# Posted 8:36 PM by Patrick Belton
CENTRAL ASIA is too often a neglected front both in counterterrorism and in democracy promotion, but my two favorite print magazines (and not just 'cause they employ Josh) are giving attention this week to
Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan. Ami Horowitz, however, treats Kazakhstan's choice between orienting itself with the democracies or with Iran as though it were a foreign policy matter that could be accomplished without actually making Kazakhstan a democracy - which seems to me fairly short-sighted. Looking across the region, it's precisely the Central Asian countries where autocratic capitals have oppressed all dissent - think Uzbekistan and its portion of the Ferghana Valley - where Islam has become most radicalized. In countries like Tajikistan (though it unfortunately, at the moment, lacks an economy - a real bummer), Islamist parties have been drawn into a comparatively more democratic government, with the result that they're now among the most moderate Muslim religious parties in the world. And this in a country that weathered a civil war through most of the last decade in which the Islamist party was one of the principal combatants, and which drew roving Islamist operatives from Iran, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Not a bad record - and not a bad lesson to learn from Central Asia. One only hopes the administration is listening.
UPDATE:
Matthew Yglesias has a thoughtful post up on the topic as well. While I'm not sure I'd want to agree that Karimov makes radical Islamists look good comparison, I strongly agree that Karimov's religious policy has driven a naturally moderate Central Asian religiosity into a radical path. More importantly, I
fully subscribe to his point that neo-cons should take equal interest in the promotion of democratic freedoms and forms of governance in Central Asia as well as the Middle East. Along the other path lies short-sighted policy conduicing to worldwide cynicism about U.S. motives, and spawning radical religious oppositions which are much more of a security threat to U.S. interests than the temporary security alliances of despots could ever make up for.
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