Regional Round-up: Central Asia

Before I say anything else, everyone here may breathe a sigh of relief. After centuries of a human existence led in savagery, crudity and boorish ignorance, this medievalism of the mind has at long last come to be dispelled. Gentlemen, lady, I give you Bach.

Yes, it's true. We finally know what he looked like. May I be the first to say that I'd split that in half like the check on a bad date?

Also, it is apparently an ancient Jewish tradition to slap a girl in the face when she first gets her period.

But if you thought that I was just here for Germans and Jews, why, you'd be crazier than a room full of waltzing mice. No, today I want to talk to you about Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan and Western China.

As all of you should know, because things that are important to me capture, I assume, your hearts and minds, I published an article earlier in the year about Central Asia, water and security. To elaborate, I wrote about the challenges to regional security posed by the failure of existing water resources. Those resources are primarily two rivers, the Syr and Amur Darya, which cut through several borders and are therefore extremely important to the economic well-being of many disparate millions of people.

There isn't a single democracy in Central Asia unless you count Afghanistan, in which case it'd be fair to say you were probably a Defense or State Department employee. Not only does autocracy reign, it does so in a truly outlandish, Stalinist-inspired way, with every rock, bridge, town square, poppy plant; everything, in effect, but the countries themselves named after their leaders. Since kleptocracy is blatant, with at least 95% of the population existing at a subsistence level, some deal of resentment has been brewing like oh-so-much black bean gumbo.

Now, Central Asia has, since the Arab invasions in the 9th-century, been comfortably integrated in the Islamic world. Cultures entering later (Turkmen, ~14th-century; Uzbeks/Khazaks, ~15th-century) adapted to the Islamic paradigm without resistance, too, making the mosque probably the only stable institution in the area. Like so many other parts of the Islamic world, the reaction to repressive, secular or atheistic governments has been a muscular resurgence of Islamic faith. And, also like in so many other parts of the Islamic world, that resurgence has been in a seemingly permanent love-affair with the hard-line. And it's in this respect that Central Asia is interesting (I think) to us, just as Afghanistan, Pakistan and the stateless Chinese Uighurs are.


View Roads crossing in a larger map

This, a stop on the silk road, has been the point of access to China from the west ever since Chinese people lost the ability to fly and to murder thousands of armed soldiers with comically flimsy swords. As you can see, the Himalayas block entry into China from Pakistan, but, as they move northwards, they diminish, shooting up into the magnificent Tian Shan range and then fading into desert. Through Kyrgyzstan one reaches Kizilsu Kirgiz, and from there, Kaxi--Kashgar--capital of China's Xinjiang and the exact point at which it is concentrating its cultural genocide of the Uighurs.

From the Fergana Valley (Toshkent, Andijon, Namangan, Khujand) to Qonduz and Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan, Peshawar in Pakistan and thence north-eastwards into China, we have an open corridor connecting some 300,000,000 people possessing a similar set of religious-contextual values and subject to more-or-less the same degree of political disenfranchisement. And with Chinese traders flooding markets in the region's largest cities, and China investing in transportation links with its western neighbors, there now exists the opportunity for communication and collaboration. Add to this mix the fact that Central Asian economic life, if it exists at all, does so at an appalling rudimentary--and unsurvivable--level, with governments restricting emigration, and you have the makings of a serious international social conflict.

Because I've recently been presented with the possibility of researching this subject again, I thought that I'd collect my thoughts here as a little column. In the next episode, I'll talk more about Iran's surprising tack of moderation, the water recapture infrastructure in Soviet Central Asia that's been a thorn in everyone's sides, and I'll introduce you to a fantastic bunch of kids from Liverpool who've been making hearts, and the airwaves, tremble since their debut album Please Please Me hit stands earlier this year.