CENTRAL ASIA AND PAX IRANICA: COOPERATION AND INTERDEPENDENCE
Abstract
For ten years now, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan have been establishing a Persian-speaking community in Central Asia. The Turkic republics of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey started moving toward a Turkic-speaking community as soon as the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Persian-speaking countries acquired their chance in the early 2000s when the Taliban, an inveterate opponent of the IRI, was overthrown and Tajikistan ended its civil war.
In fact, the entire region is more or less involved: Tajikistan is a Central Asian state, while the other two are its close neighbors with a long history of belonging to the region at one time or another.
Today, Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan have economic interests, security concerns, and geopolitical imperatives in common. Iran, which badly needs a wider Pax Irania, is the natural driving force behind integration of the Persian speaking countries, a far from easy mission in the present geopolitical and international context. In Afghanistan, the Persian-speaking communities are dominated by the Pash toons, the state-forming nation, who are dead set against all attempts to split the country into ethnic units. The U.S.-led occupation authorities, likewise, are firmly opposed to Iran’s stronger influence on the Tajik and Hazara minorities.
Tajikistan is a homogenous part of Central Asia; its ties with the region and the post-Soviet expanse are too strong to allow it to completely integrate with the Iranian world. To strengthen its position in both countries, Tehran is contributing to their large-scale economic, energy, transport, and humanitarian projects.
It should be said that, in the past, the Iranian culture extended to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, Iraq, and vast areas in the Middle East, which gives the IRI the opportunity to push its influence westward. With no chance of exploiting the ethnic and linguistic affinity there, Tehran relies on the Shi ‘a minority, which is rapidly developing into an important political factor in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries.
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In 1998-2003 Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan divided the seabed in the northern Caspian and left the water area in common use.
Reconstruction cost $70 million which was shared by the sides. India invested $19.9 million. Russia hopes to sta-tion military facilities of its 201st division there.
On 10 November, 2010, Tajikistan and Russia agreed to guard the Tajik-Afghan border together. The Russian ex-pert community believes that their country wants to return to the border in expectation of the fact that America might want to pull its forces out of Afghanistan and move them to Tajikistan.
During the operation, the sides instituted 6 thousand criminal cases, 1,108 of which were related to drug trafficking; they confiscated over 1.3 tons of drugs (including 52 kg of heroin, 50 kg of hashish, 1 ton of marijuana, and over 400 kg of precursors).
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