CICA’s Moment to Turn Confidence Building into Secure Connectivity

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The seventh Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Baku on Oct.15 adopted the Baku Declaration, admitted Laos as the 29th member, extended Azerbaijan’s chairmanship through 2028 and appointed a new Secretary General. The CICA Charter, which would complete the forum’s transformation into a full international organization, was not yet adopted, and leaders called for continued work on it. The next two years are therefore the moment of graduation. How CICA defines its purpose in the charter will decide whether it becomes a working instrument or remains a dialogue club. We argue that the organization should make one link explicit, the link between conflict prevention and secure, efficient connectivity. The disruption of Asia’s transit corridors over the past year shows why this link cannot wait, and it is squarely in Kazakhstan’s interest.

A forum that kept its distance from hard security

Kazakhstan proposed CICA in 1992 because Asia had no common security structure, and it still has none. ASEAN, the SCO, the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council each cover a subregion, while the continent’s most dangerous disputes run between states belonging to different groupings. CICA is the only format where India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, China and its maritime neighbours all sit together.

That breadth came at a price. Decisions are taken by consensus, and the forum has generally steered clear of conflict resolution. The notable exception came at the first summit in Almaty in June 2002, at the height of the India-Pakistan standoff after the attack on India’s parliament. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf both attended, and while they did not meet directly, Vladimir Putin relayed messages between them on the margins. In 2004 members adopted a Catalogue of Confidence Building Measures that included military notifications and consultations on border incidents. In 2007, however, they agreed to begin with economic, environmental and human measures and to postpone the military-political ones. 

Although military-political confidence-building measures have since been developed and implemented, their practical role in preventing disruptions to regional connectivity remains limited. Given the diversity of the membership, the caution is understandable. It has also left CICA without a role in the crises that now matter most to Asian trade.

A year of broken corridors

The past 12 months have shown how quickly conflict closes trade routes. The war that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb.28, 2026 disrupted the International North-South Transport Corridor and the southern branch of the East-West route through Iran, cutting Central Asia’s shortest access to open water. Southern routes became unusable or uninsurable for extended periods, and freight was rerouted at higher cost.

Further east, Pakistan closed its five main trade crossings with Afghanistan after clashes in 2025, and a year later they remain shut. Trade between the two countries had been estimated at about $2.35 billion a year. The closure also halted transit of goods from China, Malaysia and Vietnam. Mediation by Qatar and Turkiye produced a ceasefire in October 2025, but fighting resumed and escalated to Pakistani air strikes on Kabul in February 2026. In May 2025 India and Pakistan had already exchanged strikes for four days.

All of these conflicts involve CICA members, and each struck at routes that Central Asia had been counting on. For landlocked economies, connectivity is a security question. A corridor is only as reliable as the most fragile border it crosses.

The Middle Corridor as the test case

The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, or Middle Corridor, which runs from China and Kazakhstan across the Caspian to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkiye, shows both the promise and the vulnerability. Volumes through Kazakhstan rose from 0.8 million tonnes to 4.5 million tonnes a year, and total corridor traffic reached 4.5 million tonnes in 2024, up 62%. The World Bank estimates that volumes could reach around 11 million tonnes by 2030. The disruption of routes through Iran has shifted more of the burden onto it.

The corridor’s growth has been underwritten by conflict management. The initialling of the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace agreement in Washington in August 2025 opened the prospect of new links across the South Caucasus, and the Kyrgyz-Tajik border treaty of March 2025 reopened crossings in the Fergana Valley. Yet the war in Iran underscored how quickly instability could spill into the South Caucasus segment. Baku, which hosted the summit and has coordinated CICA’s transport track since 2007, sits at the centre of this equation.

At the summit Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed two initiatives that point in the right direction. One is a CICA Transport Connectivity Strategy covering major routes, including the Middle Corridor. The other is a Mechanism for Preventive Diplomacy, which he justified with the line that peace is best built before crises emerge. The value lies in treating these 2 proposals as one agenda.

What CICA can do

First, CICA can make corridor security part of its confidence building work. The measures adopted in 2004 already provide for notification of military activity and consultations on dangerous incidents near borders. Applied to transit routes and border crossings, they would give governments and logistics operators earlier warning and a channel to contain incidents before they close a route.

Second, the organization can articulate a norm that trade crossings and third-country transit stay open during bilateral disputes. No member would surrender its position in a dispute, yet all would gain predictability. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is the obvious first case. Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, which trade with both sides and have their own plans for routes to Pakistani ports through Afghanistan, could coordinate such an effort. The obstacle is representation. Taliban authorities were not invited to the 2022 summit in Astana, and despite their efforts to take part, they were absent again in Baku, even though Afghanistan formally remains a full member and its seat is held in reserve. The Secretariat has nonetheless kept a channel open, holding its first informal consultative meeting on engagement with Afghanistan in August 2025, and expert-level work on border and transit issues does not require settling recognition. 

Third, the Charter should write this linkage into CICA’s mandate. A charter that lists cooperation areas side by side will reproduce the old division between soft and hard issues. A charter that defines secure connectivity as a core purpose, with preventive diplomacy as one of its tools, would give the new organization a reason to exist that its members can measure.

Azerbaijan’s extended mandate

Azerbaijan’s first term strengthened the economic side of CICA. The 2025 implementation plan included 44 events, about 20 of them proposed by Baku, with a focus on transport digitalization, data protection and cybersecurity, and ministers established a Women Council and a Finance Summit. Security received less attention in the public record of the chairmanship, a limit of the consensus model more than of Baku. The extension through 2028 and the appointment of an Azerbaijani Secretary General give Baku the time and the institutional levers to close that gap and to steer the Charter negotiations toward the security-connectivity link. CICA would not replace bilateral negotiations or existing mediation mechanisms. Its contribution would be to facilitate voluntary consultations, improve communication among participating states and support practical arrangements for transit continuity. Such efforts would require the consent of the states concerned and, where relevant, cooperation with countries outside CICA.

Why it matters for Kazakhstan

CICA is a Kazakh initiative, and its Secretariat remains in Astana. Kazakhstan’s transit strategy rests on routes it does not control, from the Caspian crossing to the planned railway to Pakistan through Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. As a land-locked country like its other Central Asian neighbors, an effective transit corridor strategy must  be a very high priority. At the summit Tokayev also outlined plans with Azerbaijan to raise volumes of Kazakh oil shipped through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Every one of these projects depends on predictable borders. An organization that can lower the risk of conflict along these routes would serve Astana’s interests more directly than any additional dialogue platform.

If CICA uses the 2026 to 2028 window to adopt a Charter that ties conflict prevention to secure connectivity, it can become the first Asian institution with a practical answer to the corridor disruptions of the past year. If the Charter instead codifies the existing separation of soft and hard issues, the organization will gain legal status without gaining relevance, and Asian trade will continue to depend on ad hoc mediation by outside powers each time a border closes.

The authors are Eldaniz Gusseinov, a Co-Founder and Head of Research of Nightingale Int., a geopolitical foresight and advisory firm focused on Central Asia and Greater Eurasia, and Andrew Kuchins, a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest in Washington, who also teaches at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times. 

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