Standing on the road from Dushanbe to Khorog in 2013, looking across the river Panj from the Vanj district in Tajikistan to Darwaz-e Bala in northern Afghanistan, I looked across at the Afghan villages as women hurried past in their blue burqas. I asked my host how he viewed the Tajik speakers on the other side. “We are not only separated by this 100-meter-wide river,” he replied, “but by hundreds of years of development. They are like our ancestors, living last century.” Afghanistan and its post-Soviet neighbors are linked in important ways. They were historically part of the same region, Transoxiana. Significant Uzbek, Tajik, and Turkmen minorities live south of the 2,000-kilometer border imposed by Britain and Russia in 1895. While the region is often viewed through the misleading lens of great power politics, The Central Asia–Afghanistan Relationship brings together a diverse range of scholars and specialists to consider the infrequently asked question of what is means to be in Afghanistan’s neighborhood. The book is one of the first to focus on the Afghanistan–Central Asia relationship, rather than Afghanistan’s relations with all its neighbors.

Western narratives on the region are often divorced from the realities on the ground, focused on stabilizing the country as a prelude to withdrawal. Authors in The Central Asia–Afghanistan Relationship place emphasis on local narratives and approaches to solving the region’s problems. The first section of the book examines the experiences of Afgantsy, Central Asians who participated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and its subsequent attempts to protect the communist regime there. After an introduction to the Soviet intervention by Artemy Kalinovsky, the second chapter presents the oral histories of soldiers, nurses, drivers, and translators from the Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. The interviews form part of a larger two-volume Russian-language collection published by the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies. While a small minority of veterans returned critical of the USSR, many saw themselves as “defenders of the Soviet state” (4). Like veterans from Vietnam, almost all returned home disoriented and never found themselves in a position of prominence offered to veterans of the Great Patriotic War.

The book’s second section examines how states within the region view each other. Marlene Laruelle explores the way that the governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have adopted “transactional policies” toward Afghanistan, using the threat of instability stemming from their southern neighbor to leverage support from the international community. At the same time, they have used their geopolitical location to gain visibility internationally. In April 2018, for example, Uzbekistan co-hosted a conference on regional stability with the Afghan government. Antonio Guistozzi explores how the decentralized, uncoordinated, and fragmented foreign policy-making environment in Afghanistan has resulted in inconsistent policies and opened the country to external manipulation. In the next chapter, Ekaterina Stepanova explores Russia’s pragmatic foreign policy toward Afghanistan, protecting its interests in Central Asia by alternately supporting the northern alliance, Taliban, and central government at different times.

The peril of spillovers from Afghanistan in the form of drug trafficking and violent extremism forms the focus of Bruce Pannier’s chapter. As militant groups have strengthened their presence in northern Afghanistan, the conflict has increasingly resulted in violent incidents on the border with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. In the face of this peril, many actors both within and beyond the region have sought to counteract it with the promise of regional integration. Drawing on decades of geopolitical discourse on Central Asia, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton proposed a New Silk Road in 2011, stating the United States’s aim to help create “a web of economic and transit connections that will bind together a region too long torn apart by conflict and division.” Projects like the Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India gas pipeline, bridges across the Amu Darya, and the CASA-1000 project to deliver Central Asian electricity to Afghanistan have all been linked to this vision. Silk Road imagery is not restricted to the USA. It has also been adopted by Central Asian states looking to present themselves as a bridge between East and West, by China through its “Silk Road Economic Belt” launched in 2013 and by most recently by India.

Part three addresses the varied ways actors have framed the Central Asia–Afghanistan relationship through the language of Silk Roads. While the last three chapters are most useful for Western policy makers looking to bring stability to Afghanistan, they all cover similar ground and come to similar conclusions. All of the authors argue that the New Silk Road is a geopolitical imaginary, linked to the United States’s policy priorities rather than any reality on the ground. Alexander Diener argues that the New Silk Road is an “ideology of mobility,” built on the flawed assumption that increased connectivity will create regional stability. Similarly, Sebastien Peyrouse and Gaël Raballand question the economic basis of the project, ignoring the limited trade between Central and South Asia, and failing to address issues of corruption, poor governance, and production patterns. But arguably, even at the time the chapters were written, the New Silk Road had already ceased to be the talk of the town after John Kerry became Secretary of State in 2013. While the Trump administration talked of reviving the imagery in early 2017, this vision is yet to have been fully articulated. A more significant connectivity-related project involving Afghanistan is now China’s ambitious Belt and Road initiative, which is already resulting in China becoming involved in the Central Asia–Afghanistan relationship through security assistance to Tajikistan. Nonetheless, The Central Asia–Afghanistan Relationship is an excellent collection of essays that points to the ways in which regional actors are shaping politics in Central Asia and Afghanistan.