I didn't get this post published back in May when I first drafted it -- and now I don't think I can find the links and tweets referenced, but given "Omar and Me" and the awful Al-Shabab attack killing 39 people in Kenya in a shopping mall, and the discussion around J.M. Berger, I'm going to publish this now and hunt for the links later.
I also hope to take up a critique of what the new revised Registan management is doing now with a new study of the IMU which looks like -- just as under the old management of Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm -- it also minimizes the terrorist movement and tells us all it won't be a problem.
BTW, Nathan Hamm is now in Portland, Oregon making leather goods or something to sell, and he may be the person from Portland, OR that heckles me on this blog anonymously. He's a creep.
So the old post:
I came across the news of the arrest of Fazliddin Kurbanov, a 30-year-old Uzbek emigre suspected of material aid to terrorists, by reading the snarky comments of two terrorism experts on Twitter.
Like Joshua Foust, Sarah Kendzior and the other authors at Registan. they were snickering at news that came out of Idaho -- Idaho! -- concerning a possible affiliation to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).
These two -- one is @intelwire (J.M. Berger) with many followers and highly respected -- smirked at the invocation of the IMU affiliate as people of this perspective do because they believe it doesn't exist anymore, or its activities are totally reduced, ever since the US killed its leader in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. They only exist outside of Uzbekistan! Or they don't even exist! They are just a Fig Newton of your imagination!
The pair of them joked and said the IOU was an offshoot of the IMU -- you know, like a debt? Harhar.
I interrupted and sent them the link to the story of a female suicide bomber who was said to be related to the IMU, in Pakistan. Her motiviation was said to be an attack on a religious school by Pakistanis.
Ten people were killed and at least 75 were injured, but the IMU doesn't exist, you see. It was just made up by Karimov to exercise his authoritarian powers....
Now, that may very well be true, and maybe some of it is made up and many of the people he has put in jail don't seem to deserve to be in jail.
But the case of Kurbanov, like the case of Muhtorov and his accomplice, seems to be one where these individuals have been properly arrested. It may turn out that the US government cannot make its case against them, but that it had grounds for arrest seems clear.
@intelwire and company can smirk so much at the very thought of IMU in part because it's a male bonding exercise (nearly all the terrorist experts are male) and it's part of establishing the pecking order that says "We're the smart ones, surrounded by idiots". But it also positions them as the savvy ground-breaking innovative thinkers who challenge the status quo of all those hidebound haters of Islam -- whoever and wherever they are. I actually never see them (I don't mean extreme bloggers like Pamela Geller; I mean people in think-tanks who are specialists on terrorism.) The derision about the IMU is nearly universal among those who follow this part of the world, yet none of those making the claims of its falseness ever seem to adequately challenge the FBI or State Department with their beliefs.
Foust went so far as accusing me of helping to put an innocent man in jail with my blog (!) merely because I legitimately researched and published the open-source information I could find on Muhtorov and tried to piece together why the human rights groups in Uzbekistan had rejected him for extremism; why refugee officials in Kyrgyzstan had him pegged as in fact cooperating with police; why some emigres believed he was in fact an agent of Uzbek intelligence (these types of beliefs are common and of course hard to prove) and how it came to be that he spent years in this country, became a conservative Muslim, and then began to plot to help an IMU-related group in Turkey, getting together funds and equipment and planning a trip to Turkey to deliver it (he was arrested at the airport). The case seems to have stalled, as he has been in pre-trial detention more than a year.
The Registanis base their disdain for these types of cases -- which they call "Interneting while Muslim," i.e. people arrested only because they watched extremist videos or any Islamic videos at all -- because they think they are all stings. Many of them are. The FBI offers to sell explosives or weapons to someone they've been tracking, and lo and behold, the person bites, and then is arrested. Sure, stings need to be questioned. But I think the public would probably prefer a sting to take someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev off the street and prevent him killing and maiming people rather than some more ACLU-approved method waiting until first they helped terrorists with websites and Twitter accounts and translations and "Interneting while Muslim," then, it took deadly effect....
Yes, these are very real civil rights problems and they need to be debated. Debating them is not what these terrorist experts are doing, however; they are smugly delivering the same set pieces over and over.
This entire cast of mind of the "anti-anti" -- it's so much like the "anti-anti-communism" -- is one I can only condemn because I think it
has no basis. I think it also represents a close-mindedness that
means that these experts are not willing to take in fresh information,
revise their hypotheses, and listen to something other than their own
well-worn narratives.
BUKHARA, Uzbekistan -- A 6-year-old boy has died during cotton picking in Uzbekistan's southwestern province of Bukhara.
Provincial law enforcement officials told RFE/RL on September 19 that Amirbek Rakhmatov, who was sleeping in a trailer, was suffocated under a cotton load.
The incident occurred on September 15, one day before a university student stabbed four fellow students, killing one and injuring the other three, at a mandatory cotton-picking site in the province of Qashqadaryo.
Earlier this month, another college student died in a cotton field in Qashqadaryo Province after she touched a live electrical wire.
For years, rights watchdogs have accused the Uzbek authorities of forcing schoolchildren and university students to pick cotton, one of the country's biggest exports.
***
This is really awful -- the highest number of deaths related to the cotton harvest I've seen in years.
The very fact of the existence of child labour organized by the state is the root of these deaths -- it's the largest forced labour program in the world, state-controlled, and not due to "family farming" or anything like that.
Children are taken out of school and bused to fields; adults, too, removed from schools, hospitals, plants.
I'd like to think this was "getting worse before it gets better" as there is a lot of attention to the topic, but I fear there just isn't enough political will by the countries intertwined with this evil.
And I have to say Western human rights groups campaigning on this have been limp -- and just never tackle this like they mean business, the way they can do when they want to, oh, get attention to low wages at McDonalds or hate on Wal-Mart for its alleged practices.
Like all leftists and "progressives," they've preferred to focus on the Western companies buying the cotton and boycotting and shaming them, as part of their real target -- capitalism -- and their need to tie bad things to it to discredit it. That's why this never goes anywhere, as the groups involved tend not to take this issue for its own sake, but only as an add-on or to illustrate their overall anti-capitalist thesis. It just doesn't get their juices flowing as deep down, they think there is something vaguely "progressive" about Soviet socialism, collective farms, fixed prices, etc.
They also want to keep Uzbekistan in a pastoral socialist paradise of their imagination, and tend to reject outright any solution that would bring more mechanization or modern agribusiness to Uzbekistan and reduce the need for child labor.
Indeed, in Uzbekistan, the scourge of forced child and adult labour isn't about capitalism, it's about state socialism. Prices are fixed for farmers, they are forced to accept state-mandated quotas, and they have trouble getting loans to get the necessary equipment.
There isn't a free market where farmers themselves could get higher prices and then pay adult labour -- instead of a huge chunk of the male work force going abroad to work as labor migrants in Russia and other nearby countries. People either pay others to work for them in this mandated work program.
The human rights groups also have tended to pull their punches regarding the real way to get Uzbekistan to focus on this: relentless pressure through the International Labour Organisation.
Part of the problem is that Soros, the main human rights funder, and the major US and European groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International tend to be run by elites who in fact don't take up labour rights as a central part of their program, or even with much enthusiasm. And the groups that are labour unions or labour organizers are preoccupied with the US or all the way on the hard left with Occupy like SEUI.
While there has been some advocacy around Uzbekistan at the ILO, when the Uzbeks snowed everybody this year by pretending to go along half-way with some of the ILO demands, and allowed some sort of partial arrangement for a partial inspection, there were just too many groups, mainly funded and guided by the Soros Foundations (where I used to work on this cotton campaign) who were willing to compromise and who felt they had to praise some progress or look too hard-line.
It would have been better to reject this compromise and keep applying relentless pressure until the full demands were met and full recognition of the problem was made.
I can't rule out that this weak response from the NGOs is a function of too much proximity by too many to the Obama Administration which has repeatedly waived any sanctions against Uzbekistan under US law regarding forced labor and trafficking because it desperately needs Tashkent to get goods and equipment out of Afghanistan in the reverse traffic of the Northern Distribution Network. So US officials tell NGOs they'd be more effective if they didn't push too hard and worked for incremental change quietly instead.
But having this compromised half-way house inspection makes no sense to me as it is merely an avenue for manipulation -- like the "monitoring" of the harvest by UNICEF in secret that only enabled the regime to keep the system instant. No, only hard, relentless pressure and maximum publicity can work with this type of Soviet-style regime.
All that will happen is that the Uzbek regime will get to take a star turn as "cooperating" with the "international community" and pretend it is making progress instead of cynically manipulating international groups and screwing over its people.
This story in EurasiaNet takes awhile to explain that in fact this "inspection" isn't really progress -- given the ILO's real demands and the long-time efforts made by the Soros-funded Cotton Campaign to insist on these maximum standards in their advocacy with the US and the EU.
Just as Uzbekistan won't let the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit prisons without their security agent minders to suppress independent examination and expression by prisoners, so Uzbekistan won't let the cotton harvest monitors from the ILO function freely without monitors, as EurasiaNet reports.
And that's why no human rights groups should have endorsed this and should have loudly and forcefully condemned it.
That's what you do when you're an NGO and not a government.
Human Rights Watch signed their cautious welcome, yet their Uzbek researcher still felt called upon to object to the conditions:
Campaigners are concerned that the observers will not gain unfettered access to the cotton fields. “It is essential that monitoring teams be comprised only of independent observers and not include any Uzbek officials,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia Researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org.
Yet surely HRW knows that it's too late to insist on conditions when the mission is already deployed and the bad terms already set. While HRW received $100 million from the Soros Foundations to establish them as the leading human rights group in the world, they should have long ago told the Soros strategists that they were withdrawing from the Cotton Campaign because it was ineffective and wishy-washy when it needed to be strong.
The other thing that Western human rights groups won't do because they're just too damn busy bashing the West and its allies first is mount a concerted campaign on forced labour in Uzbekistan with the governments that really keep Uzbekistan in business in the cotton industry -- Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Western purchases at this point are negligible as most Western companies have pledged not to buy the Uzbek cotton (however, the honest ones not afraid of NGO brow-beating admit that they can't really control their supply when they buy from Asian countries that in turn bought from Uzbekistan.)
They feel like these governments aren't responsive to human rights campaigns, but they've never even tried and they've never tried to find counterparts inside Russia who might make common cause with them.
All of these ills are part of the deep, deep flaws the left has had for 50 years around anything to do with the Soviet Union and its successors and advocacy on universal human rights and I don't expect anything different.
C. Christine Fair is one of the experts in our nation's capital who is hugely credentialed, who has spent her adult life going to school and acquiring numerous degrees and learning foreign languages, and who has even gone to war zones. There's no disputing her capacity. But when I read her Twitter timeline (when I remember to search for it, because I'm blocked now), I have to wonder when and how maturity and good judgement are going to be acquired for such a person to temper knowledge with decency.
Remember when I asked whether Christine Fair should work at the State Department? That was a year ago. She attacked me on Twitter because I had the temerity to call out Joshua Foust's slam of Pussy Riot and cunning defense of the Kremlin as the bad faith it was, and after a bunch of name-calling intoned about me, "She can rumble with the trailer park rabble!" and then called me "cat-hoarding, stalker crazy." I thought that was a horrible way for a future government official to behave -- I'm not sure that she ever got that position, although she might well have - or might not have, for other reasons that unhappiness over her social media outbursts.
Ah well, all in a day's work on Twitter, some of the people are like that in Thinktankistan -- nasty, vicious, snarky, horrid on Twitter -- they cross the street to slam you first, and if you fight back, they then portray you as the problem -- and lob off a bunch of awful insults before they hide behind a block and get all their friends to high-five them for their "troll bashing". Sigh.
I'm not for firing people over Twitter or forcing them to resign. What I am for doing, however, is standing up to bullies and freaks on Twitter who disparage others and questioning whether they are fit for their jobs or desired positions in government in this case - as a means of trying to get some form of accountability from them. It's my hope that asking this compels them or their bosses to bring some moderation of their nastiness.
Of course nothing I say or do will make a bit of difference with a highly-credentialed (and therefore hugely elitist and arrogant personage) like Fair, but still, I think for the sake of decency, for the sake of a more credible think-tank culture and public discourse, I will push back anyway.
Here's Christine this week with an appalling tweet making light of the shooting of 12 people in the Navy Yard by a crazed gunman (!)
For the record, Mr. Alexis (aka The DC Shooter) was smoking hot. Save your howls: I KNOW that's in poor taste. I also thought UBL was hot.
And mind you, I get that these issues are "complicated" and need people with multiple degrees and languages to parse them for us, but I wonder about the product -- if the output tends to be more about how we can empathize better with terrorists and accommodate them, but doesn't in the end provide any context or moral condemnation let alone a path for the West to protect its free civilization from these illiberal fanatics, can't we question the value and values of Thinktankistan?
I put all these tweets next to each other because I think they beg these questions:
1. Why do terrorists who use their religious extremism as a justification to kill people get a Twitter denunciation (rightly!), but an American mass murderer who likely was crazy (and was a symptom of a troubled military over-reliant on contractors) get a creepy joke tweet as if he were sexually desirable? Huh?
2. If Fair feels a great sense of outrage at religious fanatics thinking they have a go-ahead from God to kill people (and we all should), has she in fact put that into her work or is she being overly pre-sympathetic of their religious sensibilities, especially given the propensity for insurgents to mingle with non-combatant worshippers at sacred sites?
I'm quite mindful that the "sacred spaces" in question could be generic sacred spaces for all Muslims that anyone should respect, but I want to put this question. Fair seems to be among those Realists who I find tend to minimize terrorism and work hard to be understand terrorists and Blame America First, judging from her timeline.
So how does that square with her Twitter rant -- and what can we all do about people who think God is telling them to kill people -- either single lunatics hearing voices like Alexis in the Navy Yard, or entire movements like the Taliban who have killed most of the people in the latest 10-year war in Afghanistan from which we're retreating?And I don't blame Twitter here for making it easy for people to spout. I blame a culture of nihilism and flippancy and arrogance in Thinktankistan first.
bbc aljazeera Taliban طالبان Afghanistan افغانستان nuristan نورستان islam terrorism...
As it happens, there are quite a few people named "Fazliddin Kurbanov" in the world. But as this particular Fazliddin Kurbanov has a very heavily used Youtube account with hundreds of videos in Russian and Uzbek about jihad (that would be much harder for him to do in Uzbekistan itself, where Youtube is blocked), and as he mentions Boise in a comment on another person's Youtube account, and even writes in English "I love Idaho" four months ago -- it seems like it is the same person as the suspect. How many Uzbeks with this particular name could there be in Idaho?
Even if it is not, but some other would-be jihadist, it deserves a close study because it seems to be an anatomy of the "self-radicalizing" jihadist -- the Youtubizing would-be terrorist who learns to hate from agitprop videos made in the Russian language by...whoever it is makes these youtubes in Russian (we know the Russian government itself funds iran.ru, so I wonder if the Russian intelligence services also run the youtube jihadist business too in order to annoy the West).
Watch as he lurches from hating Russians and loving Idaho to hating American soldiers and then studying how to make bombs...
I'm going to reject in advance any claim that analyzing the social media of suspects -- whether it turns out to be right or wrong -- is somehow an illegitimate or immoral activity. If you make a public account on social media and put comments and content on it, sorry, but other members of the public will comment on your content, especially if you become a suspect in a crime. If it's not you, but your content draws critical comment -- too bad. Don't go on Youtube then if you don't like being discussed. There was far, far too much net-nannying around the Boston marathon bombing suspects, with the liberal and leftist media being the worst at silencing critical speculation and debate about Islamists and anarchists, and then turning around and indulging it in themselves with speculation about the right-wing extremists.
I have no confirmation that this account belongs to the same person who has just been arrested, but it seems as if it is, and it deserves discussion in any event.
As you can see from this page of numerous videos, Sarah Kendzior's (and the other Registanis') theories of the Russian language disappearing and people preferring only their native Uzbek is shot all to hell. Maybe the behaviour is different in a 20-year-old or a 15-year-old (although I don't see that it is), but in this 30-year-old, we see the classic pattern of the post-Soviet space -- Russian as in fact a lingua franca, often written in Latin letters, used to be able to be understood to more people -- other Russian speakers, whether they are Chechens or Kyrgyz or Russians themselves. The post-Soviet space is a very big space, and the far-flung empire includes Eastern Europe where people also still understand Russian. So this is the language of the Internet, like it or not. You wish people spoke English, and might then be more educated -- they aren't.
To be sure, Fazliddin uses Uzbek too. But he uses Russian more. Maybe it is easier for him to express himself in a language that was one he was forced to learn in school, and it works for the technical things he wants to express -- oh, about how to make ammonium nitrate.
Every youtube you can see in this list is "legal" -- there are none of those blank spaces from where Google has pulled some of the most severe jihadist videos as you can see from Tamerlan Tsarnaev's much smaller Youtube list. This list has numerous violent, hateful videos -- showing American soldiers being killed; cheering on Chechen resistance leaders and terrorists; showing sorrow for Muslims killed and blaming America -- maybe Google isn't as active in removing Russian videos. There are also numerous jihad videos in Uzbek and various classic Islamic videos, i.e. how to wear the hijab, what kind of beard to grow.
What stands out for me in this stream is the hate. Youtube is an infamous place of hate, with people writing the most hateful comments imagineable, but usually they are anonymous. Here's a guy, under his own name, spending hours and hours writing in Russian, with Latin letters, the most vile statements about Russians.
Kurbanov's likes are a strange medley of everything from Power Rangers to jihad videos to news about drones to Chechen warriors.
Drones - License to Kill for example, and a video about the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan -- a number shared from Muhammad Foruq in Albania who also collects Islamist videos with Russian subtitles like this one from the Islamic Jihad Creative Studio Badr-at-Tauhid.
Like the other jihad kids, this guy likes to learn about Free Masonry, the secret society. There are a lot of truck videos, suggesting that like other Uzbek emigres and emigres in general from the FSU, he is driving a truck for a living (Muhtorov did as well).
But most of all, there is the vile stream of hate to Russians.
"Russians are fucked," he wrote two weeks ago. "Chechens are good guys," he wrote about Chechen Diary which is a famous documentary series by the Belarusian film-maker Pavel Sheremet, who himself suffered reprisals in Belarus and Russia for his work covering the Chechen wars.
Most of all, he feels resentment -- to the "new Uzbeks" -- affluent Uzbeks in an advertisement that others admired but which prompted him to say "herd of sheep".
So much does this guy hate Russians -- and official Uzbeks like the president's daughter, Gulnara Karimova -- that interestingly -- for someone who was planning a terrorist act in America -- that he has his to say about the Russian spy Anna Chapman:
Пидаразы а не ученые где вы были 20 лет назад. Говорили абезяны были чумошники руские всё варуют у американских ученых бараны
That's typed in Cyrillic (other Russian-language comments are in Angrusski with Latin) and he uses a term that is a huge insult, with a kind of variation that means something like "You vile pederasts". "Pederast" is usually the term people in this part of the world use for any gay person, not just child molesters.
"You are pederasts and not scientists where were you 20 years ago. They say Russian chumoshniki were monkeys, they steal everything from the American scientists, the sheep."
I see this word "chumoshniki" as in "dirty chumoshniki" on Internet fora in Central Asia all the time and I think it's an ethnic slur based on the word "chum" or nomadic tent or something. Someone in the field may know.
Every other clip has a comment to the effect that "Russians are monkeys" -- a typical insult.
A clip on "Obama's minimum wage disappointment." Let's crank up the mal-adjusted immigrant theme, shall we, because if you are poor, you get to blow up a building!
A number of videos sympathetic to the Chechens, devastated in two Chechen wars, and also about the Soviets in Afghanistan.
"You're a fool," writes Fazliddin about a video on Kadyrov, the Putin-installed head of Chechnya. "You listen to the Russians."
A video on Chechen resistance leader Shamil Basayev, responsible for a number of terrorist acts and killed by the Russians -- Fazliddin writes something like "you Russians come here, we'll fix you."
Here's another sample of his typical comments, this one on a video of a fight between Chechens and the OMON riot police, apparently addressed to the guy who uploaded the video:
Oleg feliks slishay huella. Вы руские отсосали наши хуйи и дасехпор сасете ачем ти гавориш ебан ебаныч мы вас и ваш омон мочем ти смотришь видео вы руские чмошники проиграли все гасни как и раньше гаснули свами уже переписоватся заподло алкашы недоделоные
Oleg feliks, listen, are you fucked. You Russians sucked our dicks and still suck them and you fucking tell us you'll fuck us and your OMON, look at the video, you Russian chmoshniki lost, you're dying out, it's even shameful to take your census, you're pathetic alcoholics.
Te beliy baran poprobuy is za svoyey religiy pojertvovat saboy mi umerayem I ubevaeym vas. Ati chto zbelal bla svoyey religie kazol huy drachil I drachil balshe. A perebacha tak perebelano chto zombi eto ti I nekto bolshe. Kafiri
You are a white sheep. Just try to sacrifice yourself for your religion we are dying and we will kill you. And what have you you done with your fucking religion you goat jerking off a cock and more. [?] You're a zombie and nothing else. Kafiri (infidels).
And yet on another video in this series about the shakhidki (female suicide bombers) he writes matter-of-factly "Because do not fear death as you do." This comment was five months ago; the other one was four months ago, maybe his mind shifted on this issue.
A video about Zhirinovsky -- and more "Russian goats" comments.
The film "Chechen Trap" gets this comment: "Posholti nahuy beliy russkiy baran i ruskiy rab" which is "Go fuck yourself you white Russian sheep and Russian slave."
As with other Russian-speakers in the Islamist set on Youtube, he has both videos with naked women, and quite a few videos showing how to wear the hijab.
Anti-Christian propaganda -- the real name of God is Allah in the Bible, Islam in the Bible, etc.
To Russians who made a propaganda film about how Arabs fighting for Islam on Russian terroritory had been "liquidated," our Idahoan geopolitician has this to say:
vot eto tochnoe dokozatelstvo chto ve obezani a asobeno ti samaya haroshaya i takimi vi i ostanetes poka ne achnetes i ne primite pravdu zasun tvoyu nauku ne sebe v jad a vzad tvoemu otsu i togda uvas budet nastoyashaya evolitciya a karan dlya ludey a ne dlya odezayan
Here is exact proof that you are monkeys and you are especially good and you will remain that way until you come to your senses and accept the truth stick your science up your ass and the ass of your father and then you will have real evolution but the Koran is for people and not monkeys.
And here's some fuel for the argument that US support of the Karimov job fuels jihad -- Fazliddin posts he video, made by a Russian news team, about renewal of US military aid to Uzbekistan.
This video is soley for educational purposes and references and is not by any means used for incitement of terrorism. Or terrorist acts.
Okay...
A film about a thief who converted to Islam prompts the comment, "inshaallah kazakistan stanet islamskoy derjavoe" -- "Inshallah, Kazakhstan will become an Islamic power."
The losses of the Russian army in Chechnya...Shariah courts...more how to wear a hijab...
As for one of the truther videos about how there weren't really planes at the twin towers, our Youtube jihad specialist exclaims:
"vi shto vse sumashetshie eto teroristi neponatno" "What are you saying, are you mad, those are terrorists, don't get it."
As for a video about the murder of Daniel Sysoev, well, that was alright in Fazliddin's book:
vapervih etot chelavek ne svetoe a kazol potomushto oh sam nachel oskarblat musulman tak vam enado chumoshniki i vapsheto russkie narod kak vi sami govarili sozdani iz obezani obezyanii garilla martishka aran gunani ponemaete kto vi
First, this person is not sacred but a goat because he himself began to offend Muslims, you deserve it you chumoshniki and in general the Russian people like you yourself are created from monkeys, you're monkeys, gorillas, chimps, understand who you are
Power rangers...namaz (Muslim prayers...what is it with Power Rangers and Iron Man and jihadists?!
About ten months ago, Fazliddin began to watch more 9/11 movies and movies about how to make flash powder, how to make igniters. How to make ammonium nitrate, and videos of massive explosions...
A video about how to make a car bomb with C4...okay, bring him in...
There is nothing likely more diabolically tempting to the human rights activist's mind (as distinct from the peace activist's mind) than the notion that war -- which is a given, which is legal, which even has rules -- can be made "better" or "more precise" or "more legal" or "less damaging".
And that's precisely the argument that the diabolical Joshua Foust makes to the policy community and the human rights movement which he always seeks to undermine with his latest apologia for drones, "The Liberal Case for Drones".
There's even a feel-good sub-headline, "Why human rights advocates should stop worrying about the phantom fear of autonomy". That's a reference to the idea that if machines are coded to go and do things, human agents will lose control over them, i.e. lose their autonomy, and cede it to machines, which thereby become more autonomous even beyond human agency.
I've written in the past about Foust's immorality on the drones issue here and here and about the problem of so many civilians killed here.
To extreme groups like CODE PINK, to the legions of facile shallow anti-American re-tweeters, it's easy to put Foust down as doing the evil bidding of the Amerikan war machine and discount his sophisticated arguments -- but they're not his audience and they don't matter to him.
Foust wants to convince the technocrats in the human rights organizations and liberal press and think tanks to come around to his way of thinking, and he is already successful in some respects. While Human Rights Watch has boldly started a campaign against "Killer Robots" (like Yoshimi!), there are those in the same international law circles who find the Foustian logic compelling; they think that having a cleaner and more precise way to kill people, given that it actually isn't against international law to wage war if you follow humanitarian law, would be a boon for humankind.
"Lest You Dash Your Foot Against a Stone"
At one level, this parable is worth invoking because it's about a premise that divine (perfect) agency will work right every time and the right angelic interventions would kick in every time, and at another level it's simply about bad literalist arguments that don't take into the complexity of the divine.
In the Bible (Luke 4:9-11), Jesus Christ fasts for 40 days and nights, and then Satan tempts him three times. The first time he suggests Jesus turn a stone into a loaf of bread to show off his powers, and Jesus says "man cannot live by bread alone". The second time he shows Him all sorts of earthly kingdoms that could be His if only he would serve the devil, and Jesus dismisses him quoting scripture about serving only the Lord God.
Then Satan takes Jesus up to the top of the temple and says:
He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
But this time, Jesus doesn't answer the substance of the temptation either literally or spiritually, as he did with the first two, but simply says "You should not put the Lord God to the test."
And what's diabolical about this -- like the idea of the perfect, liberal drone -- is that it's true that the angels would bear up any falling Jesus -- that He could count on, He could go against the laws of nature, or perhaps that would be their fulfillment. But testing spiritual powers in a frivolous and self-destructive manner like this? No, that would be wrong. Jumping in the first place would be a misuse of perfection.
Knowing that many people, even if they hate drones, dislike religion and find parables annoying, let me be less oblique: this is a story about the uses of perfection -- that you don't have to use perfection just because you can, or use it to show off perfection itself. The intellectual temptation that Foust is offering is the lure of perfection which then overshadows the not only commandments like "thou shalt not kill," but precludes an examination of whether a war without the deterrent of war's immediate effects is itself immoral (because it's beyond the reach of the premises of humanitarian law) and a course an examination of intent, effectiveness, and the psychological impact on local people that they simply won't change because somebody's been clever on Twitter.
"A Just War"
In our age of scientism, these arguments that are technically right and technically have nothing wrong with them and don't even have a sacred answer (for example, the arguments of "just war" seem to be irrelevant to the liberal drone advocates if they were efficient in ending war) -- they are the most persuasive.
The three reasons most people think to oppose drones are as follows:
o the program is secretive so you don't know what they're doing, whether they're attacking the right people -- it's under the CIA's management;
o people, even children, are killed accidently and aren't combatants and weren't meant to be targeted
o the people in these countries where drone attacks take place seem least persuaded of all those in the world that a liberal technocratic solution has been conceived justly to solve their problems -- and more insurgents spring up in the wake of those killed by drones.
But Foust answers all these objections and more, and always diabolically replies that if you don't like the wars in which these robotic machines are used, hey, go and attack the "war on terror" policy at its root and don't blame the messenger.
Foust will be happy to say that the program should be less secret, or more careful, or even that it doesn't work so well in, oh, Yemen. But he keeps on finding more and more diabolical justifications to which human rights advocates don't have good objections, and peace activists have even less (they just keep saying war is bad for children and other living things, and who could disagree?)
Jesus could tell the devil that powers shouldn't be tested needlessly "because it's blasphemous" or "you're just trolling me" but he simply says "don't tempt me any more with this stuff because it's not going to work, I won't fall for it". So ultimately, while it may seem pretty thin and not very technically impressive or profound and scholarly, the argument must still be tried that says drones are immoral for all the reasons you can think of if we are to remain human, and not "more than human". Or less.
Agency and Autonomy: Whose?
Foust dismisses the arguments about agency -- the engines of death are too removed from the people who fire them -- by impishly citing examples of weapons such as South Korean guns that can target from two miles away -- which nobody protests. Or indeed one could cite all kinds of weapons with computerized systems, and submarine missiles and so on. Even so, two miles is two miles, and a thousand or two thousand or more are, well, awfully far away.
It's not just about the agency, but the deterrence that you want war to have on the warrior. If they are on the battlefield or in situations where they are wounded or their buddies killed or they see awful scenes, they will want less war, right? Enough of all those atrocities, as they are having in Syria, and people will stop warring on each other, right? Well, no, it doesn't seem so, and there aren't even any drones in Syria. That argument could have been tried in the past, but it works less and less.
There's nothing magical or extra-terrestrial about robots -- they are just the concretization of human will -- for now. That's why I say whose autonomy is a good question to ask. So it's just the will of one set of humans against another, and it need not be made special or fetishized any more than computer programs. They can be criticized; they can be stopped; they can be modified with user imput. They have to be. So you can throw overboard some of the technological determinism by going back to the coder and his absence or morals or the buggyness of the code or the poor user experience (those people in countries who don't like the psychological feeling of drones bearing down on them from the sky).
But that only gets you so far, because like a good solutionist of our time, Foust says the drones are getting better and better, more and more accurate, and they can be made to be more perfect than humans.
Collateral Immorality and More Than Human
After all, he says -- and here the devil is surely at work -- "Collateral Murder" lets us know just how imperfect human beings are when they go about the task of finding an appropriate military target -- armed men -- and shooting at them without harming civilians. Right? Says Foust:
It is a curious complaint: A human being did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, apply the Geneva Convention, or determine an appropriate use of force during the infamous 2007 "Collateral Murder" incident in Iraq, when American helicopter pilots mistook a Reuters camera crew for insurgents and fired on them and a civilian van that came to offer medical assistance.
Of course, using Julian Assange's agitprop (which I totally take apart here) ought to be out of bounds morally all on its own in a debate like this, but such scruples wouldn't stop Foust, although he claims to be a critic of WikiLeaks and claims to have thought Cablegate was harmful.
The problem with "Collateral Murder," however, is that a journalist chose to be escorted by, or to be in the company of, armed men. Journalists endlessly debate whether this was appropriate, but it is a legitimate debate and it is at the heart of the matter -- after all, had they not been, they wouldn't have been killed. It is a battleground, after all. The soldiers in the helicopter in fact rightly picked out armed men -- their assumption that another man with a camera on his shoulder and not an RPG wasn't a combatant was wrong, but it wasn't immoral or a war crime. Reuters doesn't call it that; Human Rights Watch doesn't call it that; only the anarchists in WikiLeaks pretend that it is, for political purposes.
Foust holds out the possibility that in our forthcoming more perfect world, the drones will "just know" that they shouldn't shoot if they see something that they will know better is a camera tripod. Although he never specifies how exactly the more-perfect drones will now be better than error-prone humans (so very Foust!), the only thing I can think of is that the drone will do less shooting if it sees small forms that might be babies, or cameramen's tripods, which their facial-recognition or object-recognition programs will be very good at -- better than humans. Or if the drone can see right through the van, and see that the small forms in it are children. Right? So if they can't lock on the target as exact, they just won't shoot, right? But they don't do that now...
Cyber-Autonomy
Foust then finds experts to fit his theories. First, if you were going to use the argument that drones are too autonomous, Foust would say, oh, but autonomy is on a spectrum -- Armin Krishnan a political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso has parsed it all for you.
If you were going to raise objections about the general tendency of machines to malfunction (which is why you had to simply turn off and turn on again your computer, phone, Xerox machine, etc. today, maybe multiple times), why, that's just not so: Samuel Liles, a Purdue professor specializing in transnational cyberthreats and cyberforensics, discounts your argument, pointing out ""We trust software with less rigor to fly airliners all the time." (In what year do you think they will drop the "cyber" for these phenomena because so little of these things will happen in the real world?)
Yet airplanes do crash, and they don't kill the wrong people when they take off and land normally. Drones are different; they are meant to kill and do. This is ultimately like those stupid arguments that gun-rights obsessives make about car accidents killing so many more people (although of course, cars mainly drive people to their destinations and people are mainly killed accidently) -- or the argument that only four people died in Benghazi but so many more people are killed in fires every day. Yes, these kinds of "persuasive pairing" arguments are ALWAYS stupid at root.
Says Foust, about the tendency of machines to make mistakes -- and maybe these are magnified by death-dealing machines sent from far away:
The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect. Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of recent conflicts....Yet, machines are not given the same leeway: Rights groups want either perfect performance from machines or a total ban on them.
Well, why not? Rights groups are trying to stop the inevitable and they should go on trying. The UN is trying to cope -- it's already too late as lots of powers have drones now and more of the worst kind of regimes will get them, too.
Perfect Assassins
I often wonder why nobody interrupts these kind of arguments of organic morality versus technocratic machinopology by saying: you know, the CIA used to make very carefully targeted assassinations. Instead of sending lots of American troops into a country, where they'd get killed, and the locals would dislike them, and the locals would get killed, they'd just surgically take out one leader, or set things up to take out just one leader, like Patrice Lumumba, and then pull the strings in a government. Imagine if you were to take this debate and put it back in the 1960s or 1970s:
The judgment and morality of individual humans certainly isn't perfect.
Human decision-making is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of
recent conflicts....Yet, CIA assassins are not given the same leeway: Rights
groups want either perfect performance from CIA assassins or a total ban on
them.
Okay then, back to autonomy...
The Singularity
Of course, none of this is without context. We are all going to be living in what Robert Scoble calls the "age of context" soon enough (while he means something more airy about social networks, what it boils down to as far as I can tell is a future where machines do all the learning and remembering for you and serve it up to you through wearables like Google Glass). There's going to be the Singularity, and we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.
Before that, comes the Internet of Things where everything will be wired and talk -- and listen and watch, too. Perhaps in that bright future, you won't even need drones except as a last resort, because the Internet will find that whenever there is a nexus like "fireworks" or "jihad video on Youtube" or "pressure cooker" or "big black knapsack," the door will lock tight or the car won't even start or road blocks will spring up out of nowhere.
Until then, there's Yemen.
Deleted Tweets
And here where Foust's creepy immorality was really on display recently -- and now it isn't.
I was following his tweets and copious re-tweeters one day in February, when he began sparring nastily (as he always does) with a Yemeni activist namedFarea Al-muslimi whose Twitter handle is @almuslimi
I don't know this Yemeni activist's background and I don't know whether he's an extremist or preaches "defensive jihad" but if so, it isn't visible. He appears to be a man who is simply disturbed by the extrajudicial executions the United States is perpetrating in his homeland, and that seems legitimate, whatever his back story might be.
Al-muslimi gets into a Twit-fight with Foust, who is merrilly going his usual drone-apologetics way and tweets:
almuslimi Farea Al-muslimi @joshuafoust @gregorydjohnsen 8- stop ALL u r dn pollitically in yemen. 9- every place u shot drone, go build hospital/school.
Some other people chime in and say "stop tweeting from your couch about our country, you dont know anything".
Foust then savages the guy as if there is something false about the aposition of drone-killings versus school-building simply because the American miltiary does both.
I remember being appalled at the intensity and viciousness of this exchange and I wanted to copy it and put it up on Storify as a very good example of just how nasty Foust can be -- as any of us who have Twit-fought him know for a fact.
But when I went back through his feed now, it was gone. He deleted the tweets. In fact, he shows only two tweets for all of February. Now, it's possible that there's a glitch on Twitter. But I think they're gone.
An indirect evidence of them comes from the fellow cc'd -- @gregorydjohnsen -- who writes a tweet about how he regrets their fight because "both of them are smart guys" -- although Foust was most assuredly nastily to this guy who had the upperhand street-cred wise as it was his country where the drones were falling.
One of the more poignant things he said was:
u can't train me on rule of law wth ur right hnd - USAID- & shoot me without a court by ur left hand- drones.
Well, exactly. Who couldn't put it better? But Foust lobbed off something nasty about false apositives again -- now deleted.
What journalists are saying about #Yemen on Twitter - Muck Rack
for those who enjoy these things: @almuslimi & @joshuafoust are currently having a twitter argument abt US counterterrorism policy in #yemen · February 28 ...
Why would Foust erase those tweets? Did he have a change of heart that he was so nasty? But he's nasty in exactly the same way to so many people...
No, it's merely because suddenly, Al-Muslimi was hot. He actually came from Yemen to the US to testify in Congress. Now, Foust was sucking up and re-tweeting:
RT @Yemen411: Farea @almuslimi having a moment before he speaks @ the Senate Judiciary hearing on drones in #Yemen http://t.co/gqtMzA4krY
He even acknowledged that they had "disagreed" but that he was impressed with him.
Well, Twitter. Whoever looks at past Twitter streams? You can't put your foot in the same stream twice... And @almuslimi likely doesn't care about this anyway, as he has much larger problems to worry about. I can only say, I saw what you did there...
Human Rights Drones
Meanwhile, Foust assures us that drones are veritable instruments of human rights compliance: "In many cases, human rights would actually benefit from more autonomy -- fewer mistakes, fewer misfires, and lower casualties overall. "
Yet I'm not persuaded about the auto-magic way in which we get these precision targets that first depend on HUMINT and even re-checking from the ground.
And while Foust doesn't concede it or even mention it, it seems to me the precision and human rights capacity could only happen if the machines are programmed not to fire if they get to a house and see that the terrorist target is surrounded by his wife and children. Right? Is that what he means? Because isn't that really the problem, the only way you can get these people more often than not is by attacking them in civilian type of settings because they don't stay on the "battlefield," whatever that is.
That's why there is a total illusion here, regardless of autonomy and precision -- it's not really about the drone itself. It's about the need to be precise *in a civilian setting* and only blow up somebody, say, in a car on a road, not when they reach a farmhouse.
"It Should Not Be"
In any event, the technocrats will never be satisfied with emotional answers, but in politics, the psychological matters. Sen. Markey is running for office again, and when the people of Boston let it be known that they didn't want Tamerlan Tsarnaev buried in their state because they had already been convinced he committed the Boston marathon bombing, Markey didn't say, as a good liberal Democrat, "we must be civilized; we must properly bury even our dead enemies"; instead he said "“If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried
on our soil, then it should not be.” And that's how it was, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Virginia. There's all kinds of things Markey could have said to try to lead and to educate -- he didn't, not on this.
Ultimately, the arguments of drone apologists are about emotions, too, because they say that the concretized will of one set of people in the form of automated robots should prevail over other sets of people who feel they should not be used and they are immoral. And it's the lack of democracy and due process as much of the emotional and spiritual feeling of revulsion that matter in the political mix of how these weapons will be controlled; overriding those very real considerations and feelings is illiberal, especially when the goal is to prevent the killing of innocents.
In his testimony, Al-Muslimi speaks to an interesting problem -- the lack of knowledge by local farmers as to why some leader is being targeted -- they may not associate him with terrorism -- and the fact that their own local security chiefs are connected to him and doing business with them. They are angry because they could have been accidently with him when the drone hit; they also feel they could have arrested him and questioned him about his wrong-doing and made a more careful and durable solution. In fact, their own security chiefs in cahoots with the terrorist were the problem -- there was a texture and layers to this story that even the smartest drone couldn't figure out; what, it's supposed to hover while people hold a town meeting?
Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, recently gave a talk at Nazarbayev University on April 23 when he visited the region.
Watch it, it's interesting. For one, you can see the Administration seems to be a bit more foreward-leaning on human rights issues although it would be better if it were more robust.
Blake says in response to a question about the low level of press freedom in Kazakhstan and the closure of the independent newspaper Respublika (which now comes out on Facebook), that this is part of a regional trend of "more constraints for civil society as a whole".
All this work for years by the US in "nation'building" in Afghanistan and regional involvement -- and this is what we get: a situation that Blake acknowledges is ""quite risky" at this "sensitive time" for what's happening in Afghanistan and in Russia.
"We have to reverse this trend," he says, although it doesn't seem at all clear how that could be done, and if more freedoms are allowed, in the long run this will be more stabilizing. He gave a nod to religious freedom as well as press freedom and freedom of association.
Blake says he "conveys privately and publicly in both Kazakhstan and elsewhere" US concerns about human rights.
Asked about whether there was a reluctance by US universities to partner with the state-run Nazarbayev University, apparently in reference to a magazine article (which I don't know), Blake insisted that the US favoured exchange.
"We strongly support these kinds of exchange programs,"he said and spoke of his own experience studying at university with foreigners with whom he remained in touch years later.
Although this meeting took place after the Boston bombing and the arrest of two Kazakh students, it did not appear -- at least from this session where the case didn't even come up -- that there would be any lessening of exchange opportunities for Kazakhs. If anything, Blake called out the Central Asian governments for curtailing opportunities for their students to go abroad, because they were afraid they would "bring back ideas to try to change their societies". "We will continue to strongly support and advocate for these programs," said Blake.
There's a huge fear and even hysteria around this issue -- in part fueled by pre-anticipatory fear-mongering such as has come from Casey Michaels on Twitter. I've repeatedly challenged him on his claims that there is any kind of hateful stereotyping of Kazakhs as a result of these arrests. I just don't see it and I have no reason not to see it if is is there.
Even so, there is likely to be more careful checking of these applications for visas and the travel of Kazakhs as anyone else coming from any country associated even in a small way with terrorism, given that one of the students returned to the US even though he was expelled from his university for non-attendance and shouldn't have had a valid student visa.
At Otar Military Range, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Nursultan Nazarbayev attends combat parade in honour of Fatherland Defenders' Day. Photo by akorda.kz.
Every time you see the pro-government Russian media come up with headlines like this, you have to ask whether the Kremlin is manipulating the story in order to place pressure on the given stan to extract some concession. What's up? Nazarbayev is continuing to make public appearances and seems sturdy enough.
On the other hand, Nazarbayev, among the longest-running Soviet-era dictators, is getting on in years, could reasonably be said to be suffering ailments. So planning for the end and the transition government is prudent.
With Kazakhstan subsidizing some of the think-tanks in Washington that might cover it more critically; with Registan providing either strangely positive or pseudo-critical coverage of Kazakhstan; with even the far more-critical EurasiaNet lapsing into praise of Nazarbayev university and human interest stories too often; it's hard to know what's really happening in Kazakhstan. The independent press is suppressed; journalists and opposition leaders are jailed.
Yet this headline in fact comes from coverage of a critical report from the Almaty-based think-tank Institute for Political Solutions. Someone else can tell me how they think this institute leans politically or what its backers are but it seems to produce relevant, critical material (it wouldn't exist if it were too critical so it has its limits).
Meanwhile, some highlights from their interesting report:
o A large number of social protests in small and medium labor collectives mainly connected to delays in pay;
o unpopular government initiatives, i.e. reform of the pension system by having citizens of employment age make forced contributions to pension savings -- accompanied by law promoting the hiring of older persons;
o increasing rumors of Nazerbayev's ill health and uncertainty about the transition process;
o "exit of share holders from the largest Kazakhstani companies"; revival of initiatives to sell the controlling shares of ENRC and possible exit of Vladimir Kim from Kazakhmys;
o plans for hiring 18,000 people in Atyrau region in Tengiz oil fields and finding jobs for 12,000 people fired from factories -- which lets you know about great dislocations in the society.
So, people have demonstrated:
o About 1,000 people took part in a peaceful two-day protest in Jalpaktal in Western Kazakhstan over moving the administration of the district Karas to Jangal which will deprive them of water access; earlier Jalpaktal lost its status as "district center" and therefore lost work places and budgets for social services.
o Merchants at markets in Almaty protested judicial enforcers who sealed all their containers in their absence on the weekend. Authorities said they were enforcing fire safety regulations passed last November after failure to comply. The move affected 43 markets. Since these regimes use fire regulations to stop all kinds of political and commercial activity randomly and capriciously, it's hard to know what this is really about; it could really be about fire safety or it could be about not getting a sufficient cut from the market mafias, I just don't know, and await others' research.
o Plumbers and electricities went on strike in Astana because they hadn't received their pay in three months.
o A strike of builders on the Western Europe-Western China transit corridor; 600-700 workers said that labor regulations were violated, and they were not being paid overtime or getting sick days and being forced to pay for repair of machines o ut of their own salaries.
o Other strikes in Akyrtobe because pay was not received for four months.
And so on. All of these problems sound like symptoms of a state that is too involved in the economy. On the other hand, it's a vicious circle, because if the state subsidies and state controls were lifted a lot of these giant enterprises would rationally shrink or die creating more unemployment and unrest. It's the dilemma of all the post-Soviet countries caught between impossible-to-implement socialism and impossible-to-get-working-right capitalism.
Then you get lovely ideas like this: the akim (governor) of the North Kazakhstan region Samat Eskendirov has decided that the way to get those plants not releasing wages to their workers is to confiscate their land. That sounds like a great solution *cough*. The explanation is that fines over delayed wages were not effective. "At the same time, the akim's iniaitive provokes questions regarding the legal justification, and aside from everything else, lays the ground for raiders seizures of business." Indeed. Why don't plants pay their wages? Well, maybe their wage fund is in Cyprus or something, but it might be that they don't have the profits to pay the excess employed -- again, I await further analysis.
The Communist Popular Party of Kazakhstan in Almaty demonstrated agaginst a fare hike on public transport, high utility cuases and lack of day care places. Communism persists in a place like Kazakhstan with possibly unreasonable socialistic demands because the oil wealth doesn't trickle down. Now I wonder why that is...
When you see deals like this, you have to wonder how serious America is about investing in the New Silk Road -- which is how the State Department describes the concept for "prosperity" in the Central Asian region after the withdrawal of US troops in 2014.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that "the New Silk Road" merely means NATO traffic and business through Afghanistan. It's also the rest of the old Silk Road of the ancient caravan-serai in the countries of Central Asia like Uzbekistan.
That's where South Korea has just signed a $3.9 billion deal to build a gas complex, according to trend.az:
Kogas signs agreement for $3.9 billion gas-chemical complex - Trend.az - The
Government of Uzbekistan and South Korean Korea Gas Corporation (Kogas)
signed a direct agreement on the construction of the Ustyurt Gas
Chemical Complex
Or look at China, which has $15 million just in Jizzak:
Chinese companies implement $15 million worth projects in Jizzak SIZ - Trend.az - Jizzak SIZ was created in March of this year according to the decree of the President of Uzbekistan.
I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea for American companies to invest in this region, given the corruption and massive human rights violations -- which in fact are not good for business, as the same corrupt institutions that violate people's civil rights to stay in power are the same ones that take bribes or suddenly confiscate your investment; they are intertwined.
The State Department can't really avoid reporting these bad things about the poor investment climate in Uzbekistan where Oxus Gold saw its stake confiscated and were forced to leave at a loss and where Turkish companies have been hounded, suspected of fueling religious extremism, and expelled, and there have been other debacles, for example, the Germans not getting their debts repaid. W
GM sold 121,584 vehicles in Uzbekistan last year, making the
country the eighth-largest market for its Chevrolet brand. The
joint venture produced more than 225,000 cars last year and will
raise output to 250,000 units this year.
At one level, if it keeps the company in buiness, even if the jobs go to Uzbeks, it's a plus.
But on the other hand, the reality is, China, South Korea, even India are investing more in this region and apparently looking the other way when it comes to corruption and human rights problems that ultimately will haunt them. They are spending large amounts of money. And this is now a foreign policy fact of life which means that as the US "pivots" toward China for reasons I can never really grasp, they will find themselves with the harsh reality that the regions of the world that they think are "pacified" or "taking care of themselves" or merely "withdrawn from" are what are being Asia's powerhouse.
And maybe the job is just to provide a bulwark to Central Asian leaders -- who in the long term may become better as the tyrants age out -- so they have choices besides being taken over by China -- and of course, have a hedge against Russia, which has also had its failures in a region increasingly turning anti-Moscow:
Not every foreign investor has met with success in
Uzbekistan. Russia's top mobile phone operator, MTS,
which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has written off
$1.1 billion after its Uzbek licence was permanently revoked on
Aug. 13.
There's a certain lobbying force in the US which seems to be over-friendly to dictators -- and gets its way despite the objectsions of human rights groups and even others in government. Says the Asia Times:
It was reported that the American business
delegation, headed by Carolyn Lamm, chairwoman of
the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce
(AUCC), and including representatives of over 30
US companies such as Boeing, Solar Turbines,
General Motors, Merk, General Electric Energy,
Anadarko, Zeppelin International, Case New
Holland, Nukem and others, attended the business
forum.
Lamm is former head of the American Bar Association and you wonder why she doesn't get more challenge from her colleagues in the ABA, but then, the ABA is not really a human rights organization but a vehicle to expend USAID money for "training" that usually enriches US contractors.
Senior Uzbek government officials
in charge of the economic sector, including
ministers of finance, the economy, foreign
economic relations, investments and trade and
other high level officials, were also in
attendance to brief their guests on the state of
Uzbek economy and to discuss possible investment
and economic cooperation.
The forum has
been very successful, according to Uzbekistan's
National News Agency, as the two sides reached
understanding on 21 economic and investment
projects covering areas such as machinery, metal
processing, energy, oil and gas mining,
petrochemicals, electrotechnical processes,
uranium mining, pharmaceuticals, and others, with
a total value of US$2.8 billion.
Obviously, if the total value of US projects here is $2.8 billion, that doesn't even equal one project from South Korea noted above.
Fozil Mashrab at the Asia Times last year interestingly said that Uzbekistan's "look East" policy seeking investment from places like South Korea or Malaysia was only a function of Western reticence, given that the West suspended ties with Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre, when hundreds of people were gunned down by Uzbek troops for protesting injustices in 2005 after an opposition jail-break in which police were killed.
But even though the US restored ties and even some forms of military aid, subject to review, it hasn't stopped the "look East" policy in fact, which I think was never going anywhere.
Why does the Russia media print stuff like this speculating that the US is about to go to war with Kyrgyzstan?!
If you ever wonder why Eurasian exchange students and new immigrants in America acquire the views they do, ponder the media they read all their lives, were satured with, and still read and believe -- it's filled with deliberate lies and tendentious bullshit endlessly inciting hatred and suspicion.
The Kremlin is the worst of the provocateurs in this business, and the old Soviet disinformation and "agents of influence" apparatus was never dismantled. (Yes, the Daily Mail with its fake story about Saudi reports of involvement in the Boston bombing is right up there with the disinformation, but in their case, it's about sensations to sell newspapers; in the Kremlin's case, it's a state policy to lie and distract.)
The way these pieces always work there is "plausible deniability" because the Russian outlet is always citing an "expert" from one of the many state-sponsored think-tanks, or even a "Western expert" from among their likeminded networks, or even "sources" close to the government.
Today, the Russian wire service regnum.ru, which seldom departs from the official Moscow line, has a story with the headline "Plane Crash: US May Declare Kyrgyzstan as 'Outlaw' and Bring in Forces: Opinion," citing Kirill Stepanyuk, a commentator from comment.kg
Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan a country of a unrestrained terrorism and introduce US troops into the republic. We cannot forget that for the USA, Central Asia is a strategically important region and now there is the urgent issue of the withdrawl from Kyrgyzstan of the American military base, the same base from which the plane that crashed took off.
The Times published a picture of the crash site yesterday and quoted US officials as saying the reason for the crash and the status of the five crew members was still not known.
The Times cited an eyewitness who said that local authorities blocked off the site:
The news agency cited a local official, Daniyar Zhanykulov, a deputy
head of a Kyrgyz political party, who said that the open parachute was
on the ground near the site, but that police officers and firefighters
found no sign of the crew.
“It’s a horror, what’s happening,” Mr. Zhanykulov said, according to the
report. “There are no signs of people. The prosecutor and police
blocked off the area. And the rubble of the plane is burning. This is a
mountain area, and fire trucks cannot work.”
But according to the Russian "specialist" at comment.kg it was all different:
Really, in the first minutes after the plane crash, there was contradictory information with regard to the fact that at the site of the crash of the fuel plane, neither brigades from the Emergency Ministry nor police and even ambulances were allowed near the sight. Supposedly the territory was surrounded by American military." Whether that was true or not will hardly be able to be established since practically immediately followed a rebuttal of this information. If you reason logically, the Americans learned about trouble on board the fuel plane immediately and after they got an SOS signal likely sent their military people to the fallen liner.
Of course, it's possible US troops got to a plane that had just taken off from their base a few minutes earlier than local first-responders but I think more than just the American side of this story has to be questioned.
This crash follows a crash in Afghanistan in which 7 people on board a plane were killed after taking off from Bagram, and "no enemy activity" was reported in the area. Naturally, two planes like this crashing in the same week seems like sabotage, and yet, given the rush with which the US is trying to get troops out of Afghanistan and all the ensuing difficulties, fatigue and nerves and the negligence that comes with them could also be part of the background to these accidents. Or they could just be accidents.
I don't recall an American military plane ever crashing before in Kyrgyzstan, given the probably thousands of flights that have come out of that based during the Afghan war. Kyrgyzstan is like other post-Soviet countries with quite a few plane crashes in its record, but this was a plane piloted by Americans from their base, presumably.
This Russian story is not above trying to fan the flames of in fact non-existent ethnic hatred toward Kyrgyz, merely because the Boston bombers happen to have been born in Kyrgyzstan, as Chechens in the diaspora, although they left more than 10 years ago. Kyrgyzstan appears to have little to do with the Tsarnaev family, other than the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev managed to hang on to a Kyrgyz passport and use it to travel to Dagestan undetected supposedly even by Dagestani officials - a story that I think needs more research and more explanation -- and those implying that questions and criticisms here are about the Kyrgyz ethnos should knock it off, as it's about the Kyrgyz government, often pressured by Russia, and that's about something different.
As eyewitnesses describe, the fuel plane began to disintegrate in mid-air and exploded at a height of about two kilomters. Kowing that the USA will contrive to draw some advantage even from terrorist attacks, even in this story some underwater rocks may suddenly appear. Not so long ago, after the explosions in Boston, in the USA the question began to be hyped at length athat the death-dealing "pressure cookers" were prepared by natives of Kyrgyzstan, the brothers Tsarnaev."
This is fake, as there isn't a single news story in the American press, even in tabloids that sensationalized the story like the Daily News, claiming these were "Kyrgyz" -- it was always explained even for the geography-challenged American public that these were Chechens who happened to be born in Kyrgyzstan and left. Kyrgyzstan has as much to do with this story as the Seven Eleven chain store where the bombing suspects bought their Doritos and Red Bull, breakfast of champions.
Stepanyuk went on to say that the Americans "most likely will not miss a chance" to claim that a missile downed the plane (although there is no such claim) and that they are "capable" of even "sacrificing a plane" for this purpose (and of course the people on it, which of course is an outrageous implication).
"Washington may declare Kyrgyzstan an outlaw country of unbridled terrorist and introduce their forces into the republic."
American troops are there already on the base, of course, but there's absolutely nothing like that implied by US officials or even intimated by the big critics of the US involvement in this region.
EurasiaNet is back to putting falcons on the front page in a week of plane crashes and suspects in the Boston bombing tied to this region, they've either run out of copy or they've decided that this sort of "costumes and colourful objects" folk approach to the region is just the sort of "human interest" their readers are looking for -- presumably because they don't get enough of it from National Geographic.
Bug writes that the last crash of the KC-135 was in 1991 and fails to explain it wasn't in Kyrgyzstan, then links to Wikipedia, which actually says the last crash was in 1999 and in Germany.
With the arrest of two Kazakh students for obstructing the investigation into the Boston bombing, scrutiny has now moved from Dagestan to Kazakhstan. The two young men, age 19, from the University of Massachusetts, are charged not just with hiding evidence -- a backpack and computer -- related to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; it has also been reported that they heard him brag about how to make a bomb a month before the marathon.
The following are various notes I've collected on the subject. I remain dedicated to open and intense debate on this subject, unhindered by concerns of political correctness. Of course there's nothing wrong with studying the Kazakh connection in this case because it is the post-Soviet culture of this space, funded in part by our government, that led to two people lying about evidence in a bombing in which 3 people were killed and 280 wounded, many with lost limbs.
The Kazakh angle in the story of the two Tsarnaev brothers, Chechens who had lived in the Chechen diaspora in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan before emigrating to America, first surfaced in two places in the early days after the Boston Marathan Bombing:
1) In the business connections of Ruslan Tsarni, who is reported to have worked in the oil and gas business in Kazakhstan and also worked for Mukhtar Ablyazov, the prominent Kazakh banker opposed to the Nazarbayev regime who fled abroad -- even giving testimony on his behalf in a London court. Joanna Lillis of EurasiaNet has provided the most detailed account of what these connections are and what they mean and ultimately pronounces them "tenuous". I agree that the connection at present appears attenuated, but that it is worthy of scrutiny and debate precisely because we still don't have confirmation of what actors where might have influenced the Tsarnaevs.
2)In the dorm mates from Kazakhstan with whom Dzhokhar was friends and with whom he hung out after the bombing in an apparent effort to make a semblance of normality. Their relationship to Dzhokhar discovered immediately by "the Internet" in his Vkontakte account, along with pictures showing them together, were intensely scrutinized, along with the account on Twitter and elsewhere of Junes Umarov, another Kazakh youth who does not appear to be a direct relation of the Dagestanti terrorist leader Umarov, as it is a common name in this region.
Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were
charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by plotting to dispose of a
laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to bombing
suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorney’s office said in a
statement.
This is certainly grounds for discussing any involvement of jihadist groups within Kazakhstan in the bombing, although at this point no links have been proven, there isn't much of a jihad in Kazakhstan, although it's still a significant challenge to the regime there. And as I've said throughout, rather than merely trying to extrapolate what we know from every other Islamist bombing and try to pin this on Islamism in the Eurasian region, which may not fit, we shouldn't discount another angle -- revenge of business/crime circles close to the government unrelated to Islam, or perhaps using Islam as a cover -- or even a craven motivation of large cash payments for performing a hit for some other criminal or extreme group.
The diagnosis of one anonymous Twitter commentator, "Lin," regarding these second-generation privileged children of Kazakh state businessmen is that they are "stupid, spoiled, irresponsible, immature princes playing jihad". Well, I don't know whether to call them sovki (the perjorative term sovok means dust-pan and also Sovietized dimwits loyal to the government) or zolotaya molodezh -- the Soviet-era term "golden youth" for the children of parents in the nomenklatura, or Party approved list of top officials.
What I don't know is whether I can call "princes" young men whose fathers seem to run things mainly in...Atyrau.
Murat told Tengrinews.kz
that Dias and Azamat Tazhayakov, his son’s friend, that the only
violation his son could have committed was an immigration violation.
There was a connection between the two and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, according to Murat.
“They used to have common friends, they knew Tsarnaev and hang around together sometimes,” he said.
MOTIVATIONS FOR EURASIAN DICTATOR INVOLVEMENT?
So let's start from the top down to see if leaders in this region could have any reason to spite the US and be directly or indirectly responsible for this heinous act -- a line of debate I think is merited given the considerable propensity of all four of these regional leaders - Putin, Kadyrov, Abdulatipov and Nazarbayev -- for presiding over systems variously persecuting, torturing, jailing and disappearing their own citizens at home and even abroad.
The possible motivation of Putin-appointed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for conspiring in the bombing could be his inclusion by the US Senate in the Magnitsky List of sanctions, although this angle is unlikely ever to be proven and does not have any evidence to back it up so far except a hunch. It's also possible he was letting nature take its course out of spite (also not yet proven as the Dagestani authorities were immediately responsible for letting Tsarnaev trough the cracks).
The motivation for Nazarbayev doesn't immediately present itself even with a contrived conspiracy scenario, although perhaps he was gaining revenge specifically against Uncle Ruslan for his support of one of Nazarbayev's main opponents -- but it's a stretch why that would involve scripting a caper with Tsarni's nephews involving Kazakh boys that he doesn't appear to have any reason to harm to make some point about the need for a greater security state. There also doesn't seem to be a reason to set up these boys and have them participate in this anti-American act to get anything out of America; it already has plenty close relations with Washington and would likely not want to jeopardize them over something like this.
What's more important here is not finding some facile, direct mechanism of terrorism in a particular group or plot -- which the FBI is going to be better at finding, hopefully -- but understanding the overall post-Soviet milieu as dominated by Putin, and the role of him and his crony tyrants in Central Asia and the Caucasus in conflict generation, the seed-bedding of extremism, and corruption -- all of which pose a threat to America at home and abroad. The violent and broken culture of the Soviet Union -- the gift that keeps on giving 20 years later and will for generations to come -- is what we have to counter both with public diplomacy and with realistic deterrence if we don't want these kinds of tragedies to occur.
AZAMAT'S FATHER, AMIR, BUSINESSMAN WITH NAZARBAYEV'S BLESSING
The Russian-language Kazakh press has published an account of one of the suspects and his father. According to newskaz.ru citing a local newspaper Ak Zhayyk and other sources, the suspect Azamat Tazhayakov was born in Atyrau and studied in Astana, now the capital. His father is Amir Tazhayakovich Ismagulov, chairman of board of directors of the Abylaykhan Group and a deputy of the local assembly in Atyrau. (Business and polics are often more openly connected in these countries).
Here it's also relevant to ask why 19-year-old Azamat is using as his last name in his passport not his father's last name, which would be the normal custom, but a version of his grandfather's first name, or patronymic, which is the patronymic of his father, Tazhayakov. Perhaps some Kazakh expert could explain this better, but usually the sons have the same names as their fathers, and their father's patronymic, which in any event is a Russian custom and is Russification of the Kazakhs. Unless I'm missing something, Ismagulov isn't such a famous name such as to require disguising. To be sure, I've seen Kazakhs be referred to as "grandfather's grandson" if they want to reference a rich ancestral history, but I await more precise explanation for this curiosity.
Lin (@dutt155) tipped me off to this article, commenting, "here's the rich little father" of the suspect. I'd never heard of him and while he may be wealthy, he doesn't seem to be oligarch material, and frankly, if he were wealthy, we wouldn't find him still in Atyrau going to assembly meetings in between hard days at the office of the Abylaykhan Group.
In an interview on April 26th apparently before he realized that the charges would be more serious than just overstaying a student visa, Ismagulov said, "Everything is fine with them. I'm flying to America and I will provide all details when I return back home to Atyrau." Yet I haven't heard of him having arrived in the US, or at least he's not talking to the press.
Another article from 2011 in the Kazakh press at caspiannews.kz throws some light on how these countries work -- the president controls everything, or at least pretends to control everything as a populist maneuver, and is in the curious position of having to rein in his own considerable army of bureaucrats who savage the independent business sector, seeing it as a threat to Nazarbayev's power just to allow any business at all to succeed. Paradoxically, Narzarbayev had to relax the relentless inspections of business and let it thrive again, so that the kleptocratic state at least has something to rob. It's a bizarre situation at times, and this anecdote involving the father of a future suspect related to hiding evidence in the Boston Bombing, had this strange incident occur to him.
Nazarbayev made one of his "walkabout" visits in the country, where he and his retinue dramatically go about righting wrongs and improving roads or opening kindergartens and hospitals and helping the little guy against evils -- evils that paradoxically come from the very system he presides over as iron ruler. The image is of Lenin and the petitioners or Stalin and the workers in numerous socialist realism paintings.
On a visit to a plant in Atyrau, Nazarbayev comes up to a group of small and medium businessmen, including, as it happens, Ismagulov, and says: "I'll make sure they don't touch Amir".
What that means is that if any bureaucrats try to use red tape or "the law" to harm his business, he will intervene personally. Too bad Navalny didn't have a friend in Putin like that when he did his perfectly normal lumber deal in Kirov, eh?
Before that, Amir ingratiated himself to his patron by thanking the tyrant for suspending inspections of businesses for a time (?), in order to allow business to thrive for awhile. This is a revelation both of the bizarre bureaucracies that thwart and heckle free enterprise in these countries, as well as an admission that normal regulation of business seems like something punitive that has to be periodically loosened to let business breathe, instead of being a core principle of good corporate behaviour>
When Amir Ismagulov, chairman of the board of directors of Abylaykhan Group began to thank the president of the country for his support and noted that the moratorium introduced on the inspections of subjects of entrepreneurship, which had given businesses the opportunity to develop, Nursultan Nazarbayev straightened the badge on his chest and pronounced with a smile, "Well, I'll tell them not to touch Amir." The president's quip drew friendly laughter from the entrepreneurs.
Amir is head of one of those ridiculously-long-named commissions of the perestroika-era sort that sound like they control more than they free: "The Permanent Commission on Issues of Ecology, Compliance with the Law, Law and Order, Glasnost, and Acceptance of Appeals from Citizens of the Atyrau City Maslihat".
Maslihat merely means "assembly," except a persistent phenomenon of these Eurasian countries I've found is to keep the name of their national congresses resulting from unfair and unfree elections by their name in a local language, which helps you realize that it is not exactly "a parliament" in the Western sense. (And to understand Kazakh culture, you have to follow how their kuraltai works, which is any group meeting that seems to start with riotous and chaotic democracy as everyone at the table, high and low, is heard, but which ends in dictatorship, as the group sense somehow gets identified and imposed by a few, and minorities silenced. It's a wonder to see in action.)
Amir, an engineer by training, is in the party called Nur Otan, translated as "the fatherland's ray of light," whose name and the fact that it is the largest political party in the country likely helps you understand its degree of, well, affiliation with Nazarbayev, if you didn't find the fact that the president himself leads it enough of a tip-off.
Despite his aspirations to turn his town into a "European level" city, and his fortuitous and possibly pre-scripted encounter with the president of the country, I don't think Amir amounts to a big fish in Kazakhstan, but I await information. I think he wanted to educate his son abroad for the prestige and clout factor, and now it has quite literally blown up in his face through no fault of his own.
NAZARBAYEV'S RELATIONS TO THE US: CAN HE CALL IN CHITS?
Does Nazarbayev's CONSIDERABLE influence with the United States now extend to him saying "I'll tell them not to touch Amir's son"? I wonder.
Certainly, the Kazakh government will try, especially having once made this publicized connection to this particular family -- and for the good of the name of Kazakhs, as they will see it. They will want to do everything both to minimize the seriousness of the offense and maximize their willingness to fight Islamist extremism, which is exactly what they fight savagely and not successfully in their own country, sometimes renditioning people back to torture in places like Uzbekistan.
The Kazakh government has bought out think tanks, journals, and even congressmen in this country. This information isn't hidden, because those who take gifts or fees or grants from foreign governments have to reveal this information, and with all the sunshine gov 2.0 databases around, it's easy to find. There is an entire caucus in the Congress about which not much is known, but which includes above all Lyndsey Graham who has travelled to the region a number of times.
The US needs Kazakhstan not just for its oil and gas resources and some mineral wealth, and not just as a buttress against China, with which it is in competition in Kazakhstan, and not just as part of the alternatives to Russia these regimes seek and from which the US benefits, but desperately, right now, for the next year, for the Northern Distribution Network, the route OUT of Afghanistan for our heavy vehicles and troops which went IN to this region when the roads became blocked through Pakistan.
UNCLE RUSLAN'S FRIENDS IN FORMERLY HIGH PLACES
Now, some more background and thoughts on the Kazakh angle:
"Uncle Ruslan" as everyone has taken to calling him, the brother of the Tsarnaev's father, Anzor, who became memorable for his denuncation of his own nephews and the act of terror, an admirable distinguishing of individual responsibility from the entire ethnic community that was in fact helpful in avoiding the ethnic stereotyping inevitable in these types of events.
Tsarni is a Soviet lawyer by training who as a young man in the newly-independent Kyrgyzstan went to work at Price Waterhouse in Bishkek as a legal expert on governance issues
I say "Soviet lawyer" to stress that Ruslan, Anzor, who was said to work in the prosecutor's office, Zubeidat, who was also trained as a lawyer, and other relatives, including the sister's brother-in-law, said to work in the Interior Ministry (police) of Ramzan Kadyrov, were all part of the Soviet police state. This extended family were not Chechen rebels; they were part of the system.
But when it came to Uncle Ruslan, he became associated with elements of offialdom in opposition to Nazarbayev abroad, and therefore there might be there some sort of need on the part of the Nazarbayev regime for retaliation against him, or at least neutralization of his efforts on behalf of a very controversial figure.
As we know, Ruslan Tsarni was also married for a time to the daughter of a CIA chief, retired at the time of the marriage in 1996. This has fueled speculation that he could be a CIA plant and feeds the "false flag" narrative around the Tsarnaevs, but one could just as easily speculate that he was related to Kyrgyz or Russian intelligence, although neither of these "versions" seem very plausible. The CIA doesn't need to involve family members in operations in a country where the US has a military base and extensive ties to the government and security forces; in any event, Tsarni seems to have achieved his goals by getting to America soon after -- not remaining in Bishkek -- getting a law degree at Duke, and then breaking up his marriage and remarrying and pursuing business without his CIA family. By the same token, it seems that if the KGB were interested in having an asset close to the CIA, living with the daughter of a retired CIA agent in North Carolina wouldn't likely produce much useful intelligence that couldn't be gained by less obvious means.
Diagnosis: "on na yeyo vyekhal" as they say in these countries -- he used her to get an exit visa from his country, and/or an entry visa to the US, then used her prestigious connections to get into law school, to pursue his own interests. It's a fairly normal and predictable trajectory from these countries, common in mixed marriages between the US and the FSU, and in fact is understandable, given how wretched these countries can be to live in if you are smart and ambitious.
PARTY SCHOOL
The other connection is of course the two Kazakh dorm mates who were picked out in the early days of social-media sleuthing as related to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with whom he frequently partied and with whom he made a trip to New York, where the boys photographed themselves in Times Square, the same Times Square Dzhokhar and his brother planned to blow up later when they were escaping from Boston.
Some media blacked out the faces of these Kazakhs, believing they were irrelevant to the bomb case and shouldn't be tarred by association, but now they've been arrested for obstructing justice and attempting to conceal evidence. Dhozkhar's back pack, with fireworks from which the gunpowder had been removed, was found by the young Kazakh dorm mates and then thrown out in a dumpster along with his computer, when they sought to get rid of incriminating items from his room after finding out he was likely involved in the bombing.
There are texts and tweets to them during this time and it's not quite clear whether they are actual orders to get rid of the evidence, or just expressions of consent.
Hey, remember when "the experts" insisted that the foray of the Tsarnaevs to buy explosives in New Hampshire wasn't related to the bomb, that the set of tweets and pictures of them with fireworks weren't related to the bombs, and that it would be too time-consuming to extract that powders and wasn't worth it?
Well, it turns out that this backpack and its contents showed that in fact they *did* go through the painstaking effort of extracting the powder. Maybe this is proof of their "self-radicalizing" and "amateur" status if they couldn't even find bomb ingredients properly using the Internet; they also perhaps failed to realize they'd left a trail, and that the maker of the fireworks instantly cooperated with authorities and turned them in.
Which brings me to the nature of these Kazakh kids, and the intense desire of "progressives" to see them as small fry and innocents. And sure, they're young, and it's sad and their role is apparently not so great in the story, and comes after the bombing, and maybe they knew nothing of its beforehand.
A Greek leftist with a high following instantly tweets in a discussion about the youthful suspects "I guess we realize that arresting Tsarnaev's small time associates is not like dismantling Al Qaeda Central or something, do we?" A nice witty line typical of the contempt for which leftist or socialist Greeks and others hold America and its counter-terrorism programs, and I totally get where it's coming from. Indeed, I re-tweeted his remarks because it is important to remember that we didn't find any AQ footprint yet on this story.
Yet this points to a larger world vision of the European left, particularly in the distressed countries hammered by the recession, of blaming America for world economic woes and wars abroad, and minimizing terrorist forces by finding them justified. What, you think it's okay to hide the computer and backpack of a suspect in a killing of 3 people and maiming of some 280 people?! Why?! Why is that okay? Why do we have to disparage American law-enforcement trying to get to the bottom of this case in this fashion? What, because the suspects are young and foreign and appealing, we're supposed to just release them and pretend it's okay to hide your roomies stuff after he's involved in a terrorist act?!
There's no more basis for saying the Tsarnaevs acted alone than for saying they acted as part of an Al Qaeda conspiracy, quite frankly. For some time to come now, "progressives" and hard leftists will lean toward the former to maximize the "America's chickens coming home to roost" theory, and the conservatives and infowars types will emphasize the latter to invoke the weakness of the Obama Administration and the hysteria around world Islam's aspirations, although it is very diverse and disunited. Even so, at this point there's no reason not to look in Dagestan at Tamerlan's connections and any other connections that might turn up.
And as I've pointed out, these connections should also be look at in the sports world and the underworld of mafia crime, because in the former Soviet countries, intelligence, drug mafias, sports, and Islam can all be amalgamated or appear separately or in any mixture.
Laura Rozen tweeted that there was nothing stupider than a 19-year-old boy, remarking on the clumsy effort to get rid of evidence and then lie about it; leave it to Spencer Ackerman to comment that there was -- a group of them -- to imply that all of this is about the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.
It's important to understand why this happened, however, and it's not about youthfulness or stupidity; it's a culture of refusal to cooperate with authorities and lie up and down to protect one's own that has been nurtured for a century in Russia and its neighbours and has hardly been eradicated since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.
Had the Kazakhs behaved like a number of Americans in this story -- the cab driver, the fireworks seller, the woman who received facials and others who came into contact with the Tsarnaevs and immediately called the police and FBI to help the investigation -- they'd be heros now likely able to stay in the United States and continue their education on US-funded scholarships, instead of sitting in pre-trial detention now facing up to 5 years in prison.
That's really important to understand because it explains how everyone in and around the family could be lying, could be distracting, could be covering up -- and we may never know. And they will be doing this as part of an intensively indoctrinated culture of the police state, where after decades of people being forced to inform on their neighbours and turn them in under pain of death themselves, a culture of antagonism and refusal to cooperate with the authorioties, even when the authorities are legitimate, creates an endless spiral of criminality and corruption. The more these regimes in Eurasia crack down on civil society in general and their political opponents within their own administrations in particular, the more this criminalized antagonism, distrust and non-cooperation grows and becomes an institution in itself. Where once, the Soviet dissident would consider it "zapadlo" (a base, unworthy act) to inform on innocent fellow citizens, and where once Solzhenitsyn advised his fellow citziens to "live not by the lie" and refrain from cooperation with the police state for reasons of democratic resistance, today, these concepts can just as well conceal crime that any police, Russian or no, would be trying to combat.
To see just how little of the hearts and minds the central Russian authorities have going for them in Dagestan, see this video of the surrounding of the home of Nidal, the 18-year-old Salafist who was in the armed resistance to the Kremlin's appointees and with whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was said to be in touch (this hasn't been proven, but only stated by a Dagestani anti-extremism official and published in Novaya gazeta). In Kazakhstan, the armed Islamist resistance has only made a few attacks and is nothing like the Russian North Caucasus, yet popular resistance to the Nazarbayev regime is present, and accounts for the years of labor strikes at the state oil companies, some affiliated with Western companies like Chevron, which lead to a deadly massacre in Zhanaozen in 2011 in which several dozens workers were killed.
EVIL OIL COMPANIES AGAIN?
BTW, a word on nefarious oil companies. When Tsarni is described as working for the oil business, or Chevron seems to have some tangential relationship to strikes and a deadly massacre, the left automatically finds proof of guilt and complicity. But no one has ever been able to prove how kocal events related directly to economic grievances in a company run by Nazarbayev's son-in-law among other cronies (the son-in-law was even fired by the dictator after the Zhanaozen events) directly ties to Chevron. I have no ideological reason to discount any such connection if it is established, but nobody has been able to come up with it, other than to wave in the general direction of this US company doing business with state oil companies. Many people want to make oil companies responsible for the human rights violations of the regimes with which they do business. That's an admirable thing to do and they should keep trying to do this.
Yet the regimes are the original problem, and they're what need to be changed, not US companies that at the end of the day have domestic laws to control them on issues like taking bribes abroad
SHOULD WE STOP LETTING IN FOREIGN STUDENTS TO THE US?
What can we do about this? Should there be filtration or even an end to student exchange programs?
Of course not, in my view. The only hope we have of dealing effectively with difficult countries and helping promote their transformation to more democratic and accountable government which is what their own citizens seek is by helping with education of the next generation.
But we do need to include in this engagement more willingness to debate and challenge the world-views of these young people acquired in state indoctrination first in their own countries, then in their American settings.
There are zillions of such students in the US, from the former Soviet Union, China, all over. It has always been the strategy of the US in dealing with the world to encourage massive education, particularly of countries with which the US has difficult dealings -- like Russia and China -- of the youth, in the belief that things will normalize in the future after the next generation has a change to become exposed to Western values.
I think these programs are disasters now, not only because they might let slip through the occasional terrorist or various petty criminals, but because they are not working to improve attitudes toward America. While they left thinks "America's wars" do all their own bad advertising, what they can't explain is why people like these kids join "Free Jahar" movements on Twitter and root for terrorist suspects. Time and again, I've run across young people like this who admire Bin Ladn for fighting America in Afghanistan, which is next door to their countries. They have these kind of fractured consciousnesses; on the one hand, they admire or even envy America, and want to come here to study; on the other, they have been heavily indoctrinated in state-controlled media and leap from that heavily tendentious and censored milieu straight into the political correctness of a typical American campus, where their Marxist professors will only encourage them to put up Che posters and read Chomsky and Zizek.
No one ever debates them; they might get through their entire 2 or 4 of 6 years in America without anyone ever explaining to them that it's their friend Russia, and their own regimes unchanged since the Soviet era, who presided over the mass murder of one million Afghan citizens during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989, setting up the situation for terror and chaos in Afghanistan in these countries far more than any US funding of the Afghan mujahedeen back in the 1980s (much like the Syrian situation, where the lion's share of the problem comes from Assad and his Russian backing with a billion dollars in arms, and not the US belatedly getting into the conflict and funding some resistance, some of which is radicalized and related to Al Qaeda).
The sheer moral blindess of the left on first the Soviet realities and then the post Soviet realities and their obsession with America make them poor interlocutors with these young people from the stans who collect stipends and educations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American tax-payer, but never face a single challenge to their cramped and misguied world views.
This isn't an easy problem to fix, as a free society like the US can hardly start to engage in the kind of forced indoctrination that these countries still use as a staple, and the broadcasting they do with RFE/RL abroad is by law not supposed to be aimed those in the US -- as part of an old concept of "blowback". Yet in the age of the interconnected Internet, this has to be revisted, and mainly the private sector and universities themselves have to begin to grapple with the issue of how anti-Americanism and even jihad are not being mitigated by the classic approach used for 50 years particularly during the Cold War (and which had some successes then), and have to start figuring out how to reach and debate with people we pay to learn in our country.
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