Another way of writing this post is “Alexander Cooley makes broad claims he cannot support with evidence.”

There are data to suggest that governments throughout the region are backsliding, as you suggest. Cooley points this out. We also know some countries in the region have received Security Assistance from the U.S. government. Cooley also points this out.

However, what Cooley cannot and did not point out was how the Security Assistance caused that backsliding. He argued causation then he only demonstrated correlation. You say this far too gently: as an act of scholarship it is worse than lazy, it is actively misleading.

I find this a lot in the post-OSI crowd. US assistance is bad in all ways because no matter what it makes everything worse off (unless it’s funding pet projects). But also, if the U.S. plans on reducing its presence, then it’s also making everything worse, in all ways. Such arguments don’t require data, because they’re supported by sources (none of which are ever named), or, like fellow OSI recipient Kenneth Roth, actually argues this is a dereliction of duty of the government in some completely undefinable way that is unrecognizable to anyone who’s ever studied or worked for the government.

This is a lazy polemic, in other words, not a work of scholarship. Cooley abuses basic terms: paying rent for access to an airport, for example, is not “security assistance,” it is paying rent for access to an airport (he does not demonstrate if and how the far lesser amounts the U.S. spent liaising with the Kyrgyz security forces contributed to the corruption of the regime). His basic terms are just wrong, so wrong I wonder if he ever bothered to check if he got the definitions right.

You went way too gentle on him for this crap. Cooley would never allow one of his students to argue something this incompletely, based far more on posturing than on data; he would, instead, fail them for forgetting their homework (or maybe give them an incomplete). Why the tiny New York-based Central Asia crowd refuses to do basic homework on how the U.S. government operates escapes me, nevertheless it is a common thread linking all of their misleading, lazy whinge together.

It’s awful, it distorts the conversation, and it should be embarrassing for them.

Does it not seem odd to you to pin the blame on security relationships for trends in Central Asian governments’ behaviors that existed prior to those relationships and are more closely related to factors peculiar to each government? Even if this is a teaser for the book, where (for the first time ever, apparently, because we’ve heard this exact same story for a couple years now) the dots will be fully connected, the math for the process described should roughly add up better than it does. It’s precisely because each of these countries receives different levels and kinds of security assistance that have no apparent direct connections to the amount of corruption or repression that I don’t buy the argument.

I think the bigger problem is linking ALL of the Central Asian states together, as if individual governments, populaces, etc. are the same because they are Muslim and used to live in the Soviet Union. Some examples off the top of my head: US aid to Kazakhstan to destroy or manage nuclear weapons and waste is not the same as fuel contracts at Manas. The aid in the former case might (or might not) have made Kazakhstan more interested in presenting a good image to the world (e.g., wanting the OSCE chairmanship, trying to build a competitive market economy), while the latter may not have a similar effect in Kyrgyzstan.

I can name developed countries that don’t do this. Pretty much all of Europe and North America. The US doesn’t have much state support to news media, but the bit that does receive such support is actually produces some of the most accurate and even-handed we have.

I do agree with Metin, it is something that you would expect from state backed tv channel. There is nothing wrong with it. There might be a government policy to control the birth rate. Can you name any developed or developing country that does not do it? Whether it’s forced or not that seems to be the main issue here, am I right?

Or maybe not.