Why Uzbekistan Matters

The following article originally appear on CNN's Global Public Square on 18 October 2011.

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As Washington’s relations with Pakistan seem to hit a new low every week, the U.S. has been trying to compensate by improving ties with Uzbekistan to the north to shore up international efforts in Afghanistan. It is an understandable repositioning, but it is not one that will improve security prospects in the region.

Step by step, the U.S. has been increasing its reliance on Tashkent. Already the “Northern Distribution Network”, which relies in large part on overland links through Uzbekistan, delivers over 50% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan, a number set to rise to 75% by he close of 2011. At the end of last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee helped deepen commitments by approving an Administration-backed measure to remove seven years of human rights-related restrictions barring military aid to Uzbekistan. And to just keep things running smoothly, President Obama personally phoned President Islam Karimov last week to congratulate him on his country’s 20th anniversary of independence.

Of course, no one is under any illusions about what kind of regime is fast becoming central to the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The State Department’s most recent Human Rights Report on Uzbekistan in April made it clear enough. It described the country as an “authoritarian state”, where torture is “routine”, freedom of speech and association are non-existent, independent political activity is impossible, and state-imposed “forced child labor in the cotton sector was widespread”.

The odious character of Karimov’s regime is clear, but, the reasoning goes, sometimes you have to hold your nose and deal with nasty dictatorships to achieve foreign policy objectives. NATO needs a supply route, and the fact that Uzbekistan literally boils its critics alive does not change geography.

Unfortunately, holding your nose in this case also seems to mean shutting your eyes - not just to the extreme abuses of the Uzbek regime but to what the security implications will be for U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the wider region.

A New American Reality

This piece originally appeared in openDemocracy on 5 September 2011.

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In September 2006, I wrote an article that sought to gauge the atmosphere in the United States five years after 9/11. At the time, I was struck by the way that a dark and destructive conflict mentality - something I had become accustomed to in places like Serbia and Kosovo during fourteen years’ away from the country of my birth - seemed to have become entrenched in American society.

“This is what wars do”, I wrote then. “(They) push people into mental corners, where us-and-them thinking works in two pernicious ways: it makes people unwilling to accept other points of view, and utterly blinkers them to facts that do not fit the prevailing group-think. The result is that the very ability to reason gets squeezed, sometimes until it disappears entirely.”

Five years on, it is clear that things have changed enormously in the second half of the post-9/11 decade. Life may not exactly be back to the way it was on 10 September 2001, but the all-consuming public dread of the next terrorist attack and the collective mindset of tribal defence, as well as the hugely counterproductive policy-making that went with that, have mostly dissipated. Put simply, the country has moved on.

Lessons from a Decade of Conflict

Looking back at the last ten years, it is tempting to wonder if the world has not learned anything at all about conflict and conflict resolution in that time.

Afghanistan may have been a war of necessity after 9/11, but the international community continues to under-value the need for functioning government institutions to deliver services and justice free from corruption, and consequently the insurgency is now stronger than ever. Pakistan, where millions of people have been displaced by militancy and counter-terrorism activities, enjoys no more stability than ten years ago. Iraq, a thoroughly avoidable war justified through a political abuse of the memory of 9/11, took the lives of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,400 US military, far more Americans than were killed on that fateful day in September 2001.

In monetary terms, these wars alone have cost trillions of US dollars and played no small part in the crippling government debt crisis in America today.

Equally worryingly, universal values took a serious hit over the past decade. We witnessed extrajudicial renditions and imprisonment at the hands of Western governments supposedly dedicated to universal human rights. Even worse, torture became an issue of public debate rather than a moral red line.

With Media Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 10 September 2010, following a Florida-based pastor's threats to burn a copy of the Koran. The whole thing was a downward spiral of stupidity: the hateful ignorance of a book-burner, the lunacy of the world media for giving Terry Jones any attention at all, and then, six months later when the act finally happened, the mob violence that killed several UN workers in Afghanistan in some bizarrely conceived retaliation. Altogether, you might call it one of humanity's more embarrassing moments of recent years... But while you may not expect any different from religious extremists, it was the role of the world media that most shocked me. I received some criticism for attacking the media response like this, but I stand by the argument in full: news outlets have power and therefore responsibility.

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Looking at the dismal output of the international media in recent days, the only thing one can say is, shame on the lot of you.

The international media has elevated a non-entity lunatic to the heights of worldwide stardom in nanoseconds. Someone with a near-zero base of public support who wants to upset as many people as possible has been given multiple tribunes from which to incite hate and possibly violence.

Every even moderately sane public figure has spoken out against the preacher's intentions -- and with the media pushing the story at full bore, this has meant top-level political leaders, who presumably have better things to do, having to waste time damning the obviously damnable. Are they now expected to do this for every nutter who raises his head?

About the only public figures who didn't take this clear and sensible stand were the editors in newsrooms around the world. Why didn't they dismiss this story out of hand like most of the world managed to?

"But it was a story, so we had to cover it", will be the reply.

Nonsense. You made it a story.

Afghanistan: The Prince and the Press

This was originally published on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 29 February 2008.

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So, Prince Harry has been fighting in Afghanistan for ten weeks, and all the British media knew about it but agreed with the government to keep silent. Now a debate is raging among journalists. Is it unacceptable collusion with the authorities or a responsible approach to journalism in a war zone?

Afghanistan: Battered Women

This ran on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 16 November 2006.

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Tuesday's post by my fellow AlertNet blogger, F. Brinley Bruton, reminded me of one of the most disturbing NGO seminars I've attended. It was in Kabul in the summer of 2002, and the subject was domestic violence.

The panel was a mix: an Afghan judge, an Amnesty rep and a local mullah supposedly known for his more tolerant views. It started off with a description of the suffering many women face at home from husbands (and others) who abuse them. The discussion soon turned, however, when the mullah explained his interpretation of how much, not if, the Koran allowed such things.

Afghans Thirst for Web Access

I wrote this article for Online Journalism Review, which ran it on 22 August 2002. It looks at how some Afghans became experts at online publishing while in exile and then returned after the fall of the Taliban to confront their country's devastated communications infrastructure.

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On my recent media-training visit to Kabul, a group of Afghan journalists asked me for some instruction in online publishing. “Just one problem,” they said. “No one has any Internet access here yet.”

On the list of Afghanistan’s priorities, you might not think the Internet rates very highly. This is, after all, a country still hobbling away from more than two decades of war, with perhaps three million refugees trickling home to find crippling poverty, an unsure security situation, a widespread gun culture, 30 percent literacy, and food shortages in certain regions to name but a few of the country’s problems. With all that, the Internet hardly seems relevant.

But among local journalists, government workers and other educated Kabulis, there is a real thirst for access. In large part this is because many returning Afghans became accustomed to the Internet while abroad, where they scoured the Web for news from home and used e-mail to keep in touch with family members in Germany, Pakistan, England, California and everywhere else Afghans have been dispersed by years of conflict.

Victory Tour

I wrote this article from Mazar-i-Sharif for TIME magazine, which ran it on 13 August 2002.

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Entering the 19th-century fortress complex of Qala-i-Jangi on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif in north Afghanistan, you would never suspect this place was the center of world attention just a few months ago. The tranquility of the enormous inner courtyard is a surprising though welcome retreat from the fourth-world hustle and poverty outside the massive mud walls.

More surprising still, at least initially, is that they let us in at all. A handful of journalists showing up unannounced at a military facility is not usually given a friendly reception. And given that the security situation in Mazar-i-Sharif is still fragile and tense—with one warlord, Mohammed Ustad Atta, controlling the center of the city and another warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, controlling the outskirts—we expected to be quickly repelled at the main gate as suspected spies or worse.

Lessons from Kosovo

This is a piece I wrote from Pristina for TIME magazine. It ran on 12 November 2001. I was reminded of it in early April 2011, when the editor of an American magazine asked me if they could reprint it as part of an examination of international intervention over the past decades in light of current events in Libya.

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Two-and-a-half years after NATO bombers attacked Yugoslavia to force a resolution to the Kosovo conflict, the breakaway region is holding its first general elections on 17 November. The election will lead to a 120-seat assembly and a president, institutions that will hold little power but have great symbolic significance.

Most Kosovars feel they know the outcome of those elections already. Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) is likely to win a majority just as it did in local elections last year, and Rugova will likely be Kosovo's first president. The campaign has mostly been straightforward and without incident, and this lack of excitement is generally seen as a victory for the international community. Being in Kosovo as U.S.-led bombing continues in Afghanistan, I cannot help but think back to 1999 when the same bombers were pelting this country. Like many people here, I find myself wondering what lessons Kosovo holds for the international community and Afghanistan today.