U.S. MILITARY ENGAGEMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA: “GREAT GAME” R “GREAT GAIN”?
Abstract
The region of Central Asia has acquired a new strategic importance in recent years. Comprised of five states, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Central Asia has emerged as a region of strategic importance given its vast energy resources, its regional threats of narcotics production and trafficking, and by virtue of its geographic location. It is the geography of Central Asia, however, that has contributed most to making the region both a short-term and a longer-term security priority to U.S. national interests. Its proximity to Afghanistan was crucial in planning the operations against the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, endowing the Central Asian region with elevated strategic importance in the new security paradigm of post-11 September.
Although the U.S. military presence in the region was well established long before 11 September, the region became an important platform for the projection of U.S. military power in Operation Enduring Freedom.
The Central Asian states also play an important role as “security sentry” for the ongoing stabilization effort in Afghanistan and in better positioning U.S. forces in the medium-term safeguarding of stability in Pakistan. Over the longer-term, Central Asia’s strategic importance stems from several other factors, ranging from trans-national threats posed by Islamic extremism, drug production and trafficking, to the geopolitical threats inherent in the re-gion’s location as a crossroads between Russia,Southwest Asia and China.
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The five Central Asian states were formally transferred from the jurisdiction of the U.S. European Command to Central Command (CENTCOM) in October 1999.
The only exception of the five Central Asian states is Tajikistan, which formed its national armed forces from the core remnants of disparate armed groups actively engaged in the country’s civil war. All other Central Asian states reconstituted their armed forces based on the units inherited from the Soviet Turkestan Military District.
The Special Forces, known officially as the U.S. Army Special Forces and unofficially as the “Green Berets,” comprise a very small element in the overall U.S. military known as Special Operations Forces (SOF), codified by the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act of 1986.
See: W. O’Malley, R. McDermott, “The Russian Air Force in Kyrgyzstan: The Security Dynamics,” The Analyst, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, The Johns Hopkins University, 9 April, 2003.
Testimony of Thomas O’Connell, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, 10 July, 2003.
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