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A case for how Sept. 11 changed the world
By Scott Bernard Nelson, Globe Staff, 2/27/2002
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/058/living/A_case_for_how_Sept_11_changed_the_worldP.
shtml
Belgrade teenager Gavrilo Princip tried to strike a blow for
Serb nationalism in the summer of 1914, and instead triggered
World War I. At roughly the same time, Russian workers 1,000
miles to the northeast were protesting the social and economic
policies of Czar Nikolai II. The two developments ultimately set
in motion events that came to define life for much of humanity
in the 20th century.
In ''Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia,''
Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid makes a case that the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington could prove to be
every bit the catalyst those events nine decades ago were. It's
an iffy proposition, not to mention an impossible one to
validate without the passage of time, but Rashid makes a
respectable case for it.
The author of ''Taliban,'' which went from the half-price bin to
the international bestseller list almost overnight in September,
writes in his latest book's introduction that ''the civilized
nations' battle against terrorism may well define the
twenty-first century just as Nazism and the Cold War defined the
twentieth.'' And if that turns out to be true, Rashid continues,
''Central Asia is almost certain to become the new global
battleground.''
Huh? Central where?
The area formerly known as Soviet Asia, the land of the ''five
stans'' sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iran to the south and
Russia to the north, is a hardscrabble and hard-luck corner of
the globe that remains largely in the shadows. Most Americans
have trouble pronouncing Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, let alone differentiating the
countries from one another or understanding their political
dynamics.
It's a blind spot that could cost American interests a bundle in
the decades ahead. Like Afghanistan, the five stans of Central
Asia offer a primordial soup of civil war and radical Islam that
breeds fanatical young men ready to martyr themselves for the
cause.
(That cause is the implementation of ''sharia,'' a legal system
based on the Koran, across the whole of the Muslim world. The
fundamentalist groups, Rashid writes, typically see the United
States not only as a nation of nonbelievers, but also as a
global bully and a supporter of despotic governments. In any
case, American targets in this country and overseas are
typically fair game in their eyes.)
In some regards, though, it's no wonder the rest of the world
has been slow to turn its attention to Central Asia. Despite
huge untapped reserves of oil and natural gas, the region is a
thicket of shifting allegiances, broken governments, and
guerrilla fighters hiding in mountain passes. Even humanitarian
groups have had a difficult time dealing with the area's
grinding poverty, thanks in not necessarily equal parts to
forbidding geography and uncooperative government agencies.
Rashid visited the Batken district of Kyrgyzstan, for example,
where villagers join armed rebel groups because it's the only
way to get a regular paycheck. Unemployment in the area ranges
from 60 percent to 90 percent; Soviet irrigation policies ruined
the soil for farming; electricity is available only four hours a
day; and there is no industry. ''Poverty is playing into the
hands of the extremists,'' Rashid quotes the head of the United
Nations' mission in Kyrgyzstan as saying. ''There is nothing
like poverty, hunger, and not having access to basic services,
such as decent housing, to create discontent.''
To greater and lesser degrees, the story Rashid tells is much
the same throughout Central Asia. With the exception of
Tajikistan, which began tiptoeing toward a representative
government in 1997 after a five-year civil war, the region
remains in the iron grip of former Soviet apparatchiks - who,
naturally, continue with the tactics they learned from their
Communist Party bosses. The repression only popularizes the
Islamicist rebels in the eyes of most people.
It's a complicated tale that became more so in the wake of
America's war on terrorism, since the United States signed up
the region's dictators as allies, and Rashid is the right person
to tell it. As a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic
Review and The Wall Street Journal, among others, he has borne
witness to the civil war and economic strife that have swept
Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union. As he did in
''Taliban,'' Rashid weaves his firsthand experiences - including
interviews with many of the regional leaders, both governmental
and Islamicist - into the story, along with a heaping portion of
historical perspective.
The result, stuffed as it is with names, facts, and figures, is
difficult to follow without keeping notes. In the end, though,
the payoff is worth the effort. Although some of the details
will be lost by the time you turn the final page, Rashid does
paint a nuanced picture of an increasingly important part of the
planet.
Will Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan become the world's next big
breeding ground and hideout for terrorists? Will we be embroiled
in religious wars for the next century? There's no way to know,
of course, but the best way to avoid it might lie in
well-researched analysis like Rashid's.
This story ran on page C8 of the Boston Globe on 2/27/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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