WorldSecurityNetwork.com
Central Asia: Energy Pipelines or Economic Lifelines?
by: Imran Khan
Asia has been a recurring subject in geopolitics, as Eurasia in geostrategy and energy in geoeconomics. Hardly any other region of the world has been, both overly and overtly, fascinated by cartographers, geographers, geopolitics and geologists alike as Central Asia. It is known to sages of ages, of diverging orientations, of intuitions, of circumstances and civilisations differently for atypical and odd reasons. Ibni Bttuta, the 14th century Moroccan traveler-writer, called it Turkestan (the land of Turks) and Rudyard Kipling, the British imperial great gamer-and epic-writer, dubbed it the ‘Back of Beyond’. To the Greeks and the Romans, it itches the images of classical ‘Transoxiana’ (world beyond the Oxus River or Amudarya); to the English Elizabethans, it reminds of ‘the Tartary’; to the Arabs, it fascinates ‘the Mavarayunneher’ (the land between two rivers—the Syrdaya and the Amudarya). To the enlightened Occident it was known as the barbaric Orient. The Soviets called it ‘the Middle Asia’ and the Eurasianists, such as Mackinder and Brzezinski, lineated it ‘the Central Eurasia.’ Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—stepped into a new prominence over the turn of the 20th century with the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the eclipse). The Union’s cataclysmic disintegration was epoch-making, riding Central Asia of 125 years of decadence, dislocation, dormancy and dissipation, ushering in the age of renaissance. Central Asia is fast regaining its geopolitical vitality. The geopolitical revitalization is essentially, or eminently, substantiated by energy—crude oil and natural gas—and the corresponding geopolitics.
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