Flashpoint: Central Asia | Michael T. Klare | Big Think

Flashpoint: Central Asia

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Geopolitical jockeying for oil, gas and uranium will cause friction here, Klare says.

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Michael T. Klare:

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies (a joint appointment at Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), and Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies (PAWSS), a position he has held since 1985. Before assuming his present post, he served as Director of the Program on Militarism and Disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. (1977-84).

Professor Klare has written widely on U.S. defense policy, the arms trade, and world security affairs. He is the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Metropolitan Books, 2004), along with many other books. He is also the defense correspondent of The Nation, a Contributing Editor of Current History, and has contrbuted to numerous publications.

Michael Klare serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association, and the advisory board of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch; he is also a member of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What will a conflict in Central Asia look like?

Michael Klare: Now, remember central Asia was under Soviet rule for many decades and before that it was part of the Czar’s empire. This is an area of many different ethnic groups the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Kazaks, the Kyrgys and to some degree the territories that these groups inhabited were never really clearly demarcated. They're nomadic people, so they have traditional lands, but the Czars came in and said okay, this is where we are going to draw the lines and then the Soviets came in and drew the lines, and they don’t really bear close approximation to where the particular people live. So, there are a lot of competing claims to where their territory should be. In these areas lie uranium, lie natural gas, and coal and oil. So, there are some struggles underway as to who should control what of these valuable areas. So, you could have fights in the future that a territorial over, who should get these prized areas. Now, on top of that you have a situation where most of the governments in these areas are control by people who were once part of the Soviet bureaucratic machine. They look and smell like old Soviet bureaucrats, right? They claim to be democrats, but they are really not, they are really very authoritarian and with the new wealth coming from oil and natural gas, well most of that money winds up in the hands of their friends, relatives, and cronies and a lot of the wealth disappears into hidden bank accounts somewhere, I am thinking particularly of the family of Nursultan Nazarbayev,the President of Kazakhstan, which is the wealthiest of these countries. Meanwhile most of the people in these countries are not getting any wealthier, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. These are also predominantly Muslim countries. They have been a target of the Muslim, Islamic fundamentalist movements of past decade or so. I am talking of groups associated with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Quaeda and some of the other extremist movements that we've heard of. And these groups are finding some sympathy among the people of these areas who find the governments to be corrupt, to be insensitive to their needs, to be pocketing all the money and giving it to their cronies. So in the future, you could have uprisings like the kind we've had another countries that are fueled by Islamic propaganda, but really at heart are about the mal-distribution of resource wealth, kind of life what I was talking about in the Niger delta area where the elites claim all of the resource wealth, conditions of deteriorating, the masses of the people are getting worse off, not better, conditions of deteriorating and this is exactly the kind of fertile atmosphere in which extremist movements take off and this is what I worry about. This is an area of geopolitical competition between three great powers.

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