This B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is not part of the military aid package to go to Uzbekistan, EurasiaNet says in the photo caption to this article. However, if you click on the photo, you'll see that the editors write impishly on the tag, "Could this little baby be part of an EDA gift package for Tashkent?"  (EDA=Excessive Defense Articles, i.e. a kind of Goodwill surplus for allies). Even so, it symbolizes US military might, and that American military might's pixie dust is being sprinkled on the Uzbekistan military now, which bolsters its oppressive capacity overall. The transaction isn't literally in the tokens given but in their totemic power. Photo: US Air Force/Staff Sgt. M. Erick Reynolds.

This old F-16 Fighting Falcon is the sort of outdated plane that the US does sell as a "knockdown" with its EDA, however.

Here we go again with Joshua Foust and the Registanis claiming that the US military waiver doesn't affect human rights, and reiterating uncritically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's claim of "improvements".

The story has surfaced again because now it's all signed and sealed by the Secretary.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the US is referring  to "some limited progress on human rights":

The country has, for example, taken some steps to curtail illegal labor trafficking, and released some imprisoned political activists, said Emily Horne, a State Department spokeswoman.

"We do not want to overstate Uzbekistan's progress on human-rights issues, but it is appropriate to note positive developments just as we discuss setbacks," she said.

The Pakistan routes remain closed to U.S. and NATO, meaning that all nonlethal military supplies that aren't being sent by air must go through Uzbekistan.

"We are continuing to utilize alternate routes to supply our mission, and operations have been able to continue without impact," said Cdr. Bill Speaks, a Pentagon spokesman. "Nevertheless, these routes are important to our mission in Afghanistan and we would like to see them reopened."

Maybe Pentagon Spokesman Speaks doesn't want to sound desperate — yet. Here, he actually sounds as if there isn't any desperation or quid-pro-quo involved at all and the Pakistani route is sort of optional and "nice to have" (but we don't know that).

But note how this time, the State Department is saying — again! — that there is improvement, even though State gave a handout to EurasiaNet  (nowhere else published, which I criticized) on the waiver determination to The Bug Pit which claimed there was NO improvement. Funny, that.  It sort of sounds like a Country Report, but isn't — the 2010 country report, the last one available released in April 2011 is here.

Let's be clear.

First, the human rights situation most certainly did not improve; the trafficking prosecutions should definitely get a second look as to whether they really followed due process and didn't just punish labour migrants who didn't bribe the right officials. (And jailing traffickers is crime-fighting not precisely bookable to "human rights progress" — sure, trafficking has real human rights dimensions, but when we talk about human rights improvement, we generally mean the basics like "free speech" and 'free association.")

And letting out a few broken prisoners isn't "progress" — it's undoing a wrong. If those prisoners got to resume their activities, we might book it to progress; they didn't. Meanwhile, new ones go in, and a prominent prisoner, Muhammed Bekjanov, a writer and honourary member of PEN,  just got another five years slapped on him after already sitting in jail for years. So no dice there.

Second, ANYTHING — even a matchbox — that you give to THIS military helps prop up the might of the abusive regime and that creates the enabling climate for human rights violations and it creates actual human rights violations (and among those grave violations are the inability even to report on any of this without reprisals.)

It truly is Faustian to begin picking apart whether this item or that item goes to actual police who torture people or military who ostensibly protect their country. It doesn't matter, not literally, and not metaphorically.

Metaphor matters to the Uzbek government even more than the Americans; they want thesanctions lifted as a matter of pride and moral victory over the one force that has tried to apply conscience to them — the US.

In a rigid command structure in an authoritarian regime, much is militarized and civilian control is nominal — civil life itself is militarized for the state's needs (like the massive recruitment — with police guard — of school-children and adults to work in the cotton fields every year for a pittance). 

Every single soldier wearing a bullet-proof vest with "Made in America" is part of the regime, and the regime visibly propped up by the US. So let's not pretend it's something it is not.

Oh, and by the way, Registanis: I thought terrorism isn't a threat in Uzbekistan and it's all in Karimov's imagination. So why the bullet-proof vests for the military? What are they fighting, exactly? The Taliban?

As for computer simulations, virtual worlds are heavily used by the military — that's something I can testify to amply from my years of Second Life and other virtual worlds. In fact, the US military has even taken over the standards group now, so invested are they in this space — something I've been very critical about. Simulations of dots on a map aren't all you can do with virtual reality, and even those dot-sims can have strategic and military uses. EVERYTHING does in Uzbekistan. The civil aviation that is part of the NDN is essentially militarized. The Soviet Union was ALL ABOUT militarizing every aspect of society, and Uzbekistan's regime has not changed that. This shouldn't require a debate. It only requires a debate with the morally-challenged.

Now we're coming back to this "transactional" notion that the US put in the waiver because of the NDN.

Joshua Kucera shows up to say — accurately — that Foust's link to his own ravings about the alleged "moral dilemma" of the US military and alleged "deals" is not proof of anything. Foust waves around his supposed connections (remember how @State_SCA wrote back to him on Twitter thanking him for a meeting in which "blogging and human rights" was discussed? That doesn't sound like military sanctions were discussed, but we can't know, the meeting was secret!)

Kucera is out of date in claiming that the NDN "benefits Karimov's family". That notion was based on the obsession with Gulnara Karimova and her murky role in Zeromax, from which she allegedly profited, and Zeromax's alleged role in various transit companies or deals that involved a US logistics company. But that's all in the past now — Zeromax collapsed over a year ago, Karimova's wealth is abroad, there isn't any contract for that US company anymore, etc. That is, it may well have enriched the Family as just about everything in Uzbekistan seems to, but we can't really say that particular gun is smoking any more.

Kucera is right, however, to point out that we should all be pushing back on this "quid pro quo" notion IF any US officials are saying there really is such a bald-faced arrangement (and we haven't heard them say that, there's only that one WikiLeaks cable saying that Karimov bitched about a prize the US gave to a dissident, and the then-US ambassador's worries.) Indeed, the NDN purred along nicely, with no lifting of sanctions. The waiver gives only measly and symbolic aid.

But measly and symbolic though it may be, that symbolism most certainly involves strengthening the moral and psychological profile of the regime, and tangibly assisting the military, which indeed is unreformed, and which does have a problematic relationship to human rights defending Karimov's dictatorship. (Also, within the military, there is the same kind of dedovshchina or hazing as every other post-Soviet army and cases of human rights violations and corruption abound in this military as every other one.)

Foust exhibits his usual malevolent cunning by demanding that Kucera demand "evidence of activists who insist there is no need for concessions because everything would have worked out anyway." That's a skewed way of putting it. Activists have pointed out the FACTS that the NDN functioned ANYWAY before the lifting of sanctions. Indeed it did. If the Uzbeks got greedy and demanded more, we don't know that, now, do we. And we've pointed out that there isn't any need to *grovel* as the Uzbeks have *enough* — Obama phone calls, visits, silence on human rights, etc. and this latter, if anything, should be reversed.

Of course, Hamm has to show off letting us know about how connected he is — "I've heard people inside the government talk with the assumption that these transit contracts (are there any significant local procurement contracts?) are incredibly lucrative for Uzbekistan’s government. I haven’t seen compelling evidence to back that up though."  This is a key reason why it's difficult to argue with the Registanis — they can say anything they like about their secret talks with government and military officials, and no one knows what was said or even if it is an accurate portrayal.

Again, you have to ask *what is Uzbekistan fighting that it needs military aid for*? Why isn't anyone asking this question? Only Anon in the comments points out that the Uzbek professor himself said "Education will be used in the future to protect the people of our country" — indeed, because, as I pointed out, this tyranny is a militarized society, as the Soviet Union was, and remains so.

The Registanis can't have it both ways — they claim there is no significant terrorist threat; they claim that there is no threat of a civic uprising like the Arab Spring; they claim that even Uzbek-based terrorist groups said to operate in Afghanistan don't exist — so why does this lovely regime need military aid then? Indeed, it's quite the juggling act from the Registanis — furiously trying to prove that no terrorists exist, and zealously demanding that military aid go through nonetheless. Nice work if you can get it!

Claiming that there is only "border-control and counternarcotics" in some compartmentalized way is ridiculous, as the Taliban is obviously involved in opium sales and fighters slip back and forth over mountain borders despite the ferocity with which Uzbek and other regional border guards nab them. Terrorists are in the narcotics and the border-crossing business; that's what they do. That's why you can't compartmentalize all this. Turning the war in Afghanistan into a counter-narcotics battle is what the Russian government and Central Asian governments already do, and they invoke drugs and organized crime to search people whom they arrest in droves for extremism.

The unstated point is that Uzbekistan will need more military support, once the US pulls out, and the Taliban re-takes Kabul and overruns the area, and the Uzbek fighters, existing or not, are emboldened to head for Karimov's palace. So I have to wonder why they don't talk about that scenario, and why the US doesn't frankly raise it with the Uzbeks if indeed they do play any kind of hardball regarding the mildest and meekest of human rights "dialogue" that the US currently offers.