Two hours north of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, an Iranian construction firm is boring a hole in the side of the Fan Mountains. It’s for a five-kilometer tunnel that, when finished in 2007, will become the only road open year-round between this country’s two main cities. And it will mean that motorists will no longer have to make the terrifying trip between Dushanbe and Khujand across the 11,000-foot Anzob Pass.
But for Iran, the Anzob tunnel project is hardly an act of pure magnanimity. It’s an effort to get an edge on the competition. In a repeat of the “Great Game” that played out in Central Asia over the mid-to-late 19th century, foreign powers including Iran, Russia, China and the United States are converging on Tajikistan — and the rest of Central Asia — to compete for influence. There is a lot to gain: Access to vast, untapped oil and natural gas reserves, rights to the use of key military bases, and the imaginations of the nearly 50 million people who live in this part of the Muslim world. The whole place is up for grabs.
For the players in today’s version of the Great Game, Central Asia — the region that comprises Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — is like California at the dawn of the Gold Rush: A reservoir of unbounded potential and unrealized wealth. The Chinese seek new markets to dump their goods in and energy sources to fuel their economy; the Russians, who consider Central Asia part of their backyard, want to preserve the status quo while continuing to expand their multinational electricity grid; and the Iranians hope that big-money investments in the region, coupled with a successful nuclear fuel cycle, will elevate their status in the Muslim world. The United States has an eye on long runways (recent visits by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were motivated by concerns over access to American military bases), energy prospects and a region seemingly ripe for democratic change.
All this commotion harks back to the contest that took place in Central Asia starting almost 200 years ago, when the region’s unmapped terrain represented prime real estate to the expanding Russian Empire and to the British Empire in India. Over decades, the Russian czars sparred with Queen Victoria for influence, all parties sending their spies and emissaries to appease the khans, emirs and shahs who ruled the region. Many of those sent were killed, including the British agent, Capt. Arthur Conolly who coined the phrase the “Great Game.”
Central Asia was eventually swept into the Russian Empire. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the communists chopped the territory up into separate Soviet socialist republics. For more than 70 years, no one disputed the communists’ hold on Central Asia. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, foreign businesses jumped at the opportunity to invest in the oil and natural gas fields around the Caspian Sea. Western corporations and governments feted the despotic leaders of these new nations like modern-day emirs. The Great Game resumed.
When I arrived late one September night at Manas International Airport in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, the first sight to greet me was a row of hulking American KC-135s, C-17s and C-130s on the tarmac. Even through the fog of jetlag, it was a reminder to me — and everyone else flying in and out of Bishkek — that the United States is a truly global empire.
But the fate of empires is tied to more than military might, and the 21st-century version of the Great Game relies on capturing the popular imagination. In the first three years after Washington began deploying forces in Kyrgyzstan in December 2001, however, the number of Kyrgyz “favorably inclined” toward the United States fell from 65 percent to 47 percent. Sitting on the runway on my first night in Central Asia, I wondered what effect the presence of the US air base was having on popular opinion, and whether it might explain the Kyrgyz’s increasingly negative attitudes toward the United States.
These musings, I soon found out, were premature. Instead of there being too much of the United States in Central Asia, there may just be too little. Over the following weeks, I saw scarcely another speck of America in the region. While the Pentagon is well represented, American values and ideas aren’t.
America’s limited public role in Central Asia goes beyond the media and entertainment industries. In high-profile international investments, the United States lags behind Iran, China and Russia, whose combined annual gross domestic product is about three-quarters that of the United States.
One afternoon I sat in a cafe in Khujand discussing the Great Game with a Tajik friend. I asked him to envisage how the superpower competition in Central Asia would shape up over the next decade. How could a country win the Great Game? “Show us the money,” he said with a grin.
Central Asia could yet buck the trend of anti-Americanism that has swept the wider Muslim world. The loyalties and allegiances of most people there are still for sale. But the United States’s ability to win over hearts and minds is in jeopardy. Ten years from now, my friend thought, “everyone else might be here, but the Americans won’t still be interested. They just don’t have the patience.” Yet patience could well be the name of the Game.
