The Obama administration is now decisively shifting the focus of US military activities from Iraq to Afghanistan. That war effort has now significantly affected US-Russian relations: In response to sustained US-NATO pleadings, Russia has now given permission for 4,500 overflights of Russia by US military aircraft every year, in an attempt to maintain US supply lines into Afghanistan that have been severely curtailed by anti-US activities along the road route in Pakistan.
The US military effort in Afghanistan has not been going well. Indeed, it is very clear by now that the gross mis-match between the US-NATO’s over-militarized tools and methods and the real requirements of the Afghan people for peace and stability, the cultural mis-match between NATO powers and Afghanistan’s people, and the sheer length of the US-NATO supply lines into land-locked Afghanistan, between them guarantee that there will be no US military victory there.
And it’s very hard to see the US and NATO as being capable of any other kind of victory, either.
Afghanistan lies at the heart of what, in the 19th century, the British called the “Great Game”, which was a free-wheeling and often very violent contest between Russian power coming down from the north and British power coming up from India.
The “Great Game” was most likely never viewed as particularly enjoyable or fun by the majority-Muslim populations of Central Asia over whose homelands it was fought…
In the early years of the 20th century China started to join the “Game”, as the Han Chinese became able to push their influence deep into the far-west hinterland of their earlier zone of influence.
In the 1980s, when most of the central Asian ‘Stans were still firmly part of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan became a big battle-ground between the Soviet Union and the “west.” In that battle, the US (as we know) threw a lot of resources into supporting the emergence of militant Muslim organizations who were considered of use in the fight against the Soviets.
Now, once again, Central Asia is emerging as a battle-ground between big global powers. My first cut at defining the big players in this contest– which still has a great deal of fluidity– is that they are: the US/”west”; Russia; China; and various forms of indigenous social power, whether Islamic-based or ethnic-based (or some combination.)
We should also note that Iran is a non-trivial actor in Central Asia, as well as in the Persian Gulf.
The past weekend saw the outbreak of some very serious inter-communal clashes in far-west China, in what the Chinese call the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. These mainly pitted indigenous Uighurs against Han Chinese immigrants.