What’s Happened to the SCO?

May 17, 2010

By Richard Weitz

The drills in Xinjiang led some observers to speculate that the exercise was aimed at intimidating China’s Uighur population and Central Asia’s democrats. In addition, the scenario for Peace Mission 2007—as well as the thousands of troops involved with accompanying warplanes and other heavy military equipment—seemed designed to enhance the ability of the participating armed forces to suppress another attempt at a popular rebellion, such as the one that occurred in Andijon, Uzbekistan, in 2005. At the time of this incident, the SCO was not capable of organizing a military intervention to repress the uprising, which appears to have involved citizens dissatisfied with the government’s policies as well as anti-regime militants. Since then, the SCO has tried to develop such a capacity.

Notwithstanding these expanding security activities, the SCO has remained primarily a security organisation (i.e. focused on countering transnational threats from non-state actors such as terrorists), rather than becoming a collective defence structure like NATO (i.e. possessing capabilities for waging conventional wars against non-member countries). The organisation still lacks dedicated military forces, an integrated command structure, or even a combined planning staff. SCO activities continue to emphasize promoting confidence-building measures, strengthening border controls, developing collective emergency response mechanisms for natural and manmade disasters and facilitating law enforcement and intelligence cooperation against terrorism, narcotics trafficking and other transnational challenges. SCO leaders consistently deny any intention to create a Eurasian version of NATO. They justify the institution’s large security exercises as a necessary response to the challenge of countering modern terrorist movements equipped with increasingly sophisticated firepower.

One possible purpose of these SCO exercises is show Central Asian governments that China and Russia have the ability to defend them against internal rebellion and terrorists, thereby reducing their perceived need not rely on Western countries for their defence. Russia in particular has benefited from highlighting the threats to regional stability to justify its local military presence. Unlike the United States and other NATO countries, Moscow has not experienced problems retaining its air base at Kant or elsewhere in Central Asia. At the time of the Peace Mission 2009, the Russian government was seeking a second military base in southern Kyrgyzstan. President Bakiyev said that he might approve a new Russian military base so that Russian advisors could help train the region’s armed forces to combat the growing threat of narcoterrorism.

Despite SCO leaders’ general agreement that the organisation should defend its incumbent governments against foreign-inspired Internet or terrorist threats, they’ve been divided over whether to respond collectively to serious but nonviolent domestic challenges. In particular, the SCO governments continue to disagree over whether the organisation should protect its members against further collared revolutions. During the spring 2005 government crisis in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, SCO members couldn’t agree on joint action. Russia, whose leaders still consider Central Asia as falling within their security zone, reportedly blocked Chinese efforts to organize some kind of collective military intervention.

The same divisions appear to have paralyzed the SCO in the case of the latest crisis in Kyrgyzstan. To deal with similar challenges in the future, some members might try to transform the SCO into a revived Warsaw Pact-like institution (an ‘authoritarian international’), whose goal would be to guarantee its non-democratic governments against both external and internal political challenges. But such a development would alienate the organisation even further from Western countries and would presumably be opposed by SCO observer states India and Mongolia. And, complicating things further, full SCO member Kazakhstan has also been seeking to affirm its liberal democratic credentials as OSCE chair. It seems unlikely that it would welcome having its political evolution constrained by an authoritarian condominium led by China and Russia.