SCO Dushanbe summit: Afghanistan has a new gardener

SCO next meeting, in August 28^th in Dushanbe – Tajikistan, will be an important demonstration of the maturity the organisation has gained in the last decade. It is significantly set after the Olympiads, as if it intended to appreciate the security SCO can deliver to China in terms of Anti-Terrorism intelligence. It will also be a test to the capability of the organization to make safe its “Bagh”, its garden as the Middle ground between oil and gas-fields and Indian and Chinese soaring economic zones.

Securing this part of the world (that spans from XinJiang to Kashmir and Iran) is a matter of infrastructures and Military self-sufficiency, coupled with single states´goodwill. We have a good example of this in SCO dealings with Afghanistan. As said in a precedent post, SCO produced to Afghanistan a broader “Loya Jirga” in an early summit in Kyrgyzstan. The supposed aim was to lay patent the intertwined interests and problems of the region, specially in the current worsening Afghani-Tajiki border problem (in 2005 Russia retrieved its border guards Tajikistan to the current four-fold increase of drug trafficking).

Given its record-high opium production SCO is considering a joint action with India and China “to build drug-secure belts around Afghanistan”, after the expression of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. The stance was reiterated in early July by Russia in a UN Security Council on Afghanistan and was shortly followed up by the Tajiki proposal, suggested in July 28^th, of an SCO regional antidrug center in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Afghanistan is therefore benefiting form strategic help in its illegal traffics (that finance mainly the Taliban insurgency) while being provided with Russia weaponry.