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Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume 2, Number 44 December 8 - 14, 2002 Quezon City, Philippines |
Collateral
Victory America's
new imperial presence in Central Asia may be a preview of what's to come in
Iraq. The picture is not wholly encouraging. By
Christian Caryl Back
to Alternative Reader Index
On
September 11, he was living in Kabul, one of more than a thousand militant
Islamic guerillas from places like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and
Kyrgyzstan--former Soviet Central Asian republics that became independent in the
early 1990s. Akbotoev was a part of a secretive group called the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), whose members had come to Afghanistan to train in
Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps and learn from the Taliban how to overthrow
their own government and set up an Islamic state. But unlike bin Laden, Akbotoev
didn't see America as his enemy. Rather, his anger was directed at the corrupt,
authoritarian former communists running his country. Indeed,
when he first heard about the attacks on New York and Washington from a news
broadcast on the Russian-language service of the BBC, he claims that his first
reaction was sympathy: "We thought it was a terrible tragedy. We're people
too, after all." But a few weeks later, Akbotoev was ordered to Logar, a
province just south of Kabul and a Taliban stronghold. There, at the local
mosque, he was ushered into a funeral service for the IMU's charismatic military
leader, a man who went by the nom de guerre Juma Namangani. Namangani and his
soldiers had been holding the line in the northern city of Kunduz against the
U.S.-supported troops of the Northern Alliance. But when they tried to fall back
to the city of Mazar-I-Sharif, the IMU convoy was attacked by U.S. planes firing
missiles. The better part of the IMU's thousand or so active fighters were
slaughtered; the jeep carrying Namangani and his bodyguards was shredded. What
was left of their bodies arrived at the designated mosque for burial wrapped in
blankets in the back of a minibus--"but there wasn't much," says
Akbotoev, "just meat." The
grisly destruction of the IMU represented one of the greatest but least
appreciated strategic triumphs in America's war on terrorism. U.S. forces not
only removed--at least for the time being--the chief force for militant Islamic
fundamentalism in Central Asia, but also won, in return, U.S. military bases in
Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Almost overnight, American military and political
power achieved a presence in Central Asia. Now Washington is poised to put that
presence to work unlocking the region's vast, largely untapped oil reserves,
which could be used to bolster the independence of the new Central Asian states
from jealous neighbors. And if the United States can eventually get that oil to
market, it could undercut OPEC's hammerlock on world oil prices. That's
the good news. The bad news is that the United States suddenly finds itself the
guarantor of peace and stability in this brittle, deeply impoverished part of
the Muslim world--a role it appears to have little interest in fulfilling.
Instead of building bridges of friendship to the people of Central Asia, we are
instead aligning ourselves with the brutal dictators who oppress them. As a
result, America may well become the new great enemy of the remnants of militant
groups like the IMU--men like Akbotoev--and their millions of peasant
sympathizers. If the U.S. presence in Central Asia were to bring peace and
prosperity to the region, we might reap gratitude rather than hatred. Instead,
the Bush administration has scorned nation-building--even in Afghanistan, still
the source of most of the region's instability--and invited a backslide into
Islamic fundamentalism. For anyone wondering how the Middle East might look
after a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Central Asia provides an ominous and disturbing
precedent. Having won the war, we are doing our best to lose the peace. Birth
of a Legend To
most Americans, Central Asia is a long way from anywhere, but for most of human
history it has been an important place. Even before the 19th century, when the
British and Russian empires competed for its control in the "Great
Game" storied by Kipling, the region was an incubator for remarkably
successful nomadic invaders like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. For most of the
20th century, Central Asia--a vast area bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west
and the Urals in the north, running south to Iran and east to China--was
occupied by five Soviet republics. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, all five
abruptly became independent countries--now named Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan--squashed, for good measure, between
four of the world's nuclear powers: Russia, China, Pakistan, and India. (To view
map, click here.) But
Central Asia in the early 21st century enjoys enormous reserves of oil and
natural gas, most of it in the area around the Caspian Sea. That fact was not
lost on the Clinton administration, which in the mid-1990s devised a plan for
countering the influence of competing great powers while simultaneously boosting
the energy security of the West. The United States and its allies would help the
Central Asian republics--known in policyland as the "CARs" or, more
laddishly, as "the Stans"--to build pipelines, bypassing Russia and
Iran, that would bring the oil and gas from the Caspian region to world markets.
Do it properly, some wonks mused, and the United States might even persuade new
oil powers like Kazakhstan to see the benefits of scorning OPEC membership. The
Clinton plan faced some serious challenges, though. First, it depended on
long-term thinking and detailed knowledge of a group of complex, obscure,
far-away countries--in other words, it didn't exactly play to the strengths of
U.S. foreign policy. Second, though oil-rich, Central Asia was a region rife
with problems. The Stans were poor during the Soviet era, and their economies
disintegrated even further after independence. They were deeply corrupt. Their
authoritarian leaders were economic incompetents and intolerant of even the
mildest expressions of dissent. (They also had a remarkable capacity for
survival: Four of the five leaders who ruled at the time independence was
achieved remain in power a decade later.) The CARs were also riven by ethnic
vendettas, layer upon layer of them--from the millennia-old divide be-tween
Turkic peoples (like today's Uzbeks) and the Farsi nations (like today's Tajiks),
right down to the tribal violence between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz that took thousands
of lives at the beginning of the 1990s. To
be sure, oil wealth could ameliorate at least some of these problems--but years,
perhaps decades, would pass before it begins to flow. In the meantime, as some
locals saw it, there was a quicker fix at hand: religion. Most people in the
region adhere to a relatively tolerant, Sufi-influenced tradition of Islam, and
decades of enforced Soviet secularization had provided some inoculation against
fundamentalism. Unfortunately, the leaders of the new countries, all men of the
Soviet system, seemed incapable of distinguishing between the inevitable
religious revivals that accompanied the collapse of communism and rising
fundamentalist challenges to their own regimes. In Uzbekistan, for example,
merely expressing an excessive interest in the Koran was enough to get you in
trouble with the police--perhaps even land you in a labor camp. In a sad irony,
by judging the slightest sign of political awakening among Muslims as an
intolerable provocation, the Central Asian regimes created the perfect
preconditions for a faith-driven insurgency. Indeed,
some people were nursing the dream of an Islamic state even earlier. Akbotoev
was one of them. In Soviet times, he attended a covert religious college, and in
the early 1990s, as the religious renaissance that had awakened a few years
earlier began to peak, he did his best to agitate for the Islamist idea. For a
while, when the Central Asian despots proved all too adept at quashing the
nascent fundamentalist movements, it looked as though the dream had faded. But
then, in the mid-1990s, Akbotoev and his fellow believers began to hear about a
man named Juma Namangani. Namagani
never gave interviews, photographs of him were almost nonexistent, and his
ideology was vague. And yet, in a part of the world where rumor has often proven
as important as fact, it was his legend that inspired men like Akbotoev. He and
others heard the unlikely tale of a Red Army paratrooper turned holy warrior,
who had found his way to the faith after fighting on the Soviet side in the war
in Afghanistan, and had tried to introduce sharia law in his hometown in
Uzbekistan at the beginning of the 1990s, only to run afoul of the ruthlessly
secular Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov. How the defeated believers, fleeing a wave
of government repression that left thousands in jail, had fled to neighboring
Tajikistan, where they heroically--in the Islamist reading--fought on the
Islamist side in that country's savage five-year civil war. And then, in a
tragic twist, how the valiant Namangani was betrayed by his friends there, when
the war ended with a cynical peace agreement that excluded Namangani and his
fighters. Namangani retreated to his hideouts in the mountains of Tajikistan,
taking his men and their weapons with him. The
saviors, in this cautionary tale, were none other than the Taliban and their
patron, Osama bin Laden. It was they who gave Namangani support and refuge after
all else had failed, and their rationale for doing so was unassailable.
Namangani was a seasoned military leader, clearly devout, and he had already put
his life on the line for the cause. The Taliban and bin Laden viewed the Central
Asian states as ripe targets for insurrection, and Namangani appeared to be just
the man to lead it. But Namangani also offered the Taliban a kind of
drug-smuggling synergy. The Afghan mullahs were making enormous amounts of money
by exporting heroin through Tajikistan and onward, via the other Central Asian
republics and Russia, to the truly lucrative markets in Western Europe.
Namangani and his fighters controlled some of the prime routes through the
mountains, and he was happy to ink a corresponding management deal with his new
sponsors. The jihad could begin. Base
Instinct It
was in the summer of 1999 that Namangani's guerillas appeared in Akbotoev's
hometown, a village in a remote province of Kyrgyzstan. It was Namangani's first
attempt to strike out from his mountain hideouts to the strategic heartland of
Central Asia, the fertile, densely populated Ferghana Valley basin. After
intense fighting with the hopelessly ill-equipped Kyrgyz army, Namangani's
probing force withdrew; some observers say it was because the Kyrgyz simply paid
Namangani off. In the summer of 2000, he tried again. The direct military
effects of both attacks, which involved small numbers of fighters, were
negligible, but in a region of brittle stability the resulting tremors were felt
far and wide.
The
Uzbeks, with the biggest population and the biggest army in the region,
responded to Namangani's incursions by mining their borders and bombing their
neighbors--just the thing to anger the Tajiks, in particular, who have never
quite managed to stomach the loss of their ancient homelands to the Uzbeks when
Stalin drew up the republics in the 1920s and 1930s. When the IMU kidnapped four
hapless American mountain climbers during its campaign in the summer of 2000,
the feat earned it the dubious distinction of membership in the State
Department's official list of terror organizations. But no one in Washington
seemed to care particularly about the potential collapse of regional security.
Eventually the Clinton administration managed to come up with $3 million for
"non-lethal aid" to the Kyrgyz army, which had taken the brunt of the
attacks, and a few handouts for the other countries. Otherwise, life went on. And
what a life it was. In the 1990s, Central Asia was the sort of place that just
couldn't have been farther removed from the warm embrace of a Pax Americana. My
favorite destination was the city of Osh, in the Kyrgyz part of the Ferghana
Valley. The local security forces certainly had their hands full. When it wasn't
the trade in Afghan heroin, coming up the mountain highway from the south, it
was underground activity by Islamist radicals or the black-market hanky-panky of
Uighur separatists--Turkic-speaking Muslims operating in concert with their
ethnic brothers the Kyrgyz over the border in nearby China. Of course, none of
it could possibly outdo Tajikistan, still deep in the aftermath of its horrific
civil war. I remember arriving once in the capital of Dushanbe at a moment when
the entire staff of the local hard-currency supermarket had been kidnapped by a
member of the new coalition government, who quite openly expressed his
indignation at the inadequate protection money he'd been receiving from the
store's management. Kalashnikov-toting rowdies in SUVs were a frequent sight,
assassinations an everyday occurrence. You might find yourself dining in one of
the few decent restaurants next to a couple of hard-eyed Russians in ill-fitting
civilian clothes--just another indication of the huge Russian military presence
(at its peak amounting to around 25,000 troops) that made the country into a
virtual protectorate of Moscow. The truly adventurous might easily make a trip
up into the Karategin Valley, the stronghold of Islamist rebels during the civil
war and a favorite haunt of Namangani's men once the war was over. As recently
as the fall of 2000, a visitor to the town of Tavildara, in one of the valley's
remotest corners, could watch heavily armed mujahedin loading up their donkeys
for yet another trip into the high mountains, where they were presumably
preparing for the next trip to Afghanistan, at Mullah Omar's invitation, or
their next jaunt into some neighboring Central Asian state. Then
came September 11. When President Bush laid out his war aims in a speech to the
nation shortly after the attacks on New York and Washington, few Americans
paused to wonder why he took the trouble to single out an obscure Central Asian
guerrilla group as one of the prime enemies in our new struggle. The reason for
the IMU's new top billing was simple enough. The Central Asian leaders had
offered a deal: "We'll give you bases if you kill our bad guys." If
the United States wanted to conduct a military campaign against al Qaeda and its
Taliban allies in Afghanistan, it urgently needed bases in Central Asia. By
adding the IMU to the target list, the United States assured itself of the
Central Asians' support. And by wiping out Namangani and most of his forces once
the campaign started, the U.S. military eliminated the region's most immediate
security threat and cemented its own presence there, while giving its freshly
consecrated regional allies a new lease on life. These were all things to be
happy about. They were also part of the problem. Stans
and Deliver One
of the juiciest prizes gained by the United States and its allies in their deal
with the Central Asians is Ganci Air Base, located on the outskirts of Bishkek,
the Kyrgyz capital. Ganci AB (named after a New York firefighter who died in the
World Trade Center) offers a perfect--if unintended--lesson in the way that
modern military power also serves as an avatar of globalization. Right now,
there are 3,000 soldiers from eight nations (six NATO countries as well as
Australia and South Korea) holding up a 24/7 work routine at the base, from
refueling planes to flying combat sorties. The obligatory base tour takes you
from the giant gymnasium to the air-conditioned eight-man tents to the Internet
room--all flown in from halfway around the world. The PX is filled with
Butterfingers, PlayStations, and cans of Skoal. Everyone agrees that the best
cappuccino comes from the café run by the French soldiers, but it's the Dutch
and the Scandinavians who have the best recreation hall--known, with predictably
pedestrian wit, as "Valhalla." By the end of August, the base had
pumped some $34 million into the Kyrgyz economy. (The national budget of
Kyrgyzstan is $250 million.) Western
civilization, in short, has arrived in Kyrgyzstan. Nowadays, when you travel to
Osh, you won't be greeted by a surprise army checkpoint on the lookout for
infiltrating IMU fighters. The conspiracy theories in the papers are no longer
devoted to the next maneuverings of Namangani and his puppet-masters in Kabul.
Now it's Washington that supplies the oracles, and it's Donald Rumsfeld and Gen.
Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, whose words get all the parsing.
One of the biggest news stories in Tajikistan recently has been the return of
the U.S. Embassy staff, who chose to spend most of the 1990s in the considerably
safer capital of Kazakhstan, hundreds of miles to the north. Inspired by their
spirit of adventure, I decided, a few weeks ago, to visit Namangani's old
headquarters in remote Tavildara, a bone-crushing eight-hour drive from the
capital, Dushanbe. Where his mujahedin had been swarming just two years earlier,
there were now no fighters to be found. Instead,
local officials welcomed me with tales of the latest visits by their new friends
from the CIA, and showed off their souvenir shot glasses from Langley to prove
it. "They got in a helicopter and flew up into the mountains," the
head of the local KGB told me. "They went to look at Namangani's old camps,
and they were able to confirm that they were all empty." Certainly, some of
the credit for this change goes to the Tajiks themselves, along with their
well-wishers in the international community who worked out the peace deal that
ended the civil war and persuaded indigenous Islamists to put down their arms.
Still, most of Namangani's fighters are now consorting with the virgins of
paradise largely due to the painstaking work of the U.S. Air Force and its army
of spotters on the ground in Afghanistan. All
Quiet on the Kyrgyz Front? But
how long will it stay this way? On the face of things, all is quiet on the
Kyrgyz front. Take a closer look, though, and the problems loom. Stationing
troops in a country that has proven vulnerable to a dedicated guerrilla enemy is
never a long-term solution. And if you're not the Roman Empire, prepared to
crucify your political opponents at the slightest sign of dissent, you'd better
have a decent counter-insurgency program on hand--or, at the very least, some
talented PR people. So far the United States has not been able to come up with
either, in Kyrgyzstan or elsewhere. In March, the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev,
presided over the shooting of six unarmed protesters in an anti-government
demonstration, triggering a wave of opposition that has nearly pushed him out of
office. The Bush administration responded by inviting Akayev to Washington and
presenting him with a juicy aid package to sweeten his White House handshake. Most
Kyrgyz, meanwhile, say that they've seen little economic payoff from the
presence of the new base, and explain this with whispers about the president's
family members, who are alleged to be the real beneficiaries. (His son-in-law
happened to win the contract to supply the base with aviation fuel. Another
presidential relative, members of the opposition say, controls the airport.) A
Kyrgyz parliamentary deputy, who claims to have received plenty of mail
protesting the new U.S. presence, is planning a big protest this fall. Local
Islamist groups--the unarmed kind--have been railing against Ganci in their
propaganda leaflets. Kyrgyzstan is ostensibly an ally in the war against
terrorism--but these days soldiers from the base are allowed to go into town
only once a week, and then in groups. "We're in a more complicated region
of the world than most of us are used to spending our time in," was how the
affable Air Force major who showed me around put it. "If this wasn't a
complicated part of the world, we wouldn't have to be here for this
operation." In
short, the American presence in Central Asia adds up to an excellent lesson in
how not to win hearts and minds in a part of the world where you urgently need
to make some friends outside the walls of the presidential palace. And
Kyrgyzstan, arguably the most liberal of the five republics, is the best-case
scenario. In
Tajikistan a leading member of the democratic opposition has been accusing the
U.S. embassy of denying access to the State Department's annual report on human
rights. The embassy response? Deafening silence--and some hugs for the
dictatorial president, who, as rumor has it, has allowed U.S. special forces to
operate from his territory. Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan--now home to
another big U.S. base--recently got his own Rose Garden photo op, despite
thousands of opponents languishing in jails and concentration camps, some on
charges as serious as wearing long beards (allegedly an outward indicator of
Islamist inclinations). Meanwhile, both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have been
registering a startling uptick in the activities of a group called
Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an unarmed but fanatically anti-Jewish Islamist group that has
been expanding its activities to places hitherto untouched by fundamentalist
propaganda. And they're finding receptive listeners. Corruption
and contempt for the most basic norms of the law, remain as entrenched as ever.
Economies in most of the region continue to deteriorate, complicated by a high
birthrate which is generating huge numbers of unemployable young men--the
recruiting ground of terrorists to come. Even the heroin trade is alive and
well, thanks to the incapacity of the new Afghanistan government to cope with
its poppy growers. These were all problems before the Americans arrived. The big
difference now is that the United States is implicated in them, thanks to its
ostentatious support for the area's dubious regimes. But
this wouldn't be impossible to change. First, we could expand aid efforts that
benefit populations rather than corrupt rulers, beginning with such fundamentals
as schools for the region's children--boys and girls alike. This is easier said
than done, but we have little other choice. Second, we must forcefully push the
republics' leaders to coordinate their policies with each other and cooperate
across borders, especially in the all-important Ferghana Valley. To that end, we
should, wherever necessary, aggressively seek pragmatic alliances with
international organizations, ranging from the OSCE to the Aga Khan Foundation,
that have already done pathbreaking work on this front--however multilateralist
such a strategy might sound. Third, in keeping with that approach, we should
think up a strategy for solving the region's problems that can break through our
own government's bureaucratic firewalls as well as the borders between
individual countries. It's a strategy, by the way, that should include training
programs for the local militaries--as well as measures to get local armies
cooperating rather than threatening each other. Finally, we should step up our
efforts to get the oil flowing, not to mention devise ways to ensure that oil
wealth actually reaches the people of the supplying countries as well as their
rulers. A big step has already been taken in that direction with the start of
work on the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline in September. Even
if we do all these things, though, there's one other piece of business that has
to be taken care of before we can feel sure about the fate of Central Asia, and
that's to win the peace in Afghanistan. When Gen. Franks came to Tajikistan on
his recent visit to the region, President Emomali Rakhmonov had one big request
to make. He wanted the United States and its allies to deploy the International
Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to places beyond the city limits of
Kabul--the key, as most experts would acknowledge, to any serious effort to
build a new Afghan state. Like his colleagues in office, Rakhmonov may be a
dictator, but he's no idiot. He knows that all of his own work to keep his job
will be in vain unless the anti-terrorist coalition can live up to its
state-building obligations in the country that so recently provided a haven for
a full assortment of international troublemakers. If we can't even manage to
build the highway from Kabul to Kandahar, we will hardly be in a position to
ensure stability in Central Asia. The
reason is obvious: You can't fight ideas with guns, and the Islamist ideal
lingers on. Namangani may be dead, his forces scattered, but his myth continues
to haunt. He was mysterious enough in life. Now, in death, he threatens to
become what the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, one of the leading experts on
the region, has astutely described as "the Che Guevara of Central
Asia." Unless
the United States can build on its military victory, there can be no
guaranteeing that Namangani's ghost will not rise again. And while it's a sign
of hope that Washington has announced fresh initiatives to invigorate the
stalled state-building effort in Afghanistan--by re-emphasizing economic
assistance and perhaps prodding our allies to expand peacekeeping beyond
Kabul--the Bush administration's efforts in Central Asia remain less than
encouraging. Over the last few months, after all, this same administration has
unveiled a bold new foreign policy paradigm to undergird their plans for war
against Iraq. Instead of the feckless multilateralism of the Clinton years or
the amoral realpolitik of the Cold War, they argue, the United States will seek
to impose an imperial peace on the Middle East--to replace the thuggish
authoritarian regimes that breed fundamentalism and terrorism with vibrant
democracies. But in Central Asia, the Bush administration has allied America
with the thugs--men not so different from a second-rate Iraqi despot the United
States embraced, also for the sake of stability, some two decades ago. If our
new Central Asian imperialism is prologue to our coming Middle East adventure,
Iraq may turn out to be the first of many worries. (Christian
Caryl is a correspondent for Newsweek.)
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