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 for 63 percent of the country’s total water withdrawal as of 2021. Modern irrigation is used on only 16 percent of irrigated land, and by 2040 the water deficit is projected at half of demand. If Kazakh and Uzbek agriculture hits a water ceiling, the grain and flour exports on which Afghan food security rests will suffer. In November 2024 the European Investment Bank approved 465 million euro to support agriculture in Spain and Kazakhstan under a 3 billion euro pan-European program, while the Global Gateway package pools funds for water, energy, and climate. European money for water and processing turns out to be an indirect investment in Afghan food resilience.

Energy and Transit

The baseline hard constraint on cooperation with Afghanistan is the country’s own energy transformation. Only about 40 percent of Afghans have access to electricity, and Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan supplied up to 85 percent of Afghan electricity imports in 2021 and 2022. The power deficit caps industrial output. 

In Kunar province, factory production fell by half because of energy shortages. Without an Afghan industrial base, regional trade will stay locked in low-value goods, narrowing toward flour, grain, fuel, and electricity, which leaves Central Asian suppliers exposed to price shocks and to competition from Iran and Russia. 

The deeper aim is to move Afghanistan from a vulnerable consumer into a producer and transit hub, with energy integration as the lever. Connecting Afghan grids to Central Asia under CASA-1000 and TUTAP and securing reliable industrial power would let Afghan factories resume production and shift demand toward equipment, components, and services that regional partners could supply.

The transit dimension matters no less. After 2021, freight flows across Afghan territory reached 5 million tons in 2024, with the Trans-Afghan corridor becoming the priority over older detour routes through China. For landlocked Central Asian states, this is a path to the ports of the Indian Ocean and the South Asian market. 

Astana advocates integrating the Trans-Afghan railway under construction into the network of Eurasian routes and supports transport initiatives across Afghan territory, including the Torghundi-Herat-Kandahar-Spin Boldak line and the Mazar-i-Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar railway. By preliminary estimates, the railway’s commissioning, expected no earlier than 2027, would allow up to 18-20 million tons of cargo a year and cut transit times and costs by roughly 30-40 percent, bringing Central Asian goods to the Pakistani ports of Karachi and Gwadar.

This reaches beyond regional trade. Kazakhstan ranks among the world’s ten largest grain exporters, and in the 2024/2025 marketing year its grain exports rose by 33 percent, from 8.3 to 11 million tons, reaching African states, Armenia, and Vietnam for the first time in a long while, partly via Black Sea and Baltic ports. Kazakhstan depends on transit corridors, and a southern route through Afghanistan would complement the Black Sea and Baltic directions, serving African and Middle Eastern markets more reliably. The stabilization of Afghanistan thus works not only for regional but also for global food resilience. 

What matters is harmonizing standards, procedures, and tariffs so each route runs predictably within a shared architecture and signs of growing Afghan demand are already visible. In October 2024, the Kazakh side reported that Afghanistan had requested machinery deliveries and asked it to consider opening dealerships for Kazakh vehicles. Around the same time, a correspondent account for Afghanistan’s Ghazanfar Bank was opened at Kazakhstan’s Zaman Bank, shifting part of the settlements to direct payments that bypass third-country intermediaries.

The Limits of the Model

Almost five years after the Afghan Republic collapsed and the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the overall picture vindicates neither the optimists nor those who predicted catastrophe. The Taliban’s budget is growing slowly, small and medium enterprises are appearing, and industrial parks have opened in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Herat. Yet the humanitarian situation remains severe. The United Nations’ 2025 response plan of $2.42 billion was funded to about a third of its prioritized requirement, and around 29 million Afghans are in need. The pressure has been compounded by the influx of returnees. 

Cumulative estimates suggest that up to 5 million people have returned since 2023, most of whom were deported from Iran and Pakistan. Around 2.78 million returned in 2025 alone. Migration pressure remains a shared concern of the EU and the region, since the risk of spillover runs in both directions.

For the countries of Central Asia, promoting positive changes in Afghanistan through economic instruments has become a top priority given its shared border with Afghanistan. Amid the current crises unfolding both around Afghanistan and within the country, Central Asia is committed to expanding economic cooperation in order to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in this country. As noted above, Central Asia supplies over 90 percent of Afghanistan’s total flour imports and over 80 percent of its total electricity imports.

The region’s exports to Afghanistan are growing, but on market conditions and geopolitical factors rather than a solid foundation. This is why a phased energy and industrial transformation of Afghanistan is needed, above all more electricity and engagement with the private sector inside the country, which the EU can support in energy, food security, and the simplification of customs procedures.

For the EU, Central Asia offers a way to recalibrate Afghan policy without a sharp political reversal, leaning on recognized partners instead of working directly with the de facto authorities in Kabul. For the region, the Almaty meeting confirms that the Afghan direction has become part of a long-term strategy rather than a string of ad hoc gestures. The 2019 education project, which combined European money, a UNDP mandate, and Central Asian universities – and critically, found ways to continue despite the political upheaval in Afghanistan – is the small-scale proof that the model works. 

The harder question is whether it scales, whether the same template can carry water, energy, and transit at the volumes Afghanistan needs, and whether Brussels will fund it before the next crisis forces the issue.