In recent months the Obama administration has agreed an aid package worth $120 million with the Government of Uzbekistan on top of a fee of $60 million for use of an air base in the south of the country. In the years since the end of the Soviet Union, President Islam Karimov has ruled Uzbekistan with corruption and fear that have resulted in significant human rights abuses.
Martha Brill Olcott commented in the Washington Post in 2005 that, "Poverty, corruption, repressive security agencies, price controls and steep taxes have created a disgruntlement that has nothing to do with religion". On 14th May 2005, thousands of protestors gathered in the main square of Andijan in the Ferghana valley to protest against rising prices and a government decision to turn the main mosque into an art gallery. The response by the Uzbek security forces, who had been recieving training from the US military was clinically brutal, 850 people were shot dead. One shopkeeper who was present that day described women and children falling like grass when cut with a scythe. Those who tried to flee across the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border were shot by security forces. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan accused the President of having ordered the deaths of two political oppopents by boiling them alive.
In Afghanistan the US mission is to destroy the Taliban, should they blow themselves up on the streets of the US, introduce democracy, human rights, gender equality and financial stability. Yet only a couple of thousand miles away the Obama administration is financially supporting a vile and corrupt dictatorship that his little or no respect for the values that the US is attempting to intorduce to the people of Afghanistan. What then is the reason d' etre behind this contradiction in US foreign policy in Central Asia?
It would appear that even though the Cold War is over the old adage of, 'He may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch' is bankrupting the morals to US foreign policy in this arena. One only has to remember American support for the likes of Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam in the early sixties, a rather brief flirtation with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during their war againt Vietnam and the rise of General Pinochet of Chile. Indeed Karimov is a son of a bitch, but given the convenience of an airfield in close proximity to the Afghan theatre of war he is very much Obama's son of a bitch. Yet again, the US is more than happy to overlook the discretions, however serious, of an ally that is proving convenient to the current policy mission of the state department.
