After the massacre in Andijon, Uzbekistan, on May 13, the U.S. military airfield in Karshi-Khanabad (or “K2,” as it is affectionately known) has become a liability to U.S. foreign policy. The 2002 intergovernmental declaration undergirding the U.S.-Uzbek strategic partnership obligates Uzbek President Islam Karimov to democratize his regime, something he has pointedly failed to do in the last three years. Unless Karimov implements the terms of this agreement, including ensuring a respect for human rights, media independence, and the freedom to express “a diversity of opinions,” the United States should phase out its logistics base at K2, especially considering that the base is no longer essential for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, its original purpose. A failure to hold the U.S.-Uzbek strategic partnership to the standards that were set for it imperils America's global “democracy promotion” agenda, a publicly declared first principle of the Bush administration's foreign policy.
The diplomatic costs of K2 are unambiguous and snowballing. The Uzbek government has allowed the U.S. military to operate the base rent-free since 2001. Despite the recent crackdown, negotiations to extend the lease, this time for real cash, are under way. This sends a stinging message to ordinary Uzbeks that the United States cares more about its military footprint than it does a massacre of civilians.
In fact, even before Andijon, the U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan had become the new paradigmatic case highlighting tensions between the worldwide fight for freedom and the worldwide fight against terrorism. Maintaining a partnership with an increasingly unrepentant and illegitimate Uzbek government undermines the U.S. government's already weakened moral authority, laying bare the impotence of the democracy-promotion agenda when juxtaposed against the needs of the Pentagon.
This loss of American legitimacy is not a “fuzzy” or “soft” concept; it has real consequences for the U.S. government's effort to promote freedom and democracy abroad. Today, citizens not only in Uzbekistan but also in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere are rethinking their political calculus based on the action -- or nonaction -- of the U.S. government after the collision of realpolitik and a people's yearning for freedom in Andijon.
This trade-off might be bearable if K2 were demonstrably vital to stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan or fighting the global war on terrorism. But is it?Located 120 miles north of the Afghan border, K2 is geographically situated to support combat operations in northern Afghanistan. When the U.S. military entered Uzbekistan after September 11, it did so with a mandate to use the base as a platform to fight the Taliban. And, indeed, K2 provided logistical and operational support to Operation Enduring Freedom in late 2001.
Since then, however, U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan have almost exclusively been confined to the south and southeast, where Taliban and al-Qaeda elements remain scattered along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. The U.S. military has already ceded operational control of the north and west of the country to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Its personnel are responsible for peacekeeping and stability operations in the area, not combat. K2 is ideally located to support operations in the one part of Afghanistan where the Taliban clearly is not.
Moreover, the United States has military airfields in the region that make K2 redundant. The military is already leasing a base in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where a new government, while not faultless, is ahead of Uzbekistan in demonstrating respect for the rights of its citizens. In Afghanistan, the U.S. military operates two “megabases,” at Bagram airport near Kabul and in Kandahar in the south. Bagram is the busiest airfield in U.S. Central Command (which spans the Middle East, Southwest and Central Asia, and northeast Africa), and is home to 6,000 of America's 13,000 in-country troops. With hospitals, a Burger King, a Thai restaurant, and a day spa, it more resembles a small city than a forward outpost in need of K2's support. Indeed, recent restrictions on K2 air operations resulted in no more than an inconvenience to U.S. military planners, who easily redeployed assets to Bagram and other regional bases.
So why does the U.S. military stay there?
Bureaucratic inertia, most likely. Even if K2 is no longer needed, there is a natural tendency, given the costs involved, for officials at the Department of Defense to think in terms of building up and out rather than a phaseout. This is reinforced by an institutional reluctance to relinquish any asset, regardless of its actual utility, in Central Asia, a part of the Muslim world specialists warn is vulnerable to Islamist movements and state collapse. The most recent request for an additional $42.5 million for rebuilding and expanding (to 12,000 feet) the runway at K2 underlines this approach.
And while protecting Central Asia from terrorist threats may not be the kind of mission officers have in mind when they jokingly praise K2's utility as a “rest-and-relaxation” post for troops in Afghanistan, it is consistent with a position former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz stated in January 2002. While the United States might not “see a continuing need to deal with a military threat in Afghanistan,” he said, it should still maintain a military presence nearby “to send a message to everybody including … countries like Uzbekistan that we have a capacity to come back in.”
Military analysts frequently observe that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's praise of the Uzbek role in the war on terrorism evinces a serious interest in fitting K2 into unfolding plans to establish “operating sites” that the U.S. military can use to quickly spring into action. K2, a short trip away from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and even western China, is positioned to become one of these future “lily pads.”
Whatever other power-projection missions K2 might fill, however, we must keep in mind that there is only one raison d'être for the U.S. military presence: to support combat operations in Afghanistan. Any other goals -- hedging against unspecified, uncertain future threats -- do not justify the potentially astronomical costs of that presence, including a loss in our moral authority to promote democracy and the possibility that U.S. forces will end up on the wrong side of a popular uprising against a dictator.
The United States can and will win the war on terrorism without K2, but it cannot win without its moral authority intact. We live in a world of information technology, where one image is not only worth a thousand words, it can be downloaded a thousand times per second. Millions of Muslims already live with a worldview that suspects geostrategic interests lie at the heart of U.S. policy. This skepticism represents the greatest obstacle to U.S. efforts to promote democracy abroad.
After 9-11, the United States entered into a strategic partnership with the Uzbek government based on a clear plan: The United States would gain temporary access to K2 to fight the Taliban, and the deepened engagement would encourage moves toward democratization in our new ally. Nearly four years later, the military mission of K2 has been accomplished, but hopes for democracy in Uzbekistan have deserted even the most stalwart of optimists.
K2 has served its purpose well. Continuing the U.S. relationship with the Karimov regime at this time is unnecessary, reprehensible, and potentially catastrophic for our larger political goals.
David Hoffman served as a democracy and governance officer for the United States Agency for International Development in Central Asia (2000 to 2003) and Afghanistan (2003-04). Cory Welt is a fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Russia and Eurasia Program in Washington, D.C.
