CPI Makes Hay in the Dark Days of Winter

The Center for Public Integrity today released a statement containing the following:

The ICIJ’s continuing investigation, “Collateral Damage,” found the staggering amount of U.S. military aid to Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Uzbekistan in the three years following 9/11 underscores the importance of U.S. anti-terrorism priorities in the region. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. military aid to Pakistan rose 45,000 percent, from $9 million to more than $4 billion; in the Philippines, similar aid increased 1,500 percent, from $14.6 million to more than $245 million; military assistance from the United States to Uzbekistan increased nearly 1,000 percent, from $9 million to nearly $100 million. These record amounts have not only been given to regimes with documented histories of human rights abuses, but American taxpayers have little way of monitoring how this money was spent.
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The governments of Uzbekistan and Pakistan have seemingly used the U.S.-led war on terror to legitimize domestic crackdowns against their own citizens, at times arbitrarily detaining and arresting terrorist suspects and allegedly participating in the CIA’s controversial “extraordinary renditions” program— transferring terrorist suspects to a foreign country for interrogation without any legal proceedings.

The CPI’s press department could use a bit of integrity. Granted, their job is to get attention for the CPI’s work — which they’ve accomplished — but this creates a strange impression at least in regard to the US-Uzbekistan relationship. Though the past tense is used plenty, it comes off as a critique of current policy. That’s how UPI headlines it, and that’s how CPI itself does in its story on US aid to Uzbekistan after 9/11.

In that report, CPI criticizes the US for providing $100 million of military aid over the three years following 9/11. Fair enough, reasonable people can disagree on whether or not that was a smart policy decision. But there are some important bits of nuance that are missing in the report. I think it is important to note that US aid to Uzbekistan decreased over the period of the strategic partnership. One can see this in CPI’s Uzbekistan data. Some programs increase, but the combined totals go down. (By the by, I applaud CPI for putting together this information in such a clean format. They should do it every year.) I also think that they should have noted the 2004 State Department decertification of Uzbekistan to receive aid over its human rights record.

I also have a few substantive quibbles. First is that the only person interviewed for the report was apparently Human Rights Watch’s Andrea Berg. It would have been nice to have heard other points of view, but it would be naive of me to take seriously the CPI’s claims of being disinterested nonpartisans as pure as the driven snow. Sarah Fort, the author of the story, implies Berg means things that don’t appear in her quotations.

Berg said that the U.S.-led war on terror is a concept that is being used against the Uzbeks by their own government. “Internally, there is a crackdown. Use of the word ‘terrorist’ is so widespread and [the government] use[s] it for everything. Everyone is a terrorist.”

That’s not what I read Berg saying, and anyone who was in Uzbekistan prior to 9/11 surely knows that Uzbekistan’s government did not need the US to declare a war on terror to itself accuse large numbers of people of being terrorists.

I also find the implication that continuing aid under the Nunn-Lugar program is evidence that the US does not care about Uzbekistan’s human rights record to be absurd.

Despite that record, U.S. officials have found it difficult to walk away completely from the Karimov government. An important example of this was the U.S. government’s approach to weapons of mass destruction left behind in Uzbekistan when the Soviet Union collapsed. The U.S. decided to waive human rights certification under the Nunn-Lugar program, which funds destruction and deactivation of such weapons in former Soviet states.

In January 2007, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., proposed a permanent repeal of human rights restrictions associated with the Nunn-Lugar program, citing concerns that such restrictions would inhibit legitimate national security needs associated with securing weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. Andy Fisher, Lugar’s press secretary, told ICIJ in written responses to questions, “It continues to be most imperative that the Nunn-Lugar program [continue] to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Uzbekistan.”

Mr. Fisher is 100% correct. The United States should not keep illiberal dictatorships at arm’s length. That does not mean we should disregard human rights and democratization, but there are ways of cooperating that mitigate the risk of bolstering the repressive infrastructure of governments like Uzbekistan’s. Dismantling weapons of mass destruction is one of those fairly low-risk areas for cooperation while also resulting in a very large good.

My final point of dispute is that, for all the criticism of US military cooperation with Uzbekistan, we find no commendation of current US reluctance to renew close ties with the Karimov government. Granted, that period of the relationship falls outside the three year window they’re looking at, but in all fairness, so does the criticized Pentagon payment for use of K2. But, again, I’m not naive, and the point of this project is most definitely not to be constructive.

Anyhow, kudos to the Center for Public Integrity. I’m always impressed how much critical hay people can make of the US-Uzbek strategic partnership despite it being over for nearly two years.

As a total aside on the topic of integrity, I do commend the CPI for making its IRS 990 returns easily available on their website. That kind of disclosure is rare.