Time to Reassess the Uzbek Alliance

What has happened in Uzbekistan now clearly appears to have been a massacre of hundreds, committed by a government with which the United States has a military alliance. How the Bush Administration responds to this moral challenge will determine whether the usual suspects who accuse the United States of hypocrisy in its calls for global democratization will gain a useful talking point for their recruitment drives.

I’m not immune to the demands of realpolitik, and I swallowed my discomfort over Bush putting U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan, one of the world’s most repressive states, in 2001. As Bob Woodward explained in Bush at War, those bases were necessary for launching rescue teams in case U.S. combat aircraft went down in what was then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The U.S. need for this Faustian deal expired–as far as I can possibly perceive–at the end of 2001, when the Northern Alliance secured four excellent Soviet-built, hard-surfaced runways in Konduz, Bagram, Shindand, and Mazar-i-Sharif. Others, at Khost, Gardeyz, Kandahar, and Jalalabad would soon follow. Am I unjustified in presuming that Islam Karimov extracts a price in regime-sustaining money and legitimacy from the U.S. military presence there? Is there some reason why the United States military needs to pay this high cost when it has access to nearly all of the infrastructure that the Soviets used to sustain an Afghan presence ten times larger than our own? Can we say that the benefits of keeping bases in a country that has just slaughtered hundreds of demonstrators has been appropriately weighed, when we claim to be involved in a global campaign to champion democracy?

It is good that the United States has finally gotten around to “expressing concern” about this slaughter, no matter how unsavory the opposition elements that instigated it, and particularly so in light of the fact that Russia and China have publicly supported Karimov’s regime. It is appropriate, of course, that the United States should be reasonably sure of facts before acting on them. It is foolish to end military alliances capriciously. But it is equally foolish to sustain them when doing so undermines broader U.S. interests, a point I’ve repeatedly made in reference to our alliance with South Korea recently. Even as the South Korean left and its boosters, who are reliably winching up the waterlogged corpses of Kwangju in an attempt to indict the United States for complicity–something Gordon Cucullu convincingly rebuts–we are reminded of the price of associating ourselves with repressive governments (something the Korean left will find particularly damning when North Korea’s abuses show up on television screens worldwide). You may assess that price, overall, as being worth the cost in 1980. You may argue, and argue convincingly, that our continued alliance with South Korea allowed us to pressure the latter to democratize. You may defend our (in my view, with perfect hindsight) inadequate public response in the name of the greater interests of realpolitik. Perhaps some of the same arguments could apply to Uzbekistan, but they seem substantially weaker in that context. And as the Newsweek fiasco clearly illustrates, in this war, public perceptions matter much more than they one did, or at least more than we used to realize. In this arena, I’m concerned that we’re blowing it. Weak condemnation and watered-down calls for more political openness in a country where the BBC and al-Jazeera will unfailingly point out our military presence could leave us open to legitimate charges of hypocrisy.

Our first question, then, must be whether Uzbekistan’s tyranny is offering us anything worthy of the high price of our association with it. The second question must be how we can give the widest possible dissemination to our blunt condemnation of and disassociation from this massacre and the regime that carried it out. The third, and most delicate, question is how we can do something more constructive than simply condemning the violence, given that Uzbekistan’s long tyranny has had the predictable effect of radicalizing the opposition, in which anti-democratic forces appear to dominate. A call for legislative elections would seem to be be a good first step–one that would spark a public debate in which radical movements will inevitably find their public support unequal to their fanaticism. The world will find it far more meaningful if the U.S. states publicly that it will close its bases in Uzbekistan unless the government sets a date certain for free and monitored elections.