imagining of a 21st Century update of the Silk Road, Iran will be bypassed, if Washington gets its way.
The “New Silk Road” is part of a US plan to promote stability in Central Asia following the departure of American and NATO troops from Afghanistan.
The hope is that boosting trade between and among Afghanistan and its neighbors will build prosperity and promote peace. The American strategy focuses on bolstering north-south trade—linking India and Pakistan via Afghanistan to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
“We are focused on South and Central Asia because those are the immediate neighbors of Afghanistan and therefore that’s where the greatest effort lies for improving trade and other linkages,” said Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, speaking November 14 in Washington, DC.
As Blake made clear, Iran—Afghanistan’s western neighbor, and a country with which Kabul has annual trade of about $1.5 billion—would be sidelined. “In the regional integration part of this, we do believe Iran has a role to play,” Blake said. But at present, he acknowledged, there are currently no elements of the New Silk Road strategy that involve Iran.
Iranian officials have criticized the US vision. “The issue of building a New Silk Road by the United States and some European countries that have never been situated in the geographical area of the Silk Road is unjustifiable and suspicious,” said Mohsen Pakaein, head of the Afghanistan Department of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, according to the Iranian Student News Agency.
“The US regional cooperation strategy of ‘Everyone Excluding Iran’ is doomed to failure,” wrote Hassan Beheshtipur, an Iranian commentator, on the website of Iran’s PressTV. “Iran must be allowed to participate in the New Silk Road, bringing all its economic and commercial potentials to this new regional game.”
But Iran is not the only geopolitical hurdle. Uzbekistan, which has testy relations with both Washington and Iran, is the key node in the Northern Distribution Network, a supply line funneling goods from Europe to Afghanistan via Central Asia. Uzbekistan declined to sign a declaration of regional cooperation at a meeting earlier this month in Istanbul, despite the fact that the US State Department promoted Tashkent ahead of the meeting as one of Afghanistan’s 14 “key partners.” All Afghanistan’s other neighbors, including Iran, signed.
The US policy with regard to Iran’s trade with Afghanistan and Iraq has been very simple. Washington accepts that there is natural trade with Iran and recognizes that Iraq and Afghanistan cannot function with hostile relations with Iran. But Washington doesn’t lift a finger to promote Iraqi or Afghan trade with Iran and certainly won’t expend any funds or effort to expand such trade.
Russia could also play a spoiler role in the New Silk Road project. At a recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proposed investing $500 million in the CASA-1000 project, which would transmit electricity from Central Asia to India and Pakistan. US officials have suggested that a similar electricity export venture could become a building block of the New Silk Road.
It’s not yet clear whether Russia wants to cooperate with the United States, or compete with it.
In the case of Iran, the United States isn’t encouraging increased links between it and Afghanistan, but it isn’t discouraging them, either, said S. Frederick Starr, chair of the Washington, DC-based Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and a proponent of the New Silk Road.
India has constructed or proposed several road and rail projects connecting Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar, Starr told Joshua Kucera, a freelance writer. “We’ve had 100 opportunities to wag our fingers at India over that, and we haven’t,” he said. “In this case, the United States has correctly prioritized Afghanistan. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve here and we’re not going to make a big criminal case over other issues.”
On the other hand, a number of Indian officials have complained that Iran is doing next to nothing to expand the port facilities at Chabahar so that India can reach markets in Afghanistan. They suspect the Iranians are trying to limit Afghan contacts with the outside world to make it more dependent on Iran.
Starr says the United States should do what it can to make sure that emerging commercial corridors between Europe and East Asia pass through Afghanistan rather than Iran. “Failure to do this will mean that the United States will have richly subsidized the transportation sector of Iran, and given the ayatollahs a veto over US strategy, at the expense of our friends in Azerbaijan and Georgia,” he said.
Iran’s response to the New Silk Road strategy has thus far been relatively muted. Tehran understands that it is being shut out of the region, but is hamstrung by its ties to Russia and its hostility to the United States, said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
“If you’re a diplomat in the Foreign Ministry in Tehran and you see the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan going to Turkey for a meeting about the future of security cooperation in Afghanistan, that was seen as a major defeat as the Iranians, and it should be—that tells you how the Iranians have shot themselves in the foot by isolating themselves with their position on the United States.”
But Iran also is reluctant to build close ties with its neighbors in Central Asia for fear of alienating Russia, Vatanka added. “Iran feels that [the former Soviet republics] are Russia’s backyard. Iran needs Russia, it can’t antagonize Russia,” he said. “They have problems elsewhere on the international scene where they feel Russia could give them a helping hand.”
Iran has, however, long been trying to build its own north-south corridor. For example, it is building a new north-south rail line to connect Turkmenistan (and the other Central Asian states) to the Arabian Sea. It is struggling to punch a new superhighway through the Alborz Mountains from Tehran to the Caspian. It is marketing that highway as a boost to trade with Central Asia, although it fools no one that the route is one designed under the Shah to make it easier for Tehran vacationers to reach the Caspian.