The SCO Summit

The 2007 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) begins August 16 in Bishek, Kyrgyzstan. Global Voices has collected thoughts from a number of bloggers on the summit.

The SCO began in 2001 with a focus on border security, and consists of Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia have observer status.

The SCO has since became an engine for political, economic and energy cooperation. In addition, it has developed security structures, in particular for counterterrorism.

Today military exercises kicked off, and the RFE/RL reports:

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will begin counterterrorism exercises on August 9 that will involve some 6,500 troops from the organization's six members.

The maneuvers begin in China and then move to Russia, where they will conclude on August 17.

The troops will be backed up by 80 warplanes and combat helicopters in the SCO's largest counterterrorist exercise, dubbed Peace Mission 2007.

The nine days of drills will take place in China's western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Russia's Chelyabinsk Oblast.
...
But the size of these exercises has led some to speculate that they are not aimed solely at terrorist groups. Stephen Blank is a professor of national security studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. In views that he stressed are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the War College or the U.S. Defense Department, Blank commented on the scope of the SCO military exercises.

"The size of these exercises is growing and many experts do not believe that they are confined only to so-called antiterrorist activities or even just to Central Asia," Blank says. "The August 2005 Sino-Russian exercises, which were conducted under the auspices of the SCO, were so large and so thoroughly combined arms and major-theater conventional warfare in their approach that people believed these were aimed as much at Taiwan and Korea as they were at any potential Central Asian contingency."

One fact that supports Blank's comments is that the bulk of forces in Peace Mission 2007 are from Russia and China, with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan reportedly contributing small numbers of troops and Uzbekistan sending only observers to the maneuvers.

Indeed, the SCO has become a counterweight to US influence in Central Asia. For instance, take a map and look at where all the member and observer states are, and note they form a rough circle around... Afghanistan. The only country on Afghanistan's border missing from the SCO stable is Turkmenistan. The SCO is in a strong position to keep the US in check in Afghanistan. (And see here about past Russian pressure on Turkmenistan.)

Also, member state Uzbekistan evicted the US from a military base it was using. The remaining US base in Central Asia is in Kyrgyzstan.

(Possible Iranian membership is an issue for another time.)

China is hunting the world over for energy supplies, and in the SCO it finds a venue to meet those needs. For instance, there is an important oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to China which started pumping in 2005.

Russia sees the SCO has a way to weasel control of energy resources in the smaller states. See my post here, for instance.

A PINR report adds:

That the S.C.O. has grown from a loose collection of independently-minded states into a strong, largely unified organization will be on display this week at the joint military exercises and the political summit. The S.C.O.'s strength grew to counter the presence of Washington in the region, and was dominated by China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The organization is now an important aspect of the regional geopolitical balance, and it is attracting attention from Iran, Pakistan, and Mongolia.

The stronger the S.C.O. grows, the weaker Washington's strategy of dealing with Central Asian countries on a strictly bilateral basis will become. Still, Washington is a long way from being pushed out of the region as long as it maintains a troop presence in Afghanistan. After the summit ends, Washington is likely to send representatives to the area to demonstrate its commitment to the region.

Finally, at the Central Asia blog, Bonnie Boyd has some good thoughts on why this military exercise is taking place where it is:

However, I do not believe that the placement of this year’s exercises in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region is any accident. The ethnic Uighur population is considered by China to be the most likely to commit acts of domestic terrorism. Therefore, large, loud, and conventional exercises may be calculated to have Xinjiang “troublemakers” think twice about violent dissent: a little deterrence value. In addition, Xinjiang has become increasingly critical to the rest of China’s economic success, with oil being discovered there, as well as other extractable resources–and then there are those billion-dollar pipelines from Kazakhstan.

As for Chelyabinsk Oblast, it is 82.3% ethnic Russian (as of 2002 census), so cowing ethnic minorities is not likely to have been the object there. Chelyabinsk oblast is rich in iron ore, and military research (such as at Snezhinsk Russian Federal Nuclear Center, where warhead design is carried out) and thermonuclear testing have occurred there. For thirty years, Chelyabinsk was closed to foreign visitors. In the mid- to late-1990’s, Chelyabinsk was considered by the U.S. to be a center of nuclear proliferation. Therefore, I would guess these large-scale exercises are designed to practice protecting critical installations from terrorist attacks.