U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry just returned from a whirlwind trip to five Central Asian countries with "a deepening commitment" to collaborate on building the region’s economy, fighting international terrorist organizations and combating climate change, as top diplomats professed in a .
Kerry’s four-day visit briefly focused attention on the former Soviet nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The trip, which ended Tuesday, was intended to reassure them of America’s continued support, despite the U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan and subsequent spending reductions in the region.
"Certainly, the United States of America is aware that security and stability in Central Asia is an important building block for global security," Kerry told students at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, in . With neighbors including "Russia, Iran, Afghanistan and China ... you sit at the connection of some of the most significant foreign policy and security challenges anywhere on the planet."
Several experts pressed for sustained attention on the region, laying out concerns going forward, especially around religious extremism and the economy.
Kathleen Kuehnast, senior gender adviser at the congressionally funded, independent United States Institute of Peace, said policymakers hoping to challenge violent extremism should understand fault lines involving population distribution, age and religion.
A sociocultural anthropologist, she researched the Soviet Union’s approach to gender equality for her doctoral dissertation in the early 1990s. In 70 years of communist rule, the Soviets built a strong education system that reached well into remote areas. "The entire Central Asia region was well educated," with one of the world’s best-schooled Muslim female populations, Kuehnast said. Russian language and culture became embedded among the educated.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some of the academic structure did, too. Since then, "the rural population has not had the same [educational] advantages that their parents’ generation did," Kuehnast said.
Much of the region’s population remains rural, ranging from almost half (47 percent) in Kazakhstan to almost two-thirds (64 percent) in Uzbekistan and mountainous Kyrgystan, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Kuehnast also is focused on the secular/religious split. The entire region had been "Islamicized" by the late 1800s, she said, but because religion was outlawed under communist rule, Soviet bloc "citizens couldn’t experiment with religion in a free and open fashion" for much of that time.
Unfamiliarity with religion has left fertile ground for the possibility of conservative Islamic and evangelical ideologies to take root, feeding curiosity among the young and suspicion among older generations with more secular views, Kuehnast explained.
She helped poll several dozen university students last year in Kyrgyzstan as part of a study on how to prevent violent extremism. She recalled a 19-year-old’s "profoundly astute" observation that because he and his peers "were not raised in any kind of religious framework, we don’t know what is normal or what is extremist…. Of course we’re curious about religious practices, because it was forbidden."
Kuehnast’s organization encourages wider academic instruction among its recommended counterweights to extremism.
So does Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, co-founder and executive director of the (ICAN), a Washington-based nonprofit organization that promotes women’s rights, peace and security.
ICAN's partners in Tajikistan last year "were saying we need religious education in our curricula," Anderlini said, calling for a broad survey of faith traditions and their principles.
She of Pakistani all-female madrasas that promote "one-sided religious teachings." They prepare girls "to be ideal mothers and transmit conservative beliefs to their offspring,” emphasizing subservience to male relatives and restricting them to home life. Some extremist factions recognize a militant role for women, too.
Graduates of these madrasas are opening their own schools, spreading the narrow views and, in an ironic twist, giving the instructors a rare source of personal freedom and income, Anderlini said. "Here we’re saying it’s important to economically empower women, and guess who’s doing it?"
She said her group’s Tajik colleagues are trying to ward off such developments in their country.
The heightened threat of terrorism warrants more open discussion and activism, not less, Anderlini said, but it’s “being used as an excuse to shut down civil society space.”