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Afghanistan is important again today, not because it threatens Moscow with Islamic
fundamentalism, but because it constitutes a major route for those who would tap Central
Asian's resources. Russia is not yet rich enough to reclaim the region and control what
may be the hard earth's last unexplored energy fields. What Moscow is doing by its
choice of clients in Afghanistan, and has one all over the former Soviet Union, is to
exercise its still considerable powers to deny those resources to the world economy until
it is ready to exploit them itself. ' .

More than five years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Russian troops are on
duty in almost every former Soviet republic. How did Moscow to it? Only in sad cases
Belarus and Armenian are the Russians wanted. When the empire broke up, the Central
Asians found themselves without their own border guards and were forced to ask
Moscow for help. Ukraine is burdened with some 30,000 Russian military personnel who
refuse to leave, including the naval forces with the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. In
Moldova and Georgia, Russia created and covertly backed separatist movements and then
used the resulting bloodshed to insert Russian troops as "peacekeepers." Tajikistan has
suffered a similar fate.

As Vlad Socor an other analysts of the Jamestown Foundation's daily Monitor have so
amply documented, many former Soviet republics are looking for ways to break
Moscow's hold. Huge Uzbekistan is seeking a Westward-looking axis with Ukraine and
Germany. Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov met President Clinton this summer and
expressed a desire to cooperate with NATO. Over Russian and Iranian objections,
Azerbaijan this summer concluded a huge deal with Western partner, including Mobil
Oil, for exploration in the Shah Daniz oil and gas fields in"the Azeri sector of the Caspian
Sea. Temporarily accepting defeat, Russia's Lukoil and Iran's Oil Industries Engineering
and Construction took a minority 10 per cent share each as a kind of payoff.

Resource-rich Kazakhstan recently signed a military and industrial co-operation

agreement with Turkej, and in August took possession of six donated US Coast Guard
ships for its new Caspian Sea flotilla. A powerful group of eager Western partners, led
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Chevron, is now jointly exploring Kazakhstan's sector of the Caspian. Western

consortiums are busy in Turkmenistan, too.

Moscow still has the means to play the spoiler in virtually every comer of its former
empire, by stirring up rump Russian communities or other minority groups in the newly
independent states. Many are still very vulnerable to economic blackmail in the form of
punitive import duties, or are in heavy debt to the Russian state energy giant Gazprom.

Most former republics know their only hope of real freedom is the power that comes with
economics success. Yet they also know that virtually every resource export route out of
the region - over land by rail or by,pipeline -- runs through Russia. This inhibits Western
investment. Oil and gas exports are subject to the technical incompetence of problem-
ridden Gazporm, but even when equipment is functioning, operations depend on
Moscow's fickle political winds.

The great hope today for the independence-minded republics of Central Asia and
Transcaucasia rests on something they call the transit corridor. Still but a dream, this
route ~ across the Caspian through Azerbaijan and Georgia an on to Turkey and the Black
Sea -- would give them direct access to Western markets while bypassing Russia.
Moscow and Iran will do everything they can to block the construction of the transit
corridor. But there is more than one way oil and gas control. This is where Afghanistan
comes in, and why, if they cannot control it themselves. Moscow and Tehran have an
active interest in keeping Kabul in perpetual chaos.

For the past year, serious planning has been underway for the construction of oil and gas
pipelines from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and on to Pakistan and the Indian
Oceans. Interested outside parties include not only Pakistan but more importantly China,
which is now Uzbekistan's largest trading partner and is eager for a big share of Central
Asian oil and gas. A route through Afghanistan would also break Moscow's choke-hold
on Central Asian exports. Russia has more than 30,000 troops in Tajikistan today,
ostensibly to protect a Russian-installed government from Islamic rebels But the other
states of Central Asia re painfully aware of the real reason. As the commander of Russian
forces in Tajikistan, Andrei Nikolayev, so succinctly put it: "What we are doing in.
Tajikistan is protecting our strategic interests ... We are interested on cotton, rare metals
and sources of energy."

Confronted with Moscow's determination to claim for itself the riches of its former
empire, or at least deny them to others, what should the West do? There are both
geographical and political limits to the reach of the West into Central Asia. No elected
official could proposed and no general would accept a military commitment

to the region. And unlike Iran, Western governments do not have the sort of leverage on
their businessmen that could compel them to invest any more in the region than they
already do.

What the American and other Western government can do, however, is make clear in
diplomatic dialogue with Russia that any attempt to claim sovereignty over all the
Caspian Sea will be unacceptable. This is a critical point if the former Soviet republics
are to break Moscow's stranglehold on their most valuable assets. At the same time, it
must be made clear to Moscow that the West will not accept the creation of a Russian-led
military bloc in Central Asia under any pretext, including a supposed fear of the Afghan
Taliban, who have just won control of Kabul. Russian security chief Alexandar Lebed
professes to believe that the Islamicist Taliban are pointed straight at the heart of Mother
Russia and must be stopped by all military means necessary. Foreign Minister Yevgeny
Primakov has openly challenged this view, noting that Russia already got burned once in
Afghanistan and in any event faces no danger from the Taliban.

Mr. Primakov, an old KGB export on Middle East and Islamic affairs, should know what
he is talking about. In any event. Afghanistan's old friends in the West and elsewhere
must also resist the temptation to let Russia in through bogus peace talks designed to
bring Moscow's clients, deposed President Burhanuddin Rabbani and former communist
militia commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostam, back into power in Kabul.

Finally, the United States should stop endorsing Russian "peacekeeping" mission in
places like Tajikistan. In one of the more cynical and misguided acts of his Presidency,
President Clintonsecured Russia's endorsement for the US action in Haiti by giving
Russia a monopoly on peacekeeping in Georgia. It was only one symptom of a sphcres-
of-intcrcst mind set that the Clinton administration entertains long after the rest of the
world has discarded it.

Russia has controlled Central Asia through most of this century, but is has lastly proved
too weak to capitalise on that control. The West has been lucky that economic arid other
defects of communism kept the Soviet Union from developing the necessary skills or
technology. But if its economics reforms take hold, it is only a matter of time before a
mighty and invigorated Russia stakes a claim to all it backyard. The history of this
century has been marked, above, all, by a resistance to the emergence of a single power in
Europe. At the beginning of the next century, it may be Central Asia that becomes the
central focus of world conflicts.