Indefinite Deployment: US Neocons Explain Rationale of Never Leaving Kyrgyz Airbase

originally posted on CA-NEWS.org
by Ryan Weber

The US will continue to have a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, perhaps indefinitely, despite plans for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, according to a veteran conservative analyst and former Defense Department staff.

The admission was made on July 6 at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative Washington, D.C. think tank with a history of promoting US national security interests.

The comments, by Seth Cropsey (pictured), a Senior Fellow at Hudson, and formerly of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, came in response to an audience question about the future of US-Kyrgyz relations after the end of military operations in Afghanistan, and the presumed closure of the US airbase at Bishkek's Manas International airport. The base, which opened in December 2001 and is now known as the Transit Center at Manas (or Manas TC), has been a lightning rod of controversy since 2005, and more recently figured as an international negotiating chip for then-President Kurmanbek Bakiev to elicit a a six-fold increase in the American's lease, up to $60 million per year in 2009.

US Military and diplomatic envoys have long argued that Manas TC is critical to the Afghan war effort, largely over-shadowing other topics of US-Kyrgyz foreign relations such as economic development, anti-corruption, and Human Rights violations under the current and past administrations.

But according to Cropsey, who is a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Combat, future geopolitical concerns will necessitate a US presence long after the last US troops leave Afghanistan. He specifically cited a nuclear Iran, prolonged Afghan in-fighting, or an aggressive China all as viable justifications for a permanent US presence.

Cropsey's other claims, laid out during his formal presentation, painted a very monochrome picture of the benefits of militarizing US foreign policy in Central Asia. For example, he said that, “the fight against the Taliban has had a positive impact on the security of Central Asia,” and that by attacking Islamist extremists in Afghanistan, the US has reduced the risk of homegrown terrorist attacks in neighboring countries. Further, he lauded US financial and military aid to repressive regimes like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for helping to deny al-Qaeda and the Taliban the same sorts of cross-border safe havens in the North that they enjoy along the Pakistan border. Finally, he credited the US involvement with making Central Asia “less susceptible to the rise of a rogue state.”

But on-the-ground realities seem to contradict much of Cropsey's basic assumptions. Islamist terrorist groups have never been especially active in Central Asia, and are certainly no more or less active today than they were before US engagement with the region began in 2001. Over the past decade, most attempts to blame Islamists for social unrest have been revealed as authoritarian leaders using “anti-terrorism,” including US-trained soldiers and funding, as a facade for repressing political and social discontent. As for “safe havens,” the geographic, political, and demographic conditions along Afghanistan's Northern border are dramatically different than those of the South, a basic cultural understanding which Cropsey disregards.

Also contrary to Cropsey's message are the actions of current military planners, who appear after the threatened closure of Manas TC by then-President Bakiev to see the base as more of a liability than an asset. The growing Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is growing in one very clear direction – away from Kyrgyzstan. While Cropsey declares the singular advantage of airborn over land-based routes, and the primacy of Kyrgyzstan as a staging area based on its “proximity,” military planners at the Pentagon have in fact been tireless exploring other options. Rail lines from the Black Sea port of Ponti or even from as far away as Riga, Latvia are one popular solution for moving bulk freight. The Air Force announced in June that it is even experimenting with a non-stop trans-polar flight directly from the continental US.

The event, titled, “The Political Situation in Kyrgyzstan: Implications for the United States,” was sponsored in part – though organizers insist a very small part – by Mina Corp., a Gibraltar-registered company which formerly held exclusive fuel supply contracts for Manas TC before a US Congressional hearing uncovered questionable business practices and a lack of oversight by Pentagon procurement officials.

Other panelists included Sheradil Baktygulov of the Bishkek-based Program to Strengthen Parliament, Mirian Lanskoy of the National Endowment for Democracy, and Seyitbek Usmanov, co-founder of the Central Asia Free Market Institute in Bishkek.