America, EU, Japan: Time to Reunite Afghanistan with Central Asia

S. Frederick Starr

Security, Asia

Neither the five formerly Soviet states of Central Asia nor Afghanistan is happy with the current setup, and with good reason.

With respect to Afghanistan, the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea and the major international financial institutions are all caught in a time warp. Dating back a century and a half, this distortion today impedes Afghanistan’s development as a normal country. No less, it helps isolate the other countries of Central Asia from a nearby major market, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and pushes the other countries of Central Asia into a one-sided relationship with their former imperial overlord, Russia. It’s time to correct this long-standing mistake.

This impact of this time warp is manifest in the refusal of these major countries and financial institutions to acknowledge that Afghanistan is part of Central Asia and not simply a problematic neighbor. This view dates to tsarist Russia’s conquest of all Central Asia—but not Afghanistan—in the 1860s. Russia’s aims were clear: to preempt Britain from seizing Central Asia north of the Amu Darya River and to gain control of a vast cotton-producing region at a time when Union gunboats had cut off cotton shipments from the American South. However, Russia stopped its southern push at the Amu Darya, which became the southern border of its empire and then of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s Stalin closed the border, imposed Communist development on that part of the region it controlled, and declared Afghanistan a zone of backwardness and poverty.

This may have been true by Stalin’s era but it had not been true for the preceding three millennia. For all that time Afghanistan was not only a thriving part of what we now call Central Asia but its very heart. It lay astride the route to Central Asia‘s biggest and closest trading partner, which was India, not China. It was also the avenue by which Buddhism came to all Central Asia and, later, the route by which the Central Asian Babur attacked India and set up the Mughal dynasty there. Here were some of Central Asia’s richest cities and here lived some of the world’s greatest thinkers. Biruni, who hypothesized the existence of North and South America as inhabited continents half a millennium before Columbus, lived and died in Ghazni, Afghanistan. The poet Rumi and the medical pioneer Avicenna (Ibn Sino) both came from Afghan families.