According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Uzbekistan Service Director Alisher Sidiq in an RFE/RL podcast Sept. 5, Uzbekistan has been the supplier of 90% of electric power in Afghanistan, and this power has been interrupted and now cut off due to disappearance of the funding for it. Sidiq said he believed, but was not certain, that the funding had been American in recent years. The important physical-economic fact is that Afghanistan depends on power from Uzbekistan, with transmission coming down through the Mazar- e-Sharif-Kabul-Jalalabad corridor in Afghanistan. That corridor needs urgently to be developed as a north-south rail, power, and development corridor from Tashkent to Kabul to Peshawar, Pakistan – as was agreed by the three countries in February and submitted to the World Bank. And immediately, if this is more U.S. Treasury financial warfare against a Taliban government, it needs to be ended and the Uzbek power delivery turned back on.
Uzbekistan, a key nation for planning and carrying out Belt and Road-related development of Afghanistan, is being pressured by both RFE/RL and Soros Open Society networks to become a general refuge for Afghans “fleeing from the Taliban,” which would damage the two countries’ relations. Afghan and other South Asian journalists are a prime group among those whom Open Society activists are trying to get into Uzbekistan. In the period the Afghan government forces were collapsing, pilots flew military planes into Uzbekistan, and the Taliban is now demanding their return, including the planes. A total of 585 Afghans got into Uzbekistan then, including parts of warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces. The Taliban wants them all returned, Uzbekistan can hardly do this, and will likely have recourse to the UN to mediate someplace to send them. Another slick idea of the Open Society people was that Uzbekistan might send the Dostum fighters back into Panjshir Province to help the resistance against the Taliban. This would ruin Uzbek-Afghan relations for a long time.
The Uzbek-Afghan border is now closed, but Uzbekistan is waving through trains and trucks entering the corridor, which are mostly carrying trade to and from Pakistan. https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-podcast-majlis-uzbekistan/31444507.html
Another strange note from RFE/RL: “The U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe on September 1 announced plans to build a border-guard facility on the Tajik-Afghan-Uzbek border, where tensions have risen in recent months as Taliban fighters captured Afghan regions that abut Central Asia’s post-Soviet republics.” The embassy would apparently recruit guards for this border post, reported RFE/RL. (https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-tajikistan-uzbekistan-border-facility/31439185.html)
