I believe you have to keep an open mind about stories like this one trumpeted by Joshua Foust on Registan today, with crazed intensity in two posts about the arrest of Jamshid Mukhtorov (Mukhtarev) on charges of terrorism. And that means discussing the variations of reasons behind it and hypotheses -- hey, at least as much as some people are willing to mount various hypotheses about all the reasons why OSCE could have it in for Kazakhstan.
REGISTAN CONCOCTING A FREAK-OUT AGAIN
Let me start backwards on analyzing Joshua Foust's strange posts about what he see as a "truly bizarre" and "crazy trumped up" case involving an Uzbek who used to be active in the human rights movement and now has wound up arrested at O'Hare airport for terrorism. With someone as wily and cynical as Foust, who was crossing the street five minutes ago to bloody a human rights activist's nose, and who consistently winds up defending the status quo for the regimes in Central Asia (often pretending to express human rights concerns even as he concedes the continuation of the awful regimes) -- you have to wonder what's up when he frantically googles all day researching a human rights case.
So to look at the various meta hypotheses forming the backdrop for a story like this:
MAXIMIZING THE ISLAMIST TERROR THREAT
Who exaggerates the Islamic threat in Central Asia? The Karimov regime, for one, and some of the other Central Asian regimes, so that they can justify keeping themselves in power. The Russian government, probably even more than the Central Asians on a daily basis. The US, or some factions in the US National Security Council and Department of Defense so they can have an excuse to be in the region and fight things they see as threats to America. And, let's see, various conservative scholars and pundits Foust and the Registanis don't like.
MINIMIZING THE ISLAMIST THREAT
OK, so who minimizes the Islamist threat in Central Asia? Well, even the Karimov regime, sometimes when they need to keep the CSTO out and any other meddlers from their patch. Karimov was remarkably circumspect during the Osh unrest in 2010, not sounding the Islamic extremists alarm, although he might have, keeping true to his obsessions, and although the Kyrgyz did. Knowing of his manipulation of this theme at home, he could be invoking it about his neighbours, the Tajiks, where there have been more eruptions of alleged Islamist terror recently -- yet he never seems to do that despite constant acrimony with Dushanbe over water and Roghun and energy and border control.
Who else? Some State Department and other US officials who follow a contrarian opinion to some perceived status quo of people who ostensibly over-emphasize the Islamic threat (I never really see where these people really are, but let's concede them for a moment). Various scholars and pundits who believe the war on terror is all stupid and misguided and who think that no Islamic threat exists and a lot of it is made up and the "Uzbek secret police do it to themselves." This is very, very popular on the left, and such a group-think that I automatically question it just because it's such an insular club.
Sometimes intellectuals take up the "anti-anti" position regarding Islamism just to look smarter and more cool than everybody else, and it's a particularly facile way to do so, because most people will feel intimidated about calling them out on it.
Anybody else? Well, perhaps Russian military intelligence. They could play it two ways. They could either exaggerate the Islamic threat, which they have already on state TV and Kremlin speeches so they don't have to work much harder. Or they can minimize it, using their old networks of agents of influence and active measures, and get a caper going whereby they force the US military planners bent on entangling themselves in this region (who invoke the Islamic threat to do so) to face internal factions and media and interest groups telling them that there is no such thing and they should get out of the region. If these hypothetical agents work both angles, they can be sure to have people fighting each other instead of any actual threats (actual authoritarian regimes, actual Islamic terrorists). Any time you can get people fighting each other and doubting each others' scenarios, you get ahead. And here, too, this putative GRU agent wouldn't have to work very hard, and wouldn't even have to convert anybody much less pay anybody, because the Western left already thinks the entire war on terror is trumped up and already finds a certain kinship with the Islamists, whom they everywhere excuse, on the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" system.
If anything, this dual plan might be necessary to enable the Russians to both invoke Islamic terror to undermine Central Asian authoritarians and make them concede the need for outside (Russian) intervention to "help," and to keep the US out by invoking the sillyness of seeing Islamic terrorists under every bush. Does this all sound crazy? Oh, no crazier than anything you see on Registan, given that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the guy at the airport emailing the jihad website is on his way to fight the US and should be detained.
So we can conclude that the Russians really aren't split on this and therefore probably foment the hysteria in the region (and with Russian language press under state control at home and even abroad, they can do this handily) and abroad (and with RTV, they can also easily do this -- to prove my hypothesis, I'd have to find some articles that ridicule US obsession with Islamic terrorism -- and there may not be, for blowback reasons). But we can conclude the US foreign policy community *is* split and wars among themselves as to whether there is or isn't a real Islamic threat (and without any help from the GRU -- the GRU can only likely massage and shape a thing like this).
YOU STILL GET THE STATUS QUO
If you're a great-gamer in Eurasia, what else does minimizing the Islamic threat get you, or even minimizing any kind of rising tide of religious fervour and organization shy of some massive jihad or caliphate imposition? You would think that it would help prove that authoritarian regimes like Karimov's don't need to exist and shouldn't exist. But you might get something else -- if you minimize Islamic fundamentalism or revival, you would never have to concede that Islamic groups should have concessions or share power or be part of the ruling government. If they don't exist; if fundamentalism is all made up; if it's all fake, you can also cancel out their existence as handily in a virtual fashion as if you had literally put them in jail and scared their relatives into silence. Then you get to keep the status quo, too, as much as if another theory were in operation, that you kept the status quo by invoking the Islamic threat. So factions within Uzbekistan play the double game, too.
In fact, that's why I think pushing this school of thought so hard -- that there is absolutely no Islamic extremism anywhere -- is really ill-advised and even dangerous. If you won't concede the existence of a lot of fervent Muslim believers looking for more self-expression, then when they really do become visible and their dissent really does gather steam and they become more powerful, you have no plan, and you have no advice left for officials who then look at this sudden Islam coming out of nowhere that they were told didn't exist, and begin to fear it, even though a lot of it may be benign and they shouldn't react hysterically. So in the name of preventing hysteria, you actually only incite it later down the line.
Events in Egypt let you see how this unfolds -- everybody told us not to worry our pretty heads about the Muslim Brotherhood; we were all told to pack up our prejudices about extremists and fundamentalists when we asked tentative questions about women's rights or plans for the parliament, everyone (in this camp denying there's ever an Islamism problem anywhere) told us to shut up, and now we have our answer: the Muslim Brotherhood has the majority of seats and the Salafis have a good chunk of seats and the liberals are...wherever they are in this new set-up. No one was done any favours by pretending that wasn't happening.
And there are probably more permutations to these "schools of thought" that strangely always wind up conceding the status quo for these regimes and minimizing anything that challenges them. In fact, since the "classic" view is that Karimov invokes Islamic terror to stay in power -- terrorizing Muslims and ensuring that he actually becomes the greatest generator of extremism -- the "alternative view" can help other factions in that same regime who may be savvy enough to "manage" the unrest come to power after him and keep the regime authoritarian.
I'm just thinking out loud here, trying to imagine the various scenarios that account for the *frenzy* that Foust is up to -- and Sarah Kendzior, who is now busy mining her "secret Internet* of Uzbek-only sites to deliver us some nuanced take on this case.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST JAMSHID MUHTOROV
I don't know Jamshid Mukhtarov (Muhtorov) and have only read about him in the past and now, and I don't have anything special to add to the existing information out on him -- except what I dug up out of the Russian press which I think adds to the story.
But I will say this: over the years, I've sat with Uzbek human rights activists and political exile activists and listened to their stories, and I've heard some of them say they admired Osama bin Ladn. They seemed to admire him the most because he opposed the US, which they disliked -- culturally, and with a hatred of perceived imperialism. Sometimes there were even those who would talk of some kind of more pious society where their traditions could be observed, perhaps shy of some imposition of a caliphate, but not readily asking the questions we as Westerners ask about a religious state: so...what's the plan with people who don't want to go along with that? Where are you going to put the secular Uzbeks, the Sovietized Uzbeks, the Russians, the Armenians, the Jews, whoever might not like this plan?
I don't expect Homeland Security necessarily to be right about the facts in apprehending someone like Mukhtorov, but this sounds like an elaborate case that tooks months to prepare -- and involved even decoding seemingly innocuous communications about a "wedding" and a "gift" that meant "a terrorist attack" and "a bomb".
Yet I don't instantly decide they're crazy either. For one, the media may not be telling us everything there is to know about the case. For two, "mere emails" aren't necessarily innocent if they really do involve really hooking up with fighters or terrorists. Does anybody deny that there are several thousand Uzbeks fighting in the war in Afghanistan? Did they just come out of the woodwork?
I don't have any reason to insist that this or that jihad group "doesn't exist," either. That is, sure, it could be made up, but we don't have WikiLeaks from the bowels of the Uzbek government or a Stasi-file-like spill-out or even Gorbachev glasnost as we have had about the US and the USSR. We don't have any reliable defectors from the secret police. So we have only a hypothesis that the Uzbek government makes up stuff (and because they're nasty and vicious, and that's documented, we can pretty much believe that they do make up stuff -- but perhaps they have material to work with.)
The post-partisan pundit Foust (and he's like a lot of other people he hates even in the human rights community in this regard) just adopts an absolutely arrogant and self-assured posture that everything is concocted. That there's just nothing to worry your pretty little head about. He finds it inconceivable that someone active in human rights would then later become an avowed Islamist and jihadist. That suggests to me the problem I explained above -- the inability to understand that when people raise rights issues in Uzbekistan, they are raising religious freedom and the right to express religious views as a human right and that *is* human rights. That's what they care about. There isn't some separation for them or for the ideals of the UN between "secular humanism" and the rights of liberals to write blogs, and devout Islam, which demands the right for freedom of religion.
It's a good thing for all of us that the UN norms speak of "the right to believe or not believe," however, but first, let's concede that the greatest problem in Uzbekistan is that ordinary devout religious believers outside the narrow state-controlled Islam have nowhere to go but jail.
THE CLIMATE FOR EXTREMISM IS ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS
It's not a surprise to me that someone could start in a provincial human rights group in Uzbekistan and end up a jihadist, particularly because human rights work only earns repression and harassment and causes in some despair -- it never seems enough, on its own, when dealing with a brutal regime like Karimov's. But those sorts of nuances aren't evident to Foust, who is on a tear about all this for reasons that are opaque (and definitely don't have to do with having a human rights bone in his body.)
Ultimately, we don't have to determine Jamshid Mukhtorov's actualities to do a simple thing: demand that he not be returned to Uzbekistan, where he would face certain torture, and that he get an adversarial defense and an impartial judicial hearing. And certainly if it's really true that all there exists as evidence are a few emails to some website that might be something and might not be, then human rights compliance would require releasing him. You can defend human rights in Mukhtorov's case without having to then argue backwards to declaring that he couldn't possibly be involved in any Muslim group, extremist or not, and that he's merely a human rights secularist.
MUHTOROV'S TRAVELS
Mukhtorov has done quite a bit of travelling -- he went to work in Russia after Vasila Inoyatova asked to disband the branch of Ezgulik he was active in. As always, it's important to go back over even original, obvious Foust quotes like WikiLeaks (which he implies he quotes reluctantly -- he doesn't like WikiLeaks because it undermines the world of secret analysis that he thrives in). The WikiLeaks cable mentions something else from Inoyatova that Foust doesn't mention: that not only did Mukhtorov not file financial reports (like the previous boss Inoyatova removed); he complained that he wasn't being paid enough.
He then wanted to "realign" the group, writes Foust, successfully having googled WikiLeaks and quoting from it, with a party that supposedly wanted to overthrow the regime (Ezgulik is more gradualist, which is why they are registered and others aren't). Then after Andijan, he published Human Rights Watch's report and got threatened, then fled Uzbekistan because he was tipped off that they were going to arrest him; he fled to Kyrgyzstan with his family; then he was threatened with deportation there, and then somehow wound up in the US eventually. There's a lot to ask questions about there -- Foust quotes Berger:
JM Berger, who runs the Intelwire site and published Jihad Joe, a study about domestic radicalization in the U.S., sent along a grab from Lexis-Nexis. 24kg reported in 2006 that Mukhtarov, living in exile in Osh, complained thatKyrgyz special forces threatened to hand him over to the National Security Service of Uzbekistan if he didn’t leave the country. According to employees of the committee on migration and employment, 24kg reports, Muhtarov made fabricated reports and appeals to various international organizations complaining of persecution.
JM Berger then materializes in the Registan thread and basically takes the side of Homeland Security, pointing out that no big deal in fact was made of this guy's arrest -- if it weren't for Foust, there wouldn't be any hyping of it all.
Let's look for the Russian version of his name:
o Fergananews.com says Jamshid's father was arrested as soon as he fled to Kyrgyzstan. That would sure give you a reason to turn from writing mere human rights appeals to something more extreme -- your father getting arrested for what you did.
o Centrasia.ru called him an "aferist" (opportunist) in a headline quoting a refugee official -- that's the 24.kg story with more details:
He rented a cafe, got a job in an international project, openly visits the Interior Ministry and other law-enforcement agencies. But with all that, she said, he makes himself out to be a great martyr and pursues only his own goals -- to get refugee status as quickly as possible and go to a third country.
Opportunist, or agent?
At one point in January 2006, Mukhtorov was with the journalist Ulugbek Haydarov (now in Canada) in a cafe, when this website reported on their arrests:
- Illegal detention of journalists
January 15
Ulughbek Haydarov, independent journalist (Djizzak)
Independent journalist Ulughbek Haydarov has spoken with human rights advocate Jamshid Mukhtorov in “Khayrullo ota” cafe in Djizzak. Unexpectedly a police patrol appeared to detain both of them. The journalist and the rights advocate were kept under arrest for 14 hours and accused of drunkenness, although none of them drank alcohol that day. Next day investigator Zafar Saydiyev demanded that they give written promise to stop activities as human rights advocates.
WOULD-BE ASSASSIN ULUGBEK KODIROV
I do have to wonder why the Registanis didn't take up the case of Ulugbek Kodirov, the Uzbek national who was arrested for threatening to kill Obama. The most I've found on him other than some fairly cursory news reports is in this local newspaper blog. Now there was a weird case, and one where you had to wonder if the US had intel from the Uzbeks, or where they got all this. His mother says he fell in with some religious types only in America. The feds seemed to have a lot more evidence of Kodirov's possessing arms and having violent intentions, however.
Neweurasia wrote about the case but Registan seems to have missed it; uznews.net covered it mainly from the US press.
The official indictment doesn't say a lot more. And we may never know.
Wonder why Registan didn't take that one up?
