Source: Japan Institute of International Affairs
For the purposes of this text, the term “Asia” does not include the Middle East; i.e. Pakistan and Central Asia are “in”, but Iran, the Arab States, and Israel are not. The discussion of “Continental Asia” will focus on relations among China, India, Pakistan and Russia; security situation within those countries; and developments in Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Himalayan countries.
Most contemporary discussions of Asian security focus on the Western Pacific Rim. Interests of the key players, China, Japan, South Korea, ASEAN nations and, above all, the United States are concentrated along the long line where the waters of the Pacific hit the coast of East Asia. Prolong that line to the west, and add India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Do not forget to look south and include Australia, New Zealand and Oceania. This more or less completes the overview of strategic Asia, which turns out to be almost synonymous with coastal Asia. There is no doubt that Asia’s coastal territories are exceedingly important: economically, financially, politically, militarily. Indeed, the very term Asia-Pacific means in practice – Pacific Asia. What this article seeks to do is to complement the view from the ocean with the one from the continent. As I sit in Moscow and look east, I see a lot of the Asian landmass before I can see the shoreline. And the shoreline is where Asia, except for its great islands, stops – for me.
In the past two centuries, Continental Asia used to be at least as important strategically as the coastal one. (Before that, from the times of Alexander, Chenghis Khan, Tamerlane, or the Moguls, it was more important). The Russian and British empires spent the entire 19th century competing for primacy from the Caspian to the Hindukush. Turkestan, Tibet and Tuva; Afghanistan, Mongolia and Nepal, which used to be referred to as Inner Asia, were hard-fought prizes in that Great Game. In the 20th century, to name but a few examples, Manchuria and Mongolia turned into a battleground between the Russians and the Japanese; Kashmir became a tug of war between India and Pakistan, while the glaciers of the Himalaya saw border clashes between China and India; and the fighting along the Soviet-Chinese border threatened a large-scale war between two nuclear powers. Toward the end of the century, Afghanistan, once a neutral buffer between Russia and Britain, and then a sleepy mountainous kingdom, plunged into a state of war, which has been going on for more than three decades.
Big-Power (Relative) Stability
At the start of the 21st century, traditional big-power relations in Continental Asia are more stable than either fifty or a hundred years ago. China’s steady rise has been accompanied by Beijing’s moves to improve relations with neighbors. The Sino-Japanese situation is that of growing interdependency and integration. China’s relations with India, although not nearly as thick, are becoming closer, and far less acrimonious than they used to be. The Moscow-Beijing connection has been flourishing ever since the end of the thirty-year cold war between them in the second half of the last century. True, China has been expanding its influence on the Asian Continent, gently, but firmly displacing that of other powers, such as India’s in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Burma, or Russia’s in Central Asia and Mongolia, but this has not yet produced the kind of friction likely to lead to confrontation. China has shown a fair amount of flexibility and willingness to compromise on a long range of issues. Essentially, Beijing takes a hard-line stand only on the issues pertaining to territories which are part of China: Tibet, Xinnjiang – or Taiwan.
India’s rise was marked by its acquisition of nuclear weapons, a controversial but predictable move. Its Navy has been looking at the Indian Ocean as its natural zone of operations and, eventually, dominance. Delhi, too, has been working to expand its influence overland, in particular in Afghanistan and Central Asia, but also competing with Beijing in Nepal and Burma. India’s relations with China have grown warmer in comparison to the 1960-1990s, as both countries are focused on economic development, but underlying tensions remain. India’s nuclearization, after all, is a move toward strategic parity with China, rather than a product of the stand-off with Pakistan. Yet, it is Indo-Pakistani relations which pose one of the main dangers to security in Asia. The Kashmir situation has produced Islamist militants supported by Pakistan. In recent years, these militants have engaged in terrorist attacks against high-profile Indian targets, from the parliament in Delhi to the luxury hotel in Mumbai. A new attack might well lead to an Indian retaliation against Pakistan, and thus a new war, the first one since both India and Pakistan have deployed nuclear weapons.
Japan, historically Asia’s first modern military power, has been absent from Continental Asia since the end of World War II. Starting from Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, its leaders have been attempting to craft a “Eurasian strategy” of more active diplomatic engagement, but this effort is yet to produce lasting results. Japan has been growing increasingly concerned over the rise of the Chinese navy, even as it tries to redefine and rebalance relations with the United States. Logically, Tokyo needs to strengthen its strategic American connection, and to establish closer ties with India. It may also explore ways to normalize relations with Russia.
Russia, which is virtually absent from Coastal Asia, still plays an important role in Asia’s interior. It has built a good-neighborly relationship with China which allowed it to fix the entire 4,500-kilometer-long Sino-Russian boundary. It has close, if underfulfilled, relations with India. Despite the lack of a territorial settlement, Russia’s trade with Japan has been on the increase. Moreover, Moscow has been able to consolidate a measure of influence in Central Asia, and has rediscovered Mongolia.
Following the demise of the Soviet Union, however, it is the United States that became, in the 1990s, the dominant power in Eurasia. In the 2000s, following the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on American territory, the United States inserted itself deep into the Asian Continent. The outcome of the U.S./NATO mission in Afghanistan is likely to have important consequences for the future of U.S. power in Asia, and for the future role of NATO. Likewise, it will have a major impact on the Muslim world and its direction.
Internal Political Developments
Afghanistan underlines a seminal trend. With the end of the Cold War confrontation, it is the internal developments in small Asia’s and medium-sized countries that has become the main challenge to security in the region. Pakistan, with its 140 million people and nuclear weapons, is a middling power only compared to its giant neighbors, India and China. Since its foundation in 1948, Pakistan has been notoriously unstable politically. To many outsiders, a political meltdown of the “Islamic Bomb” is the ultimate threat to security in Asia and beyond, more serious than Iran’s nuclear program. However, Pakistan’s radical Islamists, though vocal, are not likely to come to power through the ballot box, and the Pakistani military, though notoriously implicated with the Taliban through their semi-independent intelligence services, are secular nationalists. Conventional wisdom contends that America and China are the only two powers capable of influencing Pakistan politically and, in extremis, the only ones capable of averting a nuclear catastrophe. It makes more sense to argue that Pakistan’s future lies in the hands of its own elites, political and military. Should they fail, Washington and Beijing will not be able to do much.
Right from gaining their independence from the Soviet Union, Central Asian countries had been compared to the Balkans. A cauldron of combustible tensions, it was feared, would implode and affect other parts of the ex-U.S.S.R., starting with Russia’s own Muslim republics on the middle reaches of the Volga, and reach into western China. Yet, almost two decades on, all five states in the region have survived. None has been taken over by Islamist radicals, and none has gone to war against another. The land-locked region has seen a civil war, a revolution, a death of the founding father of a nation, and has experienced all sorts of tensions, but so far peace has largely prevailed there. It may continue – or not, depending on domestic developments in the individual countries.
Of those, Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous, is the pivotal one. If, in the short-to-medium term, Uzbekistan manages to organize succession to its still reigning first head of state, and keep tensions in the Ferghana valley below boiling point, chances for peace in Central Asia will be massively bolstered. If this is not the case, not only will Uzbekistan experience disorder and create openings for radicals, but its neighbors will suffer from the spillover effect: the Ferghana valley is shared by two other countries, Kyrgyzstan and Tajiistan. Kyrgyzstan is evidently weak, and Tajikistan has a legacy of the bitter civil war. Both have difficult relations with the Uzbeks, but either one can develop problems independently, and export them to others.
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan appear more solid, albeit for different reasons. The former is the region’s most advanced energy-based economy, and an example of Turkic-Slav happy coexistence in a single state, ruled by an enlightened autocrat. The latter is a gas-rich country ruled by the region’s harshest regime. If Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan are rocked by an upheaval, the entire region will be shattered, just as in the case of Uzbekistan’s implosion.
Mongolia is a different, and happier example. It has managed both to transit from a communist to a pluralist democratic system of government with parties alternating in office, and to find a new balance in its relations with the country’s only two neighbors, China and Russia. For even better balance, Mongolian foreign policy reached out to the United States and Japan. For the first time in modern history, Mongolia has become a truly independent international player.
Regional Development Issues
Another cause of trouble lies in the bigger countries’ regional policies. Beijing’s attempts at integrating Tibet and Xinjiang with the rest of China have met with spontaneous and weak, yet real resistance. The Chinese leadership has drawn lessons from both cases, and can be expected to pursue better-informed and more effective policies. At some point, Beijing may decide that national-territorial autonomy is a particularly dangerous borrowing from the Soviet model, and suppress it altogether – which may have the opposite effect.
Russia’s failure to date to develop its vast territories in Siberia and along the Pacific coast is fraught with dangers. Even though the Sino-Russian border treaty of 2001, with the demarcation agreement of 2004, seemingly closed the territorial issue, some Russians are worried that China’s historical claims to 1.5 million sq.km across the Amur and Ussuri rivers have not been finally put to rest. They fear that when China succeeds in recovering Taiwan, Beijing, in its quest to consolidate lost territories, will look north. Others in Russia are worried about what they call China’s demographic aggression. Russia’s population of the Far Eastern region is a mere 5 million, completely dwarfed by China’s 130 million in the three adjacent provinces. Few dispute that China, which needs ever more resources for its development, is interested in gaining an access to Russia’s mineral and other natural wealth. Moscow’s mismanagement of the distant territories and its inability to kick off a genuine regional development project issues an invitation to the neighbors to become more closely involved themselves.
Multilateral Mechanisms
Over the past decade and a half, Continental Asia has witnessed emergence of several multilateral mechanisms. The most important of them is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which grew out of the border talks between China and its four former Soviet neighbors: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. The SCO is, above all, an arrangement between Beijing and Moscow over the terms of China’s presence in Central Asia. By showing outward deference to Moscow and going steady rather than pushing fast, Beijing has won Moscow’s acquiescence with its enhanced role. Besides gaining China’s “respect”, Russia has received an instrument of monitoring, though not controlling, China’s moves in its former backyard. The Central Asians have benefited from having to deal with both – softly competing - great powers simultaneously, rather than having to face them one-on-one.
Besides managing covert Sino-Russian rivalry, and reassuring Central Asians, the SCO has evolved into a continent-wide platform for political consultations and exchanges. In addition to its membership of six (the original five plus Uzbekistan), it has attracted India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Mongolia as observers and regular participants. The SCO has also provided a useful chapeau for military exercises, ostensibly for combating terrorists, with Chinese and Russian participation. These exercises are meant to send a message to the United States, whose military presence in Central Asia both SCO leaders regard as an unwelcome intrusion into their spheres of strategic interest.
Russia, of course, is still jealous of its positions in Central Asia. In parallel to the SCO, it has been building a security alliance and an economic community, both of which include the same Central Asian states, but exclude China. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has been focusing on preventing and repelling attacks by radicals and extremists. It has decided to create a rapid reaction force for that purpose. A small Russian army and air force presence already exists in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Yet, it is not clear what kind of joint force it will be, and under what circumstances it might be actually used.
Whereas the SCO has been created at Beijing’s initiative, Moscow is proud to have initiated regular trilateral exchanges among Russia, India and China (RIC). There is no question that forming a habit of consultations at three among such vociferously pro-sovereignty states is a good thing in itself. A trilateral format is also a step forward by comparison to the traditional bilateral diplomacy. Yet, there is no doubt that collaboration among RIC powers, especially between India and China, is a challenging task. Moscow could act as a moderator, but only occasionally and to a certain extent.
Outlook
It may well be that the more important strategic developments in Asia will continue to happen in relations among the coastal states. The Korean Peninsula and Taiwan; the many “islands of discord” from Senkaku to the Spratleys; the challenge of the Chinese Navy and the U.S. naval response; the stability and security of Indonesia and the Philippines; the sea lanes from the Middle East to East Asia are all among the principal security challenges of the early 21st century. Yet, this is not all that belongs to Strategic Asia. Developments in the continent’s interior will have a major contributing factor or, in some cases, can actually initiate major changes. For the near term, it is what will happen in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the neighboring Iran that will shape Asia’s strategic environment and strike a new balance on the continent.