BACKGROUND:Constitutional reform has not taken place, corruption and criminality is rampant and opposition leaders, no doubt aggrieved at their being left out of the spoils, complain that Bakiyev and Kulov have followed in Askar Akayev’s footsteps as president by assigning choice economic plums to members of their families. Economically, as well, the country is not able to make major progress and the Russian economic presence has grown as Moscow has sought to help Kyrgyzstan overcome its crippling debts and backwardness which are exacerbated by a lack of exportable natural resources. Since the Tulip Revolution in March 2005, many of the hopes generated by that event have dissipated. It is clear in hindsight that this event was not so much a revolution as it was a reshuffling of elites with the ineffectual and insufficiently resolute Akayev regime being shouldered aside. The aforementioned police scandal reflects not just the police’s and security forces’ politicization but also their corruption and links to drug traffickers, so it is clear that the corruption engendered from that trade has powerful protectors and connections. And that sector alone hardly exhausts the possibilities for corruption. Government remains essentially a matter of personality and tribal factions and it is clear that considerable popular unhappiness, if not outright opposition, continues. Kyrgyzstan has also seen an upsurge in violent attacks against it coming from the Tajik and Uzbek borders. While the regime invariably labels such attacks as emanating from Hizb ut-Tahrir, the rise in violence suggests a potential for unrest in the peripheries of the country or that could be exploited by Kyrgyzstan’s neighbors. Accordingly Bishkek’s rapprochement with Uzbekistan possibly rests on the understanding that that they both face a similar threat from popular unrest but also that Tashkent, if it chose to do so, could make life very uncomfortable for the Kyrgyz government. Kyrgyzstan’s economic weakness, manifested in a lack of exportable resources like oil and gas, the ubiquitous corruption, and crippling foreign debt – three factors that inhibit economic growth – have led it to seek grater foreign assistance as well. One reason for retaining the U.S. base at Manas was that Kyrgyzstan could not afford to let it go and the economic advantages accruing to it from increased American assistance are too great to surrender. At the same time, Kyrgyzstan has solicited Kazakhstan to increase foreign investment in the country and Russia to support greater Russian penetration of its hydroelectric and other assets. Russia and China clearly want to preserve the status quo and prevent any further signs of unrest or so called color revolutions in Central Asia generally. And Russia has steadily increased the scope of its air base at Kant, making it a centerpiece of its regional military presence. But the more money it commits to stabilizing the situation in Kyrgyzstan, the more implicated it becomes in the success or failure of the regime which, despite Russian help, is no more secure than before. Yet Kyrgyz observers agree that Russian economic power is insufficient to truly retrieve the situation in Kyrgyzstan. IMPLICATIONS:However the rapprochement with Russia and Uzbekistan clearly limits Kyrgyzstan’s ability to carry out a truly multi-vectored foreign policy. Instead, analysts see “an asymmetric multi-vectored” foreign policy with the Russian and Uzbek vectors enjoying more prominence than do the others. Moscow and Beijing have brought great pressure to bear on Kyrgyzstan to oust the U.S. base, and it is quite likely that American economic capability plus the upsurge of the Taliban threat in Afghanistan were the factors that retrieved the situation for the United States here. But the inclination to Moscow and Tashkent carries with it the price of increased authoritarianism and repression, not to mention official corruption. In their wake follows economic stagnation and the continuing generation of the political dry timber needed to spark a conflagration at the first sign of trouble. While Kyrgyzstan remains a precarious state, it is not necessarily a failing state. It is possible that given foreign assistance and support by its neighbors, the government could continue to muddle through in the absence of any increased capability for dealing with the accumulating problems of internal or external security. But the failure to increase the government’s ability to command popular support or increase its own capability for governing the country enhances possibilities for a more violent response when a crisis ensues. So while Kyrgyzstan may not be a failing state today, let alone a failed one, its inherent precariousness mandates a very close watch upon its future courses of action and their consequences. Despite its weakness relative to other neighboring states like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan’s development is an important sign of the times in Central Asia. The “Tulip Revolution” led Russia and China to intensify their ideological and political offensives against America, charging it with support for anti-regime revolutions throughout Central Asia. It also helped them generate the idea of persuading Uzbekistan of this U.S. conspiracy or misguided policy in order to move Uzbekistan away from Washington and to place pressure on it to remove the U.S. base at Karshi Khanabad. This pressure turned out to be successful and this tactic could easily be repeated in Kyrgyzstan. Second, the Tulip Revolution strengthened China’s interest in military bases in Kyrgyzstan and possibly Uzbekistan. And it certainly strengthened Russia’s interests in preventing anyone from having a base in the region and in intensifying its own program of assistance to Kyrgyzstan, and its own regional military footprint in Central Asia. The Tulip Revolution also generated an ongoing reconsideration of exactly what are the purposes of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. While the debate over the SCO continues and is by no means over, what is clear is that another such uprising could force the SCO into taking more forceful action on behalf of its members’ perception of regional security and the threats to it. CONCLUSIONS:In other words, what happens in Kyrgyzstan does not stay in Kyrgyzstan. Its developments have repercussions that are transnational and its fragility could spread to other neighboring states and also involve important policy decisions in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. Furthermore, given the inherently precarious and unstable situation there, it is all too easy for some unexpected development or surprise to generate the pressures that could lead to a major crisis in Kyrgyzstan, the equivalent either of the Tulip Revolution, whose success was by no means foreordained or foreseen, or of Uzbekistan’s Andijan uprising which had tragic repercussions across the region and in world politics as well. Kyrgyzstan’s enhanced links to Tashkent and Moscow also suggest that if something were to happen in either of those two capitals that had important consequences for Central Asia, then Kyrgyzstan would not be able to escape the consequences of that at event, whatever they may be. Thus while Kyrgyzstan is by no means the most strategically important state in the region, it could be sign of things to come. And under the circumstances of its present political trends, if it is such a weather vane for future trends in Central Asia, then we have good reason to be very wary of what the future might bring to Kyrgyzstan and to its neighbors. AUTHOR’S BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies institute, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. 17013. The views expressed here do not represent those of the U.S. Army, Defense Department, or the U.S. Government