Just a week ago at a cabinet meeting, Uzbek leader Islam Karimov hailed the achievements of the Uzbek economic model, which is basically a retrofitted command system. But Karimov clearly hasn’t gotten out of the capital much lately. For many citizens in Central Asia’s most populous state, electricity cuts and gas shortages have become a defining feature of this winter.

During a Jan. 19 cabinet session, Karimov recited a bevy of positive economic statistics, anchored by a reported 8.3 percent rise in GDP in 2011, according to state-controlled news outlets. While many international experts question the quality of official statistics, strong GDP growth is plausible given the fact that Uzbekistan is a significant exporter of natural gas. Yet, the state appears not to be sharing any profit with the population.

Citizens in Tashkent and other major cities say privation is a daily fact of life. Residents in one of the hardest hit areas, Andijan Province, tell EurasiaNet.org that they must endure long lines at gas stations and hours without heat or lighting at home. In Tashkent, power outages are also becoming a regular feature of life: even some businesses and offices in the city centre have been informed that they will have to operate without electricity on Wednesday mornings until further notice.

“There are shortages, especially in the regions,” said one Tashkent entrepreneur on Tuesday. The entrepreneur added that officials offered no explanations for the cause of the planned, regular Wednesday morning outages.

A 44-year-old housewife in Andijan, speaking to EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity, said shortages were hitting the elderly and poor especially hard. “We don’t have electricity for five or six hours a day, but sometimes we don’t have electricity up to 10 hours a day,” she said.

“It is very difficult for old people, they always sleep with clothes on and use plastic bottles with hot water to heat themselves,” the woman added. “Recently our neighbours called an ambulance and doctors had to help the old person without electricity. They used candles for that.”

Apartment dwellers in Andijan are being provided with gas, but the supply is not always regular. To exacerbate matters, some Andijan residents are illegally tapping into municipal pipes, thus depriving neighbours further down the gas lines, she continued.

“For the past seven or eight years people have been using hand-made gas pumps which work on electricity, or just small AA batteries,” the housewife explained. “The pumper is connected to a pipe and goes to a heater, so the heater can work well with a high pressure of gas. But at the same time your neighbour will have no gas because the pumper sucks out everything.”

In the autumn, according to the housewife, officials advised residents in Andijan Province that gas might be in short supply, and urged people to make alternative arrangements, including obtaining coal- and wood-burning heating systems.

“The people who followed that advice are warm now, but those who didn’t are living in cold,” she added.

Gasoline supplies for cars is also intermittent, an attendant at a busy gas station in Andijan told EurasiaNet on Tuesday. The business has two outlets – one selling fuel for vehicles, the other selling gas for heating.

“Sometimes we have gasoline in our gas station, sometimes we don’t. I really don’t know why it happens,” said the attendant, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “Sometimes we have no electricity at our gas stations and we can’t fill cars with fuel, and that causes long lines of people waiting for gas. All our equipment works with electricity and without it our business is just stuck.”

A spokeswoman for Uztransgaz, the state-owned entity responsible for distributing gas both domestically and for export, maintained that “all oblasts (provinces) of Uzbekistan have gas, 100 percent. Maybe some remote regions have low pressure but we can’t change that.”

However, she admitted that gas is not plentiful. “We are providing what we have, trying to use our supplies of gas rationally. We cannot spend all the gas we have this winter as it may be not enough for the next year,” she added on Wednesday.

Some experts suggest several factors are behind the power shortages. On the one hand, the government appears to prioritise exporting gas in order to gain much needed foreign currency for state coffers. In addition, domestic demand is poorly served by the existing infrastructure, much of which is in need of modernisation.

“Authorities know that exporting natural gas is more profitable than selling it domestically, and apart from the profit margin there’s the problem of insolvency for most of the local population, they just can’t pay on time for the gas they use,” said Sukhrobjon Ismoilov, director at the Expert Working Group, a non-governmental, non- commercial network of independent experts in Uzbekistan.

The question of energy supplies is fast becoming a problem on a “national scale”, Ismoilov added.

The current shortages and the associated hardships are unlikely to prompt much in the way of public dissent, said Ajdar Kurtov, an analyst at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies in Moscow.

“Of course a lack of gas in wintertime certainly causes resentment and dissatisfaction, and it is significant. But will this impact the political arena, causing a shift of political power or the current regime? No,” Kurtov said.

“If you compare Uzbekistan today to the time when Tajikistan continually had no electricity and when the population was dissatisfied — it changed nothing in the Tajik political arena,” Kurtov added. “Uzbekistan operates a much stricter regime, the economic situation will not lead to a change in government leadership.”

*Editor’s note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.

Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan’s supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent “all systems go” test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org.

“It doesn’t happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this,” the source said.

The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins.

U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is “imperceptible” given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source.

The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defence to be a safer re-supply option than trucking goods and fuel through Pakistan. The Pakistani route has become increasingly vulnerable in recent years to Taliban attacks.

The NDN comprises of a rail link starting in Latvia going through Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; a road route via Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for goods initially delivered to the Manas Transit Centre near Bishkek; and a Caucasus pathway that ferrys cargo from the United States and Europe by sea to the Turkish port of Metin, as well as to Poti in Georgia, for onward delivery across the Caspian Sea into Afghanistan.

Pakistan has closed its re-supply route on two previous occasions to protest U.S. or NATO military activities – for almost two weeks in 2010 and again for three days in April 2011. This time, officials in Islamabad insist that the closure is permanent.

Policy-makers in Washington have long planned for such a contingency. Since 2005, many U.S. government contracts have specified that fuel should be sourced from countries north of Afghanistan. By 2010, northern sources were a requirement in tenders that cited potential “mission failure” due to disruptions in Pakistan.

“If you look at the trajectory, it’s clear which way the relationship is going. It will be difficult to overcome yet another serious problem. The policy implication is that we need to diversify (transit routes) as much as we can and as quickly as we can. That’s what the U.S. government has been all about recently,” said a U.S. government official.

“But the real question is whether the NDN can fully compensate for what’s happened in Pakistan. We have a good NDN, but we also have Central Asian roads that are not the best,” he added. The NDN’s rail component is expected to pick up most of the extra freight volume.

Editor’s note: Deirdre Tynan is a Bishkek-based reporter specialising in Central Asian affairs.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.