AMERICAN.COM

Last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, was hailed by Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi for its “historic significance.” And in many ways it was historic. But for an event that brought together heads of state from China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, the most recent SCO Summit received surprisingly scant attention in the United States. Here’s what you likely missed:

• Participants expressed concern about events in the Arab world while supporting “the drive of regional states in the path of democratic development in accordance with their specific cultural and historical characteristics.”

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai formally requested SCO observer status, which gives non-members the ability to participate in some of the organization’s activities.

• Pakistan and India—already observers—filed official membership applications last year, and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari announced his expectation that Islamabad’s submission “will be put on a fast track.” Meanwhile, Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna voiced his country’s desire for “a larger and deeper role” in the organization and said that New Delhi shares the SCO’s goal of a more “democratic international system.”

• “The member states believe that unilateral and unlimited build-up of missile defense by one state or by a small group of states can cause damage to strategic stability and international security,” read a joint declaration. Asked whether Moscow pushed through the statement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded, “No one talked anyone into it.”

• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad characteristically criticized the existing world order as “managed and run by slavers and colonizers of the past,” adding, “I believe together we [the SCO] can reform the way the world is managed. We can restore the tranquility of the world.”

• In a Moscow Times op-ed on the day of the summit, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev wrote, “It is possible that the SCO will assume responsibility for many issues in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of coalition forces in 2014.”

Individually, these statements may not amount to much. But collectively, and in the context of an impending U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan, they should raise eyebrows. In some limited respects, the aims of the SCO are comparable to those of NATO in the early years of the Cold War. NATO in the 1950s was an alliance implicitly constructed to—in the words of its first Secretary General Lord Ismay—“keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Moreover, with the exception of Portugal, Greece, and Turkey, it was an association of like-minded democracies. The SCO conversely is an association of like-minded autocracies whose raison d’être, from Moscow’s perspective, is to keep the Americans out of Central Asia, the Russians in, and the Chinese down in terms of their overall regional influence.

Islamabad and Kabul want in because they’re convinced that the United States is on its way out of Afghanistan. While Iran’s prospects for full-fledged membership are slim, Tehran’s observer status provides the Islamic Republic with one of its few remaining platforms for international legitimacy. Most troubling, however, is Nazarbayev’s contention that the SCO may need to “assume responsibility” for Afghanistan in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal. The reasons for maintaining a robust presence in Afghanistan have been discussed elsewhere at length and don’t need to be rehashed here. But what hasn’t been discussed is the potential relationship between a considerable and precipitous U.S. drawdown, the inevitable security vacuum that would result, and the emergence of a more cohesive, muscular, and militarily-inclined SCO in Afghanistan and beyond.