The Great Game Version Two?

When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.

-Hurree Babu in Rudyard Kipling’s, Kim, 1901

Sir Francis Younghusband

The Great Game describes the behind-the-scenes diplomacy and spy games played by the British and Russians for supremacy in Central Asia during the mid and late 1800s. Made famous by the Rudyard Kipling novel, Kim, it was a power struggle between Great Britain’s interest in Asian, especially India, and Russia’s desire to exert influence on all the countries along its southern borders. One of the most famous participants in the Great Game, Sir Francis Younghusband, traveled all over Central Asia, as well as Nepal, modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh working to destabilize Russian alliances established by his counterpart Bronislav Gromchevsky.

While Kipling fantasized what was really most likely a boring, diplomatic series of negotiations, there is nothing benign about the events currently taking place in the exact same area over a century later. Russia is once again desperate to exert its influence on Central Asia. It has used a series of carrots and sticks to buy, cajole, and bully its way into the politics of Turkmenistan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and their central Asia neighbors. This time, however, Russia’s Great Game foes are the United States and China.

Russia has worked to promise aid, revoke aid, and institute trade sanctions in order to influence the elections and politics of its neighbors. It has tried to get them to sign joint defense pacts as, it sees, a counter to NATO. It has also attempted to purchase influence in Kyrgyzstan in order to get them to close a military base in use by the US as a staging point for the war in Afghanistan (perhaps the new India, as far as the Great Game is concerned). The Kyrgyzs took the Russian money and announced the Americans would be leaving in six months. Then, in a reversal, upped the rent on the base (now called a transit center) from $17.5 to $60 million annually, and allowed the US to stay put.

All of these shenanigans stink of backroom diplomacy and spycraft–just like the Great Game of old. Perhaps next, Sir Francis Younghusband will engineer a coup in Tibet.