President Nazarbyaev gave a long speech at the Astana Economic Forum yesterday, describing what Trend.az calls his “concept of civilized development in the 21st century.” (For those with a particular interest in this subject, the full text of the speech is available.) In the course of laying out his vision, which includes social and economic justice based on a global rather than “Washington” consensus, he takes a swing at the internet, saying that its improper use can derail development.

Nazarbayev said that the unprecedented level of global communications technologies now available reduce barriers of time and distance, but that this potential cannot be used as a tool of provocation to undermine the moral foundations of public order. Instead, he says, these tools should be used for “constructive goals.” Later in the speech, he describes the protests of the Arab Spring as having unleashed a host of ills including the hampering of social development and complication of international relations. Such revolutions, Nazarbayev says, are harmful to politics and society.

Though Nazarbayev’s warning about the misuse of the internet comes well before his mention of the Arab Spring in his speech, the two ideas are closely connected as a major theme in his speech is that revolution has nothing to offer modern politics or societies but waste and chaos. He commented last month that countries affected by the Arab Spring have been set back economically 15 years and that they’ve ushered in Islamist rule. In that interview, he also said that using social media for political purposes threatens stability and he complained then too that the west pushes values incompatible with the mentality and tradition of much of the world.

It is unlikely that this talk signals any significant expansion of restrictions on the internet beyond those that already exist. However, it is another reminder that Kazakhstan is pursuing the same strategy as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan of demonizing the internet as a source of considerable danger and incompatible western morals and ideologies while encouraging “legitimate” use of it as a tool to enable businesses and government.

Nazarbayev casts Kazakhstan as a bridge between east and west. But, having Ilham Aliyev and Islom Karimov as peer practitioners in his approach to the internet places him and Kazakhstan very far from the middle ground.

This past weekend, I attended the NATO Summit in Chicago. There I heard from many heads of state, foreign ministers, defense ministers, secretary-generals, officials, and analysts about what NATO is doing and how it’s evolving into an enlightened global actor for peace.

The challenge with what I heard is that a lot of is little more than gussied up magical thinking. While NATO’s broader issues merit discussion (I did some of that for U.S. News here), the way it is approaching Afghanistan leaves much to be desired.

Though the session was off the record, I did have the opportunity to ask a senior ISAF official if there had been any progress in developing a plan to fund the continued expansion and operation of the Afghan security forces. He was a bit dismissive and non-committal, and simply referenced that ISAF has done “sustainment studies.”

Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. One of President Obama’s priorities going into the summit was to get NATO member country pledges to fund the transition strategy. While he got a promise from new French President Hollande to withdraw early only their combat troops (and not their support troops — whatever that means), Obama did not get pledges to fully fund the transition strategy. That’s a major failing, considering the entirety of the strategy rests on funding the ANSF basically forever.

(I discuss many of the open holes in the current strategy in an update to a report I wrote for my think tank, The American Security Project, last week.)

But the other part of the Afghanistan strategy that needs to be addressed is the issue of Pakistan’s supply lines. I’ve supported the administration’s decision to build the NDN and its relationship with the Central Asian regimes because it gives the U.S. an alternative to the toxic relationship with Pakistan and provides a means to circumvent Pakistani leverage over the U.S.

But, as I argue in an op-ed for The Hill, while the U.S. can actually run the war just fine with the NDN, it really cannot end the war with the NDN — at least in anything like a reasonably expensive way.

NATO might be able to run the war without Pakistan, but it cannot end the war without Pakistan. There is so much equipment in Afghanistan, so many vehicles, so much ammunition, so much trash and construction material, that the NDN could never hope to accommodate all of it by NATO’s 2014 end date for combat operations. Furthermore, some of the governments along the supply route, like dictatorial Uzbekistan, are morally reprehensible regimes that should not be rewarded with surplus combat equipment. So the Pakistani supply routes must be reopened….

If the Pakistani supply lines cannot be reopened, then the withdrawal from Afghanistan will become a lot messier. Just as the Russians left tons of equipment, supplies, buildings, weapons and vehicles behind in their mad rush back north after the Geneva Accords were signed in 1988, so too will the United States and NATO leave an unimaginable cache of valuable equipment and materiel behind as they leave over the next two years.

Among the many other clouds in all the silver lining coming from NATO’s official statements about the war, I think this looms the largest of all. The war in Afghanistan is heading toward catastrophe when the years of magical thinking at the policy level come crashing into the uncompromising brick wall of reality. I hope someone in charge will bother to pay attention, but honestly… I don’t think anyone will. And by the time it all comes crashing down, it will be someone else’s problem anyway.

While Central Asia’s international political profile has risen considerably since 2001, it has primarily been seen in the West through the prism of Afghanistan. The policies of Western governments towards Central Asia as a whole and as individual states have widely fluctuated, but in almost every case, been heavily shaped by policies toward Afghanistan. US and ISAF Afghanistan policy has been short-sighted and messy enough, making policy toward Central Asia even moreso.

In recent years, Central Asia’s governments have backslid, becoming more authoritarian and less able to provide services to all of society. This contributes to greater risks for instability in the future.

How much responsibility do Western countries, particularly the United States, have for this situation?

According to Alexander Cooley, who writes, “…the West has left a trail of repression, graft and unfulfilled commitments to Central Asia’s fledgling civil society,” a lot.

Cooley makes two big claims about how the US and ISAF campaign in Afghanistan has affected Central Asia:

1. Security assistance has made Central Asian states more authoritarian and corrupt
2. The drawdown from Afghanistan will magnify these effects

I acknowledge the possibility that Cooley is referring to a very small, slightly more than trivial, increase when using the adjective “more” to describe the changes in authoritarianism and corruption in Central Asia caused by western security assistance. However, it seems unlikely that he means “slightly more than trivial” for a few reasons. First, why bother writing about it in anything other than a theoretical way if that is indeed the case? Second, he does not write about these changes in the way one might expect were he describing small changes; the language suggests a qualitative and quantitative levels of authoritarianism and corruption rather than describing, for example, how western assistance creates new opportunities for the pre-existing corruption. Third, the tone suggests he means something big.

Perhaps the strong evidence is in his forthcoming book, because the case made in the article linked above is extraordinarily thin.

Before even looking at the evidence, this case should be approached with extreme skepticism. As a thought experiment, imagine there had been no war in Afghanistan. Would we expect any of the Central Asian governments to be qualitatively different in any perceivable way? Would corruption or authoritarianism be significantly less pronounced? To say they would be dramatically understates the agency these governments have.

Similarly, even with the war in Afghanistan, if western security assistance is a noteworthy contributor to increased corruption and authoritarianism, we should expect the effects to be more pronounced where that assistance is and has been greatest. It is hard to measure these things objectively, but looking at Freedom House and Transparency International scores or purely qualitative assessments of corruption and freedom as levels of US security assistance over the last decade shows no clear patterns. Uzbekistan was a little better in the early part of the decade when US security assistance was greatest and did most of its slide during the period of poor relations with the US. Kyrgyzstan has slid on corruption rankings and fallen and bounced back on freedom rankings. There is a lot more economy in explaining these changes by referring to the features of the particular governments than there is by pointing to US security assistance as the cause.¹

So, Cooley has big evidentiary hurdles — ones he sets up himself by writing at the outset that, “Western security assistance has made the Central Asian states more authoritarian and more corrupt” — to clear to show a causal relationship between security assistance and increased corruption and authoritarianism. He simply does not clear them.

On promotion of political and civil rights, he writes,

The K2 eviction prompted Western officials to accept the Central Asian governments’ insistence that engagement on security issues was now antithetical with promoting political freedoms.

To support this claim, he points out that the US toned down criticism of President Bakiev in 2007 to prevent the eviction of Manas, that human rights organizations complain that the US will not raise rights issues with certain Central Asian governments because of security relationships, and that the EU addresses human rights issues in EU-Central Asia dialogues. This simply does not cut it. Yes, the US has toned down criticism at times, and some agencies are particularly prone to downplaying concerns over rights. However, it is incorrect to say that the US does not raise these issues, as some human rights organizations claim (though this argument is hard to refute without details). Whether or not this engagement makes any difference, especially in a systematic way, is an entirely different question, as is whether or not US officials are eager to bring these issues up. But the mountain of rights related reports and certifications required for security assistance required by Congress make it impossible not to bring these issues up. Is it really that hard to find people in government with knowledge of these negotiations or who can describe the far more complicated story on trying to promote rights and maintain security assistance agreements?

On corruption, Cooley describes the rent-seeking around the Northern Distribution Network and the massive corruption in fuel sales for the Transit Center at Manas. He is entirely right that western, mostly US, engagement on transit into Afghanistan has created opportunities for corruption for local elites. And he is right that the payments are likely to increase as equipment is moved out of Afghanistan on the NDN. Yes, this is “more” corruption quantitatively, but is it qualitatively? One’s mileage may vary, but any and all resources coming into the region from outside are likely to have a chunk taken out due to corruption.²

Cooley never directly supports his claim that western security assistance has made Central Asia more authoritarian. The closest he comes is when he writes,

…the Obama Administration in January of this year lifted a ban on providing military assistance and its financing to the Uzbek government, opening the way to transfers of material that is as likely to be used to target domestic opponents as it is for its publicly stated purpose of guarding these supply lines.

Cooley, like other analysts of US security assistance, would be better served by taking a look at what security assistance has been given and what is on offer. Vague reference to “material” muddies the water. Uzbekistan wants all kinds of military equipment, but what is actually being offered does not include weapons and ammunition. Specific items include night-vision goggles, thermal imaging sensors for border posts, and body armor, and it will probably also include things like computers, desks, certain kinds of vehicles, and similar equipment being moved back out of Afghanistan. It explicitly does not include expansion of training. I guess all of these things could be used against domestic opponents or the public, but is that really such a significant risk? These are not the tools of repression currently used, and to claim that this increases authoritarianism is making a mountain out of a molehill. Again, is it really that hard to find people, especially at State or on Congressional staffs, who have worked these issues and can provide another perspective to add something to the story?

I agree that US policy has been lacking in Central Asia over the last decade. There have been strategic missteps and missed opportunities. Western governments, particularly the US and German, have too often let themselves lose sight of the importance of human rights to the long-term security and stability of Central Asia in the pursuit of short-term goals in Afghanistan. Human rights organizations play an important role in reminding western governments that Central Asian governments are headed the wrong direction, and academics play an important role in providing inputs to orient policy in better directions. However, in either of these cases, that role is undermined by making thinly-supported arguments that overstate the effects of security assistance on Central Asian governments.

Uzbekistan’s popular Axborot news program showed that even Islom Karimov must be censored if he speaks about subjects too sensitive for Uzbekistan’s national mentality. According a report originally published by Ozodlik (in Uzbek), Axborot cut a portion of comments Karimov delivered while meeting with President Putin in Moscow. During his talk with Putin, Karimov brought up birth rates and the need to prevent population from growing too quickly for the economy to keep up.

Axborot reported Karimov as saying,

The population of Uzbekistan is now nearly 30 million people. We are doing all we can so that the growth of our population corresponds to the growth of our economy so that future generations can live better than us, be smarter than us, and live happier lives than us. If one looks through this lens, our children must grow up so that they are no more worse off than those of the most developed countries.

What he actually said, according to he transcript of the meeting available from the Kremlin in Russian and in English was,

Uzbekistan’s population today is nearly 30 million people. I am not saying that the population is growing rapidly: unlike Russia, we are doing everything we can to make sure that the population growth rate does not exceed 1.2 to 1.3.

It is our firm belief that given the present situation and our current prospects and resources, which include first of all water, territory and arable land, our main challenge is to provide everything our people need, and most importantly to make sure that the future generation lives better than we do, and is smarter and happier than we are. From this perspective, we try to use public campaigns, education and healthcare to ensure that population growth corresponds to economic growth. [Если смотреть через эту призму, мы и в этом вопросе через пропаганду, агитацию, медицину пытаемся создать условия, чтобы темпы роста нашего населения соответствовали темпу роста экономики..] Our children should enjoy the same standards of living as children in the most developed countries. This is the Kremlin’s translation. I’ve inserted the Russian original after the second to last sentence.

Ferghana speculates that Axborot wanted to avoid even hinting at birth control, a taboo subject, and especially at anything that might suggest the government does indeed engage in a campaign of forced contraception or sterilization.

Placing Karimov’s comment in the context of how Uzbekistan’s government works, this looks as close to an admission that the state is indeed engaged in suppressing the birthrate as one could ever expect. For every one of the government’s sinister policies, there is a tame explanation from the highest levels of government. If forced labor in cotton is just “children helping their families earn an income,” “job training,” or “a peculiarity of national culture,” then it’s not hard to interpret a “public awareness, education, and healthcare” campaign to keep birthrates low to be referring to a campaign going back more than a decade that forces contraception and sterilization on women in rural areas.

Alisher Usmanov, the world’s richest libel tourist and oh yeah Uzbek-turned-Russian magnate of extractive industries, stands to profit massively from the upcoming Facebook IPO:

As other investors were demanding tough terms, he said in an interview this week, he and his Russian business associates were willing to buy almost 10 percent of the company while giving up the voting rights on those shares to Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

Now the Russian-led investments of less than $900 million, made through two entities, Mail.ru and Digital Sky Technologies, will be worth more than $6 billion, based on the midpoint of the $34 to $38 price range that Facebook’s bankers have set for the stock.

This makes for kind of an interesting contrast with Facebook co-founded Eduardo Saverin, who recently renounced his U.S. citizenship and stands to save over $100 million in capital gains taxes from the upcoming IPO. Doing so will, in all likelihood, mean he’ll never be allowed back into the United States.

Usmanov, as a non-US citizen, doesn’t face these constraints. Considering the many accusations about Usmanov’s shady financial dealings with Tashkent (some of which were levied by our old friend Craig Murray, which prompted a ridiculous libel suit by Usmanov’s lawyers), it’s a really striking that a probable criminal like Usmanov can travel to the U.S. freely (as best I know he doesn’t face any travel restrictions), but a non-criminal like Saverin will probably be barred from ever traveling to the U.S. again because of a tax loophole.

Oh yeah, and Usmanov also owns notable stakes in Zynga as well. So basically, he knows everything you do on Facebook and Farmville.

President Karimov meeting with the President of FIFA in his favorite suit and with his favorite pencils at his side.

Does he have hundreds of this same suit and tie or what?

The following announcement was posted at the request of Awareness Projects International

From May 20-21 of 2012, leaders from around the world will be gathering in Chicago for The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) important diplomatic summit hosted by President Barack Obama. Chicago is the first American city other than Washington DC to host a NATO summit. About 2,000 journalists from around the world are expected in Chicago to document the event.

President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov will be attending the summit. Given the importance and high class of this summit, and presence of the Uzbek tyrant, it provides AwarenssProjects.Org an opportunity to demonstrate against child labor in Uzbekistan, demand the end of exploitation of children in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry and to bring awareness about the human rights situation and the cotton industry’s result in the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.

This protest is being organized by Awareness Projects International and sponsored by the International Labor Rights Forum and Human Rights Watch.

For more information, contact Dmitriy Nurullayev.

Earlier this week, Small Wars Journal published an article by Matthew Stein, a research analyst currently working at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, discussing the role of videos recorded and posted by citizen bystanders in the information battle to control the narrative over the police’s violent crackdown on protesters in Zhanaozen last December. Stein’s article provides a fairly straightforward summary of the different videos showing the police firing on protesters and how the ways in which the government has built a narrative for the incident. On the significance of the appearance of these videos, Stein writes,

Finally, the significance of these videos is that the people of Zhanaozen were able to get information on the incident out into social media despite the government’s control over access. People using social media to publicize incidents that might not otherwise be noticed is not a new trend, as can be seen from worldwide events in 2011. However, this is the most noteworthy example from Kazakhstan, much less Central Asia, of this happening. Due to the effect that the first video (Zhana Ozen 3) had, it will not be the last time that people in Kazakhstan document an incident on video and make it available for a wide audience.

Dissemination of documentary evidence without state filtering is a fairly recent phenomenon in Central Asia, though some, including myself, would argue that Kazakhstan is late to this, at least in regard to high profile events, especially compared to Kyrgyzstan, where there are several earlier examples, including 2010′s overthrow of President Bakiev and especially the ethnic violence in Osh. More importantly though, the significance of information going unfiltered into social media and out to a wide audience is overstated. As internet use increases in Central Asia, it should come as no surprise that some of these people use the internet to distribute content like the Zhanaozen videos.

In his final paragraph, Stein points to the emergence of a struggle between state and society to control the narratives around controversial events. There is a story to be told about how these authoritarian states respond to erosion of their information dominance, but in many ways, it is singularly uninteresting. Almost every state tries to shape narratives, and in Central Asia, the state controls the story by keeping political groups, social and religious groups, and the media on a short leash. Central Asian governments have stepped up some restrictions and monitoring of social media. Security services are adept enough at disrupting off-line political activity planned online, and governments are finding ways to convince people to avoid the internet.

Like my colleagues here at Registan, I have found expectations of a Central Asian spring in the near term or the assumption that the Arab Spring would have a measurable impact on Central Asia to be based on fundamental misunderstandings of the region. Political culture matters. A lot. Government plays a critical role in nurturing fear, distrust, and political apathy, but their success is aided enormously by their political opponents and the societies they govern perpetuating this culture themselves. And research on Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan suggests that at least in the near term, the internet has exacerbated these problems.

Of course, all of these things — the relationships between state and society, the discussions within society, and political and cultural attitudes — are dynamic. Timelines extend well beyond the near term. The documentation and discussion in social media of events like Zhanaozen or ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan is important because it preserves events. Stein is looking in the wrong place for meaning. The real significance of this documentation and presentation is in how and whether it changes society’s modes and norms for discussing sensitive political, social, and cultural topics and how those changes subsequently change political culture. The state’s reaction is just a continuation of a long-running dynamic.

I do not find the future as bleak as we sometimes make it sound when we focus on the near term. It is, of course, incorrect to characterize any popular uprising as entirely reliant on the internet. Twitter, facebook, etc. can only catalyze offline factors. Trends like the popular revival of Islam, failures of economies to meet rising expectations, the growth of ethno-linguistic nationalism, and demographic shifts all suggest heightened chances for political instability in the medium- to long-term. It is difficult to look at how the internet is being used in Central Asia at present and not see it playing an organizing and catalyzing role in the future should these trends keep drifting Central Asia toward instability. However, it is absolutely impossible at present to predict how or when the internet will play an appreciably important role. The only thing that is certain is that more clarity on these questions comes from focusing on discussions and practices within society than from monitoring the state-society dynamic.

Celebrating the year anniversary of bin Laden’s demise, I wrote for the Atlantic about the weird inflated hyperbole that’s arisen about al Qaeda.

This week marks one year since Osama bin Laden’s death. We’re hearing a lot about what the anniversary means for the larger struggle against Islamist violence around the world. Most assessments of the “War on Terror” fall into one of two categories: al-Qaeda is stronger than ever or al-Qaeda is dead or dying. Whatever you think about al-Qaeda specifically, the global movement of violent Islamism is more complicated.

More there.

Fareed Zakaria wants to blame (or whatever) Borat for a recent increase in tourist visa applications to Kazakhstan:

When the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan premiered in 2006, Kazakhstan’s government banned the film and threatened to sue its star. Six years later, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister is thanking Borat, crediting the film with a large tourism boost. He called it a ‘great victory’ as the number of applications for tourist visas to Kazakhstan has grown tenfold.

Well, that’s all he posts. The story first showed up last week in the AP, Hollywood rags, and Eurasianet, where Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov is quoted thanking Borat Sagdiev for increasing the number of visa applications.

Of course, there’s no real reason to think the increase has anything to do with Borat. In addition to the movie, the government of Kazakhstan has undertaken an aggressive marketing campaign in this country — buying multiple full-section advertisements in papers like the Washington Post, and even sponsoring the 2012 Congress Handbook (pictured to the right). Maybe, just maybe, Kazakhstan’s own zealous efforts to sell “The Kazakhstan Way” have had an effect as well.

As for Zakaria, he recommends future tourists should watch a video uploaded to YouTube by Prime Minister Karim Massimov called “The Stirrups of Time,” which is apparently not about natural childbirth but rather horses and whatever else happened in Mongol, or Nomad, or whatever. It is very cleverly narrated by Tony Blair, which means — thanks to his lucrative advising contract — that he’ll totally tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the country.

Zakaria ends his segment by rattling off some Wikipedia stats about press freedom, corruption, and democracy. Cute, right? He could not, it seems, bring himself to note the wholesale murder of 17 protesters in Zhanaozen in December, though one would think travelers to the country would kind of want to know about that.

But who really cares? Borat will forever be the perfect hook for talking about Kazakhstan, no matter the context. You don’t have to get all your facts lined up or even say anything interesting or real about the country — you just have to reference Borat and feel really clever for it.