A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Over the course of June and July 2004, twenty-three of the most prominent businessmen, including Azimov, were arrested and taken to the Andijan headquarters of the Uzbek secret police (SNB). Initially, the men were told they were under investigation for tax evasion and financial documents were demanded. When the seized paperwork failed to reveal any indictable offences, the SNB changed tack. The businessmen had affiliations with Akram Yuldashev, the jailed extremist and possible terrorist. Weren’t they, too, religious extremists? Weren’t they, perhaps, terrorists?

  When Azimov denied all knowledge of religious or political dissi-dence and insisted that Yuldashev himself was innocent, too, the SNB decided to push harder. He was beaten repeatedly, first with fists, then police batons. His fingers were splayed and put into a vice-like machine that slowly spread them apart and squeezed them. His interrogators then informed him that, if he failed to confess, his wife would be raped. Other union members were given the same ultimatum. Handed a piece of paper with a pre-written confession, Azimov signed without even reading it. They all did.

  That Karimov and his henchmen could behave this way was no great surprise to Human Rights Watch. The Uzbek president had been doing this kind of thing, to a greater or lesser extent, since assuming power in 1990.

  More interesting was the fact that Karimov was a strategic partner of the United States. He was a special friend.

  The mechanics of the US–Uzbek special relationship shed an interesting light on the White House’s prosecution of the War on Terror. A shame, then, that so few US officials involved are prepared to go on the record about it. Even those that have retired are generally unwilling to be named, or to discuss it. Presumably this reticence is a result of the fact that, almost from its outset, the relationship was a disaster. Undoubtedly, it ended in tragedy.

  Soon after the United States decided to invade Afghanistan in September 2001, planners had faced the age-old problem: how to get there?

  ‘This region is probably the most remote, landlocked area in the world,’ explains a senior Pentagon official involved with the planning process. ‘So the real strategic challenge was: how do we get air power into Afghanistan to wage modern war?’

  The gravity of the situation was not lost on US policymakers, who were shocked to discover just how hard this undertaking might be.

  ‘You look at the map, you look at Afghanistan and where it is,’ Condoleezza Rice later told the PBS channel of these initial discussions. ‘I think the colour kind of drained from everybody’s faces.’

  Traditionally, the United States launched attacks from aircraft carriers, but Afghanistan was so far inland that fleets in either the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea were too far away. The Pentagon needed access to one of its target’s neighbours. Of the six countries that bordered Afghanistan, three – China, Iran and Pakistan – either were not asked or refused to allow the United States to launch attacks from their territory. This left Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

  By far the best option was Uzbekistan: the route between the two countries was not unduly mountainous and it was nicely situated above the north-west corner of Afghanistan, home of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s arch-enemies and thus key allies of the United States. It was perfect.

  Operationally, Uzbekistan was important for another reason, too. Before aerial bombing of Afghanistan could begin, Pentagon officials insisted that a Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) facility had to be available: if a pilot was shot down on a bombing run, without CSAR he would be stranded behind enemy lines. The White House agreed: US personnel in Taliban custody could put paid to the entire operation. Quite apart from the tactical issues, Americans in Islamic hands had crippled the Carter Administration in the 1980s. The political risk was just too high. Since CSAR was conducted by helicopter, it had to be based in a county near the theatre of operations. That meant Uzbekistan.

  ‘Very swiftly after [9/11] it was very clear that Uzbekistan was a very important country,’ says David Merkel, a Central Asia specialist and National Security Council member at the time. ‘It was critical to have a military presence and have overflight rights.’

  Military planners agreed. ‘Uzbekistan,’ General Tommy Franks informed CENTCOM on 12 September, ‘will be vital to the operation.’ The country’s strategic importance was hard to overstate. According to one Pentagon negotiator involved, Uzbekistan was ‘the geographical and political keystone’.

  CS AR from Uzbekistan now became the enabling factor for the invasion of Afghanistan. Before a deal was hammered out, little could happen.

  ‘I don’t know what H-Hour was in the minds of the planners in terms of when they wanted to conduct airstrikes against the Taliban,’ admits Colonel Jon Chicky, CENTCOM’S Uzbek Country Officer at the time, ‘but it was important to have these guys on the ground, to support the bombing operations once they began.’

  State Department and Pentagon officials laboured around the clock to facilitate access to the country.

  ‘Travel well into the night, meetings sometimes at midnight with [President] Karimov,’ recalls a senior Pentagon planner. ‘It was a bit chaotic.’

  The United States had a number of effective bargaining chips to offer Uzbekistan in return for a base. At the top of the list was security. The Uzbek leader was paranoid about the threat of Islamic extremism and had been banging the drum about al-Qaeda ever since one of the organization’s offshoots, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had attempted to assassinate him in 1999. At the time, he had requested assistance from the United States, which had suggested a joint operation.

  Still smarting from its inability to deploy AC-130 SPECTRE gunships to Afghanistan to kill Bin Laden outright, the CIA had struck a secret deal with Karimov with a view to snatching the al-Qaeda leader instead. Uzbek special forces were recruited for a cross-border raid, then equipped and trained by the United States. When it had become clear a year later that the operation was likely to be a non-starter,13 the United States had established an Uzbek base for Predator unmanned aerial vehicles instead, with a view to deploying them over Afghanistan. It was these flights that had led to real-time images of Bin Laden in September 2000; it was their cessation two months later that would lead to the rebirth of the CIA’s rendition programme.

  Admittedly, these plans had all come to nothing, but post-9/11 the signs looked good for a new agreement: there was already a relationship, and Karimov was as concerned about al-Qaeda as the White House.

  ‘The US and Uzbek positions on this were similar,’ explains the senior Pentagon official. ‘We both had a terrorism problem.’

  Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov had a couple of other good reasons to strike a deal with the United States. Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia had been breathing down his neck. A US treaty would send a powerful signal to Moscow that he was his own man. It would also give him political leverage with his neighbours: after all, no one messes with allies of the United States. Then there was the issue of money. If the Americans really needed a base in Central Asia, presumably they were willing to pay for it. Security assurances, political credibility, trade deals, economic assistance – there was a lot to gain here.

  United States officials were not blind to the fringe benefits of an agreement, either. Central Asia was home to the largest untapped fossil fuel reserves on the planet, worth trillions of dollars. True, most of the actual oil was in Kazakhstan, next door to Uzbekistan, but a deal with any Central Asian nation was a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it would give the United States a chance to stymie Russia’s monopoly of the region’s deposits.

  On top of this came the issue of Russia itself. Notoriously cagey about US troops positioned near its borders, here was an opportunity to plant a US base right in Russia’s backyard. Best of all, in the light of the 9/11 attacks, the Kremlin was powerless to intervene.

  * * *

  Almost immediately after 9/11, it became clear that a deal between the two countries would be struc
k. But under what terms? By 15 September the CIA was informing President Bush that Uzbekistan was to be ‘the jumping-off point’ for the Afghan campaign. The obvious choice for a US base was an old airstrip near the border that the Soviets had used during their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The place looked as if it had been deserted ever since: the runways were pitted, the land contaminated with asbestos and the hangars full of Soviet-era MiG aircraft. Situated between the towns of Karshi and Khanabad, an amalgamation of the two names led to a US military acronym becoming the base’s unofficial moniker: K2.

  Not everyone in the White House was enthusiastic about this new friendship with President Karimov. For a start, he was clearly out to drive a hard bargain. Among other demands, he wanted to join NATO (a request that even the United States was powerless to grant). He wanted a mutual defence pact. He wanted economic support. Above all, he wanted some sort of indication that the United States would not achieve its military goals in Afghanistan and then abandon him, either to face an angry Russia, or fleeing Taliban fighters hell-bent on revenge.

  ‘They weren’t very easy to deal with, I’ll put it that way’ comments one negotiator. ‘It got into, quite frankly, “What am I going to get out of this?” They wanted stuff from us.’

  Others pointed out the risks of making a deal with a man like Karimov. At a meeting on 15 September, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet not only presented the President with the draft Memorandum of Notification, making extraordinary rendition a reality, he also warned that intelligence and basing exchanges with a few of the countries the US was currently negotiating with were likely to raise awkward issues. Some of these guys had reputations for terrible human rights abuses. They weren’t, Tenet warned the President, the kinds of people you found yourself sitting next to in church on Sunday.

  State Department officials were also wary. ‘You need to be exactly clear what it is you are asking of the Uzbeks,’ Secretary of State Colin Powell told the National Security Council on 24 September: ‘the bases, the number of people, what are they going to do, how long they are going to be there’.

  Condoleezza Rice agreed: wasn’t there a risk that Karimov might reclassify every internal political opponent a terrorist and persecute them all in the name of the War on Terror? ‘We have to be sure,’ she said, ‘we know what we’re buying into.’

  Powell and Rice’s warnings would later prove prescient, but Vice-President Dick Cheney had little time for their hand-wringing. ‘We need to get al-Qaeda,’ he explained. ‘Before they get us.’

  By 27 September, the White House was impatient with Karimov’s demands. US men and materiel were backing up at airstrips around the world, waiting to get into Uzbekistan. In Spain, Sicily and Turkey, military aircraft clogged the runways, unable to proceed any further. They wanted CSAR. They wanted to go.

  ‘Our delegation is not senior enough,’ Cheney concluded. ‘We need a swing through the area with a high-level person . . . We need a presidential call to Karimov. We need someone to go in and settle it.’

  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did the deed, and on 3 October Uzbekistan gave CSAR permission with a view to operations commencing the moment the correct equipment had arrived at K2.

  Four days after the unofficial go-ahead, a Status of Forces Agreement was signed between the United States and Uzbekistan. Officially, Karimov was allowing the United States to deploy CSAR from his territory. Unofficially, K2 was to be the hub of the entire operation: Special Forces planned the Afghan infiltration there and the first CIA officers and troops into the country all flew through the base to launch the invasion. Later arrivals would include three AC-130 SPECTRE gunships from the 16th Special Operations Squadron: K2 would be the ‘undisclosed location’ from which the crews would launch their attacks, including the one on the wedding party in Deh Rawood.

  Militarily, the deal was unprecedented. For the first time, the United States was inserting troops within the borders of the former Soviet Union. Politically, the deal was equally exciting: after 200 years of Great Gamesmanship, Central Asia’s crown jewels had just dropped into America’s lap. Here was an opportunity to reshape the strategic balance of the entire region. One hour after the deal was done, the United States started bombing Afghanistan.

  ‘As soon as the agreement was signed,’ says Colonel Jon Chicky ‘the planes launched.’

  After eight months of interrogation, on 11 February 2005, the twenty-three businessmen were removed from Andijan Prison via a tunnel, herded into police cars, then driven to Altinkus District courthouse, where they were displayed in iron cages.

  Over the next four months, they were charged with attacks against the constitutional order, organizing a criminal conspiracy and funding a criminal group. In short, the Government’s case was that the men belonged to an extremist political sect named after its founder, the jailed dissident Akram Yuldashev: Akramiya.

  At the end of each day, the Akramists’ were sent back to jail, where they were incarcerated separately. Every three weeks, they were rotated to new cells to prevent them from making friends and contaminating the jail’s population with their revolutionary extremism.

  For a judicial system as rampantly corrupt as Uzbekistan’s, finding the twenty-three businessmen guilty presented no real challenge. Not so easy, however, was dealing with the fallout. The men were the city’s main employers and their assets had been seized by the Government; thousands of labourers had either been laid off or stood to be laid off in the event of their conviction.

  They had also dedicated a great deal of time and resources to building hospitals, surgeries and schools. They were extremely popular. The moment the trial began, their supporters showed up to picket the courthouse. As the trial progressed and numbers swelled it became clear to the authorities that guilty verdicts might be counterproductive: the point of the exercise was to stop these men, not make martyrs of them.

  When numbers reached the thousands, the SNB realized it had painted itself into a corner. The lead interrogator summoned three of the businessmen and offered them a deal.

  ‘He told us that we should pay $100,000 per person, and then he would release us,’ says Sardor Azimov. The twenty-three were allowed to confer briefly to consider the offer and the three men reported back. ‘They said to him, “OK, if you are going to demand this kind of money, you’ll have to release one of us, without conditions, to go and get it.” We agreed to pay’

  Not so fast, said the SNB. No one was going free. The twenty-three were told that, if they couldn’t get the $2,300,000 in one go, they should cobble together as much as they could and pay in instalments. At this point, the businessmen realized they were being played and refused to pay a penny. The interrogator flew into a rage. He showed Azimov the telephone in his office.

  ‘I could take this phone and smash it into a million pieces, so no one could ever use it again,’ he told the young man. ‘That’s what I’m going to do to you. I’m going to pull the whole thing apart so badly that no one will ever be able to put it back together.’

  On 11 May 2005, the final day of the trial, more than 2,000 protestors showed up outside the court to stand all day, silently awaiting the verdict. Human Rights Watch had been correct. Something was about to blow.

  It was a shame, really. The whole thing had started so well.

  Although the US–Uzbek relationship was never going to be a simple affair, initially all looked promising. America hiked aid payments and military assistance to Uzbekistan by a factor of three, and a steady stream of military aircraft ferried materiel and manpower into and out of K2. Far from being the ‘quagmire’ predicted by the Press, Afghanistan toppled almost immediately. By mid-November 2001, coalition troops had taken Kabul. Behind the operation lay the critical re-supply base, Karshi Khanabad.

  The United States-Uzbek Status of Forces Agreement had been a stopgap designed to get the United States into Afghanistan as fast as possible. Once the liberation was underway, it was clear something more formal was ne
eded. To this end, meetings continued through late 2001 and into 2002 to hammer out what, exactly, both sides could expect from the K2 deal.

  US delegates approached these meetings with a degree of trepidation: while the base was crucial to the Afghan effort, Karimov’s atrocious human rights record rang warning bells. US administrators held no illusions about the republic’s president, for whom it was clear that ‘preserving national security’ and ‘staying in power’ amounted to the same thing. The White House didn’t want to get too close to Uzbekistan. Accessing an airbase in Central Asia was one thing; propping up a corrupt dictatorship was another. The War on Terror, after all, was supposed to be about spreading freedom.

  Meetings started on an unexpected note when the Uzbek delegation presented US officials with a draft agreement they had concocted themselves. At the top of the draft was a list of human rights and democratization reforms. It was time, negotiators were told, for Uzbekistan to progress into the twenty-first century.

  The Americans almost fell off their chairs. Could it be that Karimov actually wanted to reform his regime? It appeared so. In January 2002, a Declaration on Strategic Partnership and Co-operation (known as the ‘Framework Agreement’), using the Uzbeks’ draft as a blueprint, was signed by both countries in Tashkent.

  ‘There was optimism, not just at [the] State [Department], but with all of us,’ recalls a senior Pentagon official involved. ‘It was seen as a good opportunity. And a good sort of indication, a positive indication on the Uzbek side that they might be interested in democratizing.’

  To counter the risk of the Uzbek deal going wrong, the United States settled on a dual strategy: funding and supporting Karimov, while at the same time gently encouraging him to democratize. The airbase and the money became levers with which to exert pressure on the country.