The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

always his own man; indeed, that is what defines an SOB. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were all “our” SOBs for long periods — before they bit the hand that was providing their support. Karimov proved just as unreliable an ally. By May 2005 the argument that he was a reformer had already become untenable, when his troops massacred over 600 almost entirely unarmed demonstrators in the town of Andijan. Shortly thereafter he served the United States with notice of eviction from its large air base at Karshi Khanabad. There has been a concerted attempt by Republican institutes to rewrite history to pretend that the U.S. quit the base in response to the Andijan massacre. But that is not true — the U.S. had no intention of leaving prior to being evicted. Moreover, the entire Peace Corps operation and dozens of U.S. NGOs were also evicted. Karimov quickly moved back into the Russian orbit, fol- lowing a deal struck by his daughter. In exchange for massive bribes, the country’s substantial gas reserves were handed over to the Russian energy monopoly, Gazprom. So the U.S. lost in Uzbekistan in every respect. It forfeited its moral standing, acquiring a reputation in the Muslim world as a hypocritical and self-serving superpower, interested in democracy and human rights only when convenient. In return, the intelligence the U.S. gained from the torture chambers of the Karimov security services was self-serving propaganda that mud- died the picture by providing a stream of false infor- mation exaggerating the strength of al-Qaida in Central Asia. Elsewhere in the former communist bloc (e.g., Ukraine and Georgia), Washington backed the people against their dictatorships. That policy contributed hugely to the successful revolutions that spread so much freedom in the world. But in Uzbekistan, blinded by the short-term demands of the “War on Terror,” the U.S. backed the dictatorship against the people. That is always a very bad call. F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 47