What makes Central Asia a region

Where the line is drawn

The M49 standard of the United Nations Statistics Division lists Central Asia as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and files Afghanistan under Southern Asia beside Iran, Pakistan and India. The catalogue files Afghanistan here instead, on the older reading that treats the Amu Darya as a river through the region rather than a wall along its edge. The UNESCO survey published across six volumes from 1992 drew the boundary wider still, taking in Mongolia, Xinjiang, northern Iran and the Punjab. M49 says of its own groupings that they carry no political meaning. All three readings are in print, and none of them is settled here.

What the states date from

Five of the members left the Soviet Union in a single autumn. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan declared independence on 31 August 1991, Tajikistan on 9 September, Turkmenistan on 27 October and Kazakhstan on 16 December, and all five were admitted to the United Nations on 2 March 1992. Afghanistan's date is older by seven decades: the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 ended British control of its foreign relations, and it joined the United Nations in 1946. Every one of the six names ends in the Persian suffix stan, the place of, attached to the people or the ground it names.

Where the water goes

Almost none of this land drains to an ocean. The Syr Darya rises in the Tian Shan and the Amu Darya in the Pamirs, and both ran to the Aral Sea until canal building for cotton from the 1960s took the greater part of their flow. The sea had split into a northern and a southern basin by 1989, and the eastern lobe of the southern basin was dry by 2014. Kazakhstan closed the Kok-Aral dam across the connecting strait in 2005 and the northern basin has held its level since. The Karakum Canal, begun in 1954, still carries Amu Darya water more than 1,300 kilometres west across Turkmenistan.

What the mountains hold

The records give four of the members a summit above 7,000 metres: Ismoil Somoni Peak in Tajikistan at 7,495, Noshaq on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush at 7,492, Jengish Chokusu on the Kyrgyz border with China at 7,439 and Khan Tengri in Kazakhstan at 7,010. The Pamir and the Tian Shan meet in eastern Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and the Hindu Kush runs southwest from them into Afghanistan. West of the ranges the ground drops away. The high point of Turkmenistan, Aýrybaba, reaches 3,139 metres, and the Karakum and Kyzylkum deserts cover most of the ground between the two rivers.

Which agreements hold

All of the members belong to the United Nations and to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Five are recorded in the Commonwealth of Independent States, formed at Alma-Ata in December 1991, Turkmenistan as an associate rather than a full member. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, founded in Shanghai on 15 June 2001, and Afghanistan holds observer status in it. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan sit in the Organization of Turkic States, set up at Nakhchivan on 3 October 2009 and renamed in 2021, with Turkmenistan an observer; Tajikistan, whose language is Persian rather than Turkic, is outside it. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea at Aktau on 12 August 2018 alongside the three other littoral states.