Sanctions aren't the answer. If Washington is serious about building a new economic and security architecture across South and Central Asia, it can’t avoid working with Iran.
By enhancing economic integration, the strategy aims to boost local economies and stabilize the region. There are certainly doubts about the plan's feasibility. But at least, after years of endlessly repeating the myth that Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires," this new Silk Road recognizes that, from the times of the ancient Persians to Alexander the Great, and through the Mongols, Mughals, and Sikhs, Afghanistan was at the center of global exchange.This effort has the dual benefit of distributing the Afghan burden away from Pakistan, which has long been America's only link to Central Asia.
For decades, Washington's dependence on Islamabad has amounted to U.S. support for a Pakistani military-economic complex that has played a bloody double game in Afghanistan, uses terrorists and militants as strategic weapons, and has proven the world's most flagrant nuclear proliferator. And it's working: By late 2011, increased use of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) through Central Asia shifted NATO's dependence on Pakistan from bearing nearly 70 percent of its supplies and fuel in previous years to less than 30 percent today. But the NDN comes with pitfalls of its own, giving Russia and Kyrgyzstan increased leverage over U.S. supply lines, forcing the United States to turn a blind eye to unsavory dictators in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and costing three times more than shipping from the Arabian Sea. More
