Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Last month Joshua Foust wrote about the Unicorn Principle and Regional Strategy, raising some questions I'll be considering in my alternative-universe GOP debate:
There remains a lot of pushback against the idea that the U.S.’s decision to re-engage with the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan represents a least-bad option for the region. Writing a guestpost at my friend Steve LeVine’s blog, Russell Zanca argues:
"Like-minded thinkers see Uzbek military forces as competent and trustworthy military partners. Furthermore, Foust himself asserts that there are times when cooperation between U.S. military forces and even those of authoritarian states, such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, lead to a softening of how military and police forces handle domestic disturbances.
I am wondering if this was manifest in how Egyptian police recently dealt with Coptic protesters in Cairo. Those who think similarly must know that U.S. and Uzbek military forces have been working together since the mid-1990s, and yet in 2005 Uzbek military units had no compunction about killing hundreds of their countrymen in the city of Andijan. If these examples show that U.S. engagement improves the conduct of the armed forces of dictatorships, I suppose I simply don’t grasp how awful these armed forces might behave without our assistance and cooperation."
This is misreading my argument, which was that Security Assistance can lead to increased professionalism (not that it always does), and that increased professionalism would be good for Uzbekistan. In fact, former political prisoner Sanjar Umarov has argued that quite explicitly: that some monitoring and professionalization would actually substantially reduce the amount of abuse in the Uzbek system. ...
The big problem I see with the opposition to engagement is that it is focused entirely on Uzbekistan, with almost no regard for the broader political and regional context. The State Department is pushing this engagement so that the U.S. can withdraw from Afghanistan without empowering the international terrorists who run Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. The implicit argument that denying the ISI the ability to launder U.S. money and equipment to launch terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, is a bad thing because it won’t change the plight of Uzbeks is badly shortsighted.
The human rights argument about what to do in Uzbekistan are, at best, a sideshow. Ending the military subsidies to Pakistan and shifting the military’s supply chain to Uzbekistan is a massive net-gain for the entire region. Literally everyone, including Uzbeks, will benefit by starving the Pakistani beast. Moreover, it will make the war in Afghanistan more likely to end on a less-bad note, since the continuing dissolution of the U.S.’s relationship with Pakistan won’t necessarily prompt a catastrophic, sudden withdrawal.
Critics like Russell Zanca, or ICG’s Andrew Stroehlein, do not place their arguments in the context of the war in Afghanistan, which is the context the U.S. government is using. They just say engagement is bad because it won’t really help Uzbeks. They’re right about the latter part. But in the real world, where you cannot just cross your arms and pout that you don’t like your choices and wish for something better, you have to make choices. Engagement with Uzbekistan, and disengagement from Pakistan, will do the least amount of harm, which is all we can hope for at this point. It is the only real option U.S. policymakers have left.
Not incidentally, in recent days it seems Uzbekistan's top officials have been purged.
Flashback to 1989, when Pravda was Pravda and the New York Times was the New York Times.
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Aug '10
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
I wonder if it has always been the case that when a foreign policy is being evolved, the word nicer hovers over every aspect of it. Or is that just a modern, American thing? "If only [your 'Stan here] were nicer, then [our desired outcome here]." I also wonder if foreign policy was or would be easier to evolve if nicer were replaced by duller. Or richer, but that's too obvious.
Oct '11
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Often it feels like authority is so diffuse and accountability so absent in developing countries that it's hard to hold the government directly responsible for human rights violations, even if it's done under the badge of government. However, I think Uzbekistan is one of the exceptions; it suffers from a pretty oppressive regime. I'm a little surprised this deal isn't more conditional, but maybe those conditions just aren't out in the open. I suppose one upside to oppressive regimes is that it might be quicker to start breathing once the government boot lifts up. In his original post he brings up Egypt as a strategy success.
I think he's right that rejection would be a mistake, and I'm glad that the administration is explicitly waiving the human rights provision for national security reasons, so as to openly limit our support. I still feel for the people who are repressed, and the kind of message this may send. Jay Nordlinger always says about repressive regimes, "How does it look to the boys in the camps?" It's probably confusing and a bit disheartening.
Also, Josh's Atlantic stuff is always worth checking out.
Oct '11
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Also, so everyone (aka all nine of you reading this who understand the region's importance and follow Claire's posts on it) knows what he's talking about with regard to supply routes, here's a map of the Northern Distribution Network. It provides an alternative to Pakistan, and has some obvious logistic challenges due to our situation with Russia.
Sadly, parts of it mirror the north Caspian Silk Road route through Samarqand. One day...
Edited on Nov 23, 2011 at 8:29amRe: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Thanks for that map. One thing it shows very clearly is that a candidate who says, "Our interest in the region is Israel and in Iran not getting the Bomb" is lying to the American people. You can say that's just "simplifying," if you want to be charitable, but it's "simplifying" in the way Erdogan "simplifies" when he tells the Turkish electorate that Israel is oppressing Gaza. Our relations with every country on that map are critical, and we can't just wash our hands of it. Turkey, you can see, is critical, which is why we're in such a love-fest with Erdogan even though we know full well that he's a human rights nightmare and a bully. We just need Turkey so much, so we can't criticize.
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
As for Samarqand, I was there in 1989, and Tashkent, too. That was when I became an ardent, John-Bircher, "They're poisoning our precious bodily fluids" kind of anti-communist. Their magnificent Timurid architectural masterpieces were surrounded by the most unspeakably grim Soviet architecture, the kind that says, "We mean to do away completely with your language and culture and replace it with concrete, homogenous hi-rises and tell you it's progress." Also, the world's most disgusting public toilet, beating several times over the ladies bathroom in the train station in Hubli, India.
Edited on Nov 23, 2011 at 10:14amOct '11
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Very cool, that would have been an interesting time to visit. I had a Ukrainian friend who made a point to visit the old Soviet Bloc countries, and spent some time in Tashkent. He said it was like an Islamic Florence, which is why I hesitated to refer to Uzbekistan as a "developing country".
I'm surprised it took us this long to express a strong national security interest in Uzbekistan. It's the seventh largest producer of uranium (Kazakhstan's the largest), and had a lot of Soviet nuclear weapons still present after the breakup. It seems a logical foothold to the region, especially considering its neighbors.
On a side note, for as much as we rightly criticize Islam's rigid oppression (somewhat recent phenomenon, IMO), I'm constantly amazed at its adaptability, as seen through its architecture and customs and especially contrasted with the Soviet model as you noticed. My favorite Naipaul book is his non-fiction (though Eddie Said may say otherwise) Among the Believers, in which he travels to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, exploring how Islam shapes and is shaped differently through the underlying culture and politics of the country. Both critiques and praises.
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
That's a great book, especially the Iran part.
Aug '10
Re: Will Engagement With Uzbekistan Do More Good Than Harm?
Just havin' some late fun with this deplorably neglected thread:
It's a good thing I flunked my Foreign Service interviews, because had I got in, I'd've been stuck in meetings and my mind would've wandered and I'd've imagined I was in a zoology seminar. Wait a minute, are we talking about people or about semidomesticated possums? If, as I fear, the latter, then niceness, or dullness, or richness, or smartness, is by the way. What we want of such lurid lumpy violent foreigners - all we want of them - is that they be adequate.
Anyway, it's been Uzbek-Ed for me today, and that is...nice, because it reminds me that I actually was in the Uzbek Consulate in Istanbul. This was during the Tashkent Cholera Riots Centennial, though they didn't have bunting, though they could have. All the forms were in Russian. I wonder if they still are. I fear the worst. Do we Americans really need another Central Asian Civilizing Mission? Hasn't it been tried?