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Stranded in Central Asia, US mulls revived Uzbek ties as rivalry with Russia worsens
Turkish Daily News
May 23, 2006
By Ümit Enginsoy
Faced with the danger of losing a second key military base in Central Asia, the United States is looking for a way out, with a conservative faction led by Vice President Dick Cheney seeking to mend ties with Uzbekistan after last year's violence blamed on the Tashkent government that disrupted relations with Washington.
One top priority for Cheney is to reverse recent U.S. setbacks in a rivalry with Russia concerning the energy-rich former Soviet republics in Central Asia, analysts said.
Kyrgyzstan last week threatened to evict the United States from the Manas base, which U.S. forces are using for operations in Afghanistan, unless Washington agrees to pay a yearly fee of $200 million. The United States presently pays a symbolic $2.7 million annually.
Uzbekistan expelled U.S. forces from the strategic Karshi Khanabad base late last year after Washington condemned the Uzbek government for the alleged killing of hundreds of civilian protesters in the city of Andijan and for widespread human rightsviolations. The U.S. State Department also backed calls for an international inquiry into the incident.
One problem is that if the United States also loses Manas, the closest military bases the United States can use for Afghanistan will be Incirlik in Turkey and facilities in South Korea. Also, and strategically more importantly, expulsion from Kyrgyzstan will mean a major physical and psychological setback for Washington in the ongoing power struggle with Russia and China.
"Russia's strategic objective is to put en end to the American presence in Central Asia, which it still views as its backyard. To that end Moscow is exerting pressure on Central Asian nations," said Zeyno Baran, director of the Center for Eurasian Policy at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in the United States.
In an effort to reverse Washington's weakened position in Central Asia, Cheney -- a hawk on relations with Russia -- and his team favor an attempt to reach out to Uzbekistan's autocratic President Islam Karimov for purely strategic purposes, analysts said. Cheney is said to be backed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his usual ally, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Dan Fried.
Although President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's positions are not clear, many at the State Department do not share Cheney's alleged enthusiasm, sources said.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, blamed Karimov's government for disrupting ties with the United States.
"We're not the ones who slammed the door. We have tried to maintain ties with Uzbekistan," he told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on May 20. "But frankly what we've seen ... is Uzbekistan more and more closed off."
On the rift with Kyrgyzstan, Boucher said a U.S. team would soon travel to Bishkek to try to resolve the base fee issue. "I'm fairly confident we can reach a friendly solution on it," he said, but declined to discuss a dollar figure.
'Baby steps' to mend ties
Retired Lt. Col. Kurt Meppen, a former Pentagon official, said the U.S. administration was debating whether to take "baby steps to gain traction" in Uzbekistan, according to the Financial Times.
The Hudson Institute, known for its close ties with Cheney's office -- in a key move that reflects the vice president's position, according to some analysts -- last week aired a video prepared by the Uzbek government that sets out its version of what happened in Andijan -- that it was a planned uprising by Islamist militants, not a peaceful protest by unarmed civilians. The Uzbek government insists that altogether 187 people were killed. Human rights groups maintain the casualties are much higher.
Defending revived ties with Taskent, Fred Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, blamed the CIA and the State Department for Washington's loss of the Uzbek military base.
"It's now appallingly clear that a very poor job has been done since the event. There was no systematic CIA analysis, and the reporting from Taskent was very poor," Starr said, adding that the ultimate result was the United States' expulsion from Uzbekistan.
"We overemphasized the Uzbek government's reaction, which, of course, was way too harsh," Baran said.
As the United States withdrew from the Uzbek base, Russia bolstered military and energy ties with Tashkent. The Russian and Uzbek leaderships were also concerned over Western-backed revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. However, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, the new Bishkek government has proved to be closer to Moscow than Washington -- because of Russian fear, according to some experts.
Cheney-Putin fight
Cheney, in an address to the leaders of mainly ex-communist and ex-Soviet states from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in early May, Cheney rebuked Russia, accusing Moscow of intimidating its former neighbors, using energy to blackmail Ukraine and Europe and stepping back from democracy at home.
Days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin indirectly replied to the U.S. criticism, saying: "The wolf knows who to eat, as the saying goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone, it seems. How quickly all the pathos of the need to fight for human rights and democracy is laid aside the moment the need to realize one's own interests comes to the fore."
"With perfect fairness, Putin could have torn Cheney's speech apart on a whole range of issues," said Anatol Lieven, a Russia expert at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank here. "These include the hypocrisy of denouncing Russia over democracy and going straight on to lavish praise on the oil-rich dictators of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan."
He was referring to a recent red carpet reception for Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, in Washington and Cheney's visit to Kazakhstan after Vilnius to meet with President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The State Department accuses both Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan of human rights violations and elections with major irregularities.
U.S. talks with Aliyev and Nazarbayev mainly focused on projects to carry natural gas and oil from the Caspian basin through pipelines via Turkey and bypassing Russia.
Analysts close to Cheney's office say Russia and China have joined forces to fight against U.S. interests in Central Asia, site of the 19th century Great Game between the British Empire and czarist Russia.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc.
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