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1990s (see also Modasser, 2012a). Uzbekistan’s border (137 km long) with
Afghanistan’s northern Balkh province is one of the world’s most heavily
guarded frontiers, although the country is most concerned about threats
originating from Afghanistan penetrating Uzbekistan via the restive Ferghana
Valley (Tadjbakhsh, 2012b). The government of Uzbekistan has reported 22
cases of what it called ‘border violations’ by people from Afghanistan. In one
case in mid-March 2013, in circumstances that remained controversial, the
country’s border guards opened fire on and killed at least three Afghans near
Aral-Paygambar Island in the middle of the Amu Darya (see, e.g., Rotar, 2013).
At the same time, Uzbekistan has growing economic stakes in Afghanistan
(electricity transmission, trade, transit) and is anxious about how the contracts
and the underlying economic interests might stand after 2014. It has also
apparently been reaching out to Uzbek and Hazara ‘strongmen’ in northern
Afghanistan. 6
Turkmenistan, bordering on Afghanistan’s northern and north-western provinces
of Faryab, Jowzjan, Badghis and Herat (the border is 744 km long), has been the
least involved in Afghan affairs and is hence the least worried (see also
Modasser, 2012b). This is mainly because interaction between Afghanistan and
Turkmenistan at both governmental and public levels has been very limited,
although economic relations have existed throughout recent history and have
been expanding since 2001. The country has had good but circumspect relations
with various Afghan regimes, including the Taliban, given its stated policy of
‘positive neutrality’, and has been mainly interested in making attempts, so far
inconclusively, to export gas through Afghanistan to South Asia under the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) project (for historical detail,
see e.g. Brill Olcott, 2006). Recently, Turkmenistan has been leading the idea of
building a trilateral railway linking it with Afghanistan and Tajikistan, but
important questions over security and funding remain unaddressed, although the
construction of Turkmenistan’s stretch of the railway was inaugurated on 5 June
2013 (see e.g. Gurt, 2013 and Yari, 2013). Furthermore, it is reportedly the most
indifferent of all the three direct northern neighbours towards the conditions of
its ‘ethnic kin’ in Afghanistan. 7
The defensive behaviour recently shown by some of Afghanistan’s Central Asian
neighbours is not favoured by the Afghan government, which is struggling to
replace it with meaningful regional cooperation, particularly through the
Afghanistan-focused ‘Heart of Asia’ or Istanbul Process. First, the Afghan
government is trying to organise relations with neighbouring Central Asian states
through intergovernmental channels and does not support growing ties between
the Central Asian states, particularly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the mainly
anti-Taliban, non-Pashtun, co-ethnic political opposition in the north (on recent
developments with regard to what is called the ‘northern front’ in Afghan
domestic politics, see Ruttig, 2013). Second, perhaps more importantly, the
Afghan government is struggling to galvanise regional political, economic and
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