Qishloq Ovozi (Archive)

Fostering peace is a complicated process, and Uzbekistan just received a strong hint that best intentions can be interpreted as unwanted actions.

Tashkent is trying to help promote peace in Afghanistan. Other parties are too, but the outcome of events in Afghanistan has a direct bearing on Uzbekistan, which shares an approximately 160-kilometer border with Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan hosted a regional security and development conference in November 2017 that focused heavily on Afghanistan, and a conference specifically on Afghanistan in March 2018.

Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov has been shuttling between Kabul and Doha (Qatar) to meet, respectively, with Afghan government officials and representatives of the Taliban to convince the two parties to conduct peace negotiations in Uzbekistan. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani agreed to this at the end of March.

"Uzbekistan is ready to host the talks if Taliban is ready to directly talk with the Afghan government," Kamilov said at the time, naming the ancient city of Samarkand as the venue.

The next step, of course, was to convince the Taliban to send representatives to such talks.

On August 8, a delegation from the Taliban's political office in Doha, led by deputy Taliban leader Mullah Beradar Akhund, met with Kamilov in Tashkent.

The Afghan Foreign Ministry released a statement on August 10 saying that, while Kabul appreciated international and regional cooperation, the "formal reception of Taliban representatives by the Republic of Uzbekistan and the dynamics of the talks do not help in facilitating peace talks between the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban."

Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry called on "all countries, particularly our neighbors, to respect the leadership and ownership of the people and government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the Peace Process."

The Taliban Go Sightseeing

The "reception" the Taliban delegation received in Uzbekistan was indeed cordial.

Kamilov met the delegation at Tashkent's airport. Then they held talks at the Foreign Ministry.

The Taliban delegation stayed well beyond the talks.

On August 9, they went to Samarkand, met with Samarkand Provincial Governor Erkinjon Turdimov, and toured that city, including the mausoleum of Kusam ibn Abbas, who is credited with bringing Islam to the Samarkand area in the seventh century.

On August 10, the Taliban delegation went to another ancient Silk Road city, Bukhara, where they met with Provincial Governor Uktam Barnoev and visited local holy sites.

On August 11, the delegation was back in Tashkent to observe the Kurban Bayrami Muslim holy day at the central mosque.

For Kabul, it probably looked to be an excessively warm welcome for the delegation of a group with which Afghan government forces are locked in battle throughout Afghanistan.

But there are some things worth considering from Uzbekistan's point of view.

Whether a peace deal is reached or not, the Taliban are likely to be in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.

Safe Haven

The Taliban has been Uzbekistan's neighbors in the past, in the late 1990s, and the Uzbek government then took a hostile attitude toward the group. The Taliban made multiple claims of Uzbek interference when Taliban forces were trying to capture areas in northern Afghanistan near the Uzbek border.

Uzbekistan was among the first Central Asian countries to offer the use of its military bases to the U.S.-led coalition that attacked the Taliban following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

During the few years that the Taliban controlled northern Afghanistan, it allowed a terrorist group from Uzbekistan -- the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) -- to use Afghan territory as a safe haven where they could regroup and rearm to attempt to carry out their goal of toppling Uzbekistan's government.

Such contacts as the Uzbek government had with the Taliban during the latter's final months in control of much of Afghanistan were focused on convincing the Taliban to hand over IMU militants.

The situation in Afghanistan now is much more complicated than it was in the late 1990s. The IMU as a group no longer exists, but its fighters have been dispersed around northern Afghanistan. Some have joined with the Taliban, but others have joined other groups in Afghanistan, among them the so-called Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK), an offshoot of the radical group that has waged brutal combat in Iraq and Syria for much of this decade.

Uzbekistan would not be the only party trying to broker a peace agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban that sees ISK as the greater regional threat, though the ISK ranks are thought to be far less numerous than the Taliban's.

So it is natural that Uzbekistan might try different tactics in its dealings with the Taliban than those Tashkent pursued 20 years ago. And after all, Uzbek authorities were hoping to bring representatives from the Afghan government and the Taliban to meet and discuss peace in Samarkand, and the Taliban delegation said during the visit that they were interested in such a meeting.

It is also understandable that Kabul might view this recent visit by the Taliban delegation to Uzbekistan as the Uzbek government trying to bolster its own security by warming ties with the Taliban.

RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, known locally as Ozodlik, and Afghan Service, known locally as Azadi, contributed to this report. The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.

The Caspian Economic Forum just took place in Turkmenistan’s Caspian resort area of Avaza on August 12, exactly one year to the day after the Convention On The Legal Status Of The Caspian Sea was signed at a summit of Caspian littoral state leaders in Aqtau, Kazakhstan.

The document signed in Aqtau was supposed to finally clarify for all five Caspian states -- Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan -- how the water and, more importantly, the seabed was to be used.

Use of the seabed included construction of undersea pipelines, such as the Trans-Caspian Pipeline (TCP), a project to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan to Europe that has been on the drawing board since the mid-1990s.

The topic of the TCP project to bring gas from Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan was certain to receive attention at the Avaza forum. And it did. But not the sort of attention that would inspire much confidence that the TCP would be built anytime soon.

Long-Time Coming

Plans for construction of a pipeline across the Caspian have been on the drawing board for about a quarter of a century and, for most of that time, Moscow and Tehran have demonstrated they were not going to support the project.

The Russian and Iranian representatives at Avaza made it clear their positions have not changed.

In his speech in Avaza, Behrouz Namdari of Iran’s National Gas Company said that “Iran is against any trans-Caspian pipelines.” Namdari suggested any party wishing to ship gas from the eastern side of the Caspian Sea to the western side would be better off shipping the gas through Iran’s pipeline network, neglecting to mention how that network is poorly developed and could not yet handle large volumes of gas.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was also in Avaza and said in his speech that he was “absolutely convinced that all major projects in the Caspian Sea should undergo a thorough and impartial environmental evaluation involving specialists from all Caspian countries.”

Sergei Prikhodko, the first deputy prime minister in Medvedev’s government, told journalists in Moscow just hours before the Caspian Economic Forum opened that the Convention On The Legal Status Of The Caspian Sea ensured the right “of each of the countries located on the Caspian Sea to take part in a comprehensive environmental assessment of cross-border maritime activities” that could affect the sea’s environment.

At the Caspian summit in Aqtau in 2018, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev both used their speeches to stress how important the ecology of the Caspian Sea was to their countries and pledged that both were committed to environmental safety when carrying out any projects.

But the remarks from Medvedev and similar remarks at Avaza from Namdari, indicate Russia and Iran continue to hold out ecological concerns as a means to delay construction of the TCP, a position Moscow and Tehran have used for some two decades to cast doubt on the realization of the TCP project.

There have always been suspicions that Russia and Iran were less interested in the Caspian’s ecology and more interested in supplying their own gas to Europe.

Namdari was perhaps more candid in remarks he made to the Russian publication Economika Segodnya, when he said, "We are not interested in creating competitors."

There was, however, also support for the TCP at Avaza.

The European Union’s special representative for Central Asia, Peter Burian, said at the forum that “I am happy to state that in 2019, [EU officials] have intensified our discussion with Turkmenistan on various aspects of our energy cooperation.”

EU Market

The EU hopes to receive some 30 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas from the TCP as part of the Southern Gas Corridor initiative that aims to augment and diversify suppliers of gas to EU markets, at the same time lessening EU dependence on Russian gas.

The pro-Turkmen government website Orient.tm reported on August 13 that representatives of a group of European companies -- Edison Technologies, MMEC Mannesmann, Air Liquide Global E&C Solutions -- and the Chinese company Sinopec met with Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov and the presidential adviser on oil and gas matters, Yashigeldy Kakaev, to discuss construction of the TCP.

The same source reported the general director of Edison Technologies, Edison Kasapoglu, said, “We have united in a consortium, we can now realize such a bold project as a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan along the bottom of the Caspian Sea.”

Legally, there should never have been a problem for Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to agree on constructing a pipeline to bring Turkmen gas across the Caspian to Azerbaijan where it could be pumped into Azerbaijani pipelines headed to Europe.

The signing of last year's Caspian Convention supported this, noting that two littoral countries with a common border could agree to construct an undersea pipeline, seemingly clearing the way for construction of the TCP to connect Turkmenistan with Azerbaijan.

But problems appeared almost immediately.

Less than one week after the signing of the Caspian convention, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador at large, Igor Bratchikov, was already saying that the construction of the TCP would actually require the consent of all five Caspian littoral countries.

By the end of August 2018, Azerbaijani President Aliyev said if Turkmenistan was so interested in the TCP it should be willing to put up some money toward realizing the project, the same way the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) had provided financing for the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP).

TANAP, incidentally, would be the logical pipeline to carry the Turkmen gas on the last leg to Europe, though there is also the proposed White Stream gas pipeline that could bring Turkmen gas across the Black Sea from Georgia to Romania and Ukraine.

But Turkmenistan’s policy is to make its gas available at its border to anyone who connects a pipeline to Turkmenistan. With the exception of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline that Turkmengaz is managing, Turkmenistan does not construct pipelines past its border.

And Turkmenistan is in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country’s nearly 28-year history as an independent state. It would be difficult for Ashgabat to find money for the TCP unless the government was prepared to tap into the reportedly large reserve fund it has in Germany and other foreign banks.

It is also worth considering the legitimacy of Russian and Iranian public concerns about environmental safety in the Caspian.

Moscow and Tehran say they are worried about possible ecological damage caused by undersea pipelines. But there already are undersea pipelines in the Caspian Sea that run from Caspian oil and gas fields to both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

In fact the twin pipelines -- one for oil and the other for gas -- from Kazakhstan’s offshore Kashagan field started leaking due to the effects of sulfur gas on the pipes in September 2013, shortly after production finally started at the field and both pipelines had to be replaced at a cost of some $4 billion.

Ecological Risks

Russia and Iran have never complained about the pipelines running from the Shah Deniz 2 field some 85 kilometers to the Azerbaijani shore, or from the Kashagan field some 95 kilometers to Kazakhstan’s shore.

They also have never complained about the damage that resulted from Kazakhstan’s leaking pipelines in 2013.

It is apparently only the pipelines that connect two Caspian countries, in this case Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, that elicit objections from Moscow and Tehran.

It will be interesting to see what happens if Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan move on a decade-old plan to construct an undersea oil pipeline to bring Kazakh oil to Azerbaijan, where it would be loaded into pipelines heading west toward Europe.

Further, Russia has constructed gas pipelines -- Blue Stream and TurkStream pipelines -- from its shores across the bottom of the Black Sea to Turkey, and Russia built Nord Stream 1 and is working on Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines along the bottom of the Gulf of Finland and Baltic Sea to Germany. All these pipelines are technically more difficult to construct than the proposed TCP.

So Russian experts should already know that the TCP poses no greater ecological risk than Blue Stream, TurkStream, or the Nord Stream pipelines do.

Namdari’s comments about not creating a competitor for gas markets -- in this case the particularly lucrative European gas market -- seem more likely to be the reason for Russian and Iranian objections to construction of the TCP.

But the loophole the two governments see in having all five Caspian countries agree on the ecological safety of cross-border projects promises to delay construction of the TCP from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan for the foreseeable future.

There are some people in the West who say if leading technical and ecological experts, say from the EU or the United States, are involved in planning and constructing the TCP, and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are satisfied with safety guarantees, there should be no problem building the pipeline and no place for Russian or Iranian objections.

But Moscow and Tehran’s interpretation of the Convention On The Legal Status Of The Caspian Sea requires that Russia and Iran sign off on ecological safety studies before construction of transborder pipelines can start.

If, for example, Russia claims its experts are in no way inferior to Western experts, and that Russia has studied the Caspian biosphere for longer and in greater detail than Western experts, which would be difficult to argue, then it becomes a matter of who polices the Caspian Sea.

The answer to that is clear: the Russian Navy controls the Caspian and if Moscow does not want something constructed in the Caspian, ultimately there is no one in any position to oppose that.

RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk, contributed to this report.