NATO Ties Won't Affect Eastern Alliances

Tajikistan’s interest in working with NATO is not at odds with its membership of former Soviet security groupings, say NBCentralAsia observers.



Last week, the NATO Secretary General’s special envoy Robert Simmons met President Imomali Rahmon in Dushanbe. Although they agreed that cooperation should continue, Rahmon spelled out the limits, saying it would be confined to military training, planning for emergencies and natural disasters, border security, combating drug-trafficking and certain technical projects.



Tajikistan is part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme, and has also assisted the separate United States-led Coalition operation in Afghanistan by hosting a French air force contingent at Dushanbe airport since 2001.



According to Maruf Hasanov, head of international cooperation at the Tajik defence ministry, his country was one of the last in the former Soviet Union to engage with NATO.



Simmons’s visit is “a sign that NATO wants closer ties with Tajikistan, just as we do,” said Hasanov.



The day before Simmons’s meeting with Rahmon, Nikolai Bordyuzha, the secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, CSTO, told a forum in Bishkek that the growing activity of associations like NATO which are “external to the region” represented an “imported” risk and challenge to regional stability.



Along with the CSTO, Tajikistan is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO, which is dominated by Russia and China. At the 2005 SCO summit, member states tried to push the US into drawing up a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Central Asia.



Even though Tajikistan might seem to be caught in the middle between its neighbours and the West, NBCentralAsia observers say it should have no problem achieving a balance of allegiances.



“The latest proposals will mean broader cooperation [with NATO], but they won’t fundamentally change anything. They are unlikely to affect Tajikistan’s cooperation with the CSTO and other groupings,” said political scientist Hodi Abdujabbor.



According to another commentator, Shokirjon Hakimov, Tajikistan is simply adhering to its officially-espoused aim of pursuing a “multi-vector” foreign policy by cooperating simultaneously with different military and political alliances.



He said the isolation of Uzbekistan – which distanced itself from the West after being heavily criticised for the Andijan killings of May 2005 – creates more room for Tajikistan, which should capitalise on any opportunity to move closer to NATO.



Political scientist Parviz Mullojanov explained that the CSTO and SCO charters do not ban members from cooperating with other international organisations and alliances, and he argues that the Cold War era of open confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact is long past.



“Despite the anti-NATO rhetoric of some Russian politicians, they cannot raise official or legal objections to other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States working more with NATO,” he said.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)