Vital Interests: Alex, thanks very much for joining us again on the Vital Interests forum. Our last conversation was on Beyond Hegemony. Today we will discuss an area of the world that you've spent a lot of time focusing on, which is Central Asia. You wrote several important books on this region - Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, and Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia which you did with John Heathershaw. 

Can we begin with some historical context? As we know it today, Central Asia was incorporated into the Russian Empire during its 19th century expansion and then, of course, that morphed into the Soviet Union. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, we saw the emergence of the independence states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. How did this historical reality impact these new nations?

Alex Cooley: I think one of the most important things to remember about Central Asia historically is that it is landlocked. This is an area that is bounded by Russia to the North, by China to the East, by Iran or Persia to the Southwest, and then also what we now think of South Asia - India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This sense of being landlocked and being a crossroads between these different historical influences, empires, dynasties - that's what's captured the imagination of historians and analysts.

Pretty much every major religion has traversed through the area - Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. There's a sense that Mongolia should also be included, as well as the Xinjiang region of China when discussing a “greater Central Asia.” There's also a celebration of the region's cultural innovations that emerged - it is credited for inventing scripts, and for contributing different forms of mathematics and scientific thinking, especially during the so-called Central Asian “Golden Age” of 800-1100. The region’s modern history was shaped by both the expansion of the Russian empire and then, of course, by the Soviet state and its accompanying project.

The biggest thing that the political geography of the region has faced over the years entail real questions and instabilities about what Central Asia's political boundaries and areas of influence are. As it was incorporated, mostly during the Russian Empire, you had two vectors here. One was the settler colonialism of the Russians taking over what's known now as the Kazakh Steppe, and then, on the other hand, the subduing of the Khanates that were in Central Asia at that time, primarily in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, by cutting different kinds of deals over the terms of their incorporation.

 At the same time, the British were also competing in the Central Asia region due to their concern about having access blocked to their important colonial ambitions in the Indian subcontinent. This was known as the “classic great game” between the Russians and the British over control over that part of Eurasia.

The important thing to remember about the Soviet period was that territorially, it took up pretty much similar areas as had the Russian Empire, but the real difference was a state-building project. The Russian Empire did not transform the governing policies in Central Asia the way the Soviets did. Soviet rule brought a whole set of economic investments, modernization, infrastructure, a centrally coordinated system of economic planning, education, and indoctrination, of course, in the creation of Communist party cadres.

It was as much of a modernization project, and that's certainly the way the Russians would like to view it, as it was a classic colonial project. Even though, essentially, the structural features of colonialism were still there - i.e. the central state mediated interactions amongst the periphery - you still had a lot of extraction going on. Oil and gas and cotton came from places like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to the center, but you did have Soviet planning and Soviet state subsidies of republican budgets, and that left a really important footprint on the region and a set of legacies on societies there.

One of the most important legacies was that the Central Asian republics for the most part were quite reluctant to accept post-Soviet independence. You did not have the same kind of mass demonstrations, pro-independence movements as you did in the Caucasus, and as you did in the Baltic States. Some commentators at that time even talked about an “unwanted independence.” I don't think that's quite right, but certainly there was real trepidation because they were losing Moscow’s subsidies, they were losing being part of what was acknowledged as a superpower, and there's real uncertainty as to what was going to happen in the region.

There is a recurring theme that Central Asia has always been at the crossroads of different external influences and empires, a theme that would be picked up on again in the post-Soviet period. Having said that, the 1990s were basically spent trying to build states and cope with Soviet extrication, trying to grapple with what it is that these contemporary “stan” governments and their institutions should become.

Maybe the legacy impacted the “stans” in ways that we didn't recognize at that time, but that's when these countries really consolidated their rule and independence. For the most part, you've had real longevity in terms of what these regimes are and in mostly orderly transfers of power. Kyrgyzstan is the big exception - it has experienced three extrasystemic changes of leadership.

VI: During the Soviet-era, when these new republics were created, what was the rationale? Were there geographic rationales? Were there cultural/ethnic/ religious considerations? How were the borders set to create these five states?

Alexander Cooley: There were both geographic and political rationales when Moscow constituted the five Central Asian Soviet republics. The main issue, the main concern, was to try and divide them so that the chances of a unified response, of social mobilization and of a unified opposition to the Soviet project would be diminished. In the mid-1930s, what was known as the Turkestan SSR and adjacent Central Asian territories were divided up and turned into the five constituent Soviet Republics that endured until the Soviet collapse and then became independent states.

Ethnically and linguistically, Tajikistan is a Farsi-based dialect and the only Persian titular nationality. The others are more Turkic, but in various degrees removed from actual Turkish. Uzbek and Turkmen a little closer, and Kyrgyz and Kazakh loosely based but further away. But within each national republic were also significant minorities. For instance, having a large Tajik minority in Uzbekistan, especially in the historical areas of Samarkand and Bukhara would also keep, again, the region divided and republics concerned more about promoting their own titular minority. Or there were dozens of enclaves and exclaves of neighboring nationalities around the Ferghana Valley. 

Some scholars have referred to this as “matryoshka doll nationalism” that was deployed by the center as a mechanism of control, designed to keep the nationalities from uniting against the Soviet center. 

Of course, Russian was the lingua franca of this region, of all these republics, and many have referred to Russian rule during Soviet times also as “empire-like.” It was interesting in the 1970s and 1980s, there was genuine surprise expressed by some Western sociologists who did research in Central Asia because they found that there was a lot of "affirmative action" going on in areas like the labor market and in higher education where the local titular national state, Uzbeks and Uzbekistanis, seemed to be getting preferential treatment over local Russians or Slavs. That didn't square with our notion of the Soviet empire and so forth. What occurred was an empowerment of regional and local elites to promote their own, often informally, within the structure of the Soviet system.

VI: During the Sovietization of this region Russian was certainly introduced as the official language in schools. People had to learn Russian if they wanted to do business and participate in the party cadres. Were there also elites or certain groups affiliated with the Communist Party who were brought to Moscow and trained there in the universities to be economic and political leaders?

Alexander Cooley: Absolutely. There was a whole project to train and promote cadres in each republic. The idea was to try and take a select few and train them and place them within Union-wide institutions. Comparatively speaking, Central Asia still did not have the representation that, say, Russia and Ukraine had in Union-wide institutions, but theoretically it was possible.

Again, the upward mobility politically was something that was in theory open to all. What tended to happen at the republican level is that the interior KGB forces were staffed by Russians predominantly. They tended to be deputy party secretaries and were tasked with keeping tabs on who the leader was at the time. It was this complex system of Soviet federalism where you had Union-wide opportunities on the one hand, but also real decentralization.

I should say decentralization was also promoted a couple of times experimentally. One was under Khrushchev.  In this de-Stalinization period, republican-level administrators were given more autonomy to organize local collective farms and different agricultural structures. Then again under Brezhnev the whole Soviet system sunk into this patronage dynamic where a lot is being stolen, and where there is significant republican-level party corruption, but as long as things are sort of stable, no one really wants to know about it or draw attention to it.

Central Asia becomes a real symbol for this era’s economic stagnation, embodied in the scandal known as the Uzbek cotton affair during the '70s and '80s when it turns out that the Uzbeks were billing Moscow billions of rubles for cotton that was never produced, and was written off the books of Russian operations. There was a lot of that kind of stuff that was going on, what organizational theorists now describe as “principal-agent” problems. Again, the overall deal was don't rebel, be loyal, and we won't really hold you to account too much. That was the equilibrium that emerged in late Soviet times.

VI: Within this Soviet Union sphere of influence, were Central Asia republics considered to be second-class citizens to Ukraine and Belarus - the more Europeanized parts of the Soviet Union?

Alexander Cooley: I think that's a fair criticism. There is a debate amongst Central Asians scholars of how imperial the Soviet system was, how colonial it was, and what in essence were those opportunities. I would have to say, just for the benefit of your readers, there’s something that's always interested me whenever I teach in Central Asia and get opinions - there is a real pushback on this idea that they were colonial subjects in the Soviet system. That does not sit well.

You hear a lot of quips like "The Soviet brought us electricity, they brought us education." I think there's a real conflict there. I think increasingly as scholars start to excavate the Soviet period, you're starting to see pushback on that official narrative. I'll give the example of the Kazakhs famine, which per capita during the 1930s was even worse than the Ukrainian famine. That there was a lot of complicity of local Kazakh communiust party officials as they turned a nomadic people with seasonal mobility patterns into a sedentary people living off of land where there were non-existent resources - killing up to 2 million people. It's a highly controversial and politically sensitive topic. Now you're recently getting Kazakh scholars who are probing this, along with Western scholars. But the popular image that they were an equal or almost equal part of the Soviet Union is quite ingrained in terms of their own understanding of the Soviet period.

VI: When it comes to the largest of these states, Kazakhstan, with 18 million people, and Uzbekistan with 35 million, did they make any attempts after 1990 to chart their own course, to try to establish closer relations with Europe as did Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia? Or did they consider themselves more part of an Asian reality?

Alexander Cooley: It's a great question because those two countries are also the two largest in terms of their importance within Central Asia. They were both dominated for the first 25 years by these authoritarian rulers with larger-than-life personalities, but very different conceptions of their place in the world and the region.

President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan very early on wanted to promote an image of Kazakhstan as open to all and globalized. Open to the world, to the European Union, to the United States, while maintaining close ties with Russia and its integration plans. Also, Kazakhstan was rich in natural resources, especially with oil and gas, and so you have the so-called deals with Western energy companies in the 1990s, including the so-called deal of the century over the Tenghikz field there, as well as the Kashagan field. 

At the same time, Kazakh officials encouraged young people to go abroad, through the Bolashak program, where the Kazakh state actually for a while paid for tuition to attend prestigious universities worldwide in exchange for serving in government for some years after their return.

Uzbekistan was very different. They also had a very autocratic ruler, but President Karimov was more of a classic strong man, who was far more autarchic than Nazarbayev. He closed the country, was very concerned about so-called internal enemies, about the potential of Islamic militants to destabilize the state. Karimov depended on a far more aggressive State Security Service. Especially post 911, there was wide-spread repression in Uzbekistan against all kinds of political opponents, Islamic and otherwise.

Karimov never bought into this idea that you have to be open to the world. In fact, he perceived the Uzbek diaspora abroad – including in the United States – as politically threatening. He was always very hard-nosed. Importantly, he and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev never got along. They could never agree on major regional cooperation initiatives such as free trade or any kind of common approach to things like energy sharing or the electricity grid or things like that. Those two personalities kept Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on different paths vis-à-vis the world, but also kept them from cooperating with one another.

The essence of their independence was trying to promote their own countries and sneering at the course that the other had decided to take. That situation has changed a little bit since you've had political successions in both countries over the last five years.

VI: You mentioned Islamic militarism. Let's talk about religion in this area because for the neighbors of the Central Asian republics religion is a defining characteristic, certainly in Iran, in Pakistan, very militant Islam, and then of course, we have the reality of the Taliban returning to control Afghanistan. Does Islam played an important role in the Central Asian republics or is it just a minority religion and people consider themselves more secular?

Alexander Cooley: It's really important. It's a complex question in the sense that under the Soviet system, all expressions of religion were routed through official Soviet institutions, right? They tried to depoliticize its role, play it down, and created officially state-sanctioned Islamic boards and institutions and so forth. But non-sanctioned religious displays and customs were stamped out. In the 1990s, there was a revival and a real interest regarding religion and related cultural practices.

In the 1990s, the region was what scholar Fiona Adamson has referred to as being viewed as a tabula rasa by interested outside countries. You have Saudi Arabia funding schools and madrassas in the region to promote their brand of Wahhabism.

VI: Which is a fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam which is the dominant form of Islam in Central Asia?

Alexander Cooley: Yes, everywhere but Iran, also Tajikistan. Other countries, the Turks, the Gulf States, were trying to influence their own particular interpretations. There were actually a lot of Christian missionaries there at the time too in the 1990s. It was a real hotbed of activity. Having said that, I think there was this overblown concern that religion will become all of a sudden the region's primary affiliation.

I think a lot of the Central Asian governments were very open to saying whatever they thought their neighbors wanted to hear in order to get engagement and cooperation. Karimov back in the early 1990s went to Saudi Arabia, he went to Mecca and then he became one of the most repressive rulers out there. 

The situation starts to change politically as the Taliban consolidates power. There's real concern that there's going to be a possible spillover that there are some Central Asian factions now operating in Afghanistan that are aligned with the Taliban. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is one of the most important ones. In 1999 and 2000, they conducted a few operations where they kidnapped some foreigners in the hills of Kyrgyzstan, and that created genuine concern.

The IMU was targeted by the US when it took out the Taliban, 20 years ago. That becomes a dominant meme. The governments want to associate Islamic radicals as being aligned with terrorists and Al-Qaeda support. Then you start getting a second wave of concern that relates to basically the wars in Syria, as well as the conflict with ISIS.

ISIS recruitment of Central Asians takes place in the thousands, but it takes place mostly overseas as opposed to in the region. Central Asians who are migrant laborers, especially in Russia and in Turkey, become ISIS recruits for conflicts in Iraq and Syria. They're more susceptible to being recruited outside of these countries than they are within these countries. You do have hundreds of Central Asians that pass through Middle East conflict zones and are then considered to be real security concerns.

A lot of them lose their lives because, frankly, they're used as cannon fodder in the frontlines of some of these conflicts. There is real concern there. In terms of Islam and its revival, absolutely, there was more of a cultural affiliation now. There are pockets of real religiosity especially in places like Fergana Valley, Southern Kyrgyzstan, and parts of Uzbekistan. I do think it's important to keep in mind that you can have multiple identities.

The idea that somehow Islam is going to become all-encompassing is not really feasible, none of these places are going to become Islamic exclusively, Islamic in terms of their political orientation. Rather, it's something that's been woven into the social fabric. Some commentators talk about a kind of a Dubai-type Islam where what really appeals to young people is not a religious fundamentalism but this idea that Islam is something that's modern, it's something that is compatible with more of a global cultural orientation.

It's got a digital component to it, it's something that you can do online. I think we need to shake our views a little bit and understand that there are different manifestations of Islam. A lot of them present real appeal to these younger generations. There's no sense that any of these countries is going to be taken over the way you've seen certainly in Afghanistan.

VI: For Central Asian countries that border Afghanistan, how secure are their borders? Is it like the northern territories of Pakistan where the Taliban could flow back and forth across and find some support and sanctuary there?

Alexander Cooley: For sure, there was a real concern with the porous border with some of these places. I would say the border regime is a bit different across these. That's to do with the length of the border and also the capabilities. Uzbekistan has always kept a very tight grip on the Afghan border, via the Friendship Bridge, which is the crossing from Termez there.

That's something that's always been very tightly controlled. In fact, you recently saw the news of the downing of an Afghan Air Force jet that strayed into Uzbek airspace. The Tajik border is more mountainous and also there's been reports of more slippage in and out of different factions there, but real concern among Tajik officials about the plight of ethnic Tajiks in Northern Afghanistan and their exclusion from a Taliban government. Whether Tajikistan would actually militarily support rebel Tajik factions remains to be seen.

You actually also have the Chinese that have set up border posts in Tajikistan near the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan. You had Russian troops that were patrolling swarths along the Tajik-Afghan border till 2004, before they handed this over to the Tajik borderguard. The Tajiks have expressed concern about what's going on at that border and securing it and have been conducting military exercises with both the Russians and the Chinese.

Then the Turkmens also have a long border with Afghanistan, but it seems like they're very open to just cutting a deal with the Taliban and just agreeing informally to allow the transit of opium through their territory. It's one of the big smuggling transit routes. The border regimes are sensitive, but different countries reach different modes of accommodation.

It seems like at this point, all of the Central Asian countries that have borders with Afghanistan have been a little more proactive in negotiating with the Taliban about what the contours of the relationship are going to be, as opposed to just putting up a barrier, which is what they did before.

VI: The Taliban are closely aligned with the tribal/cultural group, the Pashtuns, who straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Are there these kinds of cultural/tribal affiliations and alliances along the borders of the Central Asian states?

Alexander Cooley: There have been. It will be really interesting to see what happens this time around. Recall that, especially the Tajiks and the Uzbeks had ties to what was known back then as the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban from strongholds in the northern areas, away from these Pashtun areas. You had a patchwork of ethnic Tajiks and the Uzbeks helping this Afghan opposition being a big part of it. What you see now is that the Taliban actually, in their renewed offensive, secured control of several areas along the northern borders.

You no longer have these kinds of Central Asian parts of Afghanistan in open rebellion the way you did before. That's going to be a big difference from 20 years ago, and I think in essence, the Russians also considered these areas, Northern Afghanistan itself, to be a buffer zone, and Central Asia as a secondary buffer zone. Russia is concerned that once refugees or fighters enter Central Asia that they can then make their way relatively easily into Russia itself.

One of the things that's yet to be determined is how many deserters from the Afghan army, who just melted away, who are ethnic Uzbek, ethnic Tajiks, there are even Kyrgyz as well as Turkmen, will be accepted by Central Asian countries. These former Afghan soldiers are seeking some kind of asylum or refugee status and what are the policies going to be regarding letting them stay or returning them back to  probably the Taliban will be demanding.

I think that'll give us a real insight into whether, as I suspect, the Central Asian states are going to be much more accommodating to the Taliban now than they were 20 years ago.

VI: Let’s look at the great powers' interest in the nations of Central Asia. Russia and China obviously have long standing interests in this region as do European countries like Britain. The United States focus on this region increased after 9/11 as a place for military bases to support the war in Afghanistan. With the US withdrawal from Afghanistan there is talk about US “over the horizon” capabilities for surveillance and staging possible drone attacks. This could involve American bases in Central Asia - something that Putin says is a non-starter. So lots going on at the moment?

Alexander Cooley: Yes, certainly the primary purpose of the US military and logistical presence in Central Asia was to support the Afghanistan missions. Absent that Afghanistan focus, the rationale for the US being in Central Asia is much diminished. The other thing that's happened in the meantime is that the regional environment has become much more suspicious and skeptical about US motives.

Your readers might not know this, but interestingly it was Vladimir Putin who was the first world leader to call President George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11 and offering support. Talk about that. There was a common civilizational struggle and greenlight some intelligence sharing and also the US use of these bases and in these post-Soviet Stans, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, initially they thought they might use Tajikistan too.

What was really interesting about this was that there was an 18-month window in which the Russians were supportive of US operations in Afghanistan. They start to become skeptical in 2003, where you have the US drive into war in Iraq, and it becomes clear to them that even though the Taliban has been defeated, the US is staying. That's when they start to become suspicious that the US is interested in power projection and influence across the Eurasian and Central Asian region, not just in defeating the Taliban, their view of the US presence becomes a lot more competitive and even adversarial. 

China initially takes the global war on terror and grafts it onto this campaign it has against the Uighurs in Xinjiang- its “Strike Hard” campaign. It used the global war on terror as a perfect opportunity to get these organizations blacklisted, to get certain security cooperation, to get them framed as Al Qaeda affiliates, even though there's very little evidence of that.

The Chinese succeed for the most part in doing that. Again, China now feels much differently about allowing an enduring US presence in Central Asia. I think that the bottom line for both China and Russia, is that they want to critically blame the US for the instability that US policy left, but they're not interested in keeping the US here.

In some ways, this is a window into what a post-US, post-liberal world order looks like -  that both China and Russia have made outreaches to the Taliban and they're both considering eventually cutting deals to recognize the Taliban either formally or de facto and plugging in with their own kinds of institutions or regional security architectures now that the US is withdrawn. For the US, absent an Afghanistan function, there was never really a compelling reason to be engaged in Central Asia.

That's pretty much where we are. The Central Asian states welcome US engagement just as they do EU engagement. They want to pursue a multi-vector policy. They want options other than those offered by Russia or China, but if you just look at the geography - Russia to the north, China to the east - they're squeezed between these two great powers in their own backyards.

VI: In fact, China has a major economic interest in Central Asia. It has included reconstruction of the old silk road trading routes in their Belt and Road Initiative. Important pipelines are being built from the energy extractive industry areas of Central Asia to China. So Central Asia is definitely part of China’s global strategy of being the dominant influence throughout all of Asia, is that how you see it?

Alexander Cooley: Yes, that's certainly true. Central Asia is an interesting window into some of the potential but also some of the problems of the Belt and Road, since you've essentially had large scale Chinese investments in infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and transit since 2000s, as well as upgrading road networks, cellular networks, and creating smart cities with digital surveillance technologies. All this kind of stuff has been going on in Central Asia.

It's worth noting that of the six main Belt and Road routes, three of them passed through Central Asia in different forms. There's a real hub. Whether the benefits are going to accrue to Central Asia or whether it's just going to be a transit route remains an open question. How much of this is actually going to benefit Central Asia, especially when China imports a lot of its labor to build these roads and the smart city construction projects. It is not at all clear how much local, regional benefit will result.

Nevertheless, yes, if you look at the Belt and Road as not only an infrastructure project, but as a grand foreign policy strategy, Central Asia really lies at the heart of that. In terms of their economic engagement, China's the most important economic player now, more so than Russia, more so than the EU.

VI: Are the inroads the Chinese have made a cause of conflict between Russia and China?

Alexander Cooley: It's a great question because one would think that - especially because the Russian lives in that Soviet mentality that we talked about - always considered Central Asia to be its sphere of privileged interest. Suggesting that Moscow would think that these Chinese forays would become a Russian concern. Publicly, that is played down, and publicly the Russians basically say that there's no daylight between them and the Chinese.

Privately, there is some concern, but there's also resignation, in that there's such a symmetry now in economic power between Russia and China that any kind of red line that China crosses, the Russians aren't going to complain about. What you've seen since 2016 is that Vladimir Putin has gone from talking about Central Asia's sphere of interest to talking about Greater Eurasia - asserting that Russia lies at the heart of an integrating Greater Eurasia.

If China is rewiring the place and investing widely in infrastructure, then that's in Russia's interest as long as you have non-Western economic integration. What the Russians have tried to do is to wish the problem away by scaling it up. Just saying as long as this continent is non-Western, as long as it's part of a “Great Eurasia” which Russia is at the heart of, we're good. I think there's a lot of skepticism about that. The reality is that the Russians have a very close partnership with the Chinese in part because they view China as the strategic ally, pushing back against the US-led world order. If that involves accommodating recent Chinese forays into Central Asia, they can live with that.

VI: You've also written about another aspect of the governments of contemporary Central Asians republics; namely, their role not as pawns in any great power game but rather as active players in their own kind of game. In your book, Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia, you describe an involvement with the rest of the world in the dodgy spheres of international banking and finance, often facilitating grand corruption. Can you talk a bit about this?

Alexander Cooley: It's an interesting question because there's always the front stage where you have great power competition and big kinds of declarations and dramatic tugs of war between Russia and, say, the US, over basing rights. Then behind the scenes, what you see is a lot of integrated networks through which Central Asian elites are tied into systems of offshore finance, to these grand corruption schemes that are enabled by both regional and by globally-networked actors like brokers and service providers.

I'll give you an example from a Financial Times investigation into the construction of the Chinese-Central Asia gas pipeline. On the one hand, China built this natural gas pipeline across the region that displaced Russia and their own pipeline network as the main supplier and distributors of Central Asian gas. Well, this is presented as a geopolitical win for China. We also saw that the Chinese pipeline also involved a set of kickback arrangements and sweetheart deals to the benefit of the Kazakh president's son-in-law that was also tied into buyback schemes tied into Russian companies.

Things are a lot more complex behind the scenes. It's the same with the US base in Kyrgyzstan. On the one hand, the Russians wanted to kick the US out of Kyrgyzstan. They put pressure on the Kyrgyz government in 2009 to get rid of the base. Behind the scenes, the base required three Olympics size swimming pools worth of jet fuel every day. What you had was a collaborative scheme that involved sourcing of jet fuel in Omsk, as fuel from Siberian refineries was being smuggled across the border and certified as being for civilian use when in fact it was clearly for military purposes. This was known by Russian and US defense officials.

This was being done so by a bunch of shady offshore companies registered in Gibraltar with no previous corporate history and with this money flowing into the coffers of Kyrgyz government officials and connected insiders. What I find really interesting about grand corruption schemes, is that they blow up our simplistic notions of geopolitical competition, and they show how early on a lot of these Central Asian elites are really tuned into these kinds of regional and global networks.

VI: Given the events of the past weeks that saw the collapse of the Afghan government, a rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and a chaotic withdrawal by the United States, do the Central Asian nations see this as a critically destabilizing reality or can they use this regional flux to their own advantage?

Alexander Cooley: I think there is real concern and trepidation for now. But remember the US has been signaling withdrawal from Afghanistan since 2014, really, even before that. So none of what is taking place is a surprise to the region - maybe the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government caught us all out. At the same time, I think there is enough confidence that unlike when the US came in, there are a number of different regional structures and mechanisms, either on the security front or the economic front, that they feel as if they're in a much better position to integrate a Taliban-led Afghanistan within a more connected region, and that's going to be the case.

For instance, the Chinese have offered the Taliban to construct some roads, and again, to invest in the region, provided that the Taliban did not give safe harbor to Uighurs from Xinjiang. That's probably a deal the Taliban is going to take. Same thing with the Russians who basically said, "We'll recognize you. We're not going to fund opposition movements as long as you do not go over those Central Asian borders," and by all accounts, that's fine with the Taliban.

I think the Central Asian countries are in the same boat. Keep the militants from crossing the border, keep everything stable, minimize refugees. I think that's going to be another part of this. Then I think we can deal. There's more self-confidence amongst the Central Asian states that they can deal with the Taliban from a more regional perspective than before where they really were concerned about certain spillover and the destabilization of their own countries. Now, whether that's going to work out, we don't know, but I think there's a little more confidence. It is 20 years later and the Central Asian states are now 30 years old and can be a bit more proactive and deal with the situation, even with the perception of a US power vacuum. 

VI: Alex, we're coming to the end of our time. Thanks to this conversation we can keep a more informed eye on Central Asia during a significant time in this region. It sounds like you think that Central Asia will actually act as a guardrail to some of the tensions in the region and take actions to promote stability. It may not be on America's agenda, but certainly the Russians and the Chinese and the other actors in the region will all coalesce to evolve their own reality there.

Alexander Cooley: Yes, I think that you hit the nail exactly on the head. The question of stability is going to be done on non-liberal peacebuilding terms. In the end, the region appears to have accepted and converged around what the Taliban wants to do as opposed to what the US was trying to accomplish in their attempt at democratizing that in fact led to the building of a failed state in the region. That's why I think it's going to be incredibly important globally.

At the same time, we can expect friction. Russia and China are going to have to take steps and govern. If things get too out of control, they'll be forced into some really tough decisions about how much of a border presence they want to provide, how much they want to build up the Central Asian militaries, and how much they actually want to confront Islamic militants like the Taliban or ISIS affiliates? They're going to face all these decisions in this post-US world. It's a case of being careful what you wish for.

For the moment, I think they feel as if this is the end of an era and the beginning of what they would regard as a multipolar world. We'll see.

Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute. Professor Cooley’s research examines how external actors—including emerging powers, international organizations, multinational companies, NGOs, and Western enablers of grand corruption—have influenced the development, governance and sovereignty of the former Soviet states, with a focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cooley is the author and/or editor of seven academic books including, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (Yale University Press 2017), co-authored with John Heathershaw, and most recently, Exit from Hegemony: the Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Daniel Nexon.