ALMATY (Kazakhastan): As the war in Afghanistan becomes a mopping-up operation, the US has stepped up troop deployments in the region, in what Russia and China fear is an effort to secure dominant influence over their backyards, a region rich in oil and gas reserves. In the past weeks, diplomats and generals from all three countries have streamed into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The war on terrorism has turned the Central Asian republics from backwaters into prizes overnight.

In a letter to the New York Times last week, former Iraq arms inspector Richard Butler warned that the ‘Great Game’ between Britain and Russia over the Indian sub-continent in the nineteenth century may now be replayed, with Russia and the US as the dominant players. “Now the prize is oil - getting it and transporting it - and Afghanistan is again the contested territory,” Butler wrote.

From Africa to the Philippines, South America and Central Asia, unease is growing over the way the US is flexing its military and political muscle.

In the Philippines, a dispute has erupted over the impending deployment of 650 US troops to help combat the Abu Sayyaf insurgency. In Saudi Arabia, too, public concern over the presence of US troops and Washington’s future global ambitions has led officials to declare that the US may have overstayed its welcome. What worries these countries is that when US troops come, they stay.

On a swing through the former Soviet republics last week, US Senate majority leader Tom Daschle confirmed Washington’s long-term interests when he told Uzbek leaders that the US presence “is not simply in the immediate term.”

Since October, the US has established open-ended military presences in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and is now understood to be negotiating with Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev to send Kazakh troops to Afghanistan and to construct a military base. “It is clear that the continuing war in Afghanistan is no more than a veil for the US to establish political dominance in the region,” a Kazakh government source said. “The war on terrorism is only a pretext for extending influence over our energy resources.”

Kazakhstan’s oil reserves could be the third largest in the world. Moreover, the Afghan conflict has made the prospect of the US-favoured route of a pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan a potential reality.

Over the past month, the Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji has signalled his country’s wariness over a long-term US presence by sending delegations to the former Soviet republics, and by convening a meeting of the regional Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO).

Reacting to reports that the US was about to deploy in Kazakhstan, the chief of the general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, General Fu Quanyou, warned such a move “poses a direct threat to China’s security.” Beijing is understood to be mainly concerned that instability caused by radicals among the Uighur Muslims on its western borders could derail its modernization.

Russia has also expressed unease about the growing Western presence - painfully aware that it does not have the resources to pit itself against the US. “They are unhappy about the US presence, but not too publicly because (President Vladimir) Putin wants to be seen as an active participant in the coalition aginst terrorism,” says Margot Light, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.

Still, human rights groups are already complaining that in the rush to secure influence, the US is ignoring human rights abuses, corruption and weak democratic processes in the region. There is further concern that active support of the US by Muslim countries with nascent radical Muslim movements serves only to inflame their problems. “The Central Asian governments are being misguided because their own insurgency movements are likely to only grow with the presence of US military,” says Light. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.