Central Asia occupies an immense landmass stretching from the eastern banks of the Volga to the great Tienshan mountain range rimming Chinas northwest, and from Siberia down to Afghanistan. Its politics are diverse, its history not least in the legacy of Tsarist and Soviet dominion unforgiving, its cultures range from the semi-nomadic to the settled and its tribal and religious crosscurrents are exceedingly complex. Threading through it run the old Silk Road routes; and through it, too, run the frontiers between Islams northern arc and the wilder reaches of the Christianised world.
Any single-issue, thesis-driven approach to this vast and highly disparate set of countries must inherently be flawed. By setting out on his journey with the purpose of demonstrating the existence of a new Great Game centred on oil, Lutz Kleveman falls into that trap. I hope that his book, which I have not read, is less simplistic than the article he has written for openDemocracy.
A mosaic, not a polarity
For a start: American involvement in this region is not all about oil anything but. US diplomacy was active in the region in the decade before 9/11, but the American military deployments to Central Asian bases (which fall well short of a massive military build-up) began only after 9/11 and only because this region was seen (by Russia as well as America) as a sensitive and important battleground in the counter-terrorism offensive.
Moreover, this is not an exclusively American military presence. Lutz Kleveman writes about Bagram, the US base in Afghanistan, but perhaps it does not fit his thesis to mention the presence there of the military of fourteen nations, serving as part of the counter-terrorism coalition. If the USs true motivation were really to seal the American cold war victory against Russia, to contain Chinese influence [which is currently small] and to tighten the noose around Iran, its investment of money and military effort would be far larger.
Western (not just American) interest in Caspian oil reserves is certainly intense. But euphoria is much too strong a word to describe this interest, for three important reasons that Kleveman does not mention.
The first is that unlike Saudi oil, the extraction of many Caspian reserves is hugely expensive and difficult. The second is that the most accessible form of energy, natural gas, has to contend with the problem of moving it the vast distances between the source of supply and potential foreign demand. The third is the lack of transparent rules governing foreign investment and the regions all-pervading corruption; some investment is on hold because of fierce contractual disputes with the Kazakh and other regimes.
To get some sense of the gap between the regions potential and its actual output, it is worth noting that although Kazakhstans reserves may be as high as 100 billion barrels of extractable oil and 70,000 billion cubic feet of natural gas, its current oil output is roughly on a par with Yemen, and domestically, the country suffers from severe energy bottlenecks.
On pipelines, Kleveman simplifies enormously. First, there are many more potential and actual pipeline routes than he indicates. Second, it is wrong to present this as an American-Russian fight for control. The Kazakhs favour lines running through Russia primarily for economic, not political, reasons a sentiment reciprocated in Moscow. The Americans are certainly keen on pipelines that circumvent Iran; for reasons that currently seem fairly obvious.
But economic and logistical feasibility, as well as unresolved territorial questions, for example on demarcating the maritime frontiers in the Caspian itself, are the subject of intense negotiations between all the Central Asian producers, as well as Russia. But these are indeed negotiations, not bloody conflicts which have been rare, localised and generally (as between Azerbaijan and Armenia) caused by factors other than the location of pipelines.
Finally, Klevemans assertion he provides no evidence that Americas brazen energy imperialism jeopardises the few successes in the war on terror because of the resentment it causes in Central Asia is nonsensical hype. So is his tear-jerking evocation of the mostly innocent civilians whom he describes as the victims in this new Great Game.
The great majority, even among Muslims (many of these communities were relatively late converts who tend to wear their religion lightly and tolerantly), share the detestation of Islamist extremism and have cause to fear it. They see also themselves as potential beneficiaries socially and politically, as well as economically of wider western involvement in their countries.
The travesty of conspiracism
Most Central Asian countries were keen applicants for Natos Partnerships for Peace in the 1990s; their peoples want, in the main, to join the west; and many of them hoped that 9/11 would be the catalyst that brought them to the wider worlds attention. They were well aware that their post-Soviet struggle to reinvent themselves as nations, and to resurrect their collapsed economies, ranked until then well below the wests preoccupations with the transitions to democracy and free markets in Central Europe and in Russia itself.
Nostalgia for communist-era subsidies and certainties coexists with widening understanding of the terrible economic, social and environmental legacy of the years of Soviet dominion. In the cities, at least, you see a thirst for modernity, and a hunger to be recognised as Asian Europeans. Also and importantly, their emerging middle classes entertain high hopes exaggeratedly high, perhaps that western democratic influences (backed by financial clout) will help to curb the excesses of the dictatorially-inclined, voraciously greedy rulers who have emerged from the ruins of post-Soviet collapse.
Central Asias problem is neither oil, nor capitalism. It is the way that the energies of its many skilled and well-educated people have been held back by lack of know-how, by stiflingly venal bureaucracies, by trade barriers that compound their geographical remoteness from the markets they need to reach, and by regimes that are enervatingly corrupt and aggressively authoritarian, whether or not they cloak their activities in democratic over-garments.
Their people know who to blame, and it is not Americans. All across the region last year, I saw American diplomats, and tenacious representatives of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from countries ranging from Poland to Finland and Turkey, working to protect embattled journalists, uphold freedom of assembly and support the institutions of civil society.
I do not recognise Klevemans grand conspiracy theory; it may sell his book, but it is a travesty of the complicated truth. I hope, however that he is right that oil (and, I would add, concern about stability across these Islamic faultlines) will keep western eyes intelligently focused on Central Asia. It needs help to recover from the terrible decades when it was stuck, under Soviet dominion, in a geopolitical black hole.
