Central Asian Regional Security After the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan

Abstract

This study seeks to answer the puzzle of how the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover will affect the Central Asian regional security relations in the forthcoming period. Security threats originating from Afghanistan were among the most important security problems of the newly independent Central Asian states during the nineties. By the US ending its twenty-year military presence in Afghanistan as of September 2021, the Taliban takeover brought back the potential of Afghanistan-based instability in Central Asia. In this article, the first Taliban rule during the nineties and the current situation that has developed since the Taliban takeover as of August 2021 are examined in a comparative method. It is discussed within the framework of the securitization approach whether the security problems arising from Afghanistan are real security threats for the Central Asian states and the potential of these problems to be instrumentalized by both regional states and actors such as Russia and China. In the article, it is argued that threats originating from Afghanistan on the one hand pose to a certain degree real security risks for the regional states especially in the border areas, on the other hand, this threat perception is instrumentalized by securitizing in such a way as to help the governments in the regional states to maintain their own power and to increase the influence of states such as Russia and China on the countries of the region, especially in regional security relations.