Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [340]
After Rice became secretary of state in 2005, she made it a priority to push Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf toward more democratic practices. Rice publicly called for Musharraf, the senior army officer, to seek democratic elections and relinquish his military uniform—a symbolic step designed to promote civilian rather than military leadership in Pakistan.5 Musharraf was trying to hold together a weak government, filled with elements that did not share his affinity for the United States. We were dependent on Pakistan’s logistic support for our efforts in Afghanistan; the country also had a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons that could fall into the wrong hands if Musharraf’s government fell to a radical Islamist element. I questioned whether it was for U.S. officials to dictate what clothes Musharraf wore to work. I was disappointed but not surprised when only months After he complied with Rice’s request, he could no longer assert control over the military and was forced by various political forces to step down. The alternatives to Musharraf were, in my view, not likely to be better, and that has proven to be the case.
A similar situation presented itself in Uzbekistan. In the days After 9/11, Uzbekistan had provided important cooperation for our activities in Afghanistan. From 2001 to 2006, I traveled there several times and met with Uzbek officials elsewhere. By his own admission, President Islam Karimov was not an American-style democrat—there were few if any in the region—but he had shown no hostility toward U.S. interests. In fact, to Russia’s displeasure, he had allowed U.S. forces to use his Karshi-Khanabad (K2) airfield, a key link by which many tens of thousands of tons of supplies and aid, as well as our military forces poured into Afghanistan. We were working closely with the Uzbek military and their helpful minister of defense, Kodir Gulyamov. He was a physicist by training and the first civilian minister of defense in the former Soviet Union. In the spring of 2005, all of that changed, and it led to what I thought was one of the most unfortunate, if unnoticed, foreign policy mistakes of our administration, one that was aided and abetted by a bipartisan group in Congress.
The facts as best as can be determined are: In the early morning hours of May 13, 2005, in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, heavily armed men stormed the town prison. It appeared that the goal of the assault was to release members of an Islamic extremist group accused of seeking to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate, in eastern Uzbekistan.6 The rebels attacked the town’s government center and took officials hostage, killing some of them.7 Before long, Uzbek government forces massed to put an end to the situation. A firefight between the insurgents and government forces ensued, and innocent bystanders, including human shields used by the rebels, were caught in the crossfire.8 The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency speculated that “[s]ecurity forces probably lost control of the situation and fired on noncombatants.”9 But information remained sketchy.
Self-proclaimed human rights advocates with longstanding records of opposition to the Uzbek government quickly got into the act. By 2001, “human rights” had become a sizable global industry. For some it was a cause, for some a profession. Many seemed interested in embarrassing the United States and Israel while ignoring human rights abuses by oppressive regimes such as Cuba and Zimbabwe. The facts were often mangled in the process. In spite of the fact that video filmed at the time showed the attackers in Uzbekistan to be heavily armed, the group