Once again, Joshua Foust is crossing the street to bloody a human rights advocate's nose.
Why is he doing it?
No doubt my colleague Muzaffar Suleymanov of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) (where I used to work in the 1990s), was surprised to find his perfectly normal advocacy blog post become so hideously poked and pawed over by a group of former defense contractors and former Peace Corps volunteers and academics and journalists and various anonymous hidden people on Registan.net -- a talk shop I've now dubbed "Spars & Swipes".
Muzaffar articulates the perfectly normal and obvious point that we in the human rights field have pointed out time and again: the US beats up on little Belarus -- because it can -- yet is silent about big Uzbekistan, on whom it is dependent -- although the same sorts of human rights violations go on there, and worse. How can the US government live with itself, given that obvious hypocrisy?
So the nerd-pack at Registan, notably Nathan Hamm and Foust himself, take up the cudgel merely because Muzaffar had the temerity to point out this normal and obvious moral failing of the US government. They imply that it isn't a moral failing, but in fact pragmatism of the sort that human rights groups ought to "get". Foust snarks on Twitter that the CPJ staffer's "reach has exceeded his grasp" in International Relations -- a completely unnecessary and vicious putdown, because Muzaffar is no dummy, and totally understands the gap in ideals and why it appears.
So I'm going to defend the human rights approach at length here, and I'm going to illustrate that a) there is no impossible moral dilemma; b) human rights groups are not poor strategists but simply good moralists; c) constantly slamming the human rights movement and demanding that it convert into realpolitik-ridden geostrategists is not only unnecessary, it is immoral.
Muzaffar is absolutely right to contrast the signing of the Belarus Democracy Act with sanctions against officials involved in massive human rights violations, and "the stunning cordial treatment" of Karimov by the Obama Administration. Cordial is perhaps what you need to be to get your military supplies through a tyrant's country. But stunningly cordial you don't need to be -- and that's precisely the problem. Do you really need the personal presidential phone call? You can't have lower-level officials handle the relationship? You really need Hillary and not lower deputies go visit the president? Uzbekistan has always craved legitimacy precisely in those Soviet-style honorific forms where leaders meet each other right on the tarmac with children in national costume carrying bread and salt. They should be denied this; it's not required even for the dirty business of getting the military stuff in and out of Afghanistan. Is it? I don't think this has been sufficiently tested. Giving away the present of a presidential call or a visit from Hillary should have been a bargaining chip for a lot longer than it was.
SURROGATE ADVOCACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Here's the CPJ graph that got the Registans all mad:
But no geopolitical or military interest should justify any kind of support--be it a phone call or a courtesy handshake--of such a repressive regime. Policymakers and executors in Washington must realize that by dealing with Karimov and equipping his army, they are participating in the repression. They're helping him to stifle the media and perpetuate abuses. Karimov already showed the world in 2005 what his army and special forces will do with weapons and training received from the West.
This is a classic form of what I have explained in detail is the surrogate advocacy theory: when dealing with oppressive regimes you can't get at yourself, which are impervious to their own people's criticism and yours, and which you can't influence, you do the next best thing -- you take the advocacy to those who engage with that regime and you make them feel ownership for having that engagement.
This isn't my favourite form of advocacy because I find that inevitably, those who engage in it become so engrossed in cranking up the high dudgeon about that surrogate, and become so wrapped up in finding ways to pinch and prod the surrogate's guilty conscience, that they sometimes forget that the original perpetrator of the human rights crimes is still untouched and still perpetrating (and Sarah Kendzior is right that some people import regions like Central Asia where bad stuff goes down and use it as a cudgel in their essential parochial domestic fights with the Administration).
That's why I don't like it. I think direct criticism of the regime and its obvious supporters, even if seemingly futile and unheeded, is more important, and not enough of it is done. A key reason it isn't done is because there is little bang for the buck. Yell at the US for having some business confab with some evil regime, and you get press and the consciences might twinge and some little thing might get done like a dissident released from prison or patted on the back. Yell at Karimov and listen to crickets back.
But so what? Surrogate advocacy is only one of the tools US human rights groups use. Let them! It should be no skin off yours if they do. The US government is a big boy and can handle it. They either fend it off or look for creative ways to accommodate it. With the Obama Administration, you are dealing with people who in fact do that, such as Michael Posner, the deputy assistant secretary for human rights.
People like Foust and the other regulars don't appear to have ever been involved in human rights activity officially or non-governmentally. So they don't see the enormous number of human rights transactions that go on in the world without them and inspite of this crazy vendetta they're running. Every day, somewhere in the UN system, there is somebody caring about Central Asia's human rights problems and acting on them, sometimes privately, sometimes publicly. Have they ever attended a session of the Human Rights Council or the Committee Against Torture? There is a long-standing engagement but with a great deal of criticism of torture cases in the CAT.
In the US, there are constantly bilaterals with Uzbek officials who have the conscious portfolio of human rights -- either in Washington or Tashkent or at meetings like the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM). It's actually surprising how much time and resources and personnel our government spends on human rights advocacy. Because a lot of it comes in the form of quiet diplomacy, it's not visible, but human rights is a core function of foreign policy -- it's as if Foust didn't study that in school. News flash since 1975: human rights is a core part of international relations now, it is the coin of the realm, and even tyrants bargain with it.
FOUST IS WRONG ON THE FACTS
And here Foust is simply wrong on the facts. He claims that the US publicly raises human rights with Uzbekistan. No, it most certainly does not. That was abandoned with the onset of the Obama Administration for other reasons (see the Cairo speech), and then persisted as the need for the NDN became more urgent. Clinton did *not* raise human rights criticism publicly on her trip; she made a one liner at the end of a speech at the General Motors plant that was generic and innocuous, tying business success with human rights progress (a gimmick that I have criticized as a disservice to both). There isn't any place where Hillary criticized Uzbekistan on her trip or after it. What happened is that an unnamed State Department official said there was progress, and that Karimov wanted a legacy of democracy for his children. (Oh, and no fair claiming the Country Reports are public criticism; they're just a report and not pushed by State or the Embassy.)
It's important for Foust to keep reiterating this falsity, however, because he has mounted a thesis before about how supposedly the US raised human rights publicly, had successes, and then ceased to have successes, thereby ostensibly proving the inefficacy for all time (in his view) of public criticism. But the US never had the public criticism he claimed in anything remotely like the public criticism of Belarus, and the correlations he claims exist because efficacy are specious -- prisoners are let go, but that's not a benchmark for improvements -- it's undoing a wrong and usually only a token gesture.
DID OBAMA STIFLE THE UZBEK MEDIA? DIDN'T THE UZBEKS DO THAT?
The other piece of what riled the gang at Spars & Snipes is that the CPJ advocacy mode seems to blame Obama for lack of press freedom "they are helping him to stifle the media". This goes beyond surrogate advocacy to claim a surrogate guilt. That irritates the realpolitikers, so they look for other ways to discredit it.
First, Registan's office wife Sarah Kendzior claims that the media isn't stifled to such an extent. When CPJ says "no criticism leaves the negotiations room in a country where all independent media has been silenced. Rather, the state-controlled media tells the Uzbeks that the U.S. is his friend and an ally" -- she and others begin to snipe.
Oh, knock it off. We all get it that there are some Internet sites and perhaps even some regional newspapers or something but basically, for all practical purposes, there is no significant independent media (there isn't Asia Plus as in Tajikistan); the Internet penetration is poor, which she herself is the first to tell us, and they don't have real mindshare like an Al Jazeera or an Ekho Moskvy. For all practical purposes, if the US comes over and makes nice to Karimov, the state press is either silent or portrays it as a victory for diplomacy, and the alternative narrative is nowhere to be found, not even on the US Embassy web site in Tashkent (especially not there).
Of course, nobody stifled the media but Karimov, and if anything, it's a bit unfair to rope Obama into the surrogate guilt shtick, given how the US actually quite vigorously, for example, raised the issue of the VOA correspondent arrested and charged with "defamation of the Uzbek people," and even mentioned it publicly, on a very rare occasion of such public rhetoric, when a delegation of Uzbeks came to Washington. The correspondent was let off with a fine and allowed to travel abroad. That one worked, because the US really stepped up and said, "Hey, that's one of ours, offsides." But they can't and won't do that for every opposition-leader-turned-newsletter-editor and we get that. Even so, there's something to be said for making the US feel that they do have some ownership of the problem in Uzbekistan because of their alliance with this regime. They can be challenged.
FOUST'S LACK OF IMAGINATION -- AND LACK OF GUTS TO FACE THE LOGIC OF HIS COMPLAINT
And they can make it better in a 100 ways. The problem with Foust isn't even so much his incomprehensible lack of morality on this question -- his refusal to believe that there isn't some "impossible moral choice" but actual a moral act that is not easy to perform but is performed at least by human rights advocates. Rather, it's his lack of imagination and his hegemonic aggressiveness on behalf of the powers-that-be. Foust is never content to allow a thousand flowers to bloom -- or even 17. There can't be a variety of voices speaking to Uzbekistan in different ways in his rigid monoverse. Anyone who projects hopes for a better world becomes a hopeless sap -- or even implied to be somebody risking our national security.
And that's where I will continue to challenge Foust to come clean on his charges here. He wants binary choices? Then he has to say whether he believes human rights advocates are threatening national security by criticizing this fragile channel for the NDN -- or not. That might be the real "impossible moral choice" -- if not the US government, but NGOs, too were asked to shut up or risk soldiers' lives.
I don't believe they can possibly be doing that. Their criticism isn't heard in any major way; it doesn't have any major impact. Sure, it has *some* impact and is worth continuing, especially as it reflects what we know must be different factions in the State Department or the Pentagon arguing for different things (that's what we see revealed in Cheney's and Rice's memoirs). Yes, Karimov howls if State gives an award to an Uzbek activist and threatens the NDN, as we know from Wikipedia, but again, as I've said on Registan before I was banned, we should call his bluff. We should look him square in the eye and ask him if he truly is interested in deterring the Taliban and deterring terrorism and why he isn't helping with that, then instead of spouting about people that "we both know are more useful to the opposition in prison than out" (Holbrooke).
WHO WILL STAND WITH THE UZBEK PEOPLE?
Muzaffar asks the completely normal, moral, and legitimate question: "Who will stand with the Uzbek people and against its oppressor?" Who indeed? The gang at Registan won't do that, or they tell us that some Uzbeks they know are better off under Karimov and human rights activists don't speak for them -- a false claim if there ever was one (the immediate oprichina circles around the tyrant might be affluent but that's hardly ever a means of telling how the whole population is doing).
The US actually wimps out on Belarus because it doesn't make it a sufficient talking point with Russia -- and vocally so -- which really does have some leverage on the country that provides them resources and transit and where they own a good chunk of the factories. Actually, Washington went through a period of engagement and incremental steps and niceness with Belarus for awhile in the late 1990s, as an experiment, with the same demand for high-level US official visits as a prize, but then it only ended in tears, as all the foreign ambassadors got booted from their residences at one point. Engagement doesn't work with these regimes. Only relentless pressure does. While that is going on, it's sometimes useful that some forces for peace have back channels or citizens' diplomacy but not everybody has to be a symp.
That's why standing with people really makes the difference -- solidarity among human beings is what always completely challenges the totalitarian state and undermines the authoritarian state in its essence. That's why, when the US gives an award to a dissident, even while not publicly criticizing human rights problems while visiting tyrants, they are still standing with the people of that country. They do an awful lot of that with Belarus -- arranging all kinds of official meetings, visiting lectures, sponsorship of trips to OSCE meetings, etc. etc. They do much less with Uzbeksitan. They could do way more.
HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS CONTEXTUALIZE WAY MORE THAN FOUST LETS ON
Foust lectures us with his usual inanity and faux-wonkiness: "The failure of human rights and other advocacy groups to understand and contextualize their advocacy within political and strategic realities is common in Central Asia." What this translates to is something like this: "Human rights groups don't pull their punches and mute their harsh criticism strategically or tactically like I would to play politics."
In fact, they do. HRW has been generally low-key or even silent about Russia in recent years for two reasons: Tom Malinowski believed it was effective to put Russia, as a kind of big transitional state involved in a "reset" with the Obama Administration, in a different category for "engagement". HRW also had an office in Moscow it wanted to keep. So HRW treated Russia differently, strategically and calculatedly , because it believed that scolding wouldn't work and would be counterproductive, and that engagement would get more information and provide more access. I don't believe this method worked, but they're big believers in it at the Watches.
Actually, they did the same thing with Uzbekistan, believe it or not. Even as Ken Roth and Tom Malinowski were scolding the EU in op-eds for hanging out with Karimov in Brussels and getting all craven, HRW itself was asking the the EU commissioner to quietly raise the issue of their office expulsion -- instead of holding a loud and public press conference themselves, denouncing the crap the Uzbek MFA was putting through at the time (which came out later), and grandly exiting, setting up somewhere else like Vienna demonstratively.
Instead, HRW did the same thing they accuse the Europeans of doing -- they did quiet diplomacy. They gave "diplomacy time to act". They let a few months go while they tried this lever and that before they finally, when the court session to pull their registration was already scheduled, made a strong public statement in their own defense. So HRW, which is like a state with its own diplomatic presence around the world, is perfectly capable of running strategic circles around junior fellow Joshua Foust. Again, I don't think their "nuanced" power plays -- which they are in a position to make, being powerful -- are effective. I think the minute the MFA stepped on them they should have been hollering and leaving dramatically. They saw it differently.
FOUST IS THE REAL MORAL ABSOLUTIST -- AND SPOUTING WRONG 'FACTS'
CPJ or HRW aren't guilty of moral absolutism. They might sometimes be guilty of selectivity or lack of balance, especially HRW, but it's Foust that is the moral absolutist -- but evidently a bizarrely frustrated one. He keeps insisting that everyone is doing everyone wrong and there is only one right way -- but never tells us. Perhaps if it remains an elusive mystery exceeding his own grasp, he can get us to believe in it more. Fortunately, commenters call him out on that nonsense -- he never tells us "what we like to call the right way".
Foust then gets all literalist and weeny, to counter CPJ's argument that Obama is helping to suppress the media. Again, this is only a technique, to make the US feel ownership. Again, it's personally one I don't favour because I think it lets people forget who the real perpetrators are. But it isn't wrong or false or stupid or anything of the kind, as Foust implies. It's just a technique. It's a game.
Indeed, the Obama Administration has to feel some ownership of the situation in Uzbekistan because its proximity to this regime, as seen in the state-controlled media by millions of people, fuels their sense of injustice, that the country of the world they expect to speak out about their pain is not doing so.
Foust returns to his falsehood again here:
But the “realpolitik” charge is clearly not true, since U.S. officials publicly berate Uzbek officials, including Karimov himself, for Uzbekistan’s human rights abuses. So what is the hypocrisy?
No, no, no. The US does not publicly berate Uzbek officials. Links? Screenshots or it didn't happen. We don't have to mince around being precious about reading 1978 books about morality to understand where the moral equation is here: it's ok to call out obvious hypocrisy; it's more than fine to get the US to do more, mindful of that gap; there is indeed a lot that the US can do. One of the things the US does, in fact, is use government funds, directly from agency programs, or through Congress in organizations like NED, to help human rights activists, journalists, exile web sites, etc. related to Uzbekistan. And it funds international broadcasting and many other types of programs that oppose the regime's narrative. It's as if all that doesn't exist in the rigid structure of Foust's mind.
THE FAKE DILEMMA
Here Foust comes to his pointless and fake moral dilemma. Even if the NDN issue weren't at such a crisis, and the US needed Uzbekistan less, the points would apply. But Foust wants to falsely place the awfulness of dealing with Pakistan in some fake opposition to the awfulness of dealing with Uzbekistan:
In what we’re discussing here, U.S. policymakers face a very stark choice: do they prolong the war in Afghanistan (or worse, enable the sponsors of international terrorism and global nuclear proliferators in Pakistan) by not going through Uzbekistan? Or do they decide ending the war in Afghanistan is a higher and more desirable goal than keeping the regime in Tashkent at arm’s length? Policymakers have clearly chosen the latter; what the human rights industry must argue if they’re to convince the U.S. to make a different choice is why renewing its relationship with Pakistan and, in the process, prolonging the war in Afghanistan, is a greater moral value than a short term, transactional agreement with Uzbekistan.
The fact is, this is completely silly and fake up and down. Nowhere is anybody remotely discussing any such choice. They don't care. They don't have to care. They didn't get to chose. Pakistan closed the gate, they routed around. They have to do what works. They've already decided, irregardless of the nature of the Uzbek or Pakistani regimes or what they are doing, to end the war, or at least wind it down. The human rights industry doesn't have to do a damn thing differently or wring its hands in fake empathy with a non-choice that military planners in fact didn't have. It can keep trying to talk about the gross human rights violations in both places and it can actually wind up doing less on Pakistan simply because it's far more dangerous to try to go there and challenge the state without getting killed than it is even in Uzbekistan. That's what tends to happen with the human rights movement. Not a situation of its making.
Indeed, one is obliged to affirm the universality of human rights, and chosing different strategies (like Malinowksi has done vis-a-vis Russia) doesn't necessarily undermine that universality or the prospects for the organization to change its strategy to one more proactive or critical. It would be great if human rights groups admitted more that they are political like that, and did so unabashedly. "We do this because we can (go to Uzbekistan and criticize it and then get kicked out and criticize it more); we don't do that because we can't (not go to Pakistan and criticize it and try to set up an office)".
I'm not sure Amartya Sen is arguing -- though Foust keenly wishes that he were -- that "one can behave inconsistently in supporting or promoting them without veering into moral hypocrisy by doing what one can when one can." That's a diabolical and cunning way of trying, in fact, to undermine universality. There's a difference between admiring and affirming universality -- which the State Department does by more or less credibly criticizing all countries regardless of their interests, under basic norms -- and chosing a strategy of "what we can do". The US doesn't say that Uzbekistan is a lovely parliamentary democracy transiting to a better day in the country reports. Foust does veer into moral hypocrisy *because he beats up human rights activists* and thereby creates a climate of protectionism for the regime and for hypocritical US policy -- a climate that should not exist, anywhere for the intelligentsia, because in fact it already exists as a fact on the ground for military planners.
The US military doesn't create false moral choices or experience the slightest twinging of its conscience in doing what has to be done militarily. That's what militaries do. Insect politics! But other parts of the US government -- the conscience part -- are keeping the record, condemning, advocating at least quietly -- and doing so under the pressure of the conscience of society, human rights groups. And that matters.
DON'T GUSH
Nathan Hamm claims the Uzbek media demonizes the US more often than it praises that we're friends; DW claims it "absolutely skewers" the US. Well, not really. Sure, on cultural stuff, but they get the headlines and photo ops with Hillary on the tarmac and at the palace and that's what sticks in people's minds.
But the Uzbek leaders don't gush about us in fact, and that's why we shouldn't gush about them. In fact, there were MFA and other officials who didn't want to publicize Hillary at the GM plant and were going to keep journalists away. She wanted to make it a showcase of the New Silk Road; it was for the US and not Uzbekistan. They didn't.
And of course the Arab Spring proves the risk of propping up dictators. People see the US as allied with their tormenters and they get resentful. This is a political fact, and the gang at Registan are not only colour blind on this issue, they're immoral in denying it. When it engages with tyrants, the US has to understand that the price it pays at home is repugnance from those who are moral and vocal. And that's part of what it can invoke in those quiet talks when it tries to accomplish progress on individual cases or issues. If the relationship with Uzbekistan is that "limited transactional" thing Foust claims, then we don't have to gush -- no phone calls on anniversaries.
Foust has no business claiming that the human rights movement hasn't gotten its facts right when he's muffed the main fact of his entire contrived and tendentious argumentation -- that the US supposedly berates Tashkent publicly. It doesn't. The human rights movements hasn't called for removing the NDN or not trying to deal with Uzbekistan; they've simply conceded that exigency and called for finding more ways to be public about criticism and to not gush. It really is about that nuance.
Not for Foust; he hectors again:
Right now, several of them have adopted a weird polemical style that involves twisting facts, omitting relevant history, and making breezy, unsupportable assertions about Uzbekistan to argue that the U.S. policy is wrong (another example). This undermines their message, and makes it less likely that the message will ever get through and affect things!
The use of surrogate advocacy as a technique isn't new at all, they've had it for 30 years. And there isn't anything unsupportable about what they're saying. The worst thing about Foust's contorted argumentation here is that he feigns concern for human rights groups being effective. They're being effective, in fact, by calling out hypocrisy and doing what they can -- and that's in fact what irritates him.
FOUST GETS IT WRONG ABOUT EU SANCTIONS
Foust gets another fact wrong about the EU sanctions -- in fact these are sanctions voted on the European *parliament* which has been presented now to the EU Commission and that may or may not affect what they do next. In fact, the results of the OECD complaint by NGOs to the UK and others shows more of the real problem: these governments would not accept even mild soft law in the OECD standards to rule in favour of the NGO complaints against cotton-trading companies. They ended up only with an affirmation of the importance of letting the ILO into Uzbekistan to see if they could validate NGO reports. I suspect Cargill and others have gone right on trading. Think of it as like the way that Congress voted that countries on the DOL list for trafficking/forced labour couldn't remain on it year after year without being automatically downgraded when they didn't comiply with the requirements for reporting and improvement. Uzbekistan then should have been automatically downgraded. It wasn't.
The real face-scrunching is at Foust, for not getting the lack of power of the EU parliament; for not realizing that Swerdlow's "failure" not to mention that US getting kicked out in fact is consistent with what we now know from memoirs and WikiLeaks, is that policy makers argued over it and it wasn't a uniformly moral gesture.
In the end, when confronted repeatedly by commenters to articulate his own policy, Foust loops around and cites old posts that reiterate his endorsement of the status quo. What he can't explain is what he thinks human rights groups should do, or rather, why they can't criticize the obvious hypercisy as much as they have energy for. That's the immorality of it all.