Future Threats Monitor - 9 August 2011

The failings of communism have been plain for all to see for decades, and the true, appalling, conditions in which people live(d) under some of the world’s most brutal regimes are now a matter of public record. But communism did (and in some places still does) provide stability, of a sort. Living conditions may have been abysmal in the USSR, but at least infrastructure was put in place to ‘manage’ society. Now in some former Soviet states the last vestiges of that infrastructure are on their last legs.

Conditions in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are worsening. Even Kazakhstan could be a worry. When these central Asian countries gained independence from the Soviet Union they inherited functioning infrastructure, but over the last two decades this infrastructure has crumbled. Insufficient resources were made available to maintain and upgrade the hardware, and inadequate education means that domestically trained engineers are too few and not suitably qualified. What few resources were allocated diminished further due to corruption. As the remaining technicians who are able to keep the systems running die out the future looks bleak, and while the attention of more developed nations is focused on the Arab Spring, ongoing conflicts and the state of domestic, regional and global economies, these countries are sliding, seemingly inexorably, towards failed statehood, and failed states are ideal homes for extremist groups.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) reported in an analysis in February 2011: “Quietly but steadily Central Asia’s basic human and physical infrastructure – the roads, power plants, hospitals and schools and the last generation of Soviet-trained specialists who have kept this all running – is disappearing. The equipment is wearing out, the personnel retiring or dying.”

Catalogue of failure
The two worst effected countries are Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, both of which face, according to the ICG, “catastrophic systemic collapse”. But Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan “are heading in the same direction”; it should be noted that it was anger over the state’s failure to deliver a satisfactory level of basic services that led to the unrest that unseated Kyrgyzstan’s President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April 2010, and the damage caused, and loss to the economy from, civil unrest would strain infrastructure even further.

Lack of power is the most obvious failing. In the winter of 2007-08, Tajikistan went for weeks without power, and the following year Kyrgyzstan only avoided a similar fate through tough rationing. Little has improved since. In Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the energy sector remains unreformed since Soviet times, and subsidies undermine any attempt at efficiency. Both countries are dependent on energy-generating capacity built in the 1960s and 70s which is nearing the end of its useful life. Power cuts are common. Even in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, power cuts occur several times a day lasting up to an hour each.

In the health sector, Tajikistan spends just 1.7% of GDP, far below the internationally suggested level of 5%. The figure for Kyrgyzstan is only slightly better at 2.1%. The competence of locally trained medical personnel is also decreasing throughout the region, where it is said that political loyalty often takes precedence over medical skills. Teaching standards have dropped dramatically since the demise of the Soviet Union. Among the problems noticed by observers are: widespread misdiagnosis of common conditions; the overuse of antibiotics; and poorly administered intravenous medications leading to the spread of HIV.

There are analogous problems in the education sector. In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan there is simply no replacement generation of teachers for the Soviet-trained echelon now retiring. In Tajikistan, the shortage of teachers is already running at up to 30%. In Kyrgyzstan, over 40% of teachers are already beyond retirement age. Teachers in Kyrgyzstan are paid $26 a month; in Tajikistan they get $28. (The average monthly salary in Kyrgyzstan is $65 and just $38 in Tajikistan.)

Other signs of failing education include the fact that less than 40% of pupils in Kyrgyzstan have text books, while the capacity of schools is exceeded by nearly 40%. During winter and during peak periods for agricultural work, only about half of the pupils come to school. An international assessment undertaken in 2009 found 83% of Kyrgyz students were below minimum international standards in reading, 86% in maths, and 82% in science.

As in other areas of infrastructure, the position in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is better, but still not good. There may be no major shortage of teachers, but the quality is exceptionally low – and there is both overcrowding and an acute shortage of text books. At the tertiary level, Turkmenistan has 4,000 university places for 20,000 applicants – a fact that feeds endemic corruption.

A crumbling transport infrastructure is another huge problem throughout the region. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, 20% of all roads are beyond the point of repair. Even in Kazakhstan, the least decayed of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, 60% of national roads are in need of rehabilitation.

No longer integrated
One fundamental problem is that the infrastructure built under Soviet rule was never intended to be divided up – quite the opposite. Fully integrated transport and power systems in and of themselves help to protect against individual regions splitting away from the whole. Aside from the problems of likely military intervention to ensure loyalty to the Kremlin, any region attempting to secede from the USSR would have found themselves completely dependent on Soviet infrastructure. But when the USSR ceased to exist in 1990 and the Central Asian republics went their own way various integrated infrastructures were divided into chunks that were never meant to exist on their own. Infrastructure such as, for example, a road system, does not exist independently. It is part of a system which includes the mechanisms for management and maintenance. When the countries in question gained independent ownership of the physical infrastructure it was beholden on them to recreate appropriate mechanisms for maintenance and management, and it is this process that for various reasons, fell by the wayside.

The ICG’s February report concludes: “The countries can be placed in three groups. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are in the worst shape. Infrastructure is at the edge of collapse and has been deprived of investment. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are experiencing slow but consistent decline. Their situation in the near future may be no less disastrous than in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as the scope of decline becomes harder to hide. There is little hope that the downward spiral in these four countries can be stopped. Kazakhstan has made patchy progress in some sectors and conserved Soviet endowments in others. Much of the success however can be attributed not to state policies by to the country’s oil money.”

The nature of Central Asia, with its long and poorly guarded borders, is that a collapse in security in one country is bound to affect its neighbours. For China, the danger is that there could be a spill-over into Xinjiang, which has a 400km border with Tajikistan and which is one of the most troublesome of China’s regions, with its Muslim Uighur population. Russia would be equally concerned about contagion from Tajikistan boosting Islamist separatism in the north Caucasus.

The fact that Central Asia is so clearly part of the Russia-China sphere of influence – formalised in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – means that US’s freedom of action in searching out and destroying any new haven for Islamist radicalism and jihadist terrorism would be greatly restricted. However, there is an opportunity for cooperation here. Broadly speaking, the interests of the West and those of Russia and China, are becoming somewhat aligned with each other, as regards the security of Central Asia. The future of the region may be shaped by the equilibrium of cooperation and competition between the various interested parties.