While West mulls engaging with the Taliban, Central Asia has been at it for years

If everything goes as planned, Afghanistan will within the coming decade be joined to Central Asia by gas pipelines, high-voltage power lines, and railroads.

Western countries are coming to terms with the need to engage with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Most of Central Asia has been doing it for years already.

Turkmenistan was laying out the red carpet for the Taliban even before Kabul fell in mid-August 2021.

A full six months before those events, a group of Taliban officials travelled to Ashgabat to voice their support for the strongly Turkmenistan-backed trans-Afghan TAPI natural gas pipeline. Turkmen officials dealt with the Qatar-based visitors as though they were already in charge.

Within three days of President Ashraf Ghani’s government collapsing in disarray, a Turkmen diplomat based in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif met with the Taliban-appointed head of the Balkh province. This in effect made Turkmenistan the first country in the world to acknowledge the militant group as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan.

Cordial Turkmen-Taliban dialogue flourished thereafter. As early as September 2021, Ashgabat began sending humanitarian aid to its eastern neighbour. It has repeated the gesture many more times since.

Afghanistan and Turkmenistan did $481 million of trade in 2023. Both countries want that figure to balloon. Afghan officials see Turkmenistan as a springboard for increasing their exports.

In March, representatives from 230 Afghan companies descended on Ashgabat to showcase their goods and nose about for deals.

“Turkmenistan is a country which borders the Caspian Sea … and maintains good relations with Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan. Good relations with this country can help increase transit which will benefit Afghanistan,” Khan Jan Alokozai, a representative of Afghanistan’s Chamber of Commerce and Investment, told TOLOnews in January.

Then there are the big-ticket items that Turkmenistan is eager to see make headway. In addition to TAPI, Ashgabat is lobbying hard for construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) high-voltage power line. Turkey’s Calyk Holding company has been contracted to implement that project, which will require threading lines from Turkmenistan’s Mary province through the Herat province in Afghanistan, Kandahar province in south Afghanistan, and Quetta in Pakistan.

Another big undertaking is the construction of a 173-kilometre railway line from the border town of Torghundi to Herat and a dry port at Torghundi.

That railroad project pales in comparison to what Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are now joining forces to do.

Last month, Kazakh deputy prime minister Serik Zhumangarin said during a visit to Kabul that his government is prepared to give material support to building a multi-branch railway corridor that would link Termez in south Uzbekistan, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, the Afghan-Pakistani border town of Spin Buldak, and Peshawar in Pakistan.

“This project will make it possible to reduce the delivery time of goods between countries in this region almost 10-fold, as well as reduce the cost of cargo transportation,” a Kazakh government statement read.

Around 120 Uzbek railroad labourers have been at work since February refurbishing an existing section of line running from the border town of Khairaton to Mazar-i-Sharif.

This is not charity. Building all these railroads will give landlocked Central Asia useful access to the Indian Ocean region and its 2.9 billion people.

Russia, incidentally, is eyeing an active role in these and other railway projects. Developing southbound continent-straddling transport routes is viewed by Moscow as key to advancing its agenda of pivoting trade relations away from the West.

Even Tajikistan, which has been frosty in its stance toward the Taliban regime, is increasingly cognizant of the need to do business with Afghanistan. Dushanbe sells electricity to Kabul, which is these days proving better at paying its bills.

Existing electricity supply volumes are as nothing compared to the business that Tajikistan, along with Kyrgyzstan, could do if the CASA-1000 high-voltage power line project is completed. This $1.2 billion initiative, which would see lines extended from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan, received a major shot in the arm in February, when the World Bank indicated that it would resume providing financial support.

Progress on CASA-1000 was suspended in the wake of the Taliban seizing power.

Pending progress on all these grand efforts, person-to-person and business-to-business connections are ever-multiplying.

It is hard to keep track of the gangs of entrepreneurs flying north and south in the hunt for deals. In late April, a delegation of Afghan businesspeople travelled to Uzbekistan and came away with $44 million in commercial agreements. A whole crowd of Kazakh company representatives joined Zhumangarin on his trip to Kabul. One auto dealership based in Kazakhstan proposed selling Kia and Chevrolet cars to Afghan motorists. In January, an Afghan business delegation met with a gathering of their Kyrgyz colleagues in Bishkek to investigate the viability of importing electric lamps, pharmaceuticals, sugar, vegetables, and fabrics, among other things, from Kyrgyzstan. Copious trucks laden with goods routinely rumble through the multiple border crossings between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

But there is an elephant in the room: Afghanistan’s colossal Qosh-Tepa canal project.

The Taliban regime say that this project will enable it to transform a vast section of Afghanistan’s deserts – around 550,000 hectares – into viable farming land.

Keeping this canal full will require diverting around 20 percent of the water flowing through the Amu Darya River, which Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan rely upon heavily.

Central Asian leaders have behaved with a remarkable surfeit of gingerness over Qosh-Tepa. Speaking at a regional conference in September, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev warned that the canal threatened to “radically change the water regime and balance in Central Asia.” But his rhetoric has been conciliatory to a fault. Mirziyoyev eschews the kind of belligerence that Cassandras forecasting Central Asian water wars tend to expect. He has limited himself instead to suggesting meekly that Afghan officials consider joining regional dialogue platforms on the joint use of water resources. Turkmenistan is similarly conflict-averse in its pronouncements.

Central Asian governments talk much less these days of Afghanistan as a potential security threat, but those anxieties have not gone away altogether.

These worries are regularly fanned by Russia, which reliably issues alarming bulletins about the presence of Islamic State militants in northern areas of Afghanistan. In February, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu warned that the number of the group’s militants present in the country had grown by 15 percent over the previous year.

All told, though, none of these concerns are likely to temper enthusiasm in Central Asia for expanding dealings with Afghanistan.