A couple weeks ago I mentioned the Kyrgyz base closure would end the last remaining US base in Central Asia, which complicates the supply chain for American operations in Afghanistan. The AP seems to have just picked this up as newsworthy today. I suspect they mention it because there is a positive development for the US to announce, as well as a human-rights angle:

…the tentative pact with Uzbekistan was particularly important. It represented a warming of relations between U.S. officials and Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president.

Karimov ordered a major U.S. air base in Uzbekistan closed in the wake of Washington’s criticism of his government’s deadly crackdown on anti-government protesters in the city of Andijan in 2005.

This will be an interesting twist for the new American President’s foreign policy. The test is whether Obama can extend US influence into the region more sensibly than his predecessor. Bush’s interaction with Georgia was not only short-sighted, but arguably stoked and then failed to avert war with Russia. In the case of the Uzbekistan’s leader Karimov, Bush’s Pentagon funded him as part of the “war on terror” until around 2005 when they had to admit he was a ruthless dictator using US-trained and armed soldiers to kill large numbers of civilian protesters. Some even acknowledged this could be seen as counter-productive to reducing terror. Radio Free Europe tried to explain the situation in 2005, quoting William Kristol and Stephen Schwartz from The Weekly Standard.

“I frankly think that with the war in Afghanistan essentially over, there’s no reason to maintain any base in Uzbekistan and they [the United States] should remove the base. I think they [the United States] should cut off any military or police training to Uzbek troops since we now have to face the scandalous fact that the troops in the Andijon incident apparently were trained in the United States.”

Yes, you read that right, the periodical that “often reflects the thinking of the Bush administration” said “with the war in Afghanistan essentially over” in 2005…and here we are today facing Taliban control expanding, demand for more troop enlargements in Afghanistan, and a crisis of supply routes.

With signs of encroaching Russian influence over its neighbor, the US has moved back towards alliance with Karimov in order to access the Uzbek base and Afghanistan. Will Obama’s administration also be able to continue their rhetoric on human-rights? This brings me back to the question of cyberwarfare. Russia may continue to stoke fear through its use of non-state agents on the network. This would be good as it perhaps allows the US to build on counter-cyberwarfare aid as part of the deal to win access rights, rather than supply of guns and military training, and still have enough leverage to stand tall on human rights policy. In other words I suspect cyberwarfare aid (e.g. network infrastructure and monitoring) has far less lethal and reprehensible side-effects.