How do you get to Afghanistan? And what do you have to pay, or squander, on the way? There has been a lot of talk—rightly so—about the moral compromises associated with the conduct of our war in Afghanistan: the drug dealers on our payroll; the graft we fund; the civilians killed in the course of our raids. But some diplomatic cables from our embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, give new insight into what we’ve got ourselves into just to get our stuff to Afghanistan. Wars use up a lot of supplies, and we have been carrying ours through some questionable countries. One cable from Tashkent describes “close connections between organized crime” and the government of President Islam Karimov, upon whose cooperation we've come to rely for one of our supply routes. Other cables, according to the Guardian, report on “forced labour in the cotton fields” and “torture.” They also portray the President’s daughter, Gulnora Karimova, arriving at a nightclub at three in the morning to join her little sister, Lola, who drives around town in a Porsche Cayenne and dances quite a bit—but that doesn’t make either woman charming; not even close. From another cable:
A more interesting woman is Mutabar Tadjibayeva, who has worked for human rights in Uzbekistan and had been imprisoned by the regime. Hillary Clinton gave her a prize, the Women of Courage award. That caused Karimov to have a temper tantrum. From the Guardian’s summary:
Put differently, a reluctance to pressure—and pressure to tolerate—is what transit costs us. It is bad when a dictator knows that you need him. The New York Post’s Web site, reporting on the Uzbek cables, said that WikiLeaks’ “latest exposé could imperil a key US military supply route to Afghanistan.” Is that really the problem here? Would we rather not know, and find, one day, that Uzbeks, who we have hardly thought of in connection with our war, hate not only Gulnora Karimova, but us? One cable contains this parenthetical:
There is danger there, too.
And once we get all of our equipment to Afghanistan, what are we going to do with it? There was a report in the Times this morning of a breach between assessments prepared by the intelligence community, which say that the prospects, as things stand, are pretty bleak, and the military, which, in the midst of a policy review, is arguing that the surge is working and the whole enterprise is looking up. Part of the military’s answer, according to the Times, is that the new assessments come from
No “feel for the war”? Does the war feel good? Do wars feel like anything, or rather like anything that can be translated into policy terms? And who is doing the feeling—our soldiers, who are doing their jobs without always knowing why; the officers who see it in terms of a list of objectives to be met; Afghan officials who are getting rich from American money; villagers whose homes are lost; heroin users who are simply growing numb thanks, in part, to the drug trafficking we tolerate in the name of winning the war? And how does our war feel in Uzbekistan? In Gulnora Karimova’s nightclub it might feel pretty good; in a prison cell, less so.
