mass production of cars whose "real" characteristics would make them competitive.

Nor has there been planning to improve the quality or quantity of goods in most other segments of the economy. The emphasis is not on production but on profit, which could rise even if production declined. The stress is not on long-term planning but on immediate gratification, a stockbroker mentality, and rewards or punishment for playing with stock "bubbles". In fact, the rise and fall of stock "bubbles" are often unrelated to actual production.

This emphasis has also produced a US society with group but not national interests, where concern for the majority of the poor is ignored not just by the Republican right but by the liberal left. In fact, the attempt to change "affirmative action" preferential treatment based on race and gender to a policy based on low income is constantly rejected by the left as well as the right. The reason is simple: "affirmative action" benefits mostly middle-to-upper-class blacks and females; a change would benefit the poor and lower-middle classes regardless of race.

The fragmentation of US society, the departure from the healthy "semi-totalitarian" arrangements of the 1930s-1950s, makes the country increasingly unable to withstand a prolonged "cold war" struggle, either in the economy - consider the precipitous decline of competitiveness of US industrial goods despite the decline of the dollar vis-a-vis major currencies or even the "wooden ruble" - or in military affairs.

National stamina for a long conflict continues to decline, from the World War II victory with 300,000 combat deaths; the Korean War, a stalemate with about 38,000 losses; the Vietnam War defeat, with about 50,000 losses; to the present Iraq war, clearly moving to defeat, with only 3,000 losses and a mercenary army increasingly absorbing in its ranks anyone it can attract, including ex-criminals.

Carl von Clausewitz rightly noted a strong correlation between internal and foreign policy. Indeed, US survival in the Cold War was possible only because it accepted the enemy's socioeconomic arrangements - state involvement in economic activity; concern with real production more than profit; combining toughness and repressiveness with a broad security net not for "minorities" but for the majority of the poor; and, above all, planning for a generations-long economic and military struggle. None of these elements can be found in the present US, which is based on social fragmentation and a "bubble" economy of financial speculation and stock-market games.

This does not mean that the enemies of the US should be pleased. The "bubble economy" has produced a "stock-market war" - a war of quick and reckless adventures in which all available "cash" can be used for the mirage of a quick geopolitical profit, even if this "cash" is nuclear weapons. In fact, in sharp contrast with the calculating foreign policy of the Cold War era, the present elite - like many on Wall Street - preach the motto "shoot first, think later".

Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles, 2005.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Professor says America seeks Afghanistan Oil Deal

Saturday 20. Jan 2007

Is Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government supporting another Oil War? This would yield enormous profits for greed-driven investors, and the atmosphere will continue to dangerously heat from the increasing use of those fossil fuels.

by David Michael Smith

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush declared that the United States would launch a "War on Terrorism." In early October, U.S. airplanes began bombing Afghanistan and providing assistance to the Northern Alliance and other groups opposed to the Taliban regime. Within a few months, U.S. troops and their Afghan allies had succeeded in ousting the Taliban and installing a new regime. Although Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants apparently escaped, U.S. officials proclaimed that a significant blow had been dealt to the al-Qa'ida network.

Traumatized and outraged by the horrific events of September 11, the majority of Americans supported the war in Afghanistan. Most people believed the U.S. Commander-in-Chief when he said that the replacement of the Taliban regime was required to safeguard our country against another catastrophic attack by al-Qa'ida forces. Even Princeton Professor Richard Falk, a longtime anti-war activist, wrote in The Nation ("Defining a Just War," Oct. 29, 2001) that the war in Afghanistan was "the first truly just war since World War II." But was it?

Since last October, thousands of people have participated in anti-war rallies, marches, and teach-ins in New York City, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and other cities. People opposed to the war have made clear that they condemn the atrocity of September 11. But they also condemn the U.S. role in the deaths of thousands of Afghan people who had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In the British Guardian ("The innocent dead in a coward's war," Dec. 20, 2001), journalist Seumas Milne estimated that about ten thousand Afghan soldiers may have died in the war and cited University of New Hampshire Professor Marc Herold's estimate that about four thousand civilians have also died.

Moreover, anti-war activists and progressive writers argue that the war in Afghanistan has been, in large part, another "oil war." The September 11 attacks provided a compelling pretext for military action against the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan. But a growing body of research by journalists and scholars reveals that the Bush Administration's decision in favour of a regime change and all-out war in Afghanistan was significantly influenced by the desire to install a new government that would be more sympathetic to U.S. economic interests in Central Asia.

	Has Prime Minister Harper risked the lives of Canadians for an "Oil War" in Afghanistan under the guise of a "War on Terrorism"?

Although Afghanistan itself has no significant oil or natural gas reserves, it is strategically located in a region which does. As Eric Margolis observed in the Toronto Sun ("The U.S. is Determined to Dominate the World's Richest New Source," Jan. 13, 2002), Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, is the world's "richest new source of oil." In the Jurist ("The Deadly Pipeline War," Dec. 8, 2001), Marjorie Cohn noted that some analysts have estimated the potential value of Caspian oil and natural gas reserves at four trillion dollars. Phil Gasper recalled in the Socialist Worker ("The Politics of Oil," Jan. 25, 2002) that the Middle East Economic Digest editors have described Central Asia as "the Middle East of the twenty-first century."

Even if this latter projection proves overly optimistic, Martha Hamilton concluded in a Washington Post article ("The Last Great Race For Oil Reserves," April 26, 1998) that the "largely untapped subterranean treasure" in the Caspian Basin may be "the third-largest reserve in the world, after the Persian Gulf and Siberia."

This planned pipeline would carry $3-5 trillion in oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea basin via Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where ships docked in Arabian Sea ports.

As Hamilton wrote, "The possibility of bringing those huge energy reserves to market has touched off a scramble by international oil and gas companies to get in on what may be one of the world's last great energy plays." As Cohn pointed out in "The Deadly Pipeline War," Dick Cheney, then chief executive officer of the energy company Halliburton, told a meeting of oil industry leaders in 1998: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian."

U.S. government officials and energy company executives have been anxious to exploit what Daniel Yergin, renowned energy expert and author of The Prize (1993), has called "the number-one prize in world oil." However, the transportation of oil and natural gas extracted from the region has posed a serious challenge for them. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium, led by the Chevron Corporation, opened a new oil pipeline from Kazakhstan to Russia in October, 2001. But, as George Monbiot reported in the Guardian ("America's pipe dream," Oct. 23, 2001), policymakers in Washington have generally opposed the construction of pipelines through Russia or Iran. This is why U.S. energy companies and government officials have been so interested in Afghanistan. As Ahmed Rashid explained in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2001), U.S. policy toward Afghanistan during the past decade has been largely driven by corporate interests in the region's resources. Rashid noted that in 1995, the California-based UNOCAL Corporation began negotiating with the government of Turkmenistan to build oil and gas pipelines from that country through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. Soon after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996, UNOCAL executives initiated discussions with them in order to secure the pipeline agreement.

According to Rashid, the Taliban's religious fundamentalism and harsh repression precluded normal diplomatic relations at the time but did not pose an insurmountable obstacle to a potential business deal. Strikingly, neither did the relocation of Osama bin Laden and numerous al-Qa'ida fighters to Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997. As Rashid recounted, UNOCAL Vice President Marty Miller and other company executives even wined and dined Taliban representatives in Houston in November 1997. Mullah Mohammed Ghaus and his Afghan colleagues stayed at an expensive hotel and visited the Houston Zoo and the NASA Space Center during their visit. Miller offered the Taliban representatives a lucrative contract and thought a formal agreement was imminent.

The Clinton Administration quietly supported UNOCAL's efforts, but these negotiations eventually failed. Taliban leaders finally decided against the pipeline deal, and Washington's willingness to do business with them ended after the al-Qa'ida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on al-Qa'ida training camps in Afghanistan and even authorized efforts to assassinate bin Laden. At the same time, the U.S. tried to persuade Taliban officials to surrender bin Laden. As Monbiot has noted, notwithstanding these developments, U.S. business executives and government officials remained deeply interested in the potential of oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan.

In May 2001, the mainstream media widely reported that the new U.S. Bush Administration had awarded the Taliban regime forty-two million dollars to support the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan. Less well known is the fact that, shortly after taking office, the Bush Administration had quietly resumed negotiations with the Taliban. In an important new book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth (2001), French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have revealed that the Bush Administration worked long and hard to "decouple" bin Laden from the Taliban and lay the foundations for U.S. diplomatic recognition and pipelines for oil and natural gas.

Brisard and Dasquie have drawn on numerous sources, including discussions with John O'Neill, the former FBI Deputy Director who retired in July 2001. Ironically, O'Neill then became security director for the World Trade Center, where he died in the September 11 attacks. According to the authors, O'Neill resigned from the FBI because the State Department had continually blocked his investigation into al-Qa'ida's roots in Saudi Arabia. The authors report that O'Neill bitterly complained about the ability of the U.S. oil companies and their State Department allies to thwart an investigation that might offend the Saudi royal family and jeopardize U.S. economic interests in that country.

Brisard and Dasquie's account of the negotiations between the Bush Administration and the Taliban between February and August 2001, provides a helpful framework for understanding the eventual U.S. decision to topple the Afghan regime after the tragedy of September 11. The authors have explained that Washington saw the Taliban as a potential partner who could provide stability in Afghanistan and benefit from the construction of pipelines by U.S. corporations. But, in a series of meetings in Washington, Islamabad, and Berlin, U.S. officials demanded that the Taliban surrender bin Laden and invite other Afghan political forces to join their government.

When the Taliban equivocated over and eventually refused these demands, U.S. officials threatened to take military action against them. As Brisard revealed in an interview in Paris, at one point in the negotiations, these officials told the Taliban, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." As Jonathan Steele and his colleagues reported in the Guardian ("Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack," Sept. 22, 2001), U.S. representatives told Russian, Iranian, and Pakistani diplomats at a mid-July meeting in Berlin that Washington was seriously contemplating this option. Although these U.S. officials have since denied making such a threat, former Pakistan Foreign Minister Niaz Naik, who was present at the meeting, confirmed their remarks in an interview with the Guardian reporters. Is it a coincidence that the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history occurred just several weeks after negotiations with the Taliban broke down? Perhaps. But Brisard and Dasquie have speculated that the prospect of U.S. military action against Afghanistan may have led bin Laden to approve the massive assault on New York City and Washington. Similarly, Steele and his colleagues have raised the possibility that bin Laden "was launching a preemptive strike in response to what he saw as U.S. threats." Other analysts have suggested that bin Laden may have authorized such a "preemptive strike" because he feared that the Taliban might finally accede to Washington's demands and try to force him to leave Afghanistan.

Although such speculation cannot be confirmed, it seems clear that long-standing U.S. economic interests in pipeline construction played a major role in the U.S. government's decision in favor of a regime change and all-out war in Afghanistan. Notably, as Shaun Casey emphasized in the Boston Globe ("Ethics of This War Have Yet to be Spelled Out," Oct. 11, 2001) and Stephen Zunes pointed out in the San Jose Mercury News (" U.S. Military Response is Wrong -- And It Won't Work," Oct. 12, 2001), there has never been any evidence of the Taliban regime's involvement in the attacks on the U.S. As John Pilger remarked in the British Daily Mirror ("Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror," Oct. 29, 2001), the Bush Administration knew well before the Pentagon's first bombs began falling on Afghanistan that the attacks of September 11 were planned in Britain and the United States, and that none of the actual perpetrators were Afghan nationals.

As Howard Zinn observed in The Progressive ("A Just Cause, Not a Just War," December 2001), the U.S. government rejected the alternative of turning to international law, diplomacy, and limited multinational military action in order to bring al-Qa'ida forces to justice. As Zinn has noted, the U.S. government also rejected the Taliban regime's offer to surrender bin Laden for trial in a third country after receiving evidence of his involvement in the September 11 atrocity. As Phil Gasper wrote in the International Socialist Review ("Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban," November-December 2001), the Bush Administration's refusal to seriously consider these options revealed that the overthrow of the Taliban and the installation of a new, more business-friendly regime had already been designated as primary objectives of the impending war. In his book Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2002), Professor Michael Klare of Hampshire College has acknowledged that one purpose of "Operation Enduring Freedom" was to "capture and punish those responsible for the September 11 attacks." But Klare has explained that a second objective was "to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil." As Klare has emphasized, while this latter objective "may get far less public attention than the first, this does not mean it is any less important."

In a report released just days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. Energy Information Administration described Afghanistan as a significant "potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea." However, the report noted that the potential construction of oil and natural gas pipelines has "been undermined by Afghanistan's instability." As Monbiot has written, "Given that the U.S. government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking." Indeed, the way in which the Bush Administration sought to "capture and punish" the al-Qa'ida forces in Afghanistan was significantly influenced by its commitment to promoting U.S. economic interests and power in the region.

Gore Vidal argues in his book entitled, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002), that the drive for profits and power are central to the Bush Administration's so-called "War on Terrorism." Vidal writes, "We need Afghanistan because it's the gateway to Central Asia, which is full of oil and natural gas... That's what it's all about. We are establishing our control over Central Asia."

Many Americans may not want to believe that such economic motives could play so important a role in U.S. foreign policy. But developments in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan make it difficult to deny journalists Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer's observation that "War is politics by other means, and politics is business, and oil is very big business."

As Hightower and Frazer concluded in their book The Hightower Lowdown (January, 2002), the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan "put the U.S. pipeline plans back on track." Hightower and Frazer cited a remarkable article in the Pakistani Frontier Post (Oct. 10, 2001). This article reported that, though the U.S. war against the Taliban had barely begun, U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain had already informed the Pakistan government that, "in view of recent geopolitical developments," the negotiations for a pipeline through Afghanistan would be revived.

After the Taliban regime collapsed, the Bush Administration hand-picked Hamid Karzai to head the new Afghan government and named Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American, as its new special envoy to the Karzai government. As Richard Neville pointed out in the Australian Sydney Morning Herald ("Beyond Good and Evil," April 15, 2002), both Karzai and Khalilzad are former consultants to UNOCAL. Eric Margolis has disclosed in the Toronto Sun ("America's New War: A Progress Report," Dec. 9, 2001) that Karzai is also a former "asset" for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. As Salim Muwakkil wrote in the Chicago Tribune ("Pipeline Politics Taint U.S. War," March 18, 2002), the "rise to power" of these two former UNOCAL employees will "make things even smoother" for the resumption of the pipeline project in Afghanistan. As Daniel Fisher reported in Forbes Magazine (Feb. 4, 2002), "It has been called the pipeline from hell, to hell, through hell" but "now, with the collapse of the Taliban, oil executives are suddenly talking again about building it." To be sure, the giant U.S. energy corporations are unlikely to make major investments in the project until the new Afghan regime proves able to suppress the outbreaks of violence among the various warlords' forces and any military challenge from resurgent Taliban fighters. This is certainly one reason why U.S. and British troops in Afghanistan are struggling to piece together a viable Afghan national army that can defend the new regime.

In the meantime, Karzai has already made clear that his government fully intends to work closely with neighboring countries and U.S. oil companies to reap the immense profits from the transport of Caspian Basin oil and natural gas. On Feb. 8, 2002, Karzai visited Pakistan and joined with General Pervez Musharraf in pledging "mutual brotherly relations" and cooperation "in all spheres of activity." As the Irish Times reported on Feb. 11, 2002, Karzai announced that he and Musharraf had discussed the proposed Central Asian pipeline project "and agreed that it was in the interest of both countries."

The mounting U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries may enable Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, UNOCAL, and other giant corporations to lay claim to "the number-one prize in world oil." But the extension of U.S. military power and economic domination into this region comes with very grave risks. As hundreds of millions of people in Central Asia and the Middle East watch their oil and natural gas being extracted and transported for the profit of Western companies, the prospects for a massive, violent backlash against the U.S. and its client regimes are likely to grow. As horrific as the September 11 attacks were, they may only be the beginning.

Make comments about this article in The Canadian Blog.

About the Author:

David Michael Smith is a professor of government at the College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas , in the United States.

Our Next Big Mess

Dec 29, 2006

By Ted Rall

NEW YORK--Chances are that you heard more about Rosie O'Donnell's flame war with Donald Trump than the passing of Sapamurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov. As seems to occur with increasing frequency, America's media ignored the most important story of the year.

A handful of news outlets that bothered to cover the 66-year-old dictator's death wallowed in the humor inherent in the extravagant personality cult he built up after Turkmenistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Cannier obituary writers noted that the Central Asian nation "contains many of the world's largest natural gas fields, and provides gas to Russian and European countries." (Actually, the largest. Period.) But they missed the main point of the story, one with dramatic short-term consequences for Central Asia and breathtaking dangers to the United States during the first half of the new century.

The Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and--until now--Turkmenistan are all being ruled by the same former Communist Party bosses who ran them in Soviet times. Niyazov's death marks the beginning of the end for the post-Soviet authoritarian order and the beginning of a period of increasing instability, as foreign powers attempt to monopolize access to oil and natural gas resources and pipeline routes. Kazakhstan alone may possess more untapped oil reserves than Saudi Arabia and Iraq combined, and the politics and economies of the Central Asian republics are closely intertwined. What is at stake is nothing less than the security and control of the world economy.

Unless you were one of the five million desperately poor Turkmen forced to watch while your desert nation's gas wealth was systemically looted and squandered on such vanity projects as the gilt statue of Turkmenbashi that dominates the skyline of Ashkhabat and turns to face the sun (local wags say the sun turns to face it), it was easy to laugh at the ubiquitous trappings of unhinged egotism. Turkmenbashi's moon-eyed mug glared from banners hung from the façade of every government ministry and school, appeared on every denomination of currency, even on his own brands of vodka and cologne. Everything was named after him: the country's second-largest city, its airports, a large meteorite, the month of January. His not-so-little green book of aphorisms ("Time is a mace. Hit or be hit!"), the Rukhnama, became required reading for schoolchildren and motorists who sought to renew their driver's licenses.

Saddam Hussein's reputation for self-indulgence had nothing on Turkmenbashi. Niyazov's megalomania ranged from the grandiose--at the time of his death he had just completed the world's largest mosque (featuring quotes from the Rukhnama, naturally) and had ordered the construction of a man-made lake in the middle of the Karakum desert--to obsessive micromanagement. Each Turkmen student's college application was personally considered by the great man.

Even his commonsense dictates came with a bizarre twist. During the 1990s Turkmenbashi ordered that natural gas, as a national patrimony, be supplied to Turkmen homes for free. Since most people were too poor to afford matches, however, it became common practice to leave their stoves on 24-7. Where foreigners saw hilarity, Turkmen seethed with resentment; Ashkhabati motorists saved their household garbage so they could chuck it on the lawn of one of Niyazov's pink pleasure palaces.

A power struggle is underway. Within hours of Turkmenbashi's fatal heart attack his Constitutionally-mandated successor, Majlis (lower house of parliament) chairman Ovezgeldy Atayev found himself behind bars, arrested for an unspecified "criminal investigation." An obscure deputy prime minister and former dentist, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, declared himself acting president and has arranged to have the Constitution retrofitted to validate his rule.

"Many Western analysts," reported The New York Times, "said the country was unlikely to change and that authoritarian rule would continue under any of Mr. Niyazov's successors." But Turkmen exiles who lead opposition parties are itching to fill the vacuum, if not of power, of charisma, left by Niyazov's demise. Leaders of the nation's five biggest tribes are jockeying for advantage. And five million Turkmen who can't afford matches want a piece of the action--and want to get even with the government thugs who shut down the country's hospitals and medical clinics.

Everyone is betting that Turkmenbashi's foreign policy of "positive neutrality" won't last long. Russia has already indicated its intent to reassert itself in Turkmenistan. Here's where we come in: no American president, Democrat or Republican, will allow Russia to gain control over the world's largest energy reserves without a fight. Moreover, neither Russia nor the U.S. will watch idly as Central Asia implodes and takes the world economy along for the ride. U.S. troops, currently based in Uzbekistan, could be sent in to restore order and keep the Russians out.

Signaling renewed high-level interest in Turkmenistan, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov both attended Turkmenbashi's funeral on Christmas Eve.

Uzbekistan's universally reviled despot Islam Karimov, who got away with the 2005 massacre of at least 700 civilians at Andijon because of his country's energy reserves, will almost certainly be an early casualty of civil strife in Central Asia. A witch's brew of Stalin-era ethnic gerrymandering and brutal suppression of a nascent Islamist insurgency, mixed with the collapse of Karimov's Uzbek police state, could easily take Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan--poor countries barely recovering from civil conflict and dependant on the urban-based Uzbek economy--with them. Even Kazakhstan, the most stable of a fragile lot, is susceptible to an uprising; few Kazakhs have shared in the nation's oil boom.

Whether or not Turkmenbashi's death directly affects its neighbors, it's a reminder that Central Asia's autocrats aren't getting younger. Laugh about the Leader of All Turkmen's excesses now. The storm is coming.

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)

The Great Game on a razor's edge

Over the past year, it has become clear that the US will not be able to become the single dominant power in Central Asia and thereby control oil and gas and their transportation routes. Russia and China have together put up dikes delimiting US influence, though they are far from being a tight couple. The death of Turkmenistan's president Saparmurat Niyazov, however, could dramatically shift the center of gravity of the Great Game.

Dec 23, 2006

By M K Bhadrakumar
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years

The accidental killing of Alexander Ivanov, a Kyrgyz fuel-truck driver, by Corporal Zachary Hatfield, a US serviceman, at the Manas Air Base on the outskirts of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek in December is threatening to snowball into a first-rate crisis for the United States' regional policy in Central Asia.

Manas is the lone US military base in all of Central Asia - close to the Chinese border of Xinjiang. Curiously, this was also how the year 2006 began, as Washington was grappling with the call
made by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) for a timeline for the withdrawal of the US military presence in Central Asia.

In a nationally televised address, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev called for reviewing the Manas base agreement with the US. The Kyrgyz Parliament passed a resolution that given the "negative perception of the American image among our country's population", Bakiyev should examine the continuance of the base. The Foreign Ministry made a demarche with the US that Hatfield shouldn't leave until the Kyrgyz due process of law took its course.

This is rhetoric out of Latin America. Yet Bakiyev had only come to power on the crest of the US-backed "Tulip Revolution" of March 2005. But US-funded Kyrgyz "civil society" groups are nowadays arrayed against him on account of his increasingly pronounced foreign-policy leanings toward Russia and China.

They turned rowdyish in November, and humiliated him, forcing on him a new constitution curtailing his presidential powers. That is to say, Washington must now seek Bakiyev's help while backstage it could be funding and instigating political activists bent on overthrowing him. Bakiyev's overthrow may help the US firm up its grip on Manas, but today his helping hand is useful for preserving US interests. Nothing could be more surreal. Nothing would so vividly epitomize the complexities of the geopolitics of Central Asia.

Great Game slows down
The Great Game in Central Asia itself may appear to have considerably slowed down in 2006. But nothing could be more deceptive an impression. True, we've witnessed nothing like the cataclysmic events of the previous year - "Tulip Revolution" or the Andizhan uprising in Uzbekistan. Yet great-power rivalries most certainly continued - passions that were largely driven underground, where they simmered without taking a confrontational character.

Partly this was because the bickering over geopolitical influence became somewhat manifestly lopsided, with Russia and China not only retaining their gains of yesteryear but also consolidating them, and the US painstakingly attempting to recoup its lost influence in the region.

The single biggest "success story" of US diplomacy in the Great Game during the past year has been that Washington prevailed on Russia and China to give consideration to its reasoning that granting full membership to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the SCO might not be consistent with their own long-term interests. This was no mean achievement, considering that both Russia and China have such high stakes in their bilateral relations with Tehran. But Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad attended the summit as a special invitee. The SCO evidently keeps open the "threat" of Iranian membership.

Equally, the fact that, unlike its previous year's summit, the SCO meeting in June 2006 did not assume an overt anti-American overtone must remain a matter of relief for Washington. In many ways, the SCO demeanor has come to be the litmus test of the United States' geopolitical standing in Central Asia at any given time. Contrary to earlier US estimations, the SCO is increasingly acquiring a swagger that is suggestive of its potential to become the main powerhouse of the Eurasian region - arguably, a leading Eurasian economic and military bloc. The SCO comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

During the five-year period since its birth in 2001, the SCO, which has as members a number of underdeveloped countries including some desperately poor ones with nothing ostensibly to bind them together except their common geography, has not only held together but has grown in size and influence.

Initially drawing on the Chinese tri-fecta of "terrorism, separatism and extremism", the SCO speaks today about the establishment of a free-trade area and about common energy projects such as exploration of hyrdrocarbon reserves, joint use of hydroelectric power and water resources. But from the US perspective, the SCO agenda continues to be laden with a heavy cloud of suspicion regarding the United States' geostrategic intentions in the Central Asian region.

This impression gets further confirmed by the SCO's decision to hold large-scale joint military exercises scheduled for the coming summer in central Russia with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the military alliance that is Moscow's answer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's enlargement into the post-Soviet space. The CSTO includes Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

That the military exercises will take place against the backdrop of the chill that has descended on Russia-US relations in the past year or two, and in the light of the likely deployment of the first interceptors of the US missile defense systems in Central Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, is no doubt significant.

It is irrelevant whether the SCO can be called a latter-day Warsaw Pact or a "NATO of the East". What is important is that on a practical plane, when it transpired that the US aircraft deployed at Manas Air Base might be undertaking reconnaissance missions into sensitive military regions in central Russia and China's Xinjiang, Moscow and Beijing put their foot down and acted in concert within the framework of the SCO, insisting that the stated purpose of the US military presence in Central Asia must be fulfilled in letter and spirit, namely that it restricted itself exclusively to undertaking resupply missions for the "war on terror" in Afghanistan.

The then-Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, was caught in the middle and overthrown from power in the process as a furious Washington let loose the "Tulip Revolution" on him for his perceived intransigence in turning down the US request for the stationing of AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft in Manas. But the SCO quietly and firmly held its ground. Thereby it made an important point - that it had gained traction as a security organization. Not only that, the SCO proceeded to follow up at its summit in June 2005 with the call for the vacation of the US military presence in the region.

Indeed, going one step further, the SCO emphatically rallied behind the leadership of Uzbekistan in its move to ask for the vacation of the US air base at Karshi-Khanabad. On both counts - restrictions placed on the use of Manas and the eviction from Karshi-Khanabad - Washington meekly had to give in. In the process, Bishkek even renegotiated the bilateral agreement on Manas a few months ago by getting Washington to increase the annual rent of the base from US$2.7 million to between $150 million and $200 million.

The year 2006 has thus made it clear that the US is unlikely to become a single dominant power in Central Asia. Simply put, Russia and China have together put up the SCO dikes delimiting the US influence in the region, which will be difficult for Washington to breach for the foreseeable future. During the year, by and large Washington has vainly exhausted its energies in attempts to create misunderstandings between Russia and China and in pitting one SCO member state against another.

The heart of the matter is that apart from the bleeding wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan, which remain a major distraction for US diplomacy worldwide, US policy in Central Asia is seriously handicapped in two other respects. First, the United States' complete loss of influence in Tashkent after the Andizhan mishap in May 2005 is cramping overall US diplomacy in the region.

There is no denying that Uzbekistan is a key country in Central Asia. In the Soviet era, everyone from Josef Stalin down knew the axiom that Uzbekistan was the hub of the geopolitics of the region. True, the US put out several feelers to Tashkent through intermediaries for reconciliation, and lately even the European Union lent a hand, but Tashkent wouldn't budge. The laceration of Uzbek national pride by the US over Andizhan opened such painful wounds that forgiveness may take much time coming and will extract sincere repentance on the part of Washington for its role in the Andizhan uprising. Meanwhile, the US has been left with no option but to watch Russian and Chinese influence in Tashkent expanding by leaps and bounds.

In a similar fashion, but in an even more fundamental sense, US diplomacy in Central Asia is seriously hobbled by Washington's alienation from Iran. Ten years have gone by since the famous article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in Foreign Affairs magazine calling for unconditional abandonment of the US policy of containment of Iran. Brzezinski had brilliantly argued the case (which most US career diplomats assigned to the region then also believed) that for US regional diplomacy to be anywhere near optimal in the Caucasus, in the Caspian region and in Central Asia, it must befriend Tehran. But Washington's mental block over Iran persists.
Meanwhile, the "Greater Central Asia" strategy unveiled by Washington last April with so much elan has already fizzled out. The strategy was avowedly intended to roll back Russian and Chinese influence in the region. Testifying before the US Congress that month, a senior State Department official said, "A lot of what we do here is to give the countries of the region the opportunities to make choices ... and keep them from being bottled up between two great powers, Russia and China."

The US official conjured up visions that could only belong to the world of fantasies: "Students and professors from Bishkek and Almaty can collaborate with and learn from their partners in Karachi and Kabul, legitimate trade can freely flow overland from Astana to Islamabad, facilitated by modern border controls, and an enhanced regional power grid stretching from Almaty to New Delhi will be fed by oil and gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and hydropower from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan."

No wonder there are no takers in Central Asia for Washington's policy construct. Central Asian states are aware of the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and reckon that peace is a distant goal. Even New Delhi seems embarrassed. Islamabad keeps quiet. The only capital to evince enthusiasm for Washington's paradigm of steering Central Asian states toward South Asian allies has been Kabul.

Sino-US convergence?
But failures may often hold the key to success. In a way, the current failures in regional policy may open a window of opportunity for the US in the period ahead. The point is: Without the glue of a serious US geopolitical challenge to bind them together into undertaking collective countermeasures, can the Sino-Russian condominium hold together in Central Asia for long? It is apparent that divergences have already appeared in the respective Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia.

China has used the SCO forum and the Russian influence in Central Asia to return to the region, which is indeed its back yard, for the first time in nearly 1,000 years. It is important to bear in mind that Beijing launched the idea of the SCO, and Russia accepted it. China views Central Asia as its "near abroad". As China's economic muscle grows, Beijing can afford to be more assertive.

China's soft power is already at work in the region. It is increasingly able to invoke its bilateral-cooperation mechanisms with Central Asian countries. There is hardly any need for China to ride piggyback on Russian goodwill or Russian influence in the region. China has used the SCO for acquiring local knowledge, and in building relations with the region's indigenous political, economic and military elites.

It is in the area of energy security that Chinese interests and concerns have already begun diverging significantly from those of Russia. The trend during 2006 has been that Russia's energy interests - in controlling the region's transportation routes for oil and gas, in sourcing the region's energy for meeting Russia's domestic needs that would leave an exportable surplus for meeting its commitments in Europe, in having a say in determining the price of energy in the region - are increasingly affected by China's robust quest for oil and gas in the region.

The early signs of this contradiction in Sino-Russian cooperation in Central Asia began appearing in 2005 when the China National Petroleum Corp acquired the PetroKazakhstan oil company for $4.18 billion.

China's gas deal with Turkmenistan in April 2006; the commissioning of an oil pipeline from Kazakhstan; China's proposal for an energy-pipeline grid for Central Asia and connecting it with Xinjiang; China's cooperation agreement with Iran in the Caspian region; China's gas deals with Uzbekistan; China's interest in participating in a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline - all these are happenings within one calendar year, each imbued with strategic significance.

This past year, too, China has waded into the controversial waters of the Caspian Sea in search of oil when last January Iran's North Drilling Co and China Oilfield Services Ltd signed an oil-exploration agreement relating to the disputed deep waters of the southern Caspian. In one way or another, all these developments cut into Russian interests in Central Asia's energy sector.

Having said that, however, the China-Russia strategic partnership has a much greater regional and global logic than Central Asia, and the attempt in Moscow and Beijing will presumably be to harmonize their differences in Central Asia from spinning out of control. Also, both Moscow and Beijing realize that Central Asian states themselves will seek out Russia to balance their relations with China.

How these contradictory tendencies will play out within the SCO processes presents an engrossing topic. Clearly, the opportunity arises for the US to establish a dialogue with the SCO. A breakthrough may come in 2007. The prominent Russia hand in the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, Ariel Cohen, wrote recently, "Given that the SCO primarily serves as a geopolitical counterweight to the US, Washington stands little chance of ever receiving full membership in the group ... But US officials do not necessarily need full membership in the organization in order to work closely with the Central Asian states. It would serve Washington's best interests to remain in close contact with the SCO. To do so, it could resubmit an application seeking observer status.

"To boost the chances of success," Cohen added, "the US should engage Central Asian states by balancing democracy promotion and democratization with its other national interests, including security and energy."

Conceivably, we may expect even a NATO overture to the SCO in the coming year. In an exclusive interview with People's Daily last month, NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Schaffer held out the interesting suggestion to Beijing that there doesn't have to be a contradiction between China's membership of the SCO and China's future cooperation with NATO.

Without doubt, a palpable sense of urgency is already apparent in US thinking to the effect that the Chinese-Russian strategic partnership poses a serious threat to the United States' geopolitical position in Central Asia, and second, that China is actively remaking Central Asia's order. Last September, the US
Congress held a special hearing titled "The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Is it Undermining US Interests in Central Asia?"

Moscow seems to anticipate that another US bid for observer status with the SCO is looming - and that unlike in 2005, Beijing may not oppose it this time. Curiously, at the end of December, Russia formalized a mechanism for regular political dialogue with the Mercosur grouping of Latin American countries, which has a definite slant (comparable to the SCO's) against US economic hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaking on the occasion in Brasilia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, "We have, by and large, been watching with the most sincere sympathy the integration processes in South America. We consider that the strengthening and elevation of the level of integration within the region works objectively in favor of the creation of a more stable and more fair world order in which all problems will be tackled multilaterally. I am certain that the partnership between Russia and Mercosur will be instrumental in attaining this goal."

The US estimation is basically that behind the facade of unity, China, Russia and the other SCO members and observer countries harbor serious differences of opinion. While "discord" may be too strong a word, to quote a US strategic analyst, "It is quite possible that differences will grow behind the facade of [SCO] unity. Washington must be alert to exploit any openings to gain geopolitical advantage. While the political, ideological and military dimensions of the New Great Game in Central Asia continue to heat up, it should be clear to all players that plenty of time remains in the contest. The SCO now appears to have momentum on its side, but such an advantage can dissipate quickly."

Thus the US would tell China that Russia was needlessly dragging it into an anti-American bloc, and that there was nothing irreconcilable involving US and Chinese interests in Central Asia. US strategic analysts have been arguing that both the United States and China are interested in the stability of the region; both are against the ascendancy of extremist forces in the region; both are interested in Central Asia's transition to market economies and in the region's globalization; both have stakes in the rapid development of Central Asia's hydrocarbon sector and in the diversified and efficient flow of the region's energy to the world market.

There are signs that the US is also using the oil-price issue as a wedge to divide Russia and China. The US has also been campaigning in the capitals of SCO member countries (and observer countries) that Russia is aspiring to transform the SCO into a club of energy producers and to be its dominant partner, and that if the Russian stratagem is allowed to proceed unchecked, that will be detrimental to the interests of Central Asian energy producers - and even of China and India. These are interesting straws in the wind.

The recent five-nation energy summit of major Asian consuming countries (China, Japan, South Korea, India and the US) hosted by China is partly at least an expression of Beijing's commonality of interests with Washington in leading an energy dialogue of consuming countries vis-a-vis Russia. Conceivably, Beijing may be harboring grievances that Moscow is keeping Chinese companies out of investment opportunities in Russia's strategic oil and gas fields in Russia's Siberia and the Far East, and even in the Russian pipelines leading to the Chinese market.

China may also be displeased with Gazprom's insistent attempts to get in on the Sakhalin energy projects. ExxonMobil is under pressure for a proposed gas pipeline from Sakhalin-1 to China. Russia's gas monopoly seems to want to discount any competition for its own plans for a gas pipeline to China through the Altai highlands near the Russian-Kazakh-Mongolian border. Its preference seems to be to buy all gas from Sakhalin-1 so that it remains the sole exporter of gas to China. China is also keenly watching the holdup in Sakhalin-2, being the highest-profile foreign-investment project in Russia's energy sector to date.

Important investment decisions are pending in 2007 with regard to Sakhalin-1, Sakhalin-2, Sakhalin-3, the Shtokman gas fields and the vast Russian energy reserves in the Far East on the whole. How the Kremlin makes these decisions will have a significant bearing on Chinese thinking and, indirectly, that can cast shadows on the geopolitics of Central Asia.

Besides, the ground reality is that according to recent studies, Russia will need to import 79 billion cubic meters (bcm) annually from Central Asia's gas-producing countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) to meet its domestic needs and to fulfill its export commitments. How this plays out in Russia's overall political and economic ties with Central Asian countries will have a significant impact on the regional milieu.

It is obvious that Gazprom views Central Asia as a priority area. A major development in 2006 in Central Asia's energy sector was the agreement between Gazprom and Uzbekneftgaz to undertake a geological survey of Uzbekistan. Gazprom is committing $260 million in the coming three years alone for the exploration of the Ustyurtki oil and gas deposits in Uzbekistan. Again, Russia and Kazakhstan entered an agreement in October to set up a gas joint venture at the Orenburg gas refinery in Russia - the first time Kazakhstan was making a major investment in the Russian economy.

The joint venture is expected to process 30.6bcm gas in 2012, including 15bcm from Kazakhstan's Karachaganak gas field (which has an estimated 1 trillion cubic meters of reserves), which Russia and Kazakhstan are pledged to develop jointly.

Niyazov's secret
The struggle over control of oil and gas and their transportation routes is bound to intensify in 2007. It will remain central to the geopolitics of Central Asia. In turn, pipeline politics in the Caspian can be expected to produce strange bedfellows.

Already, geopolitical circumstances in the Caspian Basin have led to a sharp deterioration in Russia-Azerbaijan relations. Again, despite all the wooing of Kazakhstan by Washington, the indefinite postponement of the Odessa-Brody pipeline project last week has stemmed from Kazakhstan having to be mindful of Russian sensitivities.

Least of all, Iran remains the wild card in the pack. Depending on which way the Iran nuclear issue develops in 2007, Iran can impact on the energy map of China, Central Asia, the Caspian, the Caucasus, Russia and Europe - and, conceivably, the United States itself.

But an entirely new ball game opens up with the sudden demise of Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov on December 21. It calls attention to the fragility of the Central Asian calculus. The political uncertainties centered on Niyazov's successor come at an extremely tricky time when Russia, China and the US are virtually preparing to besiege Ashgabat with offers and counter-offers for gaining access to Turkmenistan's gas reserves.

Will Niyazov's successor follow his policy of "positive neutrality"? Russia strives to retain its strategic leverage as the monopolist transporter and re-exporter of Turkmen gas. The European Union, supported by the US, on the other hand, is attempting to resist the Russian leverage by opening direct access to Turkmen gas.

In 2006, the US and Turkey revived the 10-year-old idea of a trans-Caspian gas pipeline project (as part of the so-called East-West Energy Corridor) to supply Turkmen gas to Europe via Turkey. Turkmenistan's gas output may well approach 80bcm annually at present. The trans-Caspian pipeline envisages an annual draw of 16bcm from the Turkmen output in the first stage, to be expanded to 32bcm in the second stage. In the US geostrategy, the project is vital for reducing Europe's heavy dependence on Russian energy supplies. Niyazov had prevaricated in the light of Moscow's opposition. But what will be the outlook of Niyazov's successor?

Russia, on the contrary, will insist on the fulfillment of its April 2003 framework agreement with Turkmenistan, which provides for a 25-year contract on gas supplies to Russia, with Ashgabat pledging to supply 100bcm per year of gas from 2010 onward (a total of 2 trillion cubic meters cumulatively over the 25-year period). Moscow now seeks to tap even more deeply into Turkmenistan's gas reserves for meeting Russia's domestic needs and for re-export to Europe as "Russian gas".

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan also stands committed to supply 8-10bcm of gas to Iran's northern region, apart from occasionally voicing interest in the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline project. China, on its part, entered an agreement with Niyazov in April for purchase of 30bcm of Turkmen gas annually from 2009 onward for a 30-year period, and jointly to explore and develop Turkmen gas deposits on the right bank of Amu Darya River.

Besides challenging Russia's monopoly control of Turkmen gas hitherto, China has also undercut the Russian practice of buying cheap Turkmen gas, by agreeing that China will pay a price "set at reasonable levels, and on a fair basis, pegged on comparable international market price". At the same time, China's deal also threatens the West, which will be a strategic loser if Turkmenistan decides to send its gas eastward instead of Europe.

The European Union's 3,400-kilometer Nabucco gas pipeline from eastern Turkey to Austria and central Europe at an estimated cost of $5.8 billion, to be commissioned in 2010, will be a net sufferer in that case, as it is predicated on the expectation that Turkmenistan can be a key supplier country.

Niyazov was always an enigmatic figure on the Central Asian political chessboard. But the biggest puzzle he has left behind was no doubt his chance remark shortly before his death in a conversation with visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Ashgabat that Turkmenistan recently discovered a super-giant gas field, South Iolotansk, with proven reserves of 7 trillion cubic meters of gas.

Like Corporal Hatfield in his sentry post in Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, Niyazov didn't probably realize what a maelstrom he was creating. If South Iolotansk indeed holds such untold treasures, the impact on the energy map of Russia, Europe and China will be dramatic. And certainly, the center of gravity of the Great Game will overnight shift eastward to the home of the fabled Ahalteke race horse - away from the SCO and all that. Central Asia, then, may never be the same again.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.