The ongoing standoff in the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and Iran is forcing a rethink about regional energy and trade routes. Afghanistan is a potential lynchpin of a new route that circumvents the Hormuz choke point, but Taliban control of the country calls into question Kabul’s viability as a connector to global markets.
Afghanistan’s willingness and ability to participate in emerging energy and trade networks was a hotly debated topic among regional experts during a recent day-long discussion on Capitol Hill in Washington organized by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy (NLI). The event was held under the auspices of NLI’s Central Asia Center, which has developed the Silk Seven Plus (S7+) initiative, a concept envisioning the creation of a Greater Central Asian economic community and the emergence of a robust trade crescent stretching from the Caspian Basin to the Arabian Sea.
Participants acknowledged that Afghanistan was the “gorilla in the room” in terms of turning the S7+ concept into reality. Myriad obstacles exist to constructing pipelines, railroads and other infrastructure in Afghanistan, including the Taliban’s toleration of radical Islamic militant groups, the government’s discriminatory domestic policies, the bitter legacy of the 20-year US military presence in the country and simmering conflict between the Taliban and Pakistan.
Despite the present challenges, S. Frederick Starr, a leading American expert on the region and founder of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, argued vociferously that Afghanistan needs to be woven into the fabric of a Greater Central Asia to unlock the region’s full trade potential in critical minerals, fossil fuels and other goods.
Starr said Central Asian states are already working assiduously and “subtly” to bring Afghanistan into the fold, adding “all of them have de facto recognized” the Taliban’s leadership of the country. He noted Uzbekistan’s annual trade turnover had already reached about $1.5 billion with Afghanistan and was set to grow rapidly in the coming years, adding that slow progress was being made on the construction of a trans-Afghan natural gas pipeline intended to connect Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India.
The US approach, Starr added, should be to ‘stay out of the way’ and let Central Asian states manage relations with Afghanistan themselves.
“Afghanistan desperately wants to be part of Greater Central Asia,” Starr said. “Reality is much more dynamic and textured, and things happening, than we acknowledge.”
Other speakers were more restrained in their assessments. Retired Ambassador Richard E. Hoagland, who in his over 40-year career served in diplomatic posts across Central Asia and in Pakistan, said that when looking at a map, a geoeconomic projects such as the S7+ “make sense.” But he cautioned that there is a “difference between ideology and reality in policymaking.”
In this context, Hoagland equated ideology with wishful thinking or “irrational exuberance,” in which logic blocks out cultural, historical and on-the-ground factors that complicate plans. Implementation of projects such as the S7+, he added, invariably should be rooted in reality to succeed.
Hoagland suggested that under present conditions, the S7+ concept may be “more of an ideology than reality” – at least as far as Afghanistan is concerned.
At its core, the S7+ is a multi-phase plan to strengthen the sovereignty of Central Asian states, making the region a more efficient negotiating partner and more reliable investment destination.
The first phase of the S7+ concept involves the promotion and formation of a Central Asian economic community so that regional states can speak with one voice, not five (or six, given Azerbaijan’s recent inclusion in what is now the C6) when negotiating trade deals with external states or entities. A model for such a community is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The S7+ initiative’s second phase involves addressing Central Asian states’ long-held desire to gain access to a seaport. As such, the S7+ aims to ultimately incorporate Afghanistan and Pakistan into its framework. This second phase is obviously a longer-term proposition, proponents acknowledge. At the same time, they point to the heightened engagement of Central Asian states with Pakistan in recent months as reinforcing the idea that the S7+ concept is realizable over the medium term.
The simmering conflict between the Taliban and Pakistan certainly places an insurmountable barrier at present to Central Asian plans to build trans-Afghan railroad or pipelines. But S7+ proponents believe the economic imperatives for all states in the region will eventually prompt regional leaders to set aside political and religious differences in favor of connectivity.
“In the end, history always develops at its own pace, and that pace can sometimes be agonizingly slow or sometimes shockingly fast. So S7+, good luck!” Hoagland said.
By Eurasianet
