Originally Posted by
Chaos One
It's complicated. The power vacuum after URSS fell made pure chaos there. Most countried have some kind of dictator, mainly Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
Turkmenistan is almost North Korea 2.0 except they don't flag a communist slogan, therefore they gather less attention. Tajikistan at least has a dictator who tries to hold Islamic fundamentalism, but have other problems about unrests between Pamiris and the central government. Tajikistan also faces a big problem in terms of investments and China is using this as a method to invest as they are doing in Africa, except we're talking about a neighbour country, which is worse.
Uzbekistan is a bit better than both and at least try to make things by itself.
Also, all those countries have huge corruption levels. Even more than some South/Central American countries.