Is There A Connection Between the IMU Rollup and the NDN?
Oh, I don't know. Elephants?
But on the way to drawing that tenuous connection, Joshua Kucera makes a really far-fetched claim on EurasiaNet today -- that the US is selling out dissidents in Uzbekistan for the sake of the almighty delivery route to -- and from -- the war in Afghanistan.
That seems like politicized hype, even given what we know about the flaccid US position on human rights in Uzbekistan -- and it's hype that isn't really independently researched, but merely reinforced by musings from other blogs, including the dubious Registan, and a new book (which was published before the current cases in any event).
First, Kucera references (without explaining) three men in Germany arrested and designated as terrorists and a fourth arrested this week in the US (former human rights activist Jamshid Mukhtarov):
Earlier this week, the U.S. designated three men as members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), shadowy groups operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And U.S. agents arrested a fourth man in the U.S., charging him with supporting the IJU.
Other Uzbek terrorists have been tried in Germany -- it's not anything new and didn't get the doubt and the scrutiny that these cases are getting now.
Then Kucera says:
These moves have prompted skepticism about whether the IMU and IJU are in fact real threats, and questions about whether the U.S. is trumping up these charges -- or even selling out Uzbekistan's dissidents -- for the sake of Tashkent's cooperation on the Northern Distribution Network.
Er, note that one of the two sources of the "skepticism" in this piece is Registan, which now has a tandem going with EurasiaNet -- after Joshua Foust first succeeded in bullying and browbeating EurasiaNet writers into silence or accommodation and forced one to be removed (me). This follows a trend on other stories where the two sites reinforce each other like a hall of mirrors, upholding a certain school of thought (that would be their right, if they actually did more homework and didn't try to terrorize others out of criticizing them).
And the other source is the blog Gazistan, which has a piece asking in even more outrage if the US sold out the opposition. I simply don't find Gazistan's logic compelling -- to make his case, the pseudonymous law student AJK has to rely on the notion of the "made-up terrorist group" for starters, and then he has to rely on a notion that the US "should have" followed Mukhtarev to Turkey to see with whom he was hooking up there, and catch the "real" terrorists.
Um, maybe they did that already? We don't know all of Mukhtarev's movements on his journey from Kyrgyzstan, where he was apparently given refugee status, to the US, where he apparently arrived as a refugee. The US would have been watching him and his contacts for some time to make an arrest of this nature. Maybe they did their leg-work but didn't put it on Twitter or Facebook?
I do realize that the very deeply-held conventional wisdom of the establishment "progressives" is that Central Asian despots, in cahoots with US military, just make up stuff about terrorism. There are no terrorists! Don't worry your pretty little heads! No terrorists here!
Of course, they might make up stuff, but there might be terrorists anyway, too. If you have a firmly closed mind on this subject, you will never look at any fresh data objectively. Everything that comes across the transom will be "faked".
Sarah Kendzior, the in-house academic (and office wife!) at Registan for these sorts of stories, has already posted a few somewhat weepy portrayals of Mukhtarov -- if he did turn extremist and did begin to friend up jihad groups, it was only because he was forced to do so by all the bad things that happened to him:
I did an interview for a news outlet on this story last night, and one of the questions the reporter asked me is whether the repression in Karimov’s Uzbekistan – which led to Mukhtarov being labeled an extremist and drove him into exile – made him so desperate for retribution that he would pursue an actual extremist group like the IJU. After looking through a lot of material on Mukhtarov, I don’t have a conclusive answer, but it’s a decent theory. It reminds me of the thesis put forth in Michael Andersen’s documentary ’(The Myth of) Religious Extremism in Central Asia’. That said, I don’t think Mukhtorov’s case is emblematic of a broader trend in Uzbekistan, but it is an interesting, and sad, story.
I have to wonder why this "decent theory" is only occuring to her now -- of course human rights activism in Andijan is all about the appalling crackdown on people labeled as extremists who then in many cases do become extremists -- no wonder there.
And that's one reason why you have to pay attention to human rights earlier and more often than the Registanis do, in their curious defense of the status quo for these regimes and these peoples of Central Asia.
But selling out a dissident? I wonder if anybody in the USG will make Joshua take that back. It's one thing to say that the US isn't very helpful to human rights activists. It's not. Or doesn't do an awful lot for them, although we do know there is some quiet diplomacy for some cases and that sometimes a few minor concessions are obtained, like the release of a thoroughly-broken prisoner (not success).
Going to another level and claiming that the US is actually trumping up charges and in fact selling out activists and claiming they are terrorists is a completely different sort of thing, and I see no evidence for it. I do believe things are bad in this region and the US has some complicity in that; I think we will see this get worse as the date approaches for withdrawal of Afghanistan. But that's why you have to be careful in making the claim, and save it up for when you really have the goods on it -- to be persuasive.
There's a built-in flaw to analysis that always tries to make everything relate to the NDN -- you begin to imagine an instrumentality that may not explain everything and may not actually affect everything. Sometimes it is related; sometimes it isn't. The US came up with their hand-delivered "bad" assessment of Uzbekistan to EurasiaNet after the Pakistani indicated they might -- for an increased fee -- open up the NDN gates again, yet that time Kucera didn't find a link. He just saw it as the US "making use of its waiver" (that should have come in a more formal statement from Secretary of State Clinton) and was glad that now the US "had a clean conscience" for at least not being hypocritical.
Now Kucera is pushing his linkage theory even further, speculating that the US got its cooperation from Uzbekistan in delivering military cargo by "paying" the Uzbeks with the arrests of these men or the designation of these groups. Perhaps. We have no more evidence of this than the opposite -- because Registani or Gazistan musings -- and they're just that, bloggy musings -- aren't evidence.
So Kucera finds a scholarly book to cut and paste from, by Eric McGlinchey, his new book Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia, which discusses how the IMU got on the State Department's official list of terrorist organizations.
Seeming quid pro quos... appear to have shaped U.S. relations with Uzbekistan. In the summer of 2000 the CIA began using Uzbek airfields to launch Predator drone missions over Afghanistan. Immediately following the Karimov government's granting of access to Uzbek airfields, the U.S. designated the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) a “foreign terror organization” – a designation Karimov subsequently used to justify dragnet police sweeps for alleged Islamist militants. A State Department official would later confide that U.S. base negotiators fully understood that they needed to “throw Karimov a bone” in return for Tashkent's cooperation on the covert Predator program.
OK, but here's what's wrong with this paste-up theory (shorn of its context, to be sure, which I'm happy to read more of): Karimov would do this sort of drag-netting anyway and did so. Karimov had his police *blow up their own colleagues* in a series of bombings, remember? (At least according to the establishment "progressives"). Karimov doesn't need the US to "throw him bones" or designate people as "international terrorists" -- he can do that all on his own, and he and his henchmen have done so with thousands and thousands of Muslim believers. The actualities of Karimov's repression are in fact what make this "US complicity" version of the story weak.
The US grants Russia and other countries their desired "terrorist group designations" -- sometimes after long haggling. The task is to show that actually helps those authoritarian regimes do their dirty work, and whether it in fact actually makes the US do any more arrests than they would have.
Oh, I'm all for harshing on the US if they are mum on human rights or complicit. It wasn't me who claimed first that human rights was "technically improving" and then counseled the US to keep mum about it, remember?
But to make your harsh criticism credible -- and to save it for the times when the US might really be selling human rights activists down the river! -- you have to be credible and correct when you make these claims. I don't think there's enough evidence here for claiming that the US literally arrests innocent people because they need to get fuel to the troops in Afghanistan via the Uzbek railroad.
Gazistan has this to say on January 26, concoting the theory (and you can see where Kucera likely got his idea for his own blog today):
Everything in the entire Muhtorov story is ill-defined, and instead of pursuing the man to give shape to it and to see just precisely what sort of crimes we're talking about, we're just going to arrest a man for internet perusal and un-American fashion activities.
Muhtorov is certainly the prime - and most widely-covered - example. But since ratcheting ties with Uzbekistan, the US government has arrested one and put the hit out on three others for being anti-Karimov. This is not enough to make a pattern, I admit. But it is absolutely frightening to think that as part of the NDN bargain , the US has decided to begin rolling up on anti-Karimov individuals.
Who is Muhtorov likely to know? Other dissident Uzbeks, to be sure. Any implication by him suddenly cracks into the entire Uzbek opposition in exile and links them to a terrorist group. Any communication, exchange of money, or organization with Muhtorov will be considered liaising with a terrorist in the eyes of the United States if Muhtorov is found guilty. These arrests are worth being followed skeptically. The US counter-terrorism establishment could be given carte-blanche to destroy or at least de-legitamize an opposition movement against a man and an apparatus that "...is one of the most horrific rights abusers on the planet.
Here's what what's wrong with Gazistan's theory:
1. Come now, these arrests were made not because these people are "anti-Karimov" or because they had "Islamic fashions" or "perused the Internet" --good Lord, there are tons of people who fit those descriptions and tons of "anti-Karimov" dissidents roaming all over Europe, the US and the former Soviet Union. That's completely misleading as federal agents, even federal agents having to "do favours for the NDN" still have to make their case. They're in a climate where not only Kucera, but Glenn Greenwald, the Huffington Post, the Nation, Human Rights Watch and scores of others will howl, remember? (HRW hasn't commented on any of this, but then, they don't comment on things that occur like this outside their campaigns as they are layered in lawyers and program managers who weigh comments like this every which way before they let anyone talk. Given the climate created in the Soros-funded "community" now around these cases, it may only be a matter of checking your watch to see when the Watch will sing from the same hymnbook.)
2. The effort to lift the waiver in Congress began with the vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee in September -- it was essentially a done deal then, as no one would likely stall the entire foreign military aid bill just over Uzbekistan -- and it was indeed passed into law in December. Wouldn't the investigation of the men in Germany and Mukhtarev in the US have to have begun before December and even September? A case like that isn't whipped up in a week or a month. The connection between the evil NDN or the waiver isn't explicit. The NDN cooperation existed even before this waiver, which is largely symbolic with minimal aid in any event.
3. Mukhtarev doesn't hook up to any big or small group in Uzbekistan. He was in a reputable human rights group's chapter in Jizzak which was disbanded by the head office because both Mukhtarev and his predecessor wouldn't file financial reports, remember? He tried to join another farmers' group which was more extreme (in terms of overthrowing Karimov, although not known to have advocated terrorism), but not much has been heard from that group, you know?
4. Mukhtarev doesn't seem to hook up to any big or small group in exile, either. He wasn't vocal during his travels from Kyrgyzstan to the US, he isn't showing up at pickets against Gulnara Karimova or various other PMU actions abroad, for example, that I can see. What has he been doing all this time?
In short, while I believe all kinds of bad bargains are made for this highway and more are yet to come, we don't have sufficient evidence that these particular cases or dissidents in general have been "sold out".
