Print
The Dilemmas of U.S. - Uzbek Relations
The story of the U.S. relationship with Uzbekistan is really quite a sad one, characterized by misunderstandings and miscues on both sides. The U.S.-Uzbek relationship is all of 16 years old, and involves one Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, who from the beginning has sought to get and then keep the attention of the U.S. However, he sought to do this in a very “old-style” way, by offering the U.S. a strategic partnership that focused on shared foreign policy goals rather than on shared political values.
First the civil war in Tajikistan, then the presence of these terrorist groups within striking range of Uzbekistan made Karimov even more leery of democratic reforms than his initial instinctive reticence. But nonetheless some key U.S. officials became convinced that they shared some important security goals with the Uzbek regime, and the US gained permission to send unmanned drones into Afghanistan from Uzbek territory in search of Osama bin Ladin, a practice eliminated after George W. Bush came to power.
The U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan eliminated Uzbekistan’s major security threat, and new opportunities for cooperation with the U.S. The prospect of U.S. pressure for economic reform was something that was viewed with real enthusiasm by certain pro-reform elements within the Uzbek political establishment of Uzbekistan, who accepted that some political reform, especially better protection of property was necessary for economic reform to succeed.
The World Bank and IMF did go to Uzbekistan and did offer a new economic reform package, whose benchmarks were not achieved, leaving these international financial institutions very frustrated with the Uzbek economic officials. For their part, the Uzbeks were angry at the World Bank and IMF officials, whom they believed had never made a sufficiently attractive offer to repel the criticisms of anti-reform elements that dominated the remnants of the old planned economy, especially those tied to the sale and production of cotton, who would stand to lose from economic reforms.
In this environment, it did not take long for the new U.S.-Uzbek “strategic” relationship to begin to sour, and for both sides to walk away unhappy. The Uzbeks had thought that they were getting a strategic friendship with the U.S. akin to what had been on offer in earlier decades, and that the U.S. would support the full-blown reform of the country’s security establishment, as well as provide massive economic and political assistance. The Uzbeks knew that most foreign aid packages were relatively small, but that “close friends” like Egypt and Israel (and Pakistan in earlier decades) were disproportionately rewarded, and they believed that they had taken a disproportionate risk by inviting the U.S. to open a base nearly in Russia’s back yard.
