The Central Asian Republics squabble like any good family, and Uzbekistan is acting the confident teenager. Uzbekistan’s government is trying to build up its own energy infrastructure to leave the Soviet era behind them. From the Jamestown:
While every Central Asian country wishes to separate from the Soviet-inherited regional electricity transmission network, the costs remain too high. Tashkent’s decision was mostly political and Uzbek TPP’s will experience severe problems in the delivery of the necessary amount of electricity during peak and non-peak hours. Unlike TPPs, hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are better able to regulate electricity supplies during daily fluctuations in the electricity demand.
Its the sort of ironheaded leap at modernization that it takes an autocrat to do. In democracies, people would vote you out of office if you cut off their electricity in the name of nationalism and geopolitical grandstanding. Karimov has nothing to lose…as long as the Tashkent Open can still run. [As an aside, Karimov has a rough google hit list. I'm surprised there's nobody at some embassy somewhere to make sure HRW isn't #2]. There’s plenty of interesting angles to the story to take. For one, Tajikistan is now going to demonstrate (whether they can or not is a different question…I haven’t gotten a clean word on how complete and effective dams like Rogun are). Tajikistan is instead getting their energy from Kazakhstan for now.
I also thought it was interesting that the article touts that the energy will come from thermal power plants. Mostly because I couldn’t find much information on thermal plants in Uzbekistan…gas and some hydro makes the most of it. All the same, it opens an interesting window into Uzbekistans’s interest in foreign investment. Their Government Energy Website is in Uzbek, of course. But their “Clean Development Mechanism” pages has English and Russian options, as well (and defaults into English). And there’s information about TPP there. There are also loads of fun charts that I don’t have the time to go into now, but will hopefully be able to get to in a few weeks. [Unless someone wants to beat me to it...paging Mr. Visotzky?] But I guess with the new openness that Western governments are showing to Uzbekistan, the government is trying to get hip with the new environment movement. I’m not sure how sincere that can be, what with the Aral and the Cotton and all, but at least it shows forward-thinking from Tashkent, which has been seemingly lacking for a while.
I’ve openly taken this story from the twitter of the writer, Erica Marat, but I wanted to peek around to see what’s going on since then. As well as my conjectural Euro-friendliness, Uzbekistan’s been meeting with Chinese and Pakistani businessfolk. Whew, Turkenistan its not.
Finally and terrifically unrelatedly, the latest US Casualty update made me do a double take: ” As of Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009, at least 855 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan…” Wait, what? The article lists 13 other countries that talk about deaths on base (but 4 deaths in those 13 countries “as a result of hostile action”) so apparently the casualties in Uzbekistan are more related to the War in Afghanistan then the casualties in, say, Tajikistan. So the American losses in Uzbekistan weren’t on bases, and were the result of hostile action. Did I just stumble into a tacit acceptance of US troops fighting in Uzbekistan, or am I missing some head-slap obvious thing? Can the more military-focused folks clue me in, please?
This post was written by...
Asher Kohn – author of 33 posts on Registan.net.
Asher is currently in law school at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is studying natural resource law in Central Asia and its intersection with different theories of jurisprudence. Besides Registan.net, Asher has written for The Los Angeles Times, Run of Play, İstanbul Altı, and Istanbul Eats. He has worked with the Natural Resource Law Center and the International Crisis Group, where he studied legal and political traction over a variety of issues.
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{ 5 comments }
On the Uzbekistan casualty, this should be the information you’re looking for:
I’m a citizen of Uzbekistan and I read an article of yours that mentioned the number of U.S. deaths in the war in Afghanistan. It said this:
“As of Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009, at least 833 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Friday at 10 a.m. EDT. Of those, the military reports 640 were killed by hostile action.”
This gave the impression that members of the U.S. military had died in Uzbekistan. But how could this be? There is no military action in Uzbekistan, and I have never heard that any American has died here.
Zukhriddin Ibragimov
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
AP maintains information on all U.S. troop casualties reported by the Department of Defense as part of the Afghanistan War effort. This includes service members who have died under non-hostile circumstances and deaths that have occurred outside Afghanistan.
While there have been no combat actions in Uzbekistan, one U.S. soldier, Pvt. Giovanny Maria, 19, of Camden, N.J., died in the country on Nov. 29, 2001, from what the Defense Department described as a “non-hostile gunshot wound.” Maria was among 1,000 soldiers providing security at an air base in southern Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan.
The day before his death, about two dozen soldiers from his group, the 10th Mountain Division, were being moved from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. According to officials at the time, their mission was to serve as a quick-reaction force in case of renewed Taliban resistance.
Details about Maria’s death and his assignment in Uzbekistan _ including whether he was about to go to Afghanistan at the time of his death _ are unclear. The Defense Department referred calls to the Army, and Army officials said they would look into Maria’s case but weren’t immediately able to provide more information.
Monika Mathur
AP News Research Center
New York
Ekspeditsya,
Thanks for doing some AP digging for me, I appreciate it. And I’m going to defer any “ooh conspiracy theory” talk about the military not disclosing Mr. Maria’s death because, well, that’s a human being we’re talking about and his family deserves privacy.
I dig some digging to follow up, and for those that are interested, this is a good resource: http://www.icasualties.org/
Sortable charts, maps, and pie charts by province, nationality, etc. is a pretty good open source tool for you researchers out there. Hopefully some people who are in Afghanistan right now reading this could shed some light.
Asher,
I should have noticed that in your post before. I received an email about those AP updates, probably from Ibragimov since that letter to the AP showed up at about the same time. I looked into it and found plenty of reporting on Private Maria’s death from around the time it happened. There was apparently some controversy surrounding the circumstances of his death and what “list” the Army would put it on.
I don’t know who sets that definition of “Afghanistan region” that puts Uzbekistan in with Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I imagine that because the troops at K2 back at the beginning of OEF were a quick reaction force, the Uzbekistan casualty is part of that group, while the 71 other deaths in support of OEF, which include deaths in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, get put into a different list.
Lo, if I had time to dig through those charts, sir, I surely would. Instead I am swimming in my own set of charts.
That being said, a link to my blog earns you a spot both on my blogroll and in my heart.
And btw, I don’t think this represents forward thinking or modernization at all. Energy industries and the type of projects Uzbekistan is proposing are basically great patronage opportunities. Money will pour into these projects, and lo and behold, they’ll be slow in coming to fruition. The Soviet era power network doesn’t really provide sufficient money-siphoning opportunities for Karimov, or perhaps he wants to shake things up and distribute these projects amongst new people. When stealing your people’s money gets old, hey, go ahead and take Western investors money. Tajikistan’s been doing it through loans to their aluminum and hydropower sector for years.
Perhaps I’m being a bit too cynical, I just can’t see any other logic to it.