DUSHANBE: Paying a pre-election visit to the Pamir mountains, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov seemed to bask in his country's role at the intersection of increasing geopolitical rivalry in Central Asia.
The occasion was the opening this week of a bridge on the Afghan-Tajik border near the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow finger of Afghan territory running along Tajikistan's southeast border and linking Afghanistan with China.
As he addressed officials, villagers and others watched from the surrounding mountainsides, Rakhmonov dwelt on plans to make his country a hub of trade at the unique spot where Afghanistan, China, India, Iran and Pakistan have long rubbed shoulders.
But he also alluded to the more distant powers that are converging on this area sometimes known as the “Roof of the World”, in a struggle reminiscent of the 19th century “Great Game” between the British and Russian empires.
Critics say Rakhmonov is lacking in democratic niceties, and Western election observers have already predicted that the Nov 6 presidential vote will not be the product of a free and fair election process.
But in international relations he “is becoming a more sophisticated player,” particularly as a broker between the outside world and Afghanistan, said Michael Hall, a Central Asia analyst with the International Crisis Group.
For this wider “game” involves not only China, but also the former imperial power Russia and most ambitiously the United States.
For Washington, there are immediate concerns in the area such as the need for its aircraft to access insurgency-ridden Afghanistan from the relatively stable north, for which Rakhmonov provides over-flight rights.
But the United States also wants to build a “corridor of reform” stretching from oil-rich Kazakhstan, where US companies have major investments, south through relatively liberal Kyrgyzstan, host to a US air base, and on through Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said a Western diplomat.
“This would not only be a corridor of reform but it would be a new trading corridor,” the diplomat explained, pointing to the United States' current construction of another bridge between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, projected to cost $36 million (30 million euros).
A Tajik analyst said Rakhmonov also wins Western praise for trying to mediate between Afghanistan's government and Washington's ideological foe Iran -- Iran and Tajikistan share virtually the same language and Tehran has paid for major road-building work in Tajikistan.
A meeting earlier this year in Tajikistan between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad occurred because “the Americans wouldn't agree to Karzai going to Tehran but they would agree to him coming here,” said the analyst, who requested anonymity.
And while progress on democracy is slow, the United States also gives Rakhmonov credit for maintaining a secular buffer north of Afghanistan.
He is helped in this by the Aga Khan, the Western-friendly billionaire spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Shias, including some 200,000 inhabitants of the Pamir mountains.
Many have received secular educations in the West paid for by the Aga Khan Development Network, which in the Pamirs almost resembles a state in its own right -- the France-based Aga Khan got a rapturous welcome when he arrived to join the bridge-opening Tuesday.
Russia meanwhile has been less keen on Western involvement in former Soviet territory.
President Vladimir Putin recently likened Washington's role in Central Asia to a “bull in a china shop” and Moscow has suffered something of a loss of prestige in the region.
The Kremlin last year pulled out a force of up to 11,000 guards that had patrolled Tajikistan's southern border, a role that dated from pre-Soviet Tsarist Russia.
Less visibly however Moscow maintains a substantial military presence -- with up to 6,000 military personnel as well as tanks and fighter planes located in southern Tajikistan -- and is seeking to recover some of its lost influence by flexing its muscles on the economic front.
Moscow and Dushanbe are, for example, currently grappling over a plan by Russia's Rusal aluminium giant to invest over $1.6 billion in hydropower infrastructure and in an aluminium plant.
One problem with the plan, the Western diplomat suggested, is that Tajikistan believes it would earn more by selling the electricity to Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than Russia.
But he noted that the size of the planned Russian investment “makes everything that everyone else is doing in this country pale into insignificance”.
As for Tajikistan's giant neighbour China, Beijing has been slower to make its presence felt than in energy-rich Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan -- only in 2004 did the two countries open their first border crossing, partly due to the difficulty of the terrain.Beijing has moved to provide help with major infrastructure projects, but as the flow of Chinese goods into the country increases it may encounter the kind of anti-Chinese feeling that helped stoke an uprising in Kyrgyzstan last year, the Western diplomat said.
Nonetheless, as he prepares to extend his rule for another seven years, Rakhmonov seems confident he can handle the pressure — even if not all voters are impressed.
“No one here has any work,” complained one member of the audience at the bridge-opening ceremony, 43-year-old Korbono, one of hundreds of thousands of Tajiks who travel back and forth to Russia each year to earn money.—AFP
