The Rising East
Untangling the threads
of the history of the ‘-stans’The day before the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, maybe one American in a hundred recognized the names of the Central Asian nations known collectively as the "-stans," just north of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Today, they are in the news all the time, given the war led by the United States against the Taliban and al-Qaida Muslim extremists in Afghanistan. President Bush's administration has cultivated them as allies in the campaign against terror and has established military ties with at least three of them.
Even so, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan remain a mystery, as does Afghanistan and even Pakistan. They are the stuff of the "great game," of Rudyard Kipling's Kim and the Khyber Pass in the 19th-century rivalry of Britain and Russia for control of the Eurasian heartland.
A splendid new book titled "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" provides a good place to begin dispelling the enigma of the "-stans." It was written by a Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, a Muslim who has become an authority on the region after having covered it for 20 years.
Rashid himself reflects the classic adage of the right man in the right place at the right time after years of laboring in obscurity. He became a journalist, like many of us, by accident. After completing his education in Pakistan and England, he happened to be in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, when a communist coup took place in 1978.
He was in Kabul again in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded. "Nobody really knew what the hell was going on," he told an interviewer at the University of California recently. So he began writing for the Pakistani and the British press. Since then, he has written for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other Western publications.
It has not been easy. The Taliban were accessible 10 years ago, when no one paid much attention to them.
"It's not as if they were flooded with reporters at that time," Rashid told the Atlantic magazine. Then it became much more difficult as the extremists came into the news, especially after Sept. 11.
It also became dangerous -- witness the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal correspondent, Daniel Pearl, in February. Even though a Pakistani and a Muslim, Rashid told the Atlantic interviewer, "I have been threatened many, many times during the last 20 years. I have been threatened by the communist government, and by some of the mujahideen (Islamic warriors) such as the former mujahideen commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar."
Rashid began writing books about this region in 1994, when he published "The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism?" That was followed in 2000 by "Taliban: Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia." Now comes "Jihad," an Islamic word that means an inner endeavor to become a better Muslim and human being.
The author is impatient with the standard Western view of jihad as holy war and believes it has its roots in the medieval Christian crusades against Muslims. "Militancy," he says at the start of his book, "is not the essence of jihad."
Rashid's book, which is blessed with a couple of good maps, sweeps across 25 centuries of history in a masterful manner, giving just enough detail to keep the unschooled reader engaged. Much of that history has been dictated by geography: "Its huge landmass lies at the heart of the Eurasian continent."
For that reason, it was the target of one invasion after another as Darius, Alexander, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan incorporated Central Asia into their empires. So did Russian tsars and Soviet commissars until the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
Today, Rashid says, a much more complicated "great game" is afoot in Central Asia, with two competing elements: Militant, nationalistic Islam mingled with the ambitions of Russia, China, and the new boy on the block, the United States.
"The game has changed," Rashid contends. "The leaders of the Central Asian regimes, each of whom has his own game to play, with his own rules, are refusing to be pawns in the superpower game."
For a road map on the twists and turns of this new game, Rashid provides a lucid guide.
Richard Halloran is a former correspondent
for The New York Times in Asia and a former editorial
director of the Star-Bulletin. His column appears Sundays.
He can be reached by e-mail at rhalloran@starbulletin.com