Afghan skepticism about U.S. intentions redoubled after Rumsfeld made a remarkably insensitive statement just five days before the elections. The U.S. secretary of defense told a NATO meeting in Berlin that the United States would withdraw three thousand to four thousand American troops in early 2006.
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The new CENTCOM chief, Gen. John Abizaid, confirmed this on a visit to Kabul and asked NATO to deploy more forces to offset the U.S. withdrawal. President Bush, battered by the growing insurgency in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, and the lowest poll ratings ever seen for a U.S. president in his second term, was desperate to show the American people that the war on terrorism in Afghanistan was such a success that he could now afford to bring troops home.
Rumsfeld’s comment, coming in the midst of a Taliban insurgency and elections, stunned Afghans and the government, who read it as a signal that the United States was preparing to abandon Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military leaders appeared to be vindicated for their long-standing prediction that the Americans would not stay long in Afghanistan. Afghans were convinced that leaving their country in the hands of a much weaker NATO would increase ISI support to the Taliban before the Taliban’s spring 2006 offensive. Yet again Rumsfeld was completely out of touch with the politics and mood in Afghanistan and the region. In dismissing the Taliban, he seemed to be ignoring the worsening reality on the ground.
The elections resulted in a fragmented parliament. The supporters of the three defeated presidential candidates, Gen. Rashid Dostum, Younus Qanuni, and Mohammed Mohaqiq, won between twenty and twenty-five seats each. Karzai’s supporters won more than eighty seats, while around one hundred winning candidates were nonaligned or, rather, they would switch sides according to whoever offered the best deal. Drug traffickers, militia commanders, and twelve former members of the Taliban or Hizb-e -Islami had won their seats.
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Remarkably six women won seats by actually fighting the elections.
Karzai continued his efforts to woo the Taliban, despite opposition by the United States and the Northern Alliance. He had appointed the former president Sibghatullah Mujaddedi to head the Peace and Reconciliation Commission charged with trying to persuade Taliban members to return home under amnesty.
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However, the non-Pashtuns led by Qanuni opposed any such reconciliation, leading to severe tensions in and out of parliament. These were made worse by the CIA and MI6, who were in touch with the Taliban but who hyped up their negotiations, saying a breakthrough with top Taliban leaders was imminent—although one never happened. This unfounded optimism percolated into the U.S. military, which insisted that the Taliban were now incapable of an offensive. Lt.-Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces, declared that the Taliban were “collapsing and rejoining the Afghan political and economic process.”
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However, the Taliban’s opening salvo in their 2005 campaign demonstrated new tactics and greater firepower than ever before.
May was a terrible month, in which each deadly incident increased the widening of the insurgency. In early May the Taliban ambushed a U.S. patrol in Zabul province, blowing off the legs of two American soldiers and wounding four others in a six-hour battle. When aircraft bombed the Taliban and killed forty-four fighters, among the dead were Pakistanis, Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks—a dramatic indication of the unity among all the jihadi groups operating out of Pakistan.
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Two days later nine Afghan soldiers were killed in another ambush. In the most devastating attack, which took place on June 1 in Kandahar’s main mosque, a suicide bomber killed the Kabul police chief, Mohammed Akram Khakrezwal, and eighteen other Afghan worshippers. An implacably honest cop in a sea of corruption, Khakrezwal had been widely respected by all Afghans.
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As the insurgency escalated, Karzai urged Bush to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. Washington had little need for one, as it already controlled Afghanistan’s air and land space and conducted the war as it wanted. However, an insecure Karzai insisted that such an argument would boost his standing at home and convince Pakistan that he enjoyed complete U.S. support. On a visit to Washington in late May, Karzai met with Bush to sign the agreement, prompting a severely negative reaction both in Afghanistan and among its neighbors.
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The agreement infuriated Pakistan, Iran, and Russia, as it signaled the possibility of permanent U.S. bases in Afghanistan; Afghans accused Karzai of surrendering Afghan sovereignty. Instead, they argued, the United States should have agreed to sign “a status of forces agreement,” which would have reaffirmed Afghan sovereignty. Moreover, the two men signed the agreement just as two Afghans died under torture at the hands of U.S. interrogators at Bagram. Furthermore, Bush humiliated Karzai by turning down his request for Afghan control over suspected Afghan terrorist prisoners.
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All these instances not only provided the Taliban with propaganda to claim that Karzai was an American stooge, but also lowered his prestige among his own supporters.
Over the summer the Taliban deployed an array of tactics to win back control of their former heartland of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, and Uruzgan provinces. In stand-up battles, suicide attacks, ambushes, roadside explosions, and the assassination of aid workers, the Taliban demonstrated that they could create insecurity and mayhem in the south. In the first half of 2005, fifty-four U.S. soldiers were killed, compared with fifty-two for the whole of 2004.
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Al Qaeda had helped the Taliban reorganize even as the ISI was separately allowing Taliban commanders to rearm and recruit fighters in Pakistan. Mullah Dadullah declared that he was receiving help from al Qaeda in Iraq.
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The Taliban insurgency had now become an international conflict.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Who Lost Uzbekistan?
Tyranny in Central Asia
The turmoil in Afghanistan dramatically affected Central Asia, which witnessed its first regime change through a popular movement since 1991, when Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev was overthrown. A former university professor, Akayev was elected as the only noncommunist president of a Central Asian state in 1991. I met him several times in the 1990s, when he was still affable, engaging, and trying to move his country toward greater democracy and the West. However, Kyrgyzstan was desperately poor and economically unsustainable, with a deeply polarized population. There were divisions between the rich new elite and the mass of poor, a north-south divide as a result of greater development in the north, clan rivalries that went back to the time of Genghis Khan, and ethnic divisions. In the south the dominant Kyrgyz were challenged by a powerful eight-hundred -thousand-strong Uzbek minority, which made up 16 percent of the country’s five million people. The country’s single gold mine accounted for 40 percent of exports, and in 2002 the government was forced to ask Western donors to reschedule repayments on its $1.5 billion foreign debt.
After a decade in power, Akayev, like other Central Asian leaders, stood accused of being enormously corrupt, power hungry, and dictatorial. His political troubles began in March 2002, when five people were killed and more than sixty injured in antigovernment demonstrations in the south by protestors demanding the release of a popular opposition leader, Azimbek Beknazarov. Instead of yielding some of his presidential powers, as the opposition demanded, Akayev held a rigged referendum in February 2003 on new constitutional provisions, which concentrated even greater power in his hands. In June, following the example of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the pliant Kyrgyz parliament granted Akayev lifelong immunity from criminal prosecution.
Even before 9/11, Kyrgyzstan was the only Central Asian state that had tilted toward the West as it tried to escape the stranglehold of Russia, China, and Uzbekistan. Facing repeated incursions and threats from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in the 1990s, Kyrgyzstan had joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and after 9/11 its fledgling army of twelve thousand men held military exercises with U.S. forces. Akayev had allowed U.S. and NATO forces to operate out of Manas Air Base outside Bishkek, which became a major hub for Western forces operating in Afghanistan. However, in October 2003, after enormous pressure from Moscow, he allowed the Russians to establish another air base near Bishkek as he tried to satisfy both powers.
As lawlessness, political assassinations, and nepotism increased, Akayev defended himself by criticizing Western influences and NGOs, which he accused of undermining stability. He expressed extreme wariness of the popular Rose Revolution in Georgia in November 2003 and of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in late 2004. A wave of opposition protests dubbed the Tulip Revolution erupted in January 2005 in Bishkek as the parliamentary elections neared. Akayev’s family was accused of benefiting from the contracts given out by the U.S. military at Manas, pilfering international aid and loans, and buying up businesses in the country. The opposition’s main targets were Akayev’s daughter Bermet, thirty-four, and son Aidar, twenty-eight, who had briefly been married to Aliya Nazarbayev, the daughter of the Kazakh president. While the family denied the accusations, there was no doubt that they had suddenly become fabulously wealthy.
On February 27, 2005, after the first round of parliamentary elections, the opposition cried foul and coalesced around Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the silver-haired former prime minister and now head of the People’s Movement. Protests intensified after the opposition won only a handful of seats in the second round, held on March 14. In cities in the south, mobs took over government offices and police stations, emptied jails, occupied airports, and set fire to government installations. The opposition mounted its first show of strength in Bishkek on March 23. The next day, when twenty thousand people surrounded the presidential palace, Akayev’s guards quickly abandoned him, and rather than resisting, he fled to Moscow. Akayev was widely condemned by other autocratic Central Asian leaders for his apparent cowardice.
Two businesses linked to the Akayev family received lucrative contracts to supply fuel for the U.S. airbase in Kyrgyzstan in 2001. According to an article in
The New York Times,
both Kyrgyz prosecutors and FBI agents were investigating whether Akayev family members “pocketed millions of dollars” before his ouster. “An internal FBI report given to Kyrgyz prosecutors in September [2005] found that the two businesses might have been involved in money-laundering” via bank accounts in New York and Holland. “The companies also had transactions with ‘a myriad of suspicious U.S. shell companies’ associated with Mr. Akayev, his family and arms traffickers, the report said.”
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The fall of Akayev and the continuing instability in Kyrgyzstan unnerved all the Central Asian leaders and led to a fierce clampdown on Western media and NGOs. The events in Bishkek were a reminder that changes in leadership in Central Asia were more likely to reflect a change in faces rather than one toward greater democracy.
In Bishkek, Kurmanbek Bakiyev was declared interim president and formed a new government, but he failed to check lawlessness and looting. Akayev, in Moscow, threatened to return. While some political groups accepted the newly elected parliament, others insisted that the old one was still legitimate. Unlike Ukraine and Georgia, Kyrgyzstan had seen no prolonged popular movement, nor was there a credible political figure to lead such a movement. The opposition looked more like a coup by a section of the out-of-power former communist elite. The old guard quickly established itself in power and assumed Akayev’s contracts, businesses, and benefits.
In early July fresh presidential elections were held, which Bakiyev won. To gain greater popularity he demanded that the United States renegotiate its base rights. “We can therefore review the usefulness of the presence of American forces in Kyrgyzstan,” Bakiyev announced in his first post-election speech.
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U.S. forces had to quit their base in Uzbekistan after the Andijan riots, and on July 5, Russia and China had demanded at a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that all U.S. forces quit Central Asia. Rumsfeld arrived in Bishkek, where he promised to increase the $50 million a year the United States paid for use of the base and also pledged a $200 million interest-free loan. Gen. Richard Myers was blunter, rebuking China and Russia for pressuring Kyrgyzstan. “It looks to me like two very large countries were trying to bully some smaller countries, ” he said.
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In Turkmenistan there was a similar change of faces when the autocratic and bizarre president Saparmurat Niyazov died of a heart attack on December 21, 2006, at the age of sixty-six. After twenty-one years in power, he left the country impoverished, although he, too, had amassed enormous wealth abroad—reportedly over $1 billion. His successor was Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedow, forty-nine, a former dentist and health minister who came to power after another rigged election. The opposition, largely living in exile abroad, was refused entry into the country for the election.
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Niyazov had taken Turkmenistan back into the Middle Ages, closing theaters, libraries, and newspapers and reducing public access to health care, education, and travel abroad while drastically cutting wages and pensions. Berdymukhamedow promised some changes, but a year after taking office he had barely implemented any reforms. Once again a change of faces did not mean significant change.
The major crisis in Central Asia, however, was in Uzbekistan, where President Islam Karimov had refused to open up his country after the end of the war in Afghanistan and despite the presence of a large U.S. base and massive American aid. The Bush administration hoped that the combination of aid and greater security in the shape of military training and weapons for the Uzbek army would allow Karimov to be more forward-looking with regard to carrying out long-neglected economic and political reforms. Instead, everything got worse. The regime became more oppressive and restrictive, while the lack of reforms and economic policies, which helped only the cronies around the president get rich, fueled an economic crisis after 9/11. The government’s restrictions on traders buying goods from neighboring countries had crippled the economy, which produced very little in terms of consumer goods. Tashkent slashed salaries of teachers and increased rates for public transport and utilities while raising salaries for the repressive police and armed forces. A decent monthly wage was now no more than twenty-five to forty dollars, far less than a family could live on. According to the IMF, the Uzbek economy grew only 0.3 percent in 2003.
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