An Outpost of Tyranny

ON JULY 25, DEFENSE secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The topic of discussion will be the continuation of U.S. military activities at Manas, the U.S. base on Kyrgyz territory established after 9/11 propelled Central Asia back to strategic importance.

The post-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan--collectively known to Westerners as "the 'stans"--were remote, somnolent, and impoverished until the fall of the Soviet Union.

With the effective end of Russian domination at the beginning of the 1990s, the first outsiders to show a new interest in the 'stans were missionaries of the extremist Wahhabi sect of Islam, the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Since Soviet communism had suppressed traditional religion and forced the influential Sufi orders into secrecy, the Saudis envisioned an enormous, virgin terrain for Wahhabization. Rich Arabs showed up to finance construction of mosques, hand out free Korans and tickets for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and seduce young minds interested in seriously studying, often for the first time, the faith into which they had been born.

Wahhabism in Central Asia was like communism in more ways than one. It aimed to replace the rigid and predictable former order, run by commissars from Moscow, with an equally inflexible system of regulation. In addition, "Islam experts" in the West did not understand the threat it represented, and ended up whitewashing Muslim radicalism as mere discontent with deprivation, just as their predecessors in Soviet studies had too often minimized the danger from Soviet Marxism. Like Communist subversives during the decades of worldwide Soviet influence, Wahhabi infiltrators in Central Asia portrayed themselves as simple protesters against social injustice. Their presence caused little alarm among those more concerned about the "root causes" of extremism than about the ideology and money that directly fueled it.

Post-Soviet Uzbekistan and its neighbors soon found themselves genuinely threatened by Islamist terror, of the kind that had overrun Afghanistan after the Soviet invaders were driven out. The encounter with faith, for post-Soviet Muslims, was extraordinarily heady, and few mainstream clerics were available to channel it. Young believers were drawn into armed jihad, mainly in Tajikistan from 1992 to 1996, but also as foot soldiers for the Afghan Taliban. Their recruiter was an al Qaeda component, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

The failure of Western observers to recognize the Wahhabi worldview--rather than economic and political disaffection--as the basis for the extremists' appeal made the transition of the post-Soviet Muslim states even more difficult than it would have been otherwise. When the government of Uzbek president Islam Karimov acted to suppress the agitators, the Wahhabis claimed they were being victimized merely for their independence from the government. Because the former Soviet republics (like Saudi Arabia) had been generally closed to foreign reporters, Western journalists did not know the terrain or how to analyze events. Islam remains, especially since September 11, 2001, exotic and dangerous to most Westerners, and the learning curve for newcomers to the subject is a long one, especially regarding moderate Islam and the institutional heritage required to sustain its tradition of pluralism. Most Western academics have been of little help in explaining the situation.

Islamist radicals and local post-Soviet rulers like Karimov engaged in a competition, both seeking to convince the West of their virtue. Then September 11 happened. Unexpectedly, Uzbekistan became an important strategic asset in the war to eradicate the Taliban. The U.S. military installed forces there, and in Kyrgyzstan. Claims by the IMU and those like it to represent nothing more than "nongovernmental" Islam were revealed as hollow. That Uzbekistan had been extremely slow to initiate meaningful steps toward democracy seemed insignificant; after all, a Western-style parliamentary regime could hardly be installed in the highlands of Samarkand overnight.

But the United States destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and with it the IMU. The IMU had never fought a sustained terrorist campaign inside Uzbekistan, where radical Islam had no real mass appeal. With the end of the IMU, the threat to Uzbekistan vanished, and the region's legacy as a center of peaceful, tolerant, Sufi-influenced Islam should have allowed it, with U.S. help, to become a paragon of the Bush-led initiative for global democratization.