Crossroads Asia | Diplomacy | Central Asia

Central Asia Is Becoming Europe’s Channel to Afghanistan

Central Asia and the EU can deepen cooperation on food, energy, and logistics to head off a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, with Kazakhstan on the front line as the region’s grain powerhouse.

The 8th Meeting of the Special Representatives and Envoys of the European Union and Central Asian Countries on Afghanistan occurred on June 15, 2026 in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

On June 15, Almaty hosted the eighth meeting of EU and Central Asian special representatives for Afghanistan. Against an unfolding humanitarian crisis, the European Union is seeking to deepen its partnership with established regional players to prevent further deterioration. Stable development inside Afghanistan is viewed as a precondition for reducing unwanted migration, including toward the EU.

Behind the diplomatic language of the meeting’s final statement lies a shift in roles. Brussels remains the principal donor to Afghanistan, sending over 161 million euro in 2025, channeled exclusively through humanitarian partners. But the operational channel for engagement is increasingly routed through Central Asia, and the Almaty meeting consolidated this.

The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution on March 4, 2025, establishing the SDG Regional Center for Central Asia and Afghanistan in Almaty. The resolution was co-sponsored by 152 states. Just before that, in February 2025, the Termez logistics hub joined the UNHCR global stockpile network as its eighth global warehouse. Kazakhstan was among the first states to normalize its relationship with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, including removing the Taliban from its list of banned organizations in December 2023. This step helped establish a channel of communication with Kabul. In June 16, 2025, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev appointed Yerkin Tukumov, a seasoned diplomat and former head of the presidential analytical center, as special representative for Afghanistan. Astana’s approach to Kabul has begun to cohere into a deliberate strategy.

At the first EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand in April 2025, Brussels launched a 12 billion euro Global Gateway investment package, of which 6.4 billion euro is earmarked for water, energy, and climate and 3 billion euro for transport. None of this is Afghanistan policy on paper. Yet much of it funds the very infrastructure, power lines, irrigation, rail and road corridors, through which Central Asia already reaches Afghanistan. The Almaty meeting represented an opportunity: the EU is already the region’s largest investor in the connectivity that runs up to the Afghan border, and the same systems could carry stabilization across it. Working through Central Asia would not mean inventing a new instrument, but pointing an existing one south.

By facilitating engagement with Afghanistan, the Central Asian states become a  link in the Central Asia-South Asia corridor, building a dependency that runs both ways.

The EU Finances, Kazakhstan Delivers

If trade and energy determine whether the Afghan economy survives, education determines who will run it. After almost 50 years of war, the country’s human capital is depleted, and the Taliban government needs skilled cadres even for the basic functioning of the state. 

Educational projects, not only higher education but also short-term courses, could become a basis for cooperation among the Central Asian states, each with its own competence, from training Afghan water-management specialists at the Taraz University of Water Management and Irrigation to agricultural training in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These efforts require funding, and Brussels has started to deliver. Since 2010, Astana has run a state educational program worth around $50 million, designed to train roughly a thousand Afghan citizens at Kazakh universities.

The clearest case is a women’s program that the regional route kept alive. In 2019 the EU funded a 2 million euro UNDP project to send 50 Afghan women to universities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Despite the political changes in Afghanistan, the project did not stop. It moved online when the 2021 cohort could not travel, resumed in person in 2022, and expanded with fresh EU funding into a second phase running to 2027, now supporting 155 women across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. There are several recent reports on new graduates and the organization of educational courses in partnership with the private sector.

Other Central Asian states, like Uzbekistan, have also engaged in educational programs with Afghanistan. For example, the Educational Center for Training Afghan Citizens (ECTAC) in Termez has trained around 700 Afghans with support from the EU, UNDP, Germany, Slovakia, and India since its establishment in 2017.

Kazakhstan is one of the region’s largest humanitarian donors to Afghanistan, with aid coordinated through the KazAID agency. In 2023, more than half of all Kazakh humanitarian aid went to Afghanistan, worth $2.6 million, of which $2.5 million was food. In 2024, Kazakhstan sent Afghanistan 1,000 tons of premium-grade flour, 795 tons of rice, and 5,000 liters of oil.

In November 2025, after a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in northern Afghanistan, Kazakhstan dispatched a mission of 13 specialists with 18 tons of cargo. Over ten days the doctors treated more than a hundred patients and performed 44 operations. These are areas where European funding and a regional partner’s proximity naturally complement each other.

Central Asia’s Food Base

Central Asia’s foreign policies have increasingly focused on intra-regional cooperation and connection, including with Afghanistan. No good is more important in this regard than food. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan together supply about 91 percent of Afghanistan’s flour imports, but behind both shares stands a single source of raw material. Uzbekistan is increasing its exports of flour milled largely from Kazakh grain, so the Afghan flour market runs in significant part on Kazakh raw material regardless of which country exports the flour. 

From September 2025 to March 2026, combined Kazakh exports of grain and flour in grain equivalent reached 8.9 million tons, a million more than the previous season, with Uzbekistan accounting for 7.5 million tons, while rail shipments to Uzbekistan rose by roughly 37 percent. The size of Kazakhstan’s harvest largely determines how much flour the region can ship to Kabul.

This opens space for European involvement as Astana is seeking to move from exporting raw grain toward processing at home, investing $2.6 billion in five wheat- and corn-processing projects with a capacity of 4.8 million tons a year by 2028. Water is the harder constraint, but here the EU can help. 

Agriculture accounts........

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