Different Stans

Why is Coverage of the Afghan Villagers So Scant and Do We Need a Different Kind of Army Recruitment Propaganda?

 

Since the identity of the American soldier who massacred 16 Afghan villagers has been made known, the media has relentlessly pursued his background. He is Robert Bales -- and for a brief time, his name trended just above Jason Russell, the maker of the Kony2012 viral video who himself had a bizarre meltdown. Neither of them got as much attention as the entertainment celebrities of that day, but they are their own forms of entertainment.

To read the coverage of Bales, you get the impression that the national media is trying to gives us three messages:

o "the savings-loan/housing market collapse/recession made him do it"

In each of the stories about Bales, even before his identity was released, we've heard a key factor for his appalling crime -- the worse in the entire war -- was his inability to pay for his mortgage -- he was falling behind on mortgage payments.

o "Post-traumatic stress and three previous tours of duty made him do it"

Somehow, although it is implied Bales suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from being injured in Iraq and experiencing "shell shock" as it used to be called, if there were symptoms of it, it never manifested before the massacre, or the symptoms that may have manifested, such as domestic violence, wasn't taken seriously enough. But much has been made of the idea that Bales was "deployed too often" or too many times in a row.

o "He's also a proper target of Occupy Wall Street"

Bales briefly became a part of the "1 percent" when he got his hands on $850,000 of an elderly couple's money in Columbia, Ohio, and then squandered it on AT&T stock and lost it all. So he's a poster boy for "what's wrong" with the evil capitalist stock market system that makes people into conniving thieving robbers of people's life's savings. Oh, an boo, evil AT&T, hated by geeks!

In other words, the form that the examination of Bales is taking isn't really so much about this man, or about the military, with very real problems which spawned this sort of soldier, but larger ills in society, vaguely formulated -- banking, capitalism, housing, etc. are all motivations that make someone depressed and even suicidal or -- in this case, homicidal.

Really?

As for the poor village left reeling from this trauma, we don't have any more attention. The New York Times haughtily instructed us that we must not "get it" about Afghan culture, if we didn't accept what mullahs were telling the Times -- that burning the Koran was a worse offense, and people weren't staging mass riots in Afghanistan over this massacre, because the killing of people was less important, supposedly, and a death could be expiated by a payment of blood money, which in this case, the Afghan government paid.

That seemed awfully callous, as even getting some kind of payment, the elderly man with a wife and 8 children lost in this horrific act surely can't be heartened and must be grieving along with all his remaining relatives and neighbours. Why would the Afghan people be different than any other people? Why are we accepting only the word of mullahs on this question? If there is a mother or aunt or sister remaining of these massacred people, don't you think she's grieving terribly, filled with anger and a sense of helplessness that the notion that the Koran is more sacred or blood money aren't helping to dissipate? I'm not prepared to believe that this doesn't matter, or that Afghanis are so inured to death that they don't care if nine children and seven adults are killed in their village.

They had real tears in their eyes, and I don't imagine they went away.

Only Al Jazeera has run a piece saying that in fact a fury has been sparked, and another  piece asking: how come we haven't been told these villagers' names?

Al Jazeera's blog ran a list of the names, noted how much of the media, itself included, focused on the backlash for Afghan-US relations, but then asked:

Many mainstream media outlets channelled a significant amount of  energy into uncovering the slightest detail about the accused soldier – now identified as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. We even know where his wife wanted to go for vacation, or what she said on her personal blog.

But the victims became a footnote, an anonymous footnote. Just the number 16. No one bothered to ask their ages, their hobbies, their aspirations. Worst of all, no one bothered to ask their names.

I don't have much use for Al Jazeera, as I find this state-sponsored Arabic news station always taking the "progressive" line when it injects into US national debates and being selective about what crises they cover in the Arab world and elsewhere. So politically-correct has ALJ become to the prognoscenti that you don't dare criticize it, but I do.

This blog struck the right note, however, and it is indeed curious why no Western correspondent is trying to interview the villagers or Afghan and US officials about the aftermath. Possibly it's just too dangerous. Possibly the US military is keeping people away to try to avoid any incitement of mobs bent on retaliation.

There are questions to ask about this scene.

How is it possible to get drunk enough to commit this sort of crime without anyone noticing, if alcohol is barred from the post?

Most people get drunk and then pass out if they are drinking under stress, or maybe they get in a bar fight or a fistfight. But to methodically go and shoot and maim 16 people? To go door to door, and also try to burn their bodies as if to destroy evidence? How was that possible?

How was it possible for a man drunk enough not to remember the incident itself to also methodically take aim, kill people one after another, and then plan enought to burn their bodies?

Why was there no one to stop him -- a US soldier, an Afghan police man? Aren't we training police to take over their own security? No one was available to take this murderer down as he methodically went house to house? What's up with that? What happened?

There are reports of multiple shooters and maybe there were, but no other suspects have been arrested. But it does continue to be a mystery why a soldier does the exact opposite of what he was supposedly deployed for: protecting Afghan villagers from the people who do the most killing in Afghanistan -- who have massacred 80 percent of the civilians murdered -- the Taliban. And goes after the most vulnerable representatives of the Afghan people -- women and children asleep in their homes -- as some way to express anger and frustration with the way the Afghans have not changed despite 10 years of American efforts. So, this is the moment (if there weren't thousands of moments before this over the years) when you realize "we became like them" and you leave as I've discussed earlier.

Perhaps people will draw "lessons learned" from this horror. About not deploying 38-year-old family men with mortgages they can't pay during a recession, despite their combat pay?  About the ravages of too many deployments in a row, and PTSD?

Bret A. Moore in The New Republic gives it a more sophisticated take, explaining it as not just possibly PTSD, but PTSD and "co-morbidity" with other conditions. Naturally, you have to wonder what other pre-combat conditions this man had that led him to get in car accidents and beat women and defraud pensioners -- and not only do all those things, but evade responsibility and punishment for them.

The military generally bars felons from service, although if you have only two misdemeanors, a supervisor can rule that you should be admitted. Different services seem to have different requirements as to how much of a criminal record you can have and still hope to get into the military to solve your life's problems. Did Bales hide his fraud charges to gain membership? Or did a financial crime not "count" in the military's examination?

What stands out for me in this story is the failure to manage expectations, both by this individual himself, and in general with recruits and the army.

There's this entire fiction that has now embedded itself everywhere in our culture of "support our troops". This fiction works like this: the army is a job -- an occupation where you can "have a career". By itself, it is something unquestionably worthy of public support because it is made up of people who "just do their job". In all kinds of advertising in the media and on campuses and in neighbourhoods, we're told that young people should be joining the armed services to they can learn an occupation and get a salary, housing, and health insurance for free in exchange for just some training and maybe brief deployments here and there.

It's indicative that Bayles wife talked about how they had dreamed he would be deployed to Germany or the Bahamas, i.e. not in combat but just in defense -- but instead, he goes not only to Iraq, but Afghanistan -- and now this horror.

It's much the same with Manning and his reasons for joining up and his expectations about deployment -- and the crime he is charged with, damaging US interests and harming sources through leaking a quarter million classified cables.

There just doesn't seem to be enough propagandizing of what the real mission is and the real purpose of the army, which isn't about "having a career" or "learning a trade" or being deployed to fun foreign locations. Instead, it's about war-fighting ruthless, cunning and deadly enemies who don't play fair, and secondarily, protecting of civilians in awful conflict zones. There just isn't enough said about that -- and even when there is a war deployment, all sorts of other agendas are invoked -- building schools, training police, helping farmers, patrolling roads, etc. The actual job here -- killing the enemy -- just isn't really featured or discussed or propagandized for (and you can't really blame an army for propagandizing -- they have done so throughout history).

In past wars, it was either the call of duty, or the defense of the motherland, or helping allies, or beating back evil enemies who committed atrocities, but careers? No, because there was a draft and you served a limited time, or there wasn't a draft, but you saw it as a civic duty with a time limit.

That's what's missing without it is portrayed today. And that's why a few times in forums, you'll see people remark that contrary to intuition, if we had a draft, this kind of case might not happen. For one, there'd be enough people so that you wouldn't have to deploy anyone three times in a row. For another, you wouldn't have this notion that you are making a "career" and hoping to get to the Bahamas and pay for your house as a function of being a soldier.

That's not to say you shouldn't have a professional army and careers in the military -- without that, everyone would be a bumbling recruit. But there's just something about the ratio here and the expectations created -- the professional recruitment shouldn't be just anybody who seems to pass a basic physical and doesn't have too bad of a criminal record, but really trained and vetted cadres -- which is maybe what can happen when you have a draft to fill up the ranks with a wider variety of people.

Of course, you could hardly get a draft requirement passed today, with sentiment against the wars and with young people's reculctance to make sacrifices when their main beef now is that they feel they are already too much in debt from their school loans and "the one percent" should somehow alleviate their cost burden.

But even so, you can ask why we have the entire fiction of the "career" and "learning a trade" and not really having to deploy any place but Germany. It's precisely that sort of advertising that has led us to bunches of soldiers who piss on the dead, thoughtlessly burn a holy book, and then go on a rampage and shoot 16 villagers -- and of course much more, that we don't even hear about.

I can't help thinking that it's precisely the disconnect between that "learn an occupation and have a career" advertising campaign and the realities of depoloyment in conflict zones that is in fact setting up many people for the crisis of psychology they do experience. If they faced the fact that the opportunity in fact involved taking on a short-term risk for not a lot of pay because there was a nasty job to do and persons of integrity were required to do it, might the outcome turn out differently?

People recruited to do a job of defeating an enemy might turn out to do better at this awful and complex job than those recruited with a fable about learning how to operate sophisticated equipment so that they can get a better industrial job after deployment.

 

Is Jamshid Muhtorov Being "Tried by the Internet"? Or Part of Some "Great Game"?

No one blogged about Jamshid Muhtorov before he was arrested -- he had been written about by human rights groups and independent news sites back in 2005 and 2006 and then forgotten for six long years. During that time he fled to Kyrgyzstan, then obtained refugee status and immigrated to the United States and went to work as a truck driver to support his wife and two children.

When the FBI made their arrest of him at O'Hare Airport on his way to Turkey, it wasn't because of anybody's blog, or news site or emigre squabbles. It was because he was caught making contact and preparing to support a group deemed terrorist by the US State Department, the Islamic Jihad Union.

That set Joshua Foust and Registan commenters and like-minded bloggers to claiming that Muhtorov had been arrested on charges of "Interneting while Muslim," like "Driving while black," i.e. for mere reasons of prejudice. They flogged this idea for awhile, but other than noting that Muhtorov had been reported as a victim of harassment in Uzbekistan and that they had concerns about the overbroad notions of "material support" Human Rights Watch didn't have anything more to say, and neither did any other human rights organization. (I actually think the Denver Post's claim that HRW "worked with him" inside the country is misleading -- researchers who may have known in Uzbekistan at that time were in Tashkent, and probably only recorded the attack on him and didn't "work with him"; the new officials at HRW quoted in the piece weren't at HRW in 2005 and didn't work in Uzbekistan).

One or two conservative blogs have agitated against Muslims immigrating to the US on the basis of this case, claiming that it increases the chances of terrorists slipping in, and have indulged in some hateful comments, but it's nothing like the firestorm of a commentary around other terrorist suspects -- this one is pretty much being ignored.

So now Foust and company are switching to a different claim -- that "the Internet is trying an innocent Muslim" for reasons of prejudice. My blog and I are to blame for condemning an innocent man, and the emigre press is scurilously reprinting hearsay -- so this line of attack goes.

Foust snarked on Twitter that I should have read the article in the Denver Post more carefully before flapping my jaw and proceeded to trash me as a "liar, lunatic, and fabulist" (!). He claims that the Denver Post was agitated into changing a headline by some angry anonymous commenters who seemed to imply the Post was misreporting the story in ways prejudicial to this defendant.

But in fact I did due diligence and came away with the same sense I had to begin with:

o There's nothing to show that the Post changed their headline under pressure from commenters; breaking news stories have headline changes all the time as the reporters update from the scene;

o There's no substantive difference between reporting that the prosecutor said Muhtorov knew he was supporting the IJU or that he knew he was supporting the IJU that fought NATO in Afghanistan -- it's still "material support" to a terrorist group.

o What's the issue here, anyway? The DP didn't put in the word "alleges"? Or they didn't make it clear that it's the prosecutor claiming Muhtorov admitted he knew what he was supporting, and not Muhtorov himself?

o So what's Foust's actual position then? The prosecutor is lying? We can't believe the prosecutor? The DP reports what officials say. Far from the "stenography" that Glenn Greenwald might find this to be, it's about reporting the news from the scene -- and that's fine. (BTW, always one to bring a gun to a knife fight, Foust is whistling to Greenwald on Twitter to get involved in this story of "trial by blog" -- and perhaps it won't be long before we see a 3000 or 4000-word post from Greenwald insensed at not the bumbling jihadist wannabee, like the first few news stories were, but the bumbling FBI.)

o As neither the lawyer or the family are talking, there isn't more to report other than to try to find neighbours or friends who might say something -- the evidence and the source for the prosecution are being kept secret. You may not like that and find that part of the abusiveness of the war on terror, but it actually looks justified here, and there isn't any reason to posit that this is an entire trump-up.

o And we know Muhtorov already declared that he was not guilty of planning a terrorist act (although he doesn't specifically say he's not guilty of supporting a terrorist group).

The anonymous commenters -- including some from Registan showing up at the DP -- and Foust -- have tried to milk these supposed failings of DP reporting to try to "come up with something," as they have with the "on trial by the Internet" meme -- because the "Intering while Muslim" didn't really fly.

And that's because new information keeps coming that does not make the defendant look good.

Further Thoughts on Muhtorov and the Denver Post

My difference in opinion on how to view the case of Jamshid Muhtorov and the coverage by the Denver Post caused quite an outrageous slam on me by defense analyst Joshua Foust.

Perhaps his outburst isn't really caused by the issue at hand, but about his irritation with my persistent refusal to be bullied and silenced by him after he banned me from his group's site Registan; my principled and continued objection to all his bad-faith posts about Central Asia; my rejection of his realpolitik take on the massacre by the American soldier; or even my response to his calling a woman he's apparently dating "my girl" -- I said this was VERY VERY VERY VERY sexist -- like he once said to me about a far more apt epithet.

Several friends as well as strangers have approached me about this outrageous attack and said things like "This is awful, you shouldn't stoop to even answering it," or "what the hell is wrong with this guy," etc. Well, I believe in patiently answering Internet smears or else you are bullied into silence and the bullies win. Bullies who link to sites on bullying and claim you are a patholical paranoid liar are the kind of bullies you have to patiently polemicize against the most, in my experience.

And ultimately, this isn't about a blog war, but a serious case of a man's life and the potential loss of his freedom and what it means for our country and Uzbekistan, and I simply refuse to be shut up about those important matters.

In projecting a view of how he sees the world -- everybody lies, everybody is cynical, everybody bullies -- Foust imagines that the only reason I could possibly take up writing about this case is merely to pique Registan, which began writing about it. But Registan doesn't get to take up all the mindshare on this, and its awful positions on so many issues in this region simply cry out for debate and refutation. And I'm not going to be harassed into not doing that.

The refusal of the organized human rights movement and the "progressive" punditocracy and academic world to really grasp the threat of extremism and terrorism -- as above all threats to human rights and the liberal idea -- isn't something I think we can idly tolerate. Just because governments misuse the prosecution of terrorism to accomplish the suppression of civil society doesn't mean we don't get to critique the threat to civil society that extremist violent ideas bring us, too.

Thank God, in discussing the case of the imam shot in Sweden, uznews.net has not been deterred from covering the grave concerns that emigres have, not only about the Uzbek secret police and its likely involvement in this assault, but also the troublesome ideas of suppressing freedom of expression from the imam himself. Victim status doesn't entitle you to victimize others. This is something Registan almost never gets.

On the Muhtorov case, long before I ever wrote about this Uzbek emigre, or Registan did (they were first),  the FBI was tracking his cell phone. That's what led to his arrest. Not a blog. Not an emigre website or comment. Cell phone conversations in which he said he was prepared to die for an extremist group's cause.

Why was he arrested? Not because he had a long beard or taught his children to recite the Koran. He was arrested because he was caught making contact with an extremist organization (one that Registan doesn't believe exists, but which he did indeed contact). He was caught offering allegiance to the group, and putting together money and equipment (cell phones, a GPS device). He took donations from another man, also arrested now. He was caught talking about "gifts" for "weddings" repeatedly in ways that suggested he was using the Al Qaeda code. He told his daughter he was not going to see her again until they met in heaven. 

And in this newspaper article that Foust so agitates about, Muhtorov was caught with a cell phone with jihad videos on it, celebrating the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers -- a fact Foust ellides from his post. He was deemed too violent to be released -- a fact that has set the Registani regulars to whine "who gets to decide?! the FBI?" or "this is America!".

Now, we all get it that violent thoughts and even intentions, as well as jihadi videos on Youtube are legal. People collect them out of spite or fury or because they think it's cool or whatever. People spout angry violent things because they are angry but not necessarily at the point of "imminent violent action."

But when you have those videos, and everything else mentioned here, and other things that the prosecution has said is part of secret information they are not revealing in the interests of national security, then it's a marker. And it's ok to be concerned about it.

Foust blusters and carries on so crazily in this post, especially with all his wacky stuff about me and false claims that "crazy Internet people are sending a man to prison" (!) that a commenter asks simply whether Foust thinks he is guilty or not. What's his gut on this? Yes, we get it that there are concerns about "thought crimes" -- but really? What do you think. "I won't tell anyone," this jokester  quips on the, um, Internet.

And the answer is -- there isn't any answer from Foust. And if pressed, he would probably say, to cover his ample ass, that we have to wait until the case comes to trial and see whether the prosecutor can make his case. That's just in case the guy turns out to be guilty, like the Uzbek who threatened President Obama and had weapons -- whom Foust readily conceded was a terrorist who deserved to be arrested.

And if I am asked to say what *I* think, I answer in all sincerity, without any coyness, that I don't know, and that we have to wait until the case comes to trial and see whether the prosecutor can make his case.

Now, how do I differ from Foust?

I think it's more than fine for the FBI to make an arrest and investigate a case like this, and Foust doesn't. He thinks anything that might turn out to be "Interneting while Muslim" or a "thought crime" means no arrest is in order.

I agree with the prosecution that he sounds like a danger, and a risk of flight (he was, after all, caught at the airport, on his way to Turkey, with money, phones, etc. to meet up with a member of an extremist group). And I think if your claim that US authorities exploit the "war on terror" to violate human rights is to ever have any credibility, you have to concede that sometimes, they make the right judgement call.

Living in New York with a keen awareness of the effects of 9/11, I sure don't take for granted the NYPD's work in arresting in a timely fashion, with the help of citizens, the Times Square bomber, for example. I just don't find these arrests to constitute the "chill on speech" that I'm supposed to. So far, I only find Foust the chill on speech here.

Taking another look at the Denver Post articles, let me say a few thoughts on what we have so far from these reporters -- who seem perfectly competent and capable of reporting on a criminal case without having to be Central Asian experts:

1. We have a claim by the prosecutor that Muhtorov has admitted that he knew what the nature of the Islamic Jihad Union was, and knew that it fought NATO in Afghanistan. This claim has been reported from the courtroom because it is what the prosecutor said, and that's what reporters do, they report on what the prosecutor says at the trial. When they do that, they aren't required to comment "how Soviet" all this is (!) as Foust suggests -- they can, um, leave that to the angry comments on their forums page.

2. We do not have any counterclaim from Muhtorov himself. As he is in prison, it may not be possible for him to give comments to the press, he may be barred from interviews, but there it is -- he hasn't claimed otherwise.

3. We do not have any statement from his wife about this. And again, that may be due to the fact that her lawyer has told her to stay silent, and a wife can't be compelled to give testimony against her husband.

4. We do not have any statement from Muhtorov's lawyer claiming that the prosecutor misled the court or even outright lied. Foust makes a pretty serious claim: he says a prosecutor is lying in court and that a prosecutor is only quoting my blog in order to prosecute a man (!). But the lawyer, who is way more important to this case, doesn't claim that. Of course, he may be biding his time and getting ready a defense at trial or seeing what else comes out from the FBI (the jihad videos were only just added to the case). But there it is -- if there is some "big story" about the prosecutor reporting Muhtorov's admission, and not Muhtorov's admission itself as such, there is no counterfactuals to show in fact the prosecutor is wrong -- and not even anybody questioning the prosecutor the way the anonymous angry Post readers were doing, and Foust was doing.

So we have a whole lot of nothing on this now -- and if it turns out that Muhtorov in fact never really admitted this, that story will have its day in court. That will not mean it was wrong to arrest him, so far as I can tell.

This may be a distinction that flies over Foust's head, and certainly his enabler Sarah Kendzior's head, but I have no need for Muhtorov to be prosecuted and go to jail, or to be arrested "while Interneting as a Muslim." I have a different need: not to second-guess law-enforcers when they make an arrest of a terrorist, because terrorism is really, really a big threat to human rights.

Not only is terrorism a threat to human rights; when this terrorist is a former member of a human rights group, it's a HUGE threat to the human rights movement. It discredits it. It makes it seem as if hiding behind every innocent and sincere human rights activist is a potential terrorist who will turn to violence if somebody asks him to file his narrative and financials on a grant. Or asks him to leave a group that doesn't wish to state as its purpose the overthrow of the president.

It makes it seems as if hiding behind every refugee is a terrorist. Indeed, it is not discussing Muhtorov critically that runs those risks; its not defining, condemning and prosecuting terrorism that runs those risks. This is a major disagreement with how Registan sees the world, but I don't care -- I'm interested in preserving the crystal-clear distinction between non-violent human rights activism and terrorism by not speciously claiming special human rights privileges where they aren't warranted.

As we've seen with Sarah Kendzior in particular, she's not concerned about making these distinctions -- she rushed to ascribe to Muhtorov from the get-go the properties of a member of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, although as it turned out this was a man with jihad videos on his phone and hook-ups with the IJU. She believes in an "activism without activists" -- convenient, awfully, for Karimov, who would like no activists, and controllable activism, too.

Muhtorov's lawyer has chosen to highlight the fact that Muhtorov was at one time a human rights activist -- just as Registan has -- in order to try to get him off. His lawyer is doing his job, but his interests are narrow; Foust and Registan writers and commenters who share his views are only interested in enlarging their own arrogant sense of being above bumbling federal law-enforcers and misguided anti-terror warriors.

I have a different concern, which is I don't want people dragging in human rights groups and their legitimate activity to try to beat their own charges of terrorism. I don't want human rights groups to be a way station or parking lot for people who graduate to terrorist acts.

If I'm wrong about this and Muhtorov is let go and the prosecutor has egg on his face and the FBI is revealed as merely too vigilant against "Interneting while Muslim," the worst that happens is all of us look bad and an innocent devout beliefer goes free to go about his business, with Registan bolstered in its self-righteous mission to set the world straight on Central Asia. Far from having his life ruined, Muhtorov will be a human rights hero.

But irreparable harm will be done to the human rights movement, because people with violent and extremist views who appeared to warrant arrest for material support for terrorism but who were a few degrees away from that in fact will have been able to hide out in -- and dine out on -- the legitimate human rights struggle.

Thus, the non-prosecution of Muhtorov after these serious allegations does real damage to the human rights movement. Foust and bloggers like Gazistan think that for every single symptom of extremism and possible actual terrorism here -- calling shady IJU characters in Turkey, pledging allegiance to die for a cause, speaking repeatedly of gifts for weddings, telling your daughter you'll see her in heaven, jihad videos -- that's there's an innocent explanation. There might be. But there likely might not be, either, and that's ok to say.

Likely the Registanis will think that the prosecution of a one-time human rights activist -- who embarked on his career out of a sense of vengeance over what appearently was injustice in his sister's murder charges -- will harm the human rights movement. I don't -- just the opposite, the future of the human rights movement depends on making this distinction. As we know from Foust's vicious attacks on human rights advocates, and Kendzior's curious theories espousing Internet inactivism, they don't care about what it means for a terrorist to attempt exoneration by association with the human rights movement. I do.

 

 

"Liar, Lunatic, and Fabulist" -- the Outrageous Claims of Joshua Foust that My Blog is Sending an Innocent Man to Prison

Foust and his disco tie do Al Jazeera.  Did my criticism of his positions on the Afghan massacre prompt him to attack me today?

Joshua Foust has an appalling rant posted at Registan in which he smears me again merely for disagreeing with him, and outrageously accuses me of aiding the prosecution of an innocent Uzbek Muslim man with my blog posts (!!!).

That beats all.  When are Sen. John Kerry and the other adults associated with American Security Project going to rein in this freak?!

Foust and other Registan writers have never liked my take on the case of Jamshid Muhtorov -- I simply don't see any reason to second-guess the FBI's prosecution of this case and won't be stampeded into political correctness with this case. There's a tendency in general from the crowd at Registan to minimize terrorist groups that is fashionable in "progressive" and even establishment think-tank circles, but I think it's reasonable to question it in Uzbekistan. You can retain a robust and vigorous critique of the Karimov regime and craven US policy toward him -- I sure do -- and yet concede that some extremist Islamic groups in Uzbekistan do pose a severe challenge to human rights themselves, and it is ok to question them.

First, Foust makes much ado about the prosecution's statement that Muhtorov knew what the IJU was and what it meant to support them. Then he features anonymous and unaccountable forums' commenters who claim the Denver Post has engaged in poor journalism because they had a headline saying "Prosecutors Say that Uzbek Refugee Knew" and then quoting the prosecutor later that Muhtorov "admitted he knew the Islamic Jihad Union was a combat organization that fights NATO forces in Afghanistan, including US forces."

But where's the problem? We're supposed to *not believe* prosecutors when they say *Muhtorov admitted* that he knew what the IJU was?

Sure, it's always good to question prosecutors -- that's what adversarial legal defense is all about and that's available in this country and available for Muhtorov, unlike in his native Uzbekistan. But I don't see that *his lawyer* has a counter-claim that he didn't know. And I find it highly unbelievable that Muhtorov would either not know what the IJU was at all, or not know that supporting it, he was supporting extremists who fought NATO. There's no evidence for the counter-claim whatsoever, but Foust jacks up the seeming lack of evidence of Muhtorov's voluntary admission as in fact that counter-claim. Sneaky!

Another commenter, "Pilgrim1620" is very much splitting hairs when he claims there's a difference between Muhtorov knowing "he'd fight US NATO forces" and that "he was joining an organization that he knew also did fight in Afghanistan" in addition to Uzbekistan. Oh, please. What did he think the IJU did in Afghanistan, go on picnics?

Curiously, Foust claims these angry anonymous readers' comments forced the Denver Post to put in the word "alleges" and gives a link. But when you go to the link, the word "alleges" never appears anywhere! The headline remains "Uzbekistan Refugee Knew of Islamic Group's Threat, Prosecutor Says at Denver Hearing" and the word "alleges" has not been asserted in this paragraph:

A prosecutor told a federal judge this morning that Uzbek refugee Jamshid Muhtorov admitted he knew the Islamic Jihad Union was a combat organization that fights NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The Post proceeds to say, "The prosecutor described Muhtorov as a former human rights activist who might have been disappointed in his life as a refugee in the U.S."

Joshua never accounts for the fact that he has claimed a word "alleged" was introduced when it wasn't (!) and instead writes this:

After writing several paragraphs detailing the prosecution’s claim that Muhtorov knew he was going to go help an organization fight U.S. forces, the DP finally gets around to noting that the prosecution won’t let Muhtorov’s defense know or discuss how the prosecution knows such a thing, because it is based on a witness whose identity is classified for national security reasons.

I'm fine with secret evidence and secret witnesses that aren't made privy to Joshua Foust, former defense contractor and researcher at the American Security Project, nor to the general public. His lawyer is welcome to challenge it; anyone is welcome to challenge it. But...they haven't that I can see. We don't see Muhtorov objecting or his lawyer objecting that he "knew what he knew when he knew it" about the IJU. This is all a very odd line of reasoning.

(I think also, as one smart commenter at the Denver Post notes, those that claim the anti-terror legislation is always misused and applied overbroadly to violate human rights should be challenged to come up with the cases -- in fact, the FBI's cases seem to be nearly always good ones.)

But -- not content with just making glib pronouncements about what the liberal democratic Obama Administration's FBI should or should not view as necessary to keep secret in prosecution of terrorism -- Foust goes on to make an OUTRAGEOUS statement.

First, he quotes the prosecutor, Greg Holloway:

A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds.

Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an "opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism."

That sounds like what I wrote here, and I definitely stand by it. It's exactly the story published by Vasila Inoyatova, the chair of Ezgulik, about her dismissal of Muhtorov at the time, and I have no reason to distrust her account, having interviewed her as a reliable source over the years a number of times. (It's also an account that can be found in a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks). Not only did Muhtorov not account for funds, he wanted to go further to work with another group, an association of farmers who wanted to overthrow the Karimov regime which Ezgulik, an organization that had obtained registration from the government with great difficulty, didn't want to do. He was dismissed, and went to the other group advocating violent overthrow -- and then fled the country.

As for the other claims I reported on made by others -- that he was an informant for Uzbek intelligence, or received refugee status on fake grounds -- those are claims that are speculative, and we don't know if they are true and I myself didn't make them. Again, I reported on them; that's what bloggers do and that's more than fine. Certainly Uzbek intelligence hasn't come to rescue their agent if they are true! Muhtorov's grounds for receiving refugee status may have been vague, and amounted to his past associations, his distribution of a HRW report and his detention and beating for this, and his mention in the State Department's report. Not a sturdy peg to hang a case on, but lesser pegs have been granted status and one would err on the side of inclusiveness when it comes to Uzbekistan.

But here's what's important about all this. I didn't say he misrepresented himself; the prosecutor does. Gosh, five seconds ago, Foust was so busy parsing what it all means when prosecutors versus suspects say things, wasn't he?

I merely said he was dismissed and was no longer characterized as a member of a human rights group and a member of the peaceful movement that doesn't call for overthrowing the regime. And that is the case. He went to a more extreme group. So if he continued to call himself a "human rights activist" that would be inaccurate in the sense that he was no longer accepted as a member of a human rights group. But I didn't comment on his refugee application or how he characterized himself -- Foust has made that up entirely.

Foust completely glides over the fact that he Muhtorov fired from a group for not making financial reports and moving to embrace a more extreme group. That's important! He implies that just because HRW and the State Department wrote about him as a victim of human rights abuse, that he retains his status as a human rights activist -- which the State Department doesn't claim. Foust mendaciously then asks "Where are they getting this from?" as if the prosecution in a terrorist case is building his case on my blog (!!!) and links to hate pages about me:

Oh yeah — it was a paranoid personality disorder victim and renowned Internet troll, who is famous for conspiracy theories and paranoia, and was banned recently from the Registan.net threads for her gleeful slinging of false accusations of secret interests and regime sympathies. This renowned liar, lunatic, and fabulist has been on a tear about Muhtorov, and literally everything else anyone at this blog has ever discussed in the last few months — because I noted that Muhtorov had a history of activism, and because Sarah Kendzior (this troll’s favorite target) once mentioned knowing of him.

Wow! Perhaps this "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters" page will satisfy some people curious about hate pages portraying me as a conspiracy nutter and "troll" -- but these are all just methods of trying to silence criticism.

"Liar, lunatic and fabulist?" My word. Because I...criticize Registan's outrageous posts on this subject legitimately?! I guess Foust is out of arguments!

Foust then proceeds to claim that my accurate reporting on Muhtorov's firing from a human rights group and characterization of him by a refugee agency as an opportunist is somehow helping to build the prosecutor's case. Huh? But the facts are the facts, and the prosecutor has merely referenced them -- and they are in the public record, not from my reporting. There's nothing racist or anti-immigrant about reporting that a man who didn't want to turn in a financial report was dismissed from a human rights group and that his desire to merge with an extremist group was rejected by that human rights group. Indeed, the fragile future of the human rights movement in Uzbekistan very much depends on all of us being able to make those very distinctions.There's nothing racist or anti-immigrant about reporting that a Kyrgyz refugee official found this refugee not fleeing the Andijan events as opportunist; and I was careful to characterize her as possibly having an agenda herself, given that she was an Osh official, and now the minister of labor.

The prosecution isn't relying on "crazy Internet people" but their own interception of Muhtorov's cell phone communications and material on his hard drive. Their case doesn't hinge on Muhtorov being a member of good standing in a human rights group or not. Even if he was the Human Rights Watch monitor of the year and Amnesty's prisoner of the month, if he decided to provide material aid to a terrorist group, that would get him arrested -- having a legitimate human rights beef with an abusive government like the Karimov regime doesn't exempt you from prosecution as a terrorist.

As for Sarah Kendzior's claim that activists always spread nasty rumours about each other working for the secret police, so what? We all get that. Tolib Yakubov made the claim that Muhtorov was working for the SNB; the Kyrgyz refugee official who saw him going to Osh police offices all the time also made a judgement that he was somehow cooperating with authorities (so you couldn't pick two more opposite sources -- an Uzbek dissident exile and an Osh official!). It's ok to report that without being accused of sending an innocent man to jail; it's part of the public record. Sometimes when people make these accusations, they are accurate; sometimes they are not. Foust and Kendzior behave as if the SNB never manipulates dissidents and is never evident in a case, ever. That's ridiculous.

Foust then slyly segues from this study of emigre counter-accusations to implying that someone is saying Muhtorov wasn't really persecuted, and didn't face a "well-founded fear of persecution". That's ridiculous. Nobody has claimed that, anyway (except Tolib who implied he shouldn't get refugee status -- and what another emigre thinks about you isn't grounds for rejection of such status). Nobody has said he wasn't persecuted, and indeed I document the ways in which he was -- as reported also by the State Department. I don't say he doesn't deserve refugee status or oppose Muslim immigration from Uzbekistan -- that's hysterical smearing that Foust is impugning to me because he doesn't know how to account for the obvious here: that a man who left human rights groups because they demanded financial accountability, and went to a more extreme opposition group, and then fled the country, later to adopt extremist Islamist beliefs and hook up with the IJU, is the proper target of the FBI.

I don't see that the Denver Post has repeated any "Internet rumours" -- the accounts of his dismissal from Ezgulik and his trajectory to more extremist groups are on the public record including even at Registan and rightly provoking questioning -- Foust simply pretends that trajectory doesn't exist.

As for the "wedding" -- it is repeatedly mentioned  in the chat transcripts over a period of time, and that naturally prompts the question of whether it was indeed a code word. How many times can you go to a wedding and bring a gift?

We all have to worry about false charges of terrorism, especially involving Uzbekistan, where our government has made an unsavory bargain. But there is no reason, again, to second-guess what the FBI says it has found on cell phones and computers: evidence of intent to go help the IJU. Foust has to explain away cell phones, money, and the GPS equipment -- it has been theorized that these were just to sell on the black market and not to carry out plots. How do we know that?

Now Foust winds up for the punch, directly and falsely accusing me of sending an innocent Uzbek human rights activist to jail (!):

A false charge of terrorism can permanently ruin a person’s life — and when terrorism cases are built on hearsay, internet comments, crazed lunatics posting 6,000 word anger-rants about some writers she dislikes, and secret evidence… well that gives me a lot of pause.

Outrageous!

But...long before I wrote any blog posts, the FBI was following Muhtorov, bugging his phone calls and finding disturbing groups for probably cause for an arrest. A judge agreed and gave them a warrant and they confiscated his computers. I've posted lengthy compilations of all the material on Muhtorov on the Internet with my translations and commentary, and that is all legitimate activity. What, we can't ever criticize terrorism suspects? Worse, Faust has linked this smear of me supposedly sending an innocent man to jail to supposedly "crazed" 6,000 "anger-rants" which are in fact measured and calm -- and extensive rebuttals of his own actual anger-rants.

Secret evidence isn't Soviet evidence, it's just secret for reasons that the FBI -- under Obama -- claims are for national security reasons. There is nothing to prevent Jamshid Muhtorov from getting a fair trial and for his lawyer and any human rights organizations from mounting the most robust defense they can conceive. Meanwhile, I will insist on my right to report and comment on his career, and utterly reject any notion that criticism of extremism somehow helps unfair prosecution.

Finally, I realized in looking over this past comment that Foust mischaracterizes as "gleeful slinging of false accusations" (the lady doth protest too much), that I had failed to publish my lengthy rebuttal to his slams preceding my banning from Registan back in December 2011. So here it is, weighing in at only 5,000 words (lol) and I note in particular the defense against his charges of behaving like "neo-cons" that claim "objective" aid to nefarious causes. The onus is indeed on Foust to explain how he can continue not only these outrageous attacks on the human rights movement, but vicious smears of me merely for legitimately criticizing his antics and also subjecting to criticism a terrorism suspect.

Turkmenistan Reads Out the Constitution at UN Human Rights Committee -- And is Peppered with Questions

 

Gurbannazarova speaking to a Lithuanian delegation at her Presidential Institute for Human Rights and Democracy, as President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov looks on from his portrait. Photo by Lithuanian Mission to OSCE.

Turkmenistan put on a very poor performance today in New York at the UN Human Rights Committee, reading long swathes of its own Constitution and Penal Code in mind-numbing detail until finally interrupted by the meeting's chair -- whereupon the Turkmen delegates were peppered with hundreds of questions from UN experts about its appalling human rights record. (The first day's brief summary record is here).

The Human Rights Committee -- not to be confused with the political body called the Human Rights Council -- was meeting in New York for this session (it alternates with Geneva), and it was Turkmenistan's turn to report.

For my money, the treaty bodies, which get little attention from the press, public or even NGOs, are really the best part of the UN system. It is the only place where countries are really called to account for their human rights performance under international law in an adversarial process where they are asked to give account of themselves. The treaties are binding, although there is really only rhetoric and persuasion to use as enforcement. Even so, the process provides a great way for NGOs to get their issues heard, to get the international community to put pressure on a regime that is scornful of their obligations, and to keep following up ever afterwards through the regularly-scheduled process.

More than 100 observers were in the room, more than often attend such sessions, possibly because it was the very first time that Turkmenistan was appearing before this body, and it also was a very rare occasion to hear Turkmenistan talk -- a smattering of European and Asian delegates turned out just to see what they would say, and an army of UN functionaries whose job it is to keep track of countries also didn't miss the occasion to actually hear from this generally silent member state.

The delegation appeared to have only two people -- First Deputy Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan Vepa Hadjiyev and Yazdursun Gurbannazarova, head of the Presidential Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, a GONGO run by the president which gave up any pretense of independent or even quasi-civic status by the sheer fact that it was the body reporting to the HRC. (When asked about the Paris Principles, the UN guidelines for the independence of human rights bodies, Gurbannazarov said this was outside her mandate to reply.)

 Also with the delegates from Ashgabat was Amb. Aksaltan Atayeva who is the longest-serving representative at the UN (since 1995).

Over the years, I've seen her at various meetings but I've never heard her talk. For that matter, I've never heard the Third Committee representative speak, or any Turkmen official. I don't know whether they pre-emptively suffer from the national-oath sanction but they just never speak up.

Using the well-worn authoritarian official's trick to soak up time, poor Gurbannazarova read out the Turkmen Constitution and laws endlessly, and seemed about to start reading out the Ashgabat telephone book when she developed a choking fit and kept gulping glasses of water as her colleague tried to find her place on sheets of paper in front of her. It got so bad it almost felt like the Hollywood spit takes on Youtube where actors evince the preposterousness of something someone has said.

"I want to live in that happy country," I thought to myself as Gurbannazarova rambled on -- everything is perfect in Turkmenistan. Eerily perfect.

There are also many conferences and seminars and exercises in improving legislation! With international experts! For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross has held a number of meetings with Turkmenistan to discuss international humanitarian law.

Has the ICRC ever been let into see the Turkmen prisons? Mrs. G. didn't say... but from what we know, they haven't been.

Finally the chair stopped her recitation with a request to wrap it up so that the meeting could take more the form of a "dialogue," which is UN-speak for "the hard questions."

Usually, the members -- experts from various countries who are nominated and compete for seats -- do a bit of a "good cop, bad cop" routine where they first profusely thank the country for even doing the report in the first place and bothering to show up (some, like Iran, never do). Here, Turkmenistan was in for a bit of a knuckle-rap, however, as its report was due in 1998, and it only turned it in recently. No matter, we could now celebrate 20 years of independence properly.

Try as he may, the "good cop" didn't have much to work with, because he was also forced to say that the delegation was disappointing -- only two people, although, he said, struggling to turn lemons into lemonade, at least they were high-ranking. Some countries, faced with the daunting task of accounting for their human rights record to the world's experts, bring huge delegations with prosecutors, judges, and lawyers, along with the foreign ministry representatives, because they have very detailed reports and face a lot of detailed questions.

Turkmenistan also got many questions -- but they were mainly all like this: why have you said nothing in your report about this, that, or the other thing? As one expert pointed out, HRC isn't just there to hear about laws, which can be read on the Internet, and which amount to good intentions. They need to hear about practices and specific cases.

You could hear the experts struggling to keep out a tone of incredulity from some of their lines of questioning. Was it really true that not a single prisoner had ever complained about torture or inhumane conditions, ever, in Turkmenistan? Was it really true that there wasn't a single case of domestic violence that had ever been prosecuted in Turkmenistan?

Several Committee members tried to reason out loud how it could be that nothing was available about any human rights violations. Could it be that people were afraid to talk?

One member asked explicitly: what happened to all those people arrested in 2002 and charged with plotting a coup? Where are they? What is their status? How is their well-being? No one has heard from them since. Why haven't their relatives been notified? What is this prison called Ovadan-Depe that is said to be a secret prison holding such political prisoners?

Another member asked specifically about individual political prisoners such as the journalists who helped the French TV crew. Why were they in jail in the first place, and how was their health?

The structure of the meeting is such that all the Committee members first get through their questions -- and they have lots of them -- going methodically through each article of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and their List of Issues which have been given to the state party in advance.

Then only when they are done does the state delegate reply -- the next day, or possibly...never, to some of the questions (that's how Turkmenistan has handled the hot seat at treaty bodies in the past).

That's why some members helpfully took up the theme of the non-answers already given to other treaty bodies -- Turkmenistan has been at the Committee on the Elimination of Racism and Discrimination and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and has also taken a turn at the Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council -- all with very incomplete and evasive responses to the basic questions of why there is no information at all, and why all the NGOs have information about torture, political prisoners, media suppression.

Of course, there is something absurd about all this exercise. Nice ladies and gentlemen from Sweden or Ireland or the Netherlands or South Africa ask all the right things for all the right reasons -- because of Turkmenistan's well-documented appalling record. NGOs get to have input in a pre-session and in alternative or "shadow" reports which they distribute to the members and which are published online at ohchr.org under the various sessions for specific treaty bodies (Turkmenistan at HRC is here.)

Throughout this ordeal, the Turkmen delegates didn't look angry or chagrined, but just looked dead-pan and dispassionate, taking down notes now and then dutifully -- probably some official higher than them will decide how to answer the questions from those nice people at the UN -- if at all.

But I must say it's really refreshing to hear stark, human rights-specific hard questions being asked of this country. Because almost every other encounter with Turkmen officialdom is completely different -- it's energy-seeking envoys and oil and gas executives flattering the president and his lackeys, with many of them being obsequious and even prostrate in the process. To be sure, quietly, Western diplomats raise the same questions and cases that the treaty body members are now asking out loud. But that's just it -- they are quiet, due to the geopolitical exigencies as they perceive them.

That is, again, why it is indeed so heartening to hear the facts stated out loud; to hear credence and respect given to the work of Farid Tuhbatullin, who maintains chrono-tm.org and Vyacheslav Mamedov and other Turkmen emigres who submitted information, as well as to the work of Human Rights Watch, Open Society Institute and others who sent their reports and representatives to the meeting.

About half-way through the meeting, one of the young bucks sitting behind the delegation came out into the audience with his camera and began demonstratively taking pictures of a row of us, from the human rights groups and web sites. I tried to think where I'd seen him before, as I think I had -- he was like a young Rashid Nurgaliyev.

So persistent and "in-your-face" was this fellow about his intimidating camera work that I flashed him a peace sign. We know what you're doing, comrade.

The last time I saw that sort of intimidating Soviet KGB-type tactic was when Azerbaijan came to CEDAW some years ago and even had their video cameras rolling to film the NGOs who came to provide alternative information. It's disconcerting, but nowadays, Little Brother is watching back -- Farid and company were there with their cell phones filming the Turkmen watchers filming us...

 

 

 

 

Uzbek Man Arrested in Philadelphia as Associate of Terrorist Suspect Muhtorov

A Philadelphia man has been arrested today as an associate in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, and also charged with conspiracy to assist the Islamic Jihad Union, the FBI and Pennsylvania news media reported.

Bakhtiyor Jumaev, 45, was arrested in connection with the case of Muhtorov, a former human rights activist who is said to have turned to extremist beliefs and planned to travel to Turkey to assist the IJU.

Fbi.gov reports:

The FBI has been conducting an investigation into the activities of Jumaev and his associate, Jamshid Muhtorov, who was arrested in January 2012 on similar charges. According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, Jumaev and Muhtorov pledged support for the IJU and Jumaev sent funds to Muhtorov specifically intended for the IJU. The IJU is an extremist organization that is responsible for a number of attacks and bombings, including attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. The IJU has been designated by the U.S. Secretary of State as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Philadelphia Inquirer says Jamayev was charged with sending just $300 to Muhtorov allegedly for the terrorist cause:

Court papers said Jumaev and Muhtorov pledged financial backing for the IJU and Jumaev sent $300 to Muhtorov on March 15, 2011 that was specifically intended for the IJU.

I don't see the court papers online yet -- still looking.

It doesn't seem like you could get very far with $300, that's not enough for an air ticket, but with free fertilizer pilfered from a farm, maybe you could get up to some terrorism.

Are we in the realm of "thought crime" with these two, as Joshua Foust and others at Registan have claimed?

I'm not seeing it, because the FBI wouldn't be able to make a case for terrorism if all they had was one emigre wiring a mere $300 to another.

Unlike Muhtorov, who was known and had an Internet footprint from various human rights reports, I don't see anything about Jamayev or бахтиор джамаев or various other spellings -- some of the people you see on social networks don't have the right age.

 

 

Just Leave

U.S. Special Forces Soldier assigned to Special Operations Task Force – South sets up his security position during a patrol Feb. 25, 2011 in Panjwai District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Photo: ISAF Media.

Those are the words that I found forming in my mind as I stared at the awful photographs from a massacre in Afghanistan, little dead children's hands poking out of colorful blankets in the flat bed of a truck.

Just leave.

And apparently 54% of Americans feel the same way -- they would like US troops to leave Afghanistan faster than by 2014, the scheduled deadline. (The massacre has been dubbed by Wikipedia as the Panjwai shooting spree which gives it a curiously -- and ghastly -- festive title, although it is the worst massacre in the history of the whole US war in Afghanistan.)

Yeah, we get it that pulling out troops prematurely could undermine the Karzai government abruptly and expose particularly those in the capital more greatly and lead to mass chaos in the provinces where the Taliban isn't defeated. But...isn't it chaos in a lot of places already?

The sense of things spinning out of control comes from at least three major incidents all revealing how demoralized and nihilistic (or simply negligent) the US troops are -- the soldiers urinating and joking over dead Afghans, the burning of the Korans, and now the killing by apparently one deranged and traumatized soldier of 16 villagers, 9 of them children -- a village Canada was making a supposedly model security place.

The enemy couldn't think up better three ways of assuring maximum publicity and making the US look utterly cruel and cynical and stupid and rageful -- and yet it was our own troops' fault, from everything we know.

That's why it doesn't feel quite right when Obama apologizes -- and says "this is not typical of the excellent troops". Sure, most of the troops are likely excellent but then...why do these things keep happening? Is it really the time to look to quickly praise our own in the same breath as an apology, with something like this? You get the feeling some military official prompted the president to put it that way -- to avoid further demoralization of the people fighting the war.

Nobody ever uses that word that I ever see -- demoralization -- but isn't that the way to describe what's happened? We have been there 10 years, longer than the Soviets. To be sure, they lost 15,000 people, and killed one million Afghan civilians (that part is so often forgotten in telling the Soviet story). We've lost about 2700 of our own and coalition troops, and not killed anything remotely like this number of civilians; in fact, the Taliban kills 75 percent or more of the civilians, and does so frequently with suicide bombs. (There isn't an official estimate of civilians killed in the last 10 years but there are tens of thousands.)

The Taliban is back in a lot of places, or never left; we gave up trying to burn and stop the opium fields and even fell to guarding them in order to give farmers at least some livelihood so they wouldn't side more with the Taliban; we've presided over various flawed elections and legislative reform procedures that haven't brought anything endurable. Every once in awhile there will be a story about the opening of a women's Internet cafe or something. How long will they last?

There was some talk of trying the soldiers who burnt the Koran in Afghanistan, and the soldier who committed the massacre -- but that won't happen now (the murderer has been removed). An army investigation says the Koran destruction was negligence and not mockery. We'll likely find out that post-traumatic stress syndrome or drugs or alcohol or insane revenge was to blame for the massacre -- already the experts are describing this as a "lone loon" -- like the shooter of Congresswoman Giffords. Remember when everybody thought that shooting wasn't the work of a deranged man, but because of right-wing bloggers and conservative talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin's targets and we all needed to work on our civility?

War is obviously a setting more condusive to such atrocities, and there seems to be a chain of them related to the base where this soldier was trained in Washington. Actually, some of the crimes by soldiers described there happen at other bases -- has anyone really aggregated all the cases from the military and analyzed them? Certainly one trend is clear: suicides are way up.

And again, that comes back to the question of demoralization.  America isn't supposed to lose wars, being the indispensable superpower, but it has before (Vietnam) and should get out of Afghanistan as it is not a just war (which would end war itself) nor bringing anyone any kind of benefits (except for masses of contractors).

The fact is, we couldn't defeat a force that is inhuman, and inhuman particularly to women. We hear so much about "the Republicans' war on women" (an exaggerated fancy) that we forget what a real war on women looks like, as Shirin Abadi reminds us, invoking the situation in Iran and Egypt. But of course not just women; these were people who wouldn't let kids fly kites. I'll never forget the eve of 9/11, in August 2001, when UN workers were describing Afghan children as blue -- from cold and hunger -- and the Taliban as not permitting aid workers to use satellite phones to coordinate deliveries.

There was one OCHA worker who was giving a briefing back then on the awful state of affairs in Afghanistan, and he described attempting to meet and talk with the Taliban to, as he put it, "get their...." And then he paused, searching, in a kind of state of exhaustion (he had just come back from there) for some word. He settled on this: "get their...thinking on this."

"Get their thinking on this" -- a kind of business jargon for a boardroom, something you might ask the ad people to tell you about a campaign. He was trying to be, well, charitable. To try to conceive that there was some kind of "thinking" behind the idea that would find it expedient or necessary to shut off people communicating by sat phone about children suffering from cold and hunger. Who were blue.

Sure, I get it that "the Taliban" is a very baggy concept that includes farmers just minding their business and young teenagers pressed into service as messengers and spies and warlords who are respected for maintaining order -- and whatever.

But I do have to ask -- since Joshua Foust is everywhere on CNN and Al Jazeera as the expert of the hour -- what the hell a political framework would look like with these people, the Taliban? The people who kill 75 percent of the civilians, who grew opium and keep the region and the world addicted, who keep women in sacks -- and so on. Really? Politics? With the Taliban?

Of course, Foust thinks everyone's doing it all wrong (and as they do seem to be, it's easy for him to get a hearing now), and says this:

Put simply, the U.S. never put in place the strategic and political framework to make much headway in Afghanistan. Despite the renewed push for negotiations with the Taliban, there is no political strategy for the country. There is no end state for the war, either -- right now, the plan is to drawdown to about 20,000 troops or so -- similar to troop levels in 2008 -- and stay that way for the indefinite future. That's not a strategy, and it's not a plan.

Because there is no political strategy for the war -- nothing that takes Afghan and Taliban politics into consideration -- the U.S. has no concept of how to manage or react to the political consequences of incidents like Sunday's rampage. That's why the military was clueless in responding to last month's Quran burnings, or to January's Marine urination scandal, or to the "kill team" in Kandahar last year.

Well, that all sounds clever, and it sounds very white-papery and think-tanky to talk about "political frameworks" -- but again -- what sort of "Taliban politics" would you really want to be taking into consideration?

I mean, I suppose you could switch gears and begin paying homage to Taliban warlords and flatter and give them gifts and treat them as worthy equals -- or no, as betters -- like Western officials shamelessly do with, say, President Berdymukhamedov, the autocrat of Turkmenistan, when they queue up for audiences in the palace to see if they can get a drilling permit or even permission for an educational program, or send their doctors or architects or lawyers to play-pretend civil society with him. And...how's that working out? I don't think a single one of these Central Asian potentates have ever been won over by Westerners dropping their scruples and principles -- and minds -- at the doors of the marbled offices.

Taliban politics? Gosh, what's that like, insect politics? I really will have to read Foust's book and try to figure out what that could possibly mean, and if it was so workable, why the other smarties in the DOD or JCOS couldn't have arrived at this "framework" without the tender ministrations of Registan.

The fact is, the US is now in talks of some sort with the Taliban, and I haven't read that they are so terrific. Obviously, urinating on dead Afghans, burning Korans, and now killing children aren't exactly conducive to building political frameworks, such as they may be. Coldly, Foust, along with other IR specialists, tell us this shooting spree "won't be a game-changer" or won't affect the schedule of the pull-out. We're told it's mainly a right-wing (therefore isolationist or non-engaged) notion to urge that the US pull out of the war (like the extremity of Ron Paul, who wants no US troops anywhere).

Curiously, just when you would want the New York Times to investigate more about the criminality around US army bases and how it is exported abroad, or to find out what some of the Karzai administration or secular Afghans think about all this, for some reason they are interviewing the mullahs, and telling us we are all out of touch (just like we are with Kony -- dubbed "My Little Kony" now by the cynical Jon Stewart) for not realizing that Afghans actually think that the burning of the Koran is a worse crime than the killing of the little children and their parents in a village.

This is said to be due to the fact that religion is a higher cause and the dead people are viewed as martyrs and their deaths able to be expiated through the payment of "blood money," which has already been paid by the Afghan government. Indeed, everybody is congratulating everyone else that they're getting through this grisly incident without more demonstrations.

My God, I can't believe the people in that village are feeling so cheerful about this -- they had real tears in their eyes.

Foust chastises the US for not having an "end state" for the war in sight, as if wars are so controllable, and for not having "a plan" for the training of the Afghan military. Well, that strikes me as fairly silly, as of course the US military has specific training goals and objectives which are impossible to meet (i.e. we all know they can't stop the Taliban). The Karzai government's soldiers themselves can't be trusted and turn on NATO, as they did recently when they got people inside the compound close enough to kill our people despite all their precautions. Even if they love the extra pay and learning opportunities, they don't have the drive that the Taliban has to prevail, and that's simply why they don't prevail.

A framework that in any way ceases the rejection of the totalitarianism of the Taliban strikes me as something the US won't accept and shouldn't accept. A pragmatic damage-control transactional exercise where the US says, look, we'll leave, don't get in our way, and don't kill a lot of people in the capital or we'll be back, maybe that's workable, but not likely. No leader of Afghanistan has ever lasted once the invaders leave, history is filled with those examples.

Here Foust contradicts himself within a space of a few days -- for Slate, which is more thinky and edgy, he explains why pulling out too soon is "a bad idea"; for the more mass audience of CNN, he says despite the consequences for Afghans, the US should just pull out.

Why does this man get so much airtime? It's the stream of factology and the faux-sincere and matter-of-fact tone -- and while he has taken off his glasses to stop their twinkle, somebody forgot to tell him to shut off his wired disco tie.

Over and over again we hear from Foust, Registan authors and other "progressive" and establishment specialists that the US is doing it all wrong, that there's some special cultural way they could have done this, that there's some intricate political process they could have established. Huh? This is the Taliban; what exactly is your....thinking on this?

For Salon, Foust fills in the dots a little more, but it's still a hodge-podge of jargon that boils down to one thing: accept the Taliban world view and don't try to fight it on behalf of those Afghans who don't. As for why the war is in a downward spiral, says Foust:

That’s because there remains no political process at work in Afghanistan than can address the fundamental conflict driving the war: a political contest between the current, corrupt government and the insurgency that rejects that government. The current line about so-called reconciliation – the negotiations process, which demands the Taliban accept the very Afghan constitution they’re fighting to upend – doesn’t account for any of Afghanistan’s politics. It is merely a call to surrender.

So, um, do the opposite then, and have the secular Afghans surrender? Or what's the plan?

Oh! I know somebody who has constantly called for not attempting a military solution in Afghanistan, and having a political solution -- Islam Karimov! Then there are think-tank solutions like "The Doctrine of ExpeditionEconomics" (if you have to look it up on Wikipedia  it's probably not going to work in an Afghan village, but Foust of course has a white paper on it -- and it sounds like a Global Amway plan to save the world through entrepreneurship (in places where businesses are a corrupt arm of the state -- great!). Or blaming the government for "poor design" -- when they're under fire from suicide bombers and night attacks from the Taliban -- well, where do you begin with someone who has not fought in a war and thinks there's something acceptable about "Taliban politics"?

But honestly, Faust needs to be pressed hard on what exact principles he is advocating abandoning, how much capitulation he is describing, what demands should be dropped -- in short, just how much a sell-out is being advised here for the sake of "peace"? It strikes me that if we are demoralized and are losing this war anyway, it hardly makes sense to give up our own values and truths -- in fact at least some Afghans will depend on us to uphold them.

 

 

 

Stop the Persecution of Elena Urlaeva

Policeman at the door of Urlaeva's house. Photo by Elena Urlaeva.

Like a number of people who are on Elena Urlaeva's mailing list, I received her "SOS" cry for help on March 13 -- only this time, it wasn't for someone else (she sends out alerts about other victims just about every day) -- it was for herself.

The story was so personal and painful that I wasn't sure it was wise to publish it simply because it was confusing -- and might not help. Of course, she herself made it public to likely hundreds of people, and that's why EurasiaNet picked it up -- but the rendering of it there seemed rather stark and devoid of context (possibly cut by an editor).

I found myself when publishing accounts from Urlaeva, notably during the "suicide student" hoax, that other journalists at EurasiaNet looked somewhat askance at her -- well, as hard-boiled reporters tend to do at the human rights activists -- they're a source, they're emotional, they're biased, they're gullible -- whatever. Not really much of a sense of reverence for their bravery and what they accomplish under terrible conditions. It wouldn't be cool to feel that way.

EurasiaNet is called "advocacy journalism" by some, and it's true that it's a niche, non-profit news service that does have a perspective and an agenda of sorts -- the question is to sort of what it is. There's nothing wrong with that; but it never gets discussed or debated and should.

So what was left out of the story by Ashley Cleek (a graduate of Columbia University in International Relations who has written on Central Asia for RFE/RL and other publications)? Two things -- that this was an actual situation of domestic violence -- and why the Uzbek authorities are finding ever new ways to harass her -- because of the many causes she has taken up.

According to Urlaeva's e-mail, her husband, Mansur Masurov, was in an uncharacteristic drunken rage. He came home from work so drunk and behaving so oddly, that, as she told uznews.net, she thought possibly some other drugs were slipped to him. He didn't just "threaten" her -- she said explicitly in the email twice that he struck her and his 7-year-old nephew, who lives with the couple because his own mother is unable to care for him. And he broke dishes and electronic gadgets and threw them around the house -- so menacing was he that she was forced to call the police for protection. That's the ultimate irony, and of course in Tashkent, they aren't so responsive to issues of domestic violence in general, and for an activist who spends a lot of time criticizing them about their own abuses, barely credible.

Mansur shouted that he was upset that the authorities were persecuting his family, and yelled at his wife to stop receiving all kinds of petitioners and people with human rights protests in their home.

Obviously, the stresses and strains of life with a human rights activist have taken their toll -- it's important to remember that for years, in fact Masurov has been supportive of his wife and their foster child. He has been pressured at work, says Urlaeva, because of her activities, and she believes that the secret police have found yet another way to pressure her -- using the "family method" of pressure for which the post-Soviet and particularly Central Asian regimes are infamous for. They go for whatever vulnerable target there is, especially non-political relatives, and harass them relentlessly, or set people against each other, to be able to silence activists.

The authorities have been threatening for months that they would take the boy away from the couple, as he was ostensibly not being raised properly in an activist's house. And officials have also repeatedly threatened Urlaeva with psychiatric incarceration, which she has suffered before, but after getting a clean bill of health from a Russian psychiatrist, she has fended off the attempts -- at least until now. I fear that now either she or her husband or both of them will be forcibly detained in psychiatric clinics and the boy forcibly placed in state care.

This is all a miserable story -- but let me get to the other point that was let out: what it is Urlaeva does that brings this on her. It wasn't just one case in Namagan, where she was roughed up for attempting to defend some broadcast journalists.

There's a tendency in reading the stories of the pravdaiskateli -- the justice-seekers -- who obsess about fighting for right in these depressing, throughly abusive situations, of seeing them as mere cranks, or at best, holy fools. That does them a disservice. I feel the need to spell this out, especially after going many rounds with Registan commenters who disparaged Urlaeva generically as a regime critic and specifically as an activist who took up the case of the woman who claimed her sister had committed suicide in detention, because it was the right thing to do. She was just as methodical in exposing the story as a hoax.

Urlaeva has accomplished really a heroic amount of stuff. At the time this incident broke out, she and several others were still attempting to march in protest in front of President Islam Karimov's residence to protest his many abuses. At least someone is still willing to do this!

And while you might think this a futile act, there's everything else Urlaeva has done -- chiefly in the last year, monitor, report on, and protest the use of forced child labour in the cotton fields. She has single-handedly done more than any other person in the human rights movement to document and publicize this issue methodically and vocally, even going to pick cotton herself to get the story.

She has taken up a number of cases of victims of torture or persecuted religious believers and various other human rights activists and journalists harassed for their work. It's just not true, as Registan writers persistently claim, that human rights advocates like Urlaeva only take up the "bourgeois" human rights in the capital of free media or association -- the overwhelming majority of her cases are garden-variety economic justice cases -- striking cab drivers, disabled people, farmers.

The focus must remain on the brave human rights work that Urlaeva has taken, and not on second-guessing her difficult situation with her family, under stress, and not on various speculative theories about "what is worth doing" or "what works" with the Uzbek regime. The secret police -- and the regular police -- should protect women when they call and say their spouses are abusive to them and their children, and they shouldn't be trying to put in jail people who legitimately raise human rights cases even at the president's door.

 

 

Uzbek Imam Clings to Life, Police Still Search for Clues, Emigres Radicalize?

 

Uznews.net, an independent emigre news site, has been reporting on the assassination attempt on Obid-kori Nazarov, an Uzbek emigre who lived in Sweden. An assailant shot him several times as he was on his way to noon prayers.

The uznews.net reporter could not get police to tell him much, but retracing the steps of the imam, he said clues might be frozen over with snowfall in the last few weeks since the assault.

Uznews.net interviewed a Swedish journalist who has also covered the story and tried to get information from police, but they are not indicating their lines of investigation.

The journalist believes it could not have been a racist or some kind of extremist from the area, as the police would have likely found him by now. It's a small town, and there are some video cameras in the area. Uznews.net believes that there might be something on a video camera, but they aren't everywhere.

While the town is small, it would be easy to flee from it after committee the murder attempt, the journalist reasoned.

The Uzbek government hasn't said anything, and hasn't denied the claims that it might be its intelligence agency that is responsible -- but then, they never comment on these cases.

Uzbek emigres have been organizing pickets demanding justice.

But the form the protest is taking -- like support for the conservative imam's teachings themselves -- have made some Uzbeks uneasy.

The picketers are raising green banners and shouting Allah Akbar!

They included members of the Popular Movement of Uzbekistan (PMU), an emigre group formed last year from political parties and activists who have been aggressive about their determination to get Karimov overthrown, and while not calling for violence, have been somewhat vague about just what sorts of civil disobedience they might call for. One of their leaders has already been murdered in the Russian town of Ivanovo -- now there has been this attack on Nazarov on February 22.

Abdujalil Boymatov, head of the Society for Human Rights in Uzbekistan, says he also calls for an international investigation of the attack on the imam, and he also believes that the Uzbek SNB is mixed up in it.

Uznews.net interviewed him:

Boymatov says he has some doubts about the intentions and capabilities of the Uzbek opposition in Europe to build a free democratic state in Uzbekistan.

"I first hear the shouts of 'Allah Akbar' in Namangan in 1991 from the leader of the future Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Tahir Yuldash," says Boymatov. And now so many years later, I am hearing them repeated."

"I believe  that the political forces fighting for power should not for any reason use religion to achieve their purposes."

Boymatov says that while the PMU claims they want to build a democratic state, when they come and shout "Allah Akbar," that indicates that they have a different idea about an Islamic state -- you have to look at what they do and not what they say in their program, he adds.

I think Boymatov is brave to raise these issues in not only the leftist political climate he must find himself in Europe, but in an emigre milieu where the tendency might be to say nothing -- especially when someone has been assaulted, likely with the involvement of the Uzbek SNB. But he is worried enough to be frank in his response to uznews.net, and charges PMU members with demanding that secular civil society activists "stand on a path of righteousness" or they will not cooperate with them.

Boymatov also speaks of the "Islamization" of the Uzbek emigre community. Is that going too far? Few follow this closely or critically. He believes that the PMU's invitation to IMU members to join their group was irresponsible, given that the IMU is on the list of terrorists, and was essentially broken up in 2001.

On the whole, all these statements and actions and this latest chanting of "Allah Akbar" in the center of the Swedish capital, at the Reichstat of Sweden (the parliament) in Boymatov's opinion indicates the appearance of an Uzbek Islamic opposition in Europe awaiting its hour to return to Uzbekistan.

Again, I don't know if this is accurate because we'd need more reports. It's troubling, but in and of itself, crying "Allah Akbar" doesn't have to mean that a group is ready to commit violence or terrorism or trying to impose a caliphate. Even so, it's out there... If I were to stand at a demonstration crying "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" would you worry that I was in Opus Dei or something?

Boymatov then concludes, when asked by uznews.net, that he isn't for an Islamic Party appearing in Uzbekistan. Of course, this is where liberals always get hoisted by their own petard. Either they concede the right to association even for Islamists who might end it forever for everyone else, or risk denying it on those grounds and then being called out as illiberals.

I'm for facing it squarely and saying that you need to permit Islamic Parties and call on them not to deny any other parties their right to existence, too.

 

 

Nato and Uzbekistan: Who Really Gets it VERY VERY VERY VERY Wrong?

Islam Karimov and NATO Secretary General, January 2011.

Scott Horton, a US lawyer and specialist on international law, has a first-rate article on NATO and Uzbekistan which was his testimony at a recent public hearing in Germany on the severe human rights situation in Uzbekistan and what Europeans can be doing about it.

He rightly calls NATO to conscience for its dealings with Uzbekistan -- isn't NATO founded on the principle of democratic governance and civilian oversight of the military and basic principles of human rights? By dealing with the authoritarian and abusive Islam Karimov, isn't NATO undermining its own goals? Indeed, it is.

Yes, we get it that this is a relationship of exigency and transaction -- the need to get supplies to NATO troops over land or air through the Northern Distribution Network. Or more importantly, to get the heavy equipment and people out as we've seen more recently.

But does NATO have to gush, and invite Karimov to Brussels? Was that really the only way to get him to cooperate?

Horton then makes an argument I've made in the past in confronting the Realpolitik of Joshua Foust and calling the notion that "human rights have to take a back burner"

I put it more emphatically as describing Foust's argument as immoral, and pointing out that putting democratic principles at the heart of your policy is in fact a moral act, as international law itself cannot force you to do this. There is no UN treaty body that can sanction a state for failing to pressure another state to abide by its human rights commitments, nor could there be in a polarized world. The closest international law comes is with things like the concept of "non-refoulement," not returning refugees back to their persecutors to certain torture, jail or death. There are European nations that have not done even that minimum, as we've seen.

I've always said that the US military officials should call Tashkent's bluff. Do they want to help with stopping the Taliban, or not? Do they want the Taliban and related radical groups to spread to their country, or not? If they really are sincere about "regional security," then, they should cooperate. Uzbekistan deflects this conversation with bromides like, "We are not for a military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan." That's a great sentiment -- too bad the Taliban don't share it.

Not unsurprisingly, because Scott's article was so on the mark, Joshua Foust went into a rage in Registan, bashing Scott and Human Rights Watch for good measure.

Unfortunately, Foust is VERY VERY VERY WRONG about this, to use his own sort of invective. Indeed, whenever you see Foust pulling his VERY VERY VERY business, you know he is lying through literalism (Fisking) and trying to bluff his way out of the Big Lie with a screech. It's like the time he claimed that I was VERY VERY VERY VERY SEXIST, when I dubbed Sarah Kendzior, moderator at Registan who banned me and suppresses others, "an office wife" at Registan for her curious coddling of Foust and others in their illiberal attacks on the human rights movement. Sexist? Except, what was sexist was playing that old subordinate role to an abusive man, not calling out what in fact was a situation that itself was profoundly sexist. Foust slams Martha Brill Olcott in a disgusting post, just like he and others slammed the Russian journalist who reported on Zhanaozen; I come to her defense and I'm banned. Who's the sexist?

In any event, Foust plays the usual game here of trying to isolate and freeze some factlets from the realm where he is said to be an expert

You know, I've never really understood this whole realm of defense analysis, much less the ethically-challenged field of "Human Terrain" Foust comes from. I'm happy to study the issue further. But I have to ask:  how is it that grown men in our armed forces find the need to get "expertise" from 20-somethings or even 30-somethings in Washington-based think tanks who have never spent a day in their lives in armed service, in or out of combat?

I mean, punditocracy and academia are great and all, and DOD experts are a hallowed tradition in our country and provide full employment for our university youth. Sure, we can't just have the military decide everything without civilian involvement, and robust civilian debate is of course required. But when the debate boils down to some specific hardware or military tactic discussion, can we really trust somebody like Foust to know what he is talking about? He has no military rank, even working for a lot of brigadier generals and such at the American Security Project think-tank.

Foust has a number of beefs with Horton which are really philosophical in nature but which he tries to reduce to a "fact-check," like so many "progressives" in our age.

Scott calls out the immoral drone war -- yes, immoral, because drones are in essence immoral, and not merely if you backdate them to the "war on terrorism" policy which is how Foust prefers to do it. Drones have had too many misses and killed too many civilians and it's ok to ask a lot of questions about the ethics involved in them. Says Scott:

NATO’s drone war, which is effectively an aggressive targeted-killings operation, has also prioritized IMU personnel on Afghan soil and in Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan. It’s likely that these strikes involve considerable dialogue between U.S. drone operators, the CIA and JSOC, and Uzbek intelligence, concerning targeting, strike assessments, and impact. In sum, the U.S. and NATO are fighting Islam Karimov’s war for him, at no expense to him, while wielding weaponry far more sophisticated and lethal than anything that Uzbekistan commands.

Foust calls this statement "worrying ignorance or active deception on Horton’s part". Gosh, if Horton has got it wrong, it could only be the result of malicious mendacity, eh? Or ignorance that can't be forgiven and is "worrisome" if it comes from a lawyer and not an expert in "human terrain," eh?

But we actually have no reason to discount what Horton is saying. What, the US never targeted the IMU?! Please. They triumphantly declared victory over it a few years ago when they helped assassinate its leader. You're really, really sure that NATO or US forces haven't targeted and/or killed an IMU figher in recent years?

There are 5,000 Uzbeks fighting in Afghanistan. What, not a single drone or a single campaign is ever, ever supposed to touch them -- and never has? Foust claims that if the Taliban and Al Qaeda are the main targets for NATO, then the IMU is irrelevant. That seems VERY VERY VERY VERY unlikely, Foust! I'm not willing to believe the IMU is the "tiny, marginalized force" Foust thinks it is because he is so wrong about so many other things in Central Asia, always and everywhere diminishing and minimizing the threat of terrorists in this region.

But even if we somehow concede his claims, the idea that the IMU "isn't prioritized" is a silly argument against Horton. The IMU is on the US list of terrorist organizations, and that's recognized by the EU. And the IMU is sometimes fighting together with these other forces, and the whole reason they are even in Afghanistan is to help them win. Hello!

As for this technical "distinction without a difference," -- "NATO is not operating drones in Pakistan or in Afghanistan. They are primarily operated by the United States Air Force in Afghanistan and the CIA in Pakistan" -- the war is always described as "NATO's war". It is a multi-national force that the US has taken great pains to put together to appear as "NATO" and not merely "the US". That's why Canada, Great Britain, Germany and others have suffered terrible losses as well. If the US technically operates the physical drones in this war, that doesn't mean that somehow NATO is uninvolved or can't take credit -- or responsibility. The US drone targets are the NATO war targets.

Says Foust:

The CIA and JSOC do not receive or coordinate on targeting data with the Uzbek security services — Horton initially presents this as speculation but then treats it as factual. It is not. The CIA has its own assets and gathers its own intelligence in Pakistan. JSOC does not operate drones in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan has its own sources & collection. Neither has a need for the SNB.

Horton has covered his back by indeed presenting it as his theorizing -- and it certainly makes sense. What, Foust has personal, inside, credible knowledge that the CIA and JSOC do NOT receive intelligence from the Uzbek government? Really? We're sure? They don't have a need for the SNB? They never, never talk, even informally? That sounds VERY VERY VERY VERY implausible. Sure, it's great if bloggers "get their facts" like journalists, but how do you expect to get something like that from the CIA outside of a WikiLeaks type of leak? It's reasonable to conclude that various bodies of our government do indeed get intelligence from the Uzbeks for a variety of purposes. That's what the transactional relationship is all about.

I also have to pause a minute here and think about the RealPolitik school here. Foust has earnestly spent months educating us to the fact that because of this dire necessity of the NDN, we have to "put human rights on the back burner" and mute our criticism. He implies that the US cannot be constrained by any moral or even international human rights considerations in this "transactional" relationship. So why would these various agencies stop at receiving SNB intelligence?! Makes no sense. In for a penny, in for a pound, I would think with a relationship like that. If human rights isn't the constraint, what would be the reason not to flush as much intel out of these goons as one could get?

Foust claims, "The SNB has not provided the U.S. with intelligence since about 2002 or so. It might be a year or two later but pretending like a thing that happened 8 years ago is directly relevant to new policies today is pretty damned silly."

And he knows that...how? Is this something that the State Department officials in South and Central Asia tell him when they have their chats "about blogging and human rights"?

So the U.S. is fighting its own war. Nor Karimov’s. If the U.S. were “fighting Karimov’s war for him,” it would be targetting the activists, rights reporters, and journalists the regime treats as its primary threat. Not the IMU. So Horton is wrong on that anyway.

No. This is VERY VERY VERY VERY wrong. That's because by arguing a series of narrow points that are refutable anyway, as I've shown, you don't arrive at the conclusion that therefore, the US and NATO fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan isn't in Karimov's interest.

To be sure, Karimov's main war is against his own people who won't cow down to his autocracy. But most of the people he's jailed are Muslim believers. A good many of them are devout religious believers who have done no wrong and have been tortured. Now he has 5,000 of them in thrall, often sentencing them to new sentences as they reach the end of their term. If they started out as unknowing farmers, today, after years in jail and exposure to hardened Islamists, and acquiring enormous resentments over this time, understandably, they do constitute a force just as perilous as the Muslim Brotherhood tortured by the Egyptian prison system and released over the years -- or becoming martyrs. This does constitute a social and political problem. Karimov is fully to blame for creating this problem that he ostensibly was solving in the first place by jailing people outside of strict state controls. Now what? Anybody have any really good ideas how to solve this? I'm for reviewing the cases impartially and releasing as many as possible. And then?

Surely no one would disagree that if extremism is any kind of problem in Uzbekistan, exaggerated or not, it's better to have the Taliban defeated or at least routed some from regions where they can't serve as a magnet for Uzbek extremists or meddler in regional affairs.

Moreover, Karimov has a situation where 5,000 other people were extreme enough to leave their country and go fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That's a lot of people, when you think of it. They are driven not only by external influences that may have trained them but the internal oppression of their own country. If all these people return to Uzbekistan or neighbouring Central Asian countries tomorrow, does anyone doubt they would create mayhem?

So regardless of whether you identify Karimov as the main creator of the problem he needs to solve now with "Karimov's war" which is "fought by NATO," there is a grim reality to it that Foust, as Mr. RealPolitik, should concede. If the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not defeated, and continue to flourish, they constitute a constant bulwark of support and a source of mayhem for Uzbekistan, either drawing fighters to their side on their territories, or spreading into Uzbekistan to destabilize the regime. Any regime. Karimov's, or whoever follows, for better or worse. It's a legitimate national security issue, regardless of whether you have a liberal in charge or a tyrant.

My beef with human rights groups is that they seldom want to concede the very real issue of extremism and terrorism in these countries, so eager are they to explain away the reason for them as the oppressiveness of the regime itself. The regime indeed needs to be dismantled and called on its exacerbation of the problem. Human rights groups don't have a good way of addressing the illiberalism that comes with allowing extremists to flourish, however, and they should -- they could be part of changing the chemistry of these countries if they would be more insistent on enforcing all human rights for all.

Why is Horton accused of "speculating wildly"? He is no more wild in his speculation than Foust, claiming with such assurance that a) the US long since ceased receiving intelligence from the SNB, even though we now have warmer relations than ever and b) claiming that US actions on drones or any other issue are somehow isolated and unrelated to NATO. They're not. NATO understands this better than Foust; that's why they invited Karimov to Brussels.

Foust always deploys a tactic of pretending that he applauds something that a target "gets right" and then skewers him with his "factual mistakes". But the entire attack is unjustified. Horton called NATO to account -- rightly. The technical ownership of drone attacks is irrelevant. The prioritization of the IMU is irrelevant. What matters is that NATO is fighting a war against the Taliban -- and that does a favour for Uzbekistan, as it increases its security and prevents more spread of militarism and terrorism to its soil.

You can have an argument about whether wars actually achieve those goals, and conclude that this one doesn't. But that's not the reasoning Karimov deploys when he mouths platitudes about not seeking military solutions. All Karimov does is substitute the militarized Interior Ministry and National Security Service as the method to deal with the threat rather than war against the region's organized extremists, the Taliban, and their terrorist friends, Al Qaeda.

What will this region look like when the US and NATO troops all withdraw, leaving Karimov and the other tyrants in the region to test their theories of "non-military solutions to conflict"? I guess we'll get a chance to see what that's about soon.

(PS Horton has a two part series here and here with a former CIA agent.)