The recent U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee Hearing on Central Asian Affairs affirmed the significance of Central Asia for U.S. regional and global security interests. Even more so, it pointed to efforts of the U.S. government to link its faltering Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy with what it hopes will be a more robust regional policy toward Central Asia and the region more broadly. However, these dynamics appear to be primarily driven by the U.S. need to finish its “business” in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas rather than by the potential of the U.S.-Central Asian cooperation in its own right. BACKGROUND: Held on 15 December 2009, the hearing came two weeks after U.S. President Obama announced plans to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. troops in Afghanistan and conclude the military campaign by 2011. The hearing, centered on testimonies of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs George Krol, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia David Sedney, and local experts, painted two divergent but co-existing realities: Central Asia is important to U.S. regional and global security interests, but no corresponding level of regional engagement has been pursued, let alone achieved, to fully utilize the capacity of U.S.-Central Asian relations. Indeed, Central Asia is critical for long-term U.S. interests in maintaining a balance of power in Eurasia and integrating some of the Eurasian sub-regions into global economic frameworks. The region can also better support U.S. objectives of defeating Al-Qaida, weakening jihadist networks, and diversifying energy sources and transit routes. Kroll seems to share this view, but necessary resources to do the job are not there. In addition, the U.S. related efforts today are frustrated not only by the rise of China and resurgent Russia, but also by the U.S. own failure, well before 2001, to pursue a serious regional engagement in the areas of trade, infrastructure investment, political and economic reform. Even in the U.S.-Central Asian relations concerning Afghanistan one can discern a narrow regional perspective on part of the U.S., largely resting on the U.S. need to pursue and end the military campaign in Afghanistan. Before 9/11 Central Asia was an insignificant item on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. In 2001, however, the U.S. needed the region to launch its war in Afghanistan. Today, it needs Central Asia to end the war, as well. This is not to underestimate the interconnection of security in Afghanistan and Central Asia. As Kroll stated, “A stable future for Afghanistan depends on the continued assistance of its Central Asian neighbors – just as a stable, prosperous future for the Central Asian states depends on bringing peace, stability and prosperity back to their immediate neighbor Afghanistan.” However, other important interests should be further explored as part of U.S.-Central Asian cooperation, with an equally significant share of resources, including on the human rights front. Legal and moral questions of pursuing security relations with authoritarian Central Asian states to support operations in Afghanistan, for instance, still remain, especially after the alleged Uzbek government’s massacre of protestors in 2005 and forced and child labor practices in the region. As Senator Edward Kaufman quipped at the hearing, “The good news is these governments repress terrorists, the bad news is they repress everybody.” IMPLICATIONS: It took the U.S. almost 3 administrations to not only better realize the importance of Central Asia in bringing what seems to be an ill-defined victory to Afghanistan, but also take concrete practical steps, albeit insignificant, to start implementing a regional strategy. A more dynamic and multifaceted cooperation, incorporating the Afghanistan-Pakistan framework, has clearly been missing in U.S.-Central Asia relations for years now. But now that the U.S. plans to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 2011, the regional states are even more likely to question the willingness of the U.S. to pursue a serious engagement with Central Asia. Uzbekistan has already pushed for “6+2 format negotiations” to bring lasting stability to Afghanistan and the region. As regional expert Martha Olcott stated in her testimony, now “the Central Asian states have to start worrying about how they are going to protect their interests when Washington departs.” The question thus remains whether the U.S., having long-term security interests in Central Asia, is ready to commit a corresponding share of resources, especially if it leaves Afghanistan in 2011. Considering the insignificant level of the U.S.-Central Asian cooperation, the U.S. military “departure” from the region, and with it the related economic and political benefits, could severely undermine regional security and the ability of the regional states to effectively balance the pressures of great powers and “spill-overs” of instability emanating from the Afghanistan-Pakistan areas. Moreover, Central Asia is of rapidly growing importance to China, which is well-positioned to outpace all major powers in the region economically, politically and militarily. The regional states welcome China’s engagement as a counterbalancing act in respect to other powers and as a source of investments. Last year, for example, China lent US$ 10 billion to Kazakhstan to help its financial and energy sector, US$ 3 billion to Turkmenistan to develop a gas field in South Yolotan, and pledged large-scale power, transportation, and trade infrastructure projects for Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Yet as China becomes an assertive player in the area, the Central Asian states will have to devise intra- and extra-regional arrangements to uphold their security and sovereignty. In this connection, Kroll’s remarks that the U.S. “does not consider Central Asia a forgotten backwater” need now be put into practice. A word of optimism is in order here. Sedney and Kroll stated that the U.S. intends to place more importance on human rights issues as part of the renewed bilateral dialogue, reinvigorate regional aspects of the still poorly-functioning Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, utilize Northern Distribution Network (NDN) to promote regional and continental trade, and strengthen food security, counter-narcotics programs, and border security. The administration has also launched Annual Bi-Lateral Consultations to pursue and monitor practical progress on issues of cooperation. Sedney further mentioned a significant increase of shipments through the NDN, from 20 containers per month last January to 350 containers per week today. The Department of Defense has also started implementing the Central Asia local purchasing program to procure goods in Central Asia for use in Afghanistan, supporting regional transportation and trade infrastructure development. It has also been training security professionals through the support of the George Marshall Center. However problems remain. Only two flights of military cargo passing through Russia have taken place after Russia’s agreement last July to allow transportation of U.S. military goods through its airspace. In addition, there are no rail lines into Afghanistan that would otherwise help shipping supplies and expand regional and continental trade. Regional cooperation among Central Asian states is a sham rather than a working partnership, not to mention the strategic gains of the Chinese and lack of progress by the West on energy diversification (the protracted Nabucco project being a case in point) and trade expansion issues. CONLUSIONS: The U.S. Senate Hearing demonstrated that the U.S. views the region as a significant foreign policy component of its grand strategy. But this view is largely conceptual, given the lack of committed resources, and reactionary, given the U.S. failures in Afghanistan and the need to reach out to Central Asian states to solve the Af-Pak dilemmas. What is needed is a practical blueprint that would indicate in bright colors the importance of Central Asia for U.S. foreign policy and significance of U.S. engagement for the regional states, both within and outside the Afghanistan-Pakistan framework. Until this is done, it is not difficult to foresee how Central Asia might turn from the “backwater” for the U.S. to the “backyard” for China. AUTHOR’S BIO: Roman Muzalevsky is an international affairs and security analyst on the Caucasus and Central Asia. He is also Program Manager at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.