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uzbekistan
US Courts Central Asian Dictators in Pursuit of Post-Afghan War Objectives
Nations including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have some of the world's most abysmal human rights records—but that isn't deterring the Biden administration from seeking to work with them.
Jul 15, 2021
As it did while attempting to build a natural gas pipeline through the region in the 1990s and during the early years of the so-called War on Terror, the U.S. government is once again courting Central Asian dictatorships in a bid to secure a military staging area from which it could launch strikes against resurgent Islamist militants in the post-Afghan War era.
The Associated Press reports U.S. diplomats are mounting a "charm offensive" in a bid to woo leaders of nations including Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan into agreeing to provide U.S. military forces with bases close to the Afghan border that could be used for the type of "over-the-horizon" operations that President Joe Biden and Pentagon brass say may continue after the withdrawal, as well as temporary relocation sites for thousands of Afghan translators and other collaborators with the nearly 20-year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
While U.S. forces--which are set to leave Afghanistan by the end of August--are perfectly capable of striking targets anywhere in the region from aircraft carriers or bases in the Middle East and Asia, Pentagon planners prefer the advantages of proximity that nearby staging areas would provide.
However, unlike in 2001--when Central Asian governments eagerly cooperated with the George W. Bush administration by allowing U.S. forces to set up bases from which much of the Afghan War was conducted--leaders of those nations are wary of offering the same level of cooperation.
On Wednesday, the White House announced that Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Biden's assistant for homeland security, "will lead a U.S. delegation to a high-level international conference promoting prosperity, security, and regional connectivity between Central and South Asia in Tashkent, Uzbekistan."
\u201cThis week, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall will lead a U.S. delegation to a high-level international conference in Uzbekistan to discuss how to advance regional connectivity, economic development, and shared security interests.\u201d— Adrienne Watson (@Adrienne Watson) 1626361046
Sherwood-Randall was accompanied by officials including U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad--a veteran of the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations.
An Afghan native, Khalilzad played a key role in supporting the mujahideen fighters--who included Osama bin Laden--in their war against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. During the 1990s he was also a director of strategy, doctrine, and force structure at the RAND Corporation and was a member of the pro-imperialist Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocated U.S. global dominance (pdf) and regime change in Iraq prior to 9/11.
Khalilzad is also a former liaison between oil company Unocal, now part of Chevron, and the Taliban during the late 1990s when U.S. leaders were courting the extremist group due to a desire to build a natural gas pipeline from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea--even as the fundamentalists' horrific atrocities were shocking the world's conscience.
\u201cThe Turkish foreign minister said Thursday that he discussed Afghan peace with US special envoy for Afghanistan reconstruction.\nMevlut Cavusoglu met Zalmay Khalilzad during his visit to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.\n@anadoluagency\u201d— Pajhwok Afghan News (@Pajhwok Afghan News) 1626371583
Securing the pipeline agreement, as well as the wartime military bases and supply route into Afghanistan--known as the Northern Distribution Network--meant maintaining friendly relations with some of the world's most brutal dictatorships, including the regimes of Turkmenistan's "president for life" Saparmurat Niyazov, who built an estimated 10,000 statues of his likeness and renamed the month of January after himself, and Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, who perpetuated institutionalized agricultural slavery and boiled dissenters alive.
While Niyazov and Karimov are long dead, both nations remain under the rule of oppressive dictators. According to Human Rights Watch, "Turkmenistan remains an isolated and repressive country under the authoritarian rule of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his associates."
"The government brutally punishes all unauthorized forms of religious and political expression," says HRW. "Dozens of forcibly disappeared are presumably held in Turkmen prisons."
As for Uzbekistan, HRW says that since "President Shavkat Mirziyoyev assumed the presidency in 2016, the government has taken some concrete steps to improve the country's human rights record."
"Nevertheless, Uzbekistan's political system remains largely authoritarian," the rights group says. "Many reform promises remain unfulfilled. Thousands of people, mainly peaceful religious believers, remain in prison on false charges. During 2020, there were reports of torture and ill-treatment in prisons, most former prisoners were not rehabilitated, journalists and activists were persecuted, independent rights groups were denied registration, and forced labor was not eliminated."
In Tajikistan, HRW reports that "authorities continued to jail government critics, including opposition activists and journalists, for lengthy prison terms on politically motivated grounds. They also intensified harassment of relatives of peaceful dissidents abroad and continued to forcibly return political opponents from abroad using politically motivated extradition requests."
"The government severely restricts freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion, including through heavy censorship of the internet," the group says. "Until the end of April, the Tajik government denied the existence of the Covid-19 virus in the country and was late to introduce meaningful measures to slow its spread."
In Kazakhstan, HRW says that "President Kasym-Jomart Tokaev's promises for reform did not bring about meaningful improvements in... human rights record in 2020. Government critics faced harassment and prosecution, and free speech was suppressed, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic."
\u201cNice. Now. dear US senators, repeat, but for #Assange, pls #AssangeCase #assangeweek \n\n"Abishev...was included in a letter from...U.S. senators urg[ing] authorities in...Central Asia...to release 'unjustly detained prisoners at high risk of COVID-19.'"\n\nhttps://t.co/T3dc2vhdS9\u201d— Tarik Cyril Amar\ud83c\udf39 (@Tarik Cyril Amar\ud83c\udf39) 1626347440
In Kyrgyzstan "the death in custody of the wrongfully imprisoned human rights defender Azimjon Askarov in July was one of the low points of [the nation's] rights record during the year," says HRW. "Kyrgyzstan held parliamentary elections in October, which international observers found to be competitive but tainted by claims of vote buying."
Nevertheless, the Biden administration, like its predecessors, is keen to work with Central Asian regimes to achieve U.S. strategic objectives, even if regional dictators are less inclined to partner with Washington than they were before.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday that the Central Asian governments "will make sovereign decisions about their level of the cooperation with the United States" after American troops leave Afghanistan.
Price added that a stable post-U.S. withdrawal Afghanistan is "not only in our interests... it is much more and certainly in the immediate interests of Afghanistan's neighbors."
John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan who was instrumental in securing American access to bases there after 9/11, told the AP that U.S. credibility in Central Asia has "taken a hit through our failures in Afghanistan."
"Is that a mortal hit? Probably not," said Herbst. "But it's still a very powerful factor."
The U.S. is vying with Russia--with which the Central Asian republics were united during the era of the former Soviet Union--China, and, increasingly, the Taliban, which has launched a neighborly charm offensive of its own, for influence in the region.
"Russia has strong historical, cultural, economic, and societal ties with the Central Asian region and is seeking to reassert its influence there, to counter the influence of actors from outside of the region, particularly the U.S.," Tracey German, a specialist in Russian foreign and security policy at the Defense Studies Department at King's College London, toldNewsweek. "It views the region as its own strategic backyard."
\u201cRussia opposing this is understandable. Look at this from another angle: You are Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Why would you help a country (the U.S.) that wants your help fixing the country the U.S. just abandoned (Afghanistan)? \nhttps://t.co/ZjcvXih3Xx\u201d— Bill Roggio (@Bill Roggio) 1626231995
Earlier this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, "I would emphasize that the redeployment of the American permanent military presence to the countries neighboring Afghanistan is unacceptable."
"We told the Americans in a direct and straightforward way that it would change a lot of things not only in our perceptions of what's going on in that important region, but also in our relations with the United States," he added.
As for the Taliban, it has in recent months been dispatching its own diplomats to regional capitals in a bid to shore up relations with its neighbors. However, Herbst said that "all the countries in the region... have to worry about Taliban intentions."
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The Death of One of Washington's Favorite Tyrants
The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries in the world for human-rights abuses. What U.S. government officials and our media mostly ignore, however, is that American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov's thirty-five years in power.
Sep 10, 2016
The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries in the world for human-rights abuses. What U.S. government officials and our media mostly ignore, however, is that American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov's thirty-five years in power.
Torture has been endemic in Uzbekistan, where Karimov banned all opposition groups, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human-rights workers and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually took as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literallyboiled alive.
Karimov became leader of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989 while the country was still part of the Soviet Union. He backed the unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hardliners against reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and personally opposed Uzbek independence. But finding himself president of a sovereign state when the Soviet Union suddenly dissolved, he quickly modified his position, changing his first name to "Islam" and morphing into an Uzbek nationalist.
As president of the newly independent Uzbekistan, Karimov banned leading opposition parties and amassed his power through the suppression of opponents and a series of riggedelections and plebiscites, labeling virtually all opponents as Islamist radicals.
Uzbekistan is the most populous country in Central Asia, and its capital Tashkent sports a modern subway system and an international airport built during the Soviet era. As an independent state under Karimov's rule, however, Uzbekistan remains one of the poorest of the former Soviet republics. This is despite generous natural resources, including one of the world's largest sources of natural gas, and sizable, but largely untapped, oil reserves. Karimov pocketed virtually all of the revenue generated by the country's natural endowments. Corruption is rampant, and his brutal militias routinely engaged in robbery and extortion. Businessmen who refuse to pay bribes were frequently labeled Islamic extremists and then jailed, tortured, and murdered.
U.S. military cooperation with Karimov's regime began under President Bill Clinton in 1995, but expanded greatly under President George W. Bush, who provided Uzbekistan with close to $1 billion in aid and an agreement to station up to 1,500 U.S. troops in the country. Karimov was invited to the White House in March 2002, where he and President Bush signed a strategic partnership agreement, which included an additional $120 million in U.S. military aid. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has praised Karimov for his "wonderful cooperation" with the U.S. military. President Bush's former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill spoke admiringly of the dictator's "very keen intellect and deep passion" for improving the lives of his people.
Uzbekistan became a destination in the "extraordinary rendition" program, where the United States would send suspected Islamist extremists for torture.
Craig Murray, who served as the British ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004, observed how Karimov was "very much George Bush's man in Central Asia" and that no Bush administration official ever said a negative word about him.
Murray's expose of American and British collaboration with Karimov's despotic regime cost him his career with the foreign service. And it is still a sensitive issue: just this week, the U.S. State Department denied Murray entry into the United States, where he was scheduled to speak before peace, human rights and civil liberties groups.
There is more than a little irony in the way that the U.S. government, which was once willing to back extremist Islamist groups in Central Asia to fight Communist dictators, became so willing to back a Communist dictator to fight Islamists.
In May 2005, following an eruption of pro-democracy demonstrations in Andijan and other cities, Uzbek government forces massacred close to 1,000 protesters over a two-day period. The Bush administration successfully blocked a call by NATO for an international investigation, though a report from Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with scores of eyewitnesses, determined that government troops had used "indiscriminate use of lethal force against unarmed people." The British newspaper The Independent reported that Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov "almost certainly personally authorized the use of . . . deadly force."
The international outcry was so intense, however, that the United States was forced to suspend military aid based on human-rights provisions in foreign aid. To the dismay of human rights advocates, however, the Obama administration in 2011 convinced Congress to waive the restrictions and resume military aid.
In reaction to the Obama administration's efforts, twenty human rights, labor, consumer, and other groups signed a letter to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying "We strongly urge you to oppose passage of the law and not to invoke this waiver." The signers encouraged the administration "to stand behind your strong past statements regarding human rights abuses in Uzbekistan" and not move toward "business as usual" with that regime.
Signatories included the AFL-CIO, Amnesty International USA, and Human Rights Watch, as well as organizations with close ties to the foreign policy establishment like Freedom House and the International Crisis Group. Despite this effort, Congress overwhelmingly approved the waiver and President Obama signed it into law
Despite evidence to the contrary, Clinton, who visited Uzbekistan that October, claimed that the regime was "showing signs of improving its human rights record and expanding political freedoms." When asked about the 2005 massacres during Clinton's visit, a senior State Department official responded, "We've definitely moved on from that."
The repression, and U.S. assistance--climbing to as much as $30 million annually--has continued every year since.
Karimov's death will not likely end systemic, government-sponsored human-rights abuses any time soon. And, despite a new U.S. President and Congress coming into office early next year, it's unlikely there will be a lessening of U.S. support for the regime.
Indeed, it has been extremely rare for the United States to suspend its support for autocracies like Uzbekistan unless there is pressure from the American public to do so. Living under a repressive dictatorship, the Uzbeks are extremely limited in what they can do to change their government's policies. We here in the United States, however, don't have that excuse.
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