When you drive along the northern bank of the Panj River, the natural border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, you'll pass by dozens of outposts manned by the Tajik Border Guard. They are spaced out every dozen or so miles, little more than hovels of piled rock. Some have a watchtower. All of them fly the Tajik national flag. It wasn't always like this. Until a few months ago, the Russian Federal Border Service (FPS) was in charge of guarding Tajikistan's borders. They decided the rules – and they flew the Russian flag. But in July, the FPS handed over the last section of border to the Tajik Border Guard, concluding a process begun the year before wherein pieces of the border were transferred from Russian to Tajik authority. From a distance, and especially in light of the Bush administration's rhetoric of self-determination, it seemed like great news. For the first time in the country's history, Tajikistan could claim to be a sovereign nation.
Inside the country, however, people were less optimistic. Tajikistan, a Muslim nation of roughly five million people, is one of the poorest countries in the world. The withdrawal of the Russians hurt not only the country's security, but its economy as well. When the FPS left, they took their toys -- vehicles, communications, and weapons -- with them. “The only technical stuff that they left,” Lieutenant General Faramus Imambardiev, a commander of the Tajik Border Guard, told me, “was from the time of the Soviet Union. Anything post-Soviet, they took.” But the most crucial thing that the Russians took back to Moscow was money.
Part of Tajikistan's long-standing arrangement with the FPS was that the Russian government paid the salaries of the Tajik Border Guard. The Border Guard, a special battalion of the Interior Ministry formed in 1997 to support the FPS, was paid handsomely by Tajik standards. Officers made between $400 and $500 a month; conscripts between $30 and $50. Their spending habits kept local economies alive. Now that Dushanbe is paying, officers make around $30. Conscripts are lucky to be paid. This autumn, I spent a week traveling along the Tajik-Afghan border. In Ishkashim, a village straddling the Panj River, I asked Feruza, a mother of three how the Russians' departure had affected her community. “Things have been terrible,” she answered, “Anyone who had a job lost it.” The story I heard in other towns and villages was the same: Sovereignty is great, but it doesn't pay the bills.
If someone in the White House pointed out Tajikistan on a map and presented the president with the facts, he would probably beam with pride. There were parliamentary elections last spring; presidential ones are slated for this fall; and the country's newfound sovereignty suggests that freedom is on the march. But the fallout from the withdrawal of the FPS, which includes weaker border security and crumbling local economies, like in Ishkashim, has put Tajikistan at a risk that is only being half-heartedly addressed by Washington. The risk is that, with as much as 65 percent of Afghanistan's narcotics traffic moving through Tajikistan, the country could be consumed by the smuggling culture that already dominates Afghanistan.
In some ways, Washington seems to recognize the hazard of having a fifth-rate army standing watch over one of the most trafficked borders in the world. In 2005, the United States spent more than $26 million in Tajikistan to assist with security and law enforcement measures. A large portion funded the Drug Control Agency, which falls under the aegis of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Since Washington is the primary donor and the umbrella organization is an international one, American officials in Dushanbe are given a say in the employment process and deciding salaries. But the Tajik Border Guard is different. Since it is part of the Interior Ministry, and thus technically an arm of the nation's police force, U.S. dollars can only be allocated for “stuff” – jeeps, GPS units, walkie-talkies, and the like. No funding is provided for salary supplements.
The fact that Washington isn't helping pay the salaries of the Tajik Border Guard illustrates how priorities on the ground are betrayed by red tape inside the Beltway. USAID policy says that foreign aid cannot provide salary supplements to “host government” employees, and the 1973 amended version of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits the usage of any American funding to train or equip the internal security services of another country. In Iraq and Afghanistan, exceptions were made. In dozens of other countries, too, Congress has granted some leeway for American funds to be used in assisting foreign police forces. So why is one of the poorest countries, with some of the lowest paid border guards, next to the largest poppy fields in the world, not considered a prime candidate? When I put this question to a spokesperson at the State Department, the individual explained how foreign aid is allocated into various “pots,” all of which have “different restrictions depending on the source of those funds.” Money from DOD, State, and USAID all come with certain strings attached. If Washington decided to provide salary supplements to the Tajik Border Guard, the spokesperson continued, “Then this will be done in accordance with the limitations of the funding source.”
It's understandable why the United States is reluctant to dump millions of dollars into the lap of the Interior Ministry for them distribute to the Tajik Border Guard. According to Transparency International, Tajikistan is the tenth most corrupt country in the world. The former head of Tajikistan's Drug Control Agency was arrested in 2004 after phone calls were traced back to him in connection with a 340-kilogram shipment of heroin. Two months ago, a high-ranking border guard was caught in Dushanbe with five kilograms of heroin in his car. But there are ways, on the receiving end, to put “restrictions” on foreign assistance -- like making polygraph tests mandatory for those who wish to benefit from American funds. “Polygraphs are the most rapid way of sorting out the wolves from the sheep,” a law enforcement official in Bishkek told me. Currently, the Tajik government refuses to submit to lie detectors. Washington has, so far, not insisted they comply.
But in order to make sovereignty a more positive experience for Tajikistan, the United States should consider finding ways to channel some of its $26 million dollars of foreign aid into the salaries of the Tajik Border Guard. Because now, a terribly underpaid and under-equipped force of 18- and 19-year old soldiers is expected to prevent organized rings of drug traffickers (and potential terrorists) from crossing the border. Freedom could be on the march in Tajikistan, but if Washington can't help the Tajik Border Guard where Russia left off, it might send the country marching in the wrong direction.
Nicholas Schmidle is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.
