Central Asian "Lilypads"

One of my correspondents, who is quite knowledgable about military matters, writes to call my attention to the following:

RFE reports:

The United States has had troops in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan since shortly after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.

The troops have mainly been used to support military efforts in Afghanistan. There are now about 800 Americans in Uzbekistan and 1,200 in Kyrgyzstan. France also has air force personnel based in Tajikistan.

Now the SCO -- whose Central Asian members include those two countries, as well as Tajikistan and Kazakhstan -- says it is time for Washington to announce when it will withdraw those forces.

On 6 July in Bishkek, acting Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Roza Otunbaeva reiterated the call, saying the situation in Afghanistan was stable and that the Americans no longer needed the bases.

"All of us are part of the anti-terrorist coalition, including our country. However, there is a time limit for everybody who comes to stay somewhere," Otunbaeva said. "We are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. We raised this issue [of the U.S. bases] together with the other [SCO] member states."

And there's this from AP:

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) -- A regional alliance led by China and Russia called Tuesday for the U.S. and its coalition allies in Afghanistan to set a date for withdrawing from several states in Central Asia, reflecting growing unease at America's military presence in the region.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which groups Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, urged a deadline be set for withdrawal of the foreign forces from its member states in light of what it said was a decline in active fighting in Afghanistan.

The alliance's move appeared to be an attempt to push the United States out of a region that Moscow regards as historically part of its sphere of influence and in which China seeks a dominant role because of its extensive energy resources.

Read them here and here.

This is understandable and quite predictable. Both China and Russia are worried about US "encirclement." With the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the establishment of US bases in Central Asia, there are now American forces based in many of the former Soviet Republics. This, as Steve Cohen has been warning us, has been a continuing source of irritation in Moscow. At the same time the US, faced by Chinese military expansion, has been building defense ties with Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and, of course, Central Asian states. China rightly sees this as an effort to contain her influence in Asia.

So there are good reasons for both Russia and China to be concerned about and to oppose a long-term US military presence in Central Asia.But, here is where diplomatic concerns run up against US military doctrine.

A key element in the reconfiguration of US military forces since the Gulf War has been an emphasis on global rapid response. The idea is that in a new, rapidly shifting global environment we can no longer rely on large, stable emplacements of troops such as we had in Europe and the Far East during the Cold War. When a major concern was a massive Soviet offensive through the Fulda Gap, it made sense to keep a large, permanent, nuclearized military force in Germany. That threat doesn't however exist any more and we learned in Gulf War I that those large permanent emplacements just cannot respond in a timely manner to emergencies.

Since then the military has been developing a new force structure that emphasizes special forces, air mobility, and force integration. This has met with a lot of resistance from dinosaurs in the Pentagon who during the Iraq conflict have been screaming "more boots, more boots, more boots." That has turned out to be a legitimate criticism of the current direction of military reform. Now, a serious diplomatic objection is emerging.

A key element of the mobile force structure is the establishment throughout the world of "lilypads" -- relatively small bases that can serve as staging areas and jumping off points for rapid deployment. The new bases in Central Asia are just such structures. The problem with this is that we nust maintain good relations with local regimes where these bases are established [which can become in some cases a reversion to the old Cold War practice of propping up bad guys] with the additional problem that these bases can be seen as a provocative threat by regional powers. That seems to be the case in Central Asia.

The dustup with Karimov is not very important in and of itself. There is little he can do to obstruct US operations in the area. But he is Moscow's man and US condemnation of his actions during the recent abortive revolt was seen as an attempt by the US to once again [as in Georgia and Ukraine] undermine Russian influence in a key strategic region. Russia has been on the losing end of the stick too often recently to not react. The expansion of US influence around the periphery of Russia has evoked strong criticism of Putin. He cannot ignore it any longer. Hence the joint declaration with China. Thus does the implementation of military doctrine create problems in international relations.

I suspect that, if their attempt to drive the US out of Central Asia is successful, Russia will come to regret it. China clearly has expansionist aims that will adversely affect Russia and if China begins to expand westward and to the north in search of natural resources, Russia will very much regret the absence of a strong US presence in the region.