Oh! That was quick. (And with a word-count of 921!)
Elephants on the move, Pakistan begrudgingly says it will open the gate to NATO again if paid more -- and the State Department -- and Joshua Kucera -- can say it's OK to criticize Uzbekistan's awful human rights situation again.
Whew! See how important elephants are!
Just a month ago, Kucera was telling us in the New York Times that a) human rights in Uzbekistan had "technically improved" and b) the Administration should remain silent about human rights or appear hypocritical -- because it was futile, anyway.
Then we were told all sorts of nonsense by the Registanis about "impossible moral choices" which are really a function of Foust's immorality in unjustifiably slamming human rights activists who criticized the regime and made the West feel ownership for their double standards.
Why did Kucera feel the need to say human rights had technically improved, just like the State Department had done inauthentically and incorrectly in November, when he himself had even scored them for punting earlier?
There weren't any "technicals" -- letting a broken prisoner go isn't progress and doesn't get counted on the scoreboard. Progress Score: "One shattered presidential nephew tormented in an insane asylum released to poverty and joblessness vs. 5,000 devout Muslims still being tortured and dozens of human rights monitors who tried to complain about their torture still in prison." That's not a score, that's sick.
Kucera mumbled in the Registani comments that perhaps he hadn't made his point clear enough about how "it's still terrible" and maybe the New York Times editors were to blame for dropping a paragraph -- which explains curiously how a line ends up saying "technical improvements" instead of "terrible".
Mkay, so...say it one way -- "technically improved" -- on the Times op-ed page which gets bazillion views and gets reprinted all over the world, but privately tell your friends on Spars & Swipes (Registan) -- Alexa traffic in the 1.7 million toilet -- that you didn't really mean that, you think it's terrible. Oh, and have a thumb-sucking conversation about just how hard it all is, due to those elephants...
So WHOOPS now we can talk again and the State Department can...or rather, the State Department has released a paper in English, to a blogger on a site with 200,000 monthly uniques, and not put it on whitehouse.gov or statehouse.gov or america.gov or humanrights.gov or the US Embassy site so that it really means something, and not say it out loud to Uzbek officials, to their faces. We are so easily placated... Does Human Rights Watch buy this, too?
So question: why is this State Department assessment only on the pages of eurasianet.org and not anywhere else? (I realize it can take time for staff to cut and paste into another website).
But a more important question: why is there an implication in this piece that there is "a provision by which the U.S. could again start providing military aid to Uzbekistan, if the Secretary of State certifies that there is a national security reason for doing so" -- and that this new "bad" assessment might mean that military aid won't be given?
I'm not getting this. There was a waiver precisely to enable that military aid. It's not much, we all get that it's symbolic, but the waiver was all about lifting military sanctions despite lack of human rights progress yet still implying there is an assessment that might change that once a year (and review of corruption issues).
If things worked right -- you know, the way they used to in 2004 -- *if* there was a finding that human rights are bad, *then* the waiver couldn't be made because it was just so bad and there was a danger that military aid would help repression, not because of literal gifted billy clubs hitting literal heads but because overall, it propped up the regime. So...No certification, no waiver.
But now we're entering a hall of mirrors, where, as Kucera says, "Anyway, the takeaway here appears to be that the U.S. can provide military aid to Uzbekistan without saying silly things about human rights there."
Wait...The takeaway with a bad assessment should be that no military aid flows. But using a waiver, you don't have to pretend that it's improving anymore by dishonestly citing only Jamshid limping home, you can say it's God-awful torture, and still hand out the equipment (oh and have somebody Fisk it on Registan to explain it isn't really equipment going to any torturers).
So is the moral of this sordid story that the solution to the fake "Impossible Moral Dilemma" concocted by Foust is that instead of contorting itself into a pretzel and pretending there are "technical improvements" (bleh) the US gets to be frank -- oh, except only in a handout to EurasiaNet and its groupies? Well, gosh, that's progress. That sure salves your conscience!
Naturally, the indefatiguable post-partisan pundit seizes the moment not only to slam human rights groups again-- he pouts at us:
Despite the hoopla about how the U.S. will participate in Uzbek repression, the text of the law governing the arrangement indicates that that just won’t be the case. So can we start talking about the strategic and regional choices they have, and how they can work toward having better options, instead of bickering about something that just isn’t there
Um, actually, there wasn't any "hoopla" about the largely symbolic $100,000 gift for...bullet-proof vests or desk-sets or something non-lethal -- not something "all about" repressing dissenters. We get all that. This isn't about tekkie literalism; it's about optics.
Of course, the pseudonymous lurkers at Regi claimed that human rights activists are stupid for thinking aid to the military is like aid to the police, or that training the police isn't like training the evil NSB. Of course, police torture, too, and riot troops and all of the police in the MVD are part of a militarized vertically-commanded system that is way different than the police and army in democratic societies in structure and therefore more prone to systemic abuse. And we get it that if somebody has a bullet-proof vest the better to resist those, um, terrorists under bridges near the border in Tajikistan, that's a good thing. Yet it is all of a piece because it's not a military with civilian oversight and an independent judiciary and a free press. Even with all those things, God knows, you can sure abuse human rights with your army.
But again: the reason the Uzbeks put such emphasis on it; the reason Obama and Clinton and all the generals put such emphasis on this measly aid is that they want to win the moral victory. They want to prevail over the human rights crowd and tell them they've been heard, but not heeded but that it's all going to turn out right and nobody will have to lie. Yet, for the Uzbeks, even a desk set for the military arm of the regime is what helps validate and seal its repressive might. These are moral issues.
Uzbek response: "We wipe our asses with such papers, and we are raising the tariffs because the Pakistanis did, see you on our blazing trains to Mazar-e-Sharif."
But that's not where it ends. It can and does get worse.
Now Kucera leaks to us from a State Department official that there's a new theory about Andijan, which of course we do all remember -- so efforts of interpolation and ahistoricism, especially with WikiLeaks, can't really fly. This new theory says that the Uzbeks expelled the US from the K2 bases not because we criticized Andijan (although this was a debated decision as we know from Cheney's and Rice's memoirs), but because Karimov feared colour revolutions and thought the US would sponsor them.
Oh, and there's this gem, for those who want to make sure that all talk of Arab Springs are scrubbed from the discourse, thank you very much, as being naive and even racist (and now with more eyeballs for that notion)
So now that the threat (or promise, depending on your perspective) of color revolutions has passed, Karimov is likely using a different calculation for how much human rights criticism he's willing to take.
Passed? Really, Joshua?
While that could well be a reason motivating Karimov -- a dissidents' book club or a prayer meeting with 6 people in a living room could make him skittish -- it was only one of the reasons for the expulsion of the US. After all, the US hadn't funded or encouraged any colour revolution in Uzbekistan up to that point (because there wasn't any burgeoning social movement, among other reasons).
Colour revolutions are held in such scorn now -- especially by Soros foundations, especially because they feel like they failed in them and then got burned -- that it's hard to recall the grander enthusiasm there was in those days. Yet even Wikipedia recalls that the Tulip Revolution -- the only one that Karimov could really care about -- in 2005 two months before Andijan was violent and fragmented.
Was it fear of Islamic unrest or colour revolutions or both that made Karimov sanction the shooting of hundreds of people, and then kick out the US? As Kucera himself points out, he on his blog, and HRW, and many others, and even Rumsfeld, didn't make the K2 calculus revolve around any colour revos -- so the invocation of this concept now seems to have an agenda coming from State: a) no more colour revolutions -- Uzbekistan, the US, and Soros don't like them b) the Arab Spring has no impact whatsoever -- and let's make sure it doesn't.
Oh, so, the bases can go back in. Watch that space.
