American diplomats are escalating a charm offensive with Central Asian leaders this week as they work to secure a staging area to respond to any resurgence of outside militants in Afghanistan after the U.S. military withdraws.
But even as high-level U.S. diplomats head to the region, they’re meeting with more doubts from Afghanistan’s neighbors about any such security partnering with the United States. That stands in contrast to 2001 when Central Asian countries made available their territory for U.S. bases, troops and other access as America hit back for the 9/11 attacks plotted by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
There’s distrust of the U.S. as a reliable long-term partner, after an only partly successful war in Afghanistan and after years of widely fluctuating U.S. engagement regionally and globally, former American diplomats say. There’s Russia, blasting out this week that a permanent U.S. military base in its Central Asia sphere of influence would be “unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, the Taliban leadership, more internationally savvy than it had been in 2001, has been visiting regional capitals and Moscow this summer in a diplomatic push of its own, offering broad pledges that it will pursue regional security, peace, and trade whatever comes of its fight with the Kabul government.
“I mean, I personally can see the value of an American base in Central Asia, but I’m not sure the Central Asian states see such value” currently, said John Herbst, who as U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan helped arrange military access in Central Asia in 2001.
“We’ve taken a hit through our failures in Afghanistan” in credibility, Herbst said after the U.S. neutralized al-Qaida in Afghanistan but struggled in fighting against the fundamentalist Taliban and in trying to strengthen a Kabul-based state. “Is that a mortal hit? Probably not. But it’s still a very powerful factor.”
The former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which neighbor Afghanistan, watched years of fervent democracy-building calls abroad by the United States, then watched President Barack Obama disengage to an extent, and then President Donald Trump almost entirely, says Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a former U.S. Agency for International Development official in Central Asia, now a researcher on the region at the University of Pittsburgh.
But relations with Central Asia are now a security issue for the Biden administration as it seeks to make sure the fundamentalist Taliban doesn’t again allow foreign Islamist extremists to use Afghanistan as a base to mount attacks on the United States or other outside targets.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby confirmed this week that the United States still was actively courting countries in Central Asia. “We are talking about and discussing with countries in the region about the possibilities of being able to use facilities and infrastructure” closer to Afghanistan, he said.
All are countries urgently and directly affected by whether Afghanistan again becomes a refuge for extremism upon the U.S. withdrawal.
For landlocked Uzbekistan, hopes of rapidly reaching outside markets hinge on completing a railroad to Pakistan’s seaports — through Afghanistan.
The region waits now to see if the Taliban makes good on its pledge to be a good neighbor, despite what may happen among Afghanistan’s rival forces. If not, cooperation with U.S. security aims will likely increase, former diplomats said.