Names: Blake to be assistant secretary for South and Central Asia

Posted By Laura Rozen Sunday, March 22, 2009 - 1:47 PM Share

Robert Blake, the current U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, and a career Foreign Service officer, will be named the next assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia. His nomination will be formally announced and submitted in the next couple weeks. If confirmed, he will oversee a bureau with a shrunken domain. Jurisdiction over Afghanistan and Pakistan has been taken out of the bureau and assumed by Special Representative Richard Holbrooke. The new South and Central Asia bureau is responsible for India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the former Soviet states in Central Asia.

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NSA47

2:15 AM ET

March 23, 2009

nice

very good choice.

ADRIAN77

3:53 PM ET

March 23, 2009

signal to Central Asia . . .

The fact that they picked a guy whose experience is Sri Lanka and before that India (he was DCM there) but with zero experience related to (former Soviet) Central Asia is a clear signal that the Stans don't loom large any more . . . and to the extent they do matter (related to access to Afghanistan) they will be handled by the Pentagon.

PAUL

2:09 PM ET

March 24, 2009

The Stans

The problem with Central Asia and State is that they didn't really fit in and got lost in the too-large European (EUR) Bureau, and they now can't compete with with India or Pakistan in the South and Central Asia (SCA) Bureau. Also, the Stans have practically nothing in common with the rest of South Asia - the Stans are OSCE members and have no cultural or historical ties to any of the countries to their south, with the exception of Uzbek and Tajik links to Afghanistan.

But with Pakistan and Afghanistan now being covered largely by Holbrooke, the new SCA Assistant Secretary might have more time to devote to Central Asia, should he choose.

I agree that as long as we have bases in Central Asia and we need them for access to Afghanistan, the Pentagon will continue to call most of the shots. But the fact is that we have few other interests in the five Stans besides energy and access to Afghanistan. And only Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have large amounts of oil or gas. The other countries - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - are autocratic, economic basket cases that have been treading water or going backwards in terms of economic and democratic reform for years. There's no reason to pay all that much attention to them because our interests are so limited - as long as they don't become failed-state havens for Taliban types, there's no need to spend a lot of time or energy thinking about them.