WITH THE COMING of the war on terrorism, the United States acquired an ally about which most Americans know very little: the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan. The mistakes our government--and supposedly friendly "non-governmental organizations"--have made in the past in relating to the Uzbeks are a foretaste of challenges ahead.

First, some facts. Of the 23 million citizens of Uzbekistan, 70 percent are Uzbeks, speaking a Turkic language. The few Americans who think about Uzbekistan have tended to write it off as an impoverished backwater of the former Soviet empire. But the Uzbeks possess distinctive resources, especially in the area of Islamic culture. There was a time, from the 8th to the 15th century, when their fabled cities of Bukhara and Samarkand led the Muslim world in the development of theology, mathematics, poetry, and spirituality. Descendants of the rulers of Samarkand established Muslim power in India.

Undeniably, after decades of tsarist and Soviet Russian imperialist rule, Uzbekistan has its share of problems. Uzbek president Islam Karimov has been widely condemned as a post-Communist authoritarian--there is evidence of abuses in his justice system, including allegations of torture and deaths in police custody--and the transition away from a statist economy has been slow. The country must contend with a particularly difficult aspect of the Soviet legacy: Moscow long treated it as a monocrop colony, producing mainly cotton. But Uzbekistan is also dealing with another, more urgent problem: terrorism.

On September 15, four days after the horrors in New York and Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher announced that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) would be designated a foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. The IMU thus appears on Washington's list of 28 entities supporting Osama bin Laden and his network. Boucher called the IMU, which declared war on the Uzbek government in 1999, "responsible for criminal acts of terrorism" and noted its involvement in the kidnapping of foreigners, bombings, bus hijackings, and the murder of ordinary citizens as well as police officers.

Subsequent media reporting has revealed that IMU militants are also fighting in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban and bin Laden's forces. But this clear evidence of the terrorist threat to Uzbekistan is getting an airing only after a long period of utter obliviousness on the part of Westerners to the reality of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia.

The IMU is a classic Wahhabi combat organization--a murderous gang of fanatics bent on imposing the fascist style of Islam fostered by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and emulated by the Taliban. But until now, the IMU did an amazing job of conning Westerners--both human rights groups and governments--into believing its followers were innocent victims of outrageous persecution by the Uzbek regime.

Consider the 2000 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, issued by the State Department only a year before Boucher's denunciation of the IMU. The report complains that the Uzbek authorities' "respect for the rights of unauthorized Muslim groups worsened, as its harsh campaign against such groups, which it perceives as terrorist security threats, intensified."

The 2000 report describes groups like the IMU as "suspected of being 'Wahhabist,' a term used loosely to encompass both suspected terrorists and . . . former students of certain independent imams or foreign madrassas (Islamic schools)." Thus is the problem of Wahhabi terrorism in Uzbekistan framed in the euphemisms typically employed at State: The groups' terrorist identity is a matter of suspicion rather than evident fact; their ideology is only loosely defined; their instruction comes from independent rather than institutional sources, and these are foreign, not Uzbek. Unfortunately, the State Department failed entirely to note the parallels with the Taliban--another once-innocuous group of suspected terrorists and students, who left Afghanistan to study at madrassas in Pakistan.