#7
Washington Post
October 14, 2001
U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With
Uzbekistan
By Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff Writers
The United States and Uzbekistan have quietly conducted joint covert operations aimed at countering Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime and its terrorist allies since well over a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to officials from both nations.
The most significant advance came more than a year ago with stepped-up intelligence cooperation between the two countries in an effort to track and undermine suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. At the same time, U.S. Special Forces began to work more overtly with the Uzbek military on training missions.
"Our cooperation began long before the events of Sept. 11," said Rustam Jumaev, chief spokesman for Uzbek President Islam Karimov. In an interview, Jumaev said significant military and intelligence joint efforts extended back "two or three years" but would not discuss specifics of the cooperation.
In 1998, after terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton signed a secret intelligence "finding" authorizing the CIA to use covert means to disrupt and preempt bin Laden's operations.
"The intensified interaction with Uzbekistan," Jumaev said, reflected the conviction of the United States that previous terrorist attacks against American targets originated from bin Laden's Afghan refuge. The U.S.-Uzbek cooperation deepened after the embassy bombings and again after last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, he said.
The disclosure of such broad cooperation on sensitive matters, nurtured quietly over several years, offers new perspective on a U.S.-Uzbek alliance that seemed to come out of nowhere in the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington.
In a region still dominated politically and militarily by Russia, Uzbekistan was the first former Soviet republic to signal its willingness to aid a U.S. military operation against Afghanistan in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks.
That partnership went public on Oct. 5, when Karimov met with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, and announced that the United States could station ground troops, airplanes and helicopters at an Uzbek air base. While stipulating that, at least "for now," Uzbekistan could be used only to launch humanitarian and combat search-and-rescue missions, Karimov left open the possibility of allowing the United States to launch offensive strikes on Afghanistan from his territory.
On Friday, the two governments released a statement outlining the details of an agreement hammered out after Rumsfeld's visit. In the statement, such offensive operations were not explicitly ruled out, with the deal stipulating only that the Uzbek military base would be used "in the first instance" for humanitarian purposes.
More than 1,000 U.S. troops from the 10th Mountain Division have already arrived in Uzbekistan, according to Pentagon officials, and at least 1,000 more are expected. An undisclosed number of U.S. Special Forces troops also are operating in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan, a California-size nation of 25 million, offers strategic access to northern Afghanistan across an 85-mile border. The ultimate size of the U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan remains unclear, but every indication suggests it will grow, and remain in place for months or even years.
That's a sharp contrast to the environment before Sept. 11, when the major limiting factor on the U.S. presence was the desire of Karimov's authoritarian government to keep it quiet. "That put a limit on the size of things," recalled a former Pentagon official who was involved in cultivating the new relationship. "The bigger it got, the more visible it got."
Uzbekistan has long pursued the most independent policy of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia, courting friendly relations with the United States over Russian objections and withdrawing from a Russian-led regional security treaty. But even for Uzbekistan, playing host to U.S. troops represents a significant escalation of its cooperation with Washington.
"This is a dramatic change in the policy they have pursued since independence of allowing no foreign troops in their country," said a senior Bush administration official. "They were nervous from the beginning about the implications for them of allowing a large American presence."
Reflecting that continued nervousness, information about the new cooperation has been all but shut off by both governments. Lack of access to even basic facts about the U.S. deployment to Uzbekistan, Jumaev said, "is not just because of our Ministry of Defense. It is not because Uzbekistan is a closed country. This is what the Pentagon wants as well."
Indeed, when news of the U.S. deployment first broke last month, one Air Force officer happily noted that "we can put aircraft there where CNN can't film them taking off." Air Force officials were irate during the Kosovo war in 1999 when television networks broadcast live images of aircraft taking off from the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy.
Pentagon officials have indicated that a veil has been kept over the new and growing U.S. military presence in part because a Special Operations unit has been moved along with the 10th Mountain Division.
In several cases, Karimov's government has denied the little information Pentagon officials have released. Despite the president's public granting of permission for the U.S. deployment here, some officials have denied that such a deployment existed.
On Monday, for example, the deputy head of the Uzbek National Security Council denied that the 10th Mountain Division, or any American troops, were in Uzbekistan even as U.S. military officials said they had started arriving days earlier. On Friday, Jumaev said the number of American military personnel in Uzbekistan "does not exceed a three-digit number," although Pentagon officials have said more than 1,000 troops have already arrived.
While Uzbeks have been wary of describing their alliance with the United States too openly, U.S. officials have argued among themselves over just how far to go in courting a dictatorship accused of holding more than 7,000 political prisoners in the name of fighting terrorism.
The split has been most evident between the State and Defense departments, according to a former CIA officer who operated in the region. Pentagon officials have wanted to operate in Uzbekistan and believe that the closed nature of Uzbek society helps preserve operational security and protect troops.
The State Department, by contrast, worries about embracing too tightly a regime that has been criticized for human rights abuses. According to human rights groups, many devout Muslims have been arrested and tortured, without any evidence that they have ties to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a home-grown terrorist group linked to bin Laden. The group launched armed incursions into Uzbekistan in 1999 and 2000 and is blamed by Karimov for setting off explosions in the capital that killed 18 people.
When then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Tashkent last year, she publicly warned Karimov to "distinguish very carefully between peaceful devout believers and those who advocate terrorism."
At the time, the extent of Uzbek cooperation with the United States had not been disclosed, but there were hints that ties were growing closer. Uzbekistan sought to distance itself from Russia, and was an eager participant in the NATO-organized Partnership for Peace military exercises. Another hint was the announcement of U.S. assistance to tighten Uzbekistan's borders and fight the influx of drugs from Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan may well have offered a more appealing and stable location for secret American intelligence-gathering about Afghanistan. Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan to the east and south, was in turmoil and Gen. Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup there two years ago.
Western observers in Tashkent said they were aware of what one termed "a long-standing, very close relationship with Uzbek security institutions on Afghanistan issues." While declining to discuss specific operations, the observer said, "It's spectacular how close Uzbek-U.S. foreign policy interests have come together. We've worked for a long time with Uzbekistan on Afghanistan issues, so it makes sense that we have very strong cooperation on the intelligence side as well."
Both U.S. and Uzbek officials said their partnership grew slowly. In the years immediately following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and Uzbekistan's independence, relations with the United States were "quite weak", one close observer said. But by the late 1990s, the two countries found common cause in their alarm over Afghanistan. The ruling Taliban regime there captured the territory adjoining Uzbekistan in 1998, while the Tashkent bombings in early 1999 made Karimov even more insistent on the need to stamp out the IMU fighters being harbored in Afghanistan.
Glasser reported from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
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