In 2001, Washington’s relations with Central Asia were at a low ebb. After showing some initial concern for the welfare of these states in the early 1990s, largely dictated by the possibility of oil and gas contracts in three of the states, Washington all but lost interest. However, in 1994 and 1995, the United States helped Kazakhstan dismantle 104 SS-18 ballistic missiles and the 104 nuclear warheads were transferred to Russia under agreement. Kazakhstan was declared free of nuclear weapons.
15
In 1994 all the Central Asian states except Tajikistan joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace alliance, and their forces participated in joint exercises with NATO. There was a renewed flirtation with Central Asia by the Clinton administration in 1997, when Strobe Talbott, a Russia specialist and deputy secretary of state, outlined a “Silk Road Strategy” for supporting democracy in Central Asia, but it never caught the imagination of Congress or the American public. Most important of all, the infrequent U.S. appeals for democratic and economic reform in the region increasingly fell on deaf ears among its authoritarian leaders because the United States never backed such appeals with either serious aid or serious recriminations.
Russia had gone through similar swings in its policy toward Central Asia. In the early 1990s, it pulled back from Central Asia as its own economy and armed services went into decline. Moscow could not project power when it did not have the instruments of power, and there was no public support for sustaining a relationship in a region that many Russians considered a backwater. Under Putin, Russia—now considerably richer and stronger on the back of Siberian and Central Asian oil and gas exports to Europe—began to insist that Central Asia was its backyard and that no major power should try to gain influence there without first going through Moscow.
Central Asian leaders also had to consider China’s reaction. In 1996, Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan had joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with China pledging to demilitarize their common borders. A year later China pulled its troops from 4,300 miles of its borders with Central Asia. China’s major security thrust was to deter the Central Asian states from providing any support to the ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. The Uighurs were China’s only Muslims, living mainly along the borders of Central Asia. Many had gone into exile in Central Asia to escape repression during the Maoist revolution. Now China considered any political expression of Uighur sentiment as a sign of separatism and Islamic extremism. China was extremely reluctant to see U.S. troops based just a few hundred miles from its borders.
Yet all the Central Asian regimes were predisposed to helping the Americans, because by doing so they could distance themselves from both Russia and China, demonstrate their independence to their own people, and gain from the political legitimacy that an alliance with the United States would offer—legitimacy that would allow them to rule more ruthlessly at home. Moreover, they all felt threatened by the Taliban. Afghanistan borders three of the Central Asian states—Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Tajikistan had long supported Masud and the Northern Alliance, allowing Russia, Iran, and India to provide military supplies to Masud through Dushanbe. Uzbekistan had supported the Uzbek faction of the Northern Alliance, led by Dostum, providing him arms and funds as well as a sanctuary when his forces were routed by the Taliban. Only Turkmenistan had reached an understanding with the Taliban regime, providing it electricity and other commodities. All the Central Asian states had become saturated with the heroin emanating out of Afghanistan and they were anxious to stem the flow of drugs.
The post-communist regimes in Central Asia were all deeply secular and fearful of Islamic extremism spreading within their territories. They were eager to defeat the Taliban for another reason. Before 9/11, incursions by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) had terrified governments in the region. Made up of Uzbek and Tajik militants from the Ferghana Valley and led by commander Juma Namangani and ideologue Tahir Yuldashev, the IMU had undergone several political metamorphoses. It had first emerged as an Islamic party opposed to Uzbek president Islam Karimov, before he drove them underground. The IMU reemerged to fight in Tajikistan’s bloody five-year civil war (1992-1997), on the side of the Islamists. After the war, they settled uneasily in the Pamir Mountains, in central Tajikistan, where I tried to track them down to write the first book about the IMU.
16
They continued to build underground cells in Uzbekistan and the Ferghana Valley, with help from the ISI and the Saudi intelligence service, which had funded them for some time. At one point Yuldashev spent several years as a guest of the ISI in Peshawar. The IMU aimed to create an Islamic state in Uzbekistan and then in the rest of Central Asia, but their ideology was confused and contradictory.
In February 1999, explosions in Tashkent close to President Karimov’s office, which claimed two dozen lives and wounded several hundred people, were assumed to have been carried out by the IMU. Karimov used the bombings to arrest hundreds of political dissidents and Islamic activists, leading to speculation that the government itself may have carried out the bombings. The IMU then led guerrilla incursions into southern Kyrgyzstan and eastern Uzbekistan in the summer of 1999, and again in 2000, creating mayhem and fear. In the winter of 2000, the IMU retreated into Afghanistan and into the arms of Osama bin Laden, who immediately adopted them, seeing them as a ready-made instrument for introducing al Qaeda into Central Asia. The Taliban also were anxious to enlist the IMU fighters, as a source of additional manpower in their battle with the Northern Alliance.
By now Namangani was a cult figure among Islamists in the entire region—all the more so because, like Mullah Omar, he remained mysterious, never giving interviews or allowing himself to be photographed. In September 2000, the United States designated the IMU a terrorist group, thus providing Karimov with a major political boost, as now his enemies were also America’s enemies. After 9/11, Mullah Omar appointed Namangani head of all Taliban and foreign forces in the north. He had proved to be fearless and brave, if not rash, while his IMU fighters were known for their ferocity and barbarity on the battlefield.
The roots of radicalization in Central Asia among young people lay in the appalling policies of leaders such as Karimov, who waged war against all political dissent and anything remotely Islamic. In Uzbekistan there was a total ban on all political parties, trade and student unions, and political gatherings. More than ten thousand political prisoners filled Uzbek jails, where torture and death under interrogation were common. Anyone appearing too Islamic or even saying his prayers five times a day could be arrested and tortured. As long as such regimes considered secular democratic parties a threat, it was natural that a violent Islamic underground would flourish.
Yet Uzbekistan was the potential springboard for any U.S. invasion of northern Afghanistan. The largest country in the region, with a population of twenty-nine million, Uzbekistan also had the largest air bases, inherited from the Soviet era, and the only trained army in the region. It was from these bases that the Soviet Union had launched its disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Moreover, the CIA and the Pentagon had been closely collaborating with the Uzbek army and secret services since 1997, providing training, equipment, and mentoring in the hope of using Uzbek Special Forces to snatch Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, a fact I uncovered on a trip to Washington in 2000.
17
Now the CIA wanted to inject its own teams into northern Afghanistan using Uzbekistan’s air bases.
Anticipating this, Russia first tried to block any U.S. deployment in Central Asia. Two days after 9/11, Russian intelligence officials held a meeting in Dushanbe with the Northern Alliance and their counterparts from Iran, India, and Uzbekistan, promising to step up military assistance to the Northern Alliance—in a bid to outbid the CIA. Russia also persuaded Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rakhmonov, to say that his country would not to allow its air space to be used by U.S. aircraft. The seven-thousand -strong Russian division guarding the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border was placed on a heightened state of alert, as Russian officials insisted that Central Asia would not offer the United States military bases.
Behind the scenes the mood was entirely different, as Karimov and other leaders were all anxious to entice the Americans. After Washington offered to increase U.S. aid, Tashkent privately told the American embassy that it would offer the United States bases. The Uzbek assurance was hastened by news from Kabul that the Taliban had appointed Juma Namangani commander of northern Afghanistan. Putin now realized that once Karimov had broken with Russian guidance, other Central Asian leaders would do the same, so it was better for Moscow to make a collective offer to the United States.
Almost overnight Moscow began to play the role of conciliator and ally to the United States. On September 17, Putin hosted a meeting of all Central Asian leaders in Moscow to hammer out a joint stand on the bases issue. A formal deal was finally struck between Moscow and Washington on September 22, after Bush spoke with Putin on the telephone. Putin insisted that any U.S. bases in Central Asia should be temporary. In return, Bush promised to desist from criticizing Russia’s controversial war in Chechnya and to consult with Moscow before taking any steps in Central Asia, while promising to help accelerate Russia’s integration into Western economic institutions. By then, the CIA was already flying its teams into the massive Karshi-Khanabad, or K2, air base in southern Uzbekistan, where U.S. army engineers were repairing the runway. Now Tajikistan said that it, too, would offer the United States bases on its soil.
The United States had arrived in Central Asia—the first Western army to penetrate the region since the Greek armies of Alexander the Great. Uzbekistan provided a base for multiple types of U.S. operations out of K2 and later allowed Germany to set up a resupply base at Termez, close to the border with Afghanistan. Tajikistan hosted French Mirage fighter bombers at Dushanbe Airport, which did not pull out until November 2005. Later, Kyrgyzstan was to provide bases for U.S. and Coalition forces and aircraft at Manas Air Base, outside Bishkek. After the war, Manas became a major hub for supplies to Western forces in Afghanistan. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided overflight facilities for U.S. aircraft. Turkmenistan balked at any other support except for facilitating humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. In Moscow, U.S. Army generals were given extensive briefings from Soviet-era commanders who had fought in Afghanistan.
When Rumsfeld arrived in Tashkent on October 5, to acknowledge the deal formally, Karimov still wanted to camouflage it. He was bargaining for the maximum from the United States: immediate membership in NATO, $50 million in loans, and a defense treaty. He played hard to get, insisting that no attacks on Afghanistan would be carried out from Uzbek soil—even as U.S. fighter jets arrived at the K2 air base. He was still fearful of a reaction from the Taliban and the IMU, who had mustered some ten thousand troops to defend Mazar-e-Sharif and had threatened to retaliate against Uzbekistan if it dared joined the U.S.-led Coalition.
Rumsfeld was opaque, saying only that “the two countries have met; the two countries have talked; the two countries . . . have worked out a series of arrangements that make sense from both our standpoints.”
18
Finally, on October 12, both countries signed the formal agreement on the use of K2. It included a vague U.S. security guarantee for Uzbekistan, speaking of “the need to consult on an urgent basis about appropriate steps to address the situation in the event of a direct threat to the security or territorial integrity of Uzbekistan.” Karimov had fought hard to get the clause in so that he could show his people and Russia that he had not sold himself cheaply.
19
The United States paid Uzbekistan an initial $15 million, but by the end of 2002, Uzbekistan would receive $120 million in military equipment and training to the army, $55 million in credits, and another $82 million for the intelligence services—the same agencies that were to help the CIA render al Qaeda prisoners and torture Uzbek civilians.
20
By mid-October, more than two thousand troops from the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division were at K2, ready to invade Afghanistan.
The United States successfully forged an alliance of neighboring countries. It was much less successful in forging an anti-Taliban alliance among the Pashtuns inside Afghanistan. Pashtun attention was focused on Rome and the group of bickering exiles surrounding former king Zahir Shah, now eighty-five years old. To millions of Afghans, his name evoked memories of a golden past in the 1960s and 1970s, when Afghanistan was at peace—although the golden hues of that era were more myth than reality because the country had also been desperately poor. The exiles in Rome were consummate intriguers, incapable of uniting, and few had set foot in Afghanistan since the 1970s. Many of them thought the king was being manipulated by his son-in-law Gen. Abdul Wali and by his influential cousin Mahmood Ghazi.
21
Before 9/11, and after some prodding by the Clinton administration and the UN, Masud and the Northern Alliance had reached out to the Rome group. Both agreed to set up a joint council that would prepare to hold a Loya Jirga presided over by the former king. After 9/11, the United States tried to get the Rome group and the Northern Alliance to move toward greater coordination, and Richard Haass, heading the State Department’s Policy Planning Division, visited Rome to anoint the king’s new role.
Whatever happened in Rome, the key to defeating the Taliban would be raising the standard of rebellion in the Pashtun belt. The ISI played all sides of the Pashtun equation, wooing prominent members of the Rome group, who detested working with the Northern Alliance, secretly contacting Pashtuns who were in the NA, while also trying to create an alternative Pashtun group in Peshawar that was anti-Taliban. This Peshawar Group was led by Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, a Sufi leader of some prominence whose party had fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Gailani hosted a conference with some seven hundred exiled Pashtuns living in Peshawar. Each participant received money and free meals (4000 rupees, or 65 dollars), leading to accusations that the ISI had manipulated the meeting. None of the participants volunteered to start fighting the Taliban.