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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Will the current crisis in Kyrgyzstan lead to greater instability, and perhaps an expansion of the current conflict in Central Asia? There are good reasons to be concerned. Deep forces, not adequately understood, are at work there; and these forces have repeatedly led to major warfare in the past.
The pattern of events unfolding in Kyrgyzstan is ominously reminiscent of how America became involved in Laos in the 1960s, and later in Afghanistan in the 1980s. American covert involvement in those countries soon led to civil wars producing numerous casualties and refugees. It will take strenuous leadership from both Obama in Washington and Medvedev in Moscow to prevent a third major conflict from breaking out in Kyrgyzstan.
1 Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112-26.
2 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 77-78; Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.
3 Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Union, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2007). Thus Brzezinski's obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal.
4 For instance, President Bush, State of the Union address, January 20, 2004; and, President Addresses American Legion, February 24, 2006: [W]e're advancing our security at home by advancing the cause of freedom across the world, because, in the long run, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of human freedom.… [T]he security of our nation depends on the advance of liberty in other nations.“
5 Scott, Road to 9/11, 71-73, 77; Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 254.
6 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461-62.
7 “Touching Base,” AsiaTimesOnLine, November 15, 2003. Even America's Freedom House, which helped to overthrow Akayev, described him in 2002 as “Once regarded as Central Asia's most democratically minded leader and a self-professed admirer of Russian human rights advocate Dr. Andrei Sakharov” (Press release of September 20, 2002). in 2005
8 According to the Akayev government's statistics from 2002, more than four-fifths of Kyrgyz families lived below the poverty line, while nearly 40 percent of the country's 5 million inhabitants lived on less than $3 per month. From 1990-96 economic growth declined 49 percent (John C.K. Daly, “Sino-Kyrgyz relations after the Tulip Revolution,” Association for Asian Research, June 7, 2005).
9 Ahmed Rashid, Jihad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 70-71, 198-99.
10 Aram Roston, Nation, April 21, 2010: “Red Star had the same London address and phone number as Iraq Today, a purportedly independent and short-lived newspaper launched in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. The paper had been set up by a former journalist who worked with Mina Corp.”
11 “Touching Base,” AsiaTimesOnLine, November 15, 2003. A year later Akayev proclaimed at a public event that all Kyrgyzstan was “firmly and forever devoted to friendship with great Russia” (Kyrgyz Television Channel One, in BBC Sumary of World Broadcasts, October 12, 2004).
12 John C.K. Daly, “Kyrgyzstan: Business, Corruption and the Manas Airbase,” OilPrice, April 15, 2010. A parenthetical aside: in 2005 Kyrgyzstan had a population of 5.5. million and the capital Bishkek less than 800,000. One wonders what might have happened if the U.S. had devoted $12 million to reinforcing the nascent democracy first fostered by Akayev, instead of spending it later to overthrow him. But that is a utopian thought.
13 “Kyrgyzstan's Leaders Struggle to Cope with Rioting and Looting,” Independent (London), March 26, 2005.
14 Craig S. Smith, “Kyrgyzstan's Shining Hour Ticks Away and Turns Out To Be a Plain, Old Coup,” New York Times, April 3, 2005, 6.
15 Ariel Cohen, “Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution,” Washington Times, March 27, 2005, B3. In his Second Inaugural Address Bush had proclaimed: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world… So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” (Second Inaugural Address of U.S. President George W. Bush, January 20, 2005).
16 “Bush: Georgia's Example a Huge Contribution to Democracy,” Civil Georgia, May 10, 2005. Likewise Zbigniew Brzezinski was quoted by a Kyrgyz news source as saying “I believe revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were a sincere and snap expression of the political will” (Link, March 27, 2008).
17 “Georgian Advisors Stepping Forward in Bishkek,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, March 24, 2005: “These members of parliament are Givi Targamadze, chair of parliament's committee for defense and security; Kakha Getsadze, a delegate from the ruling United National Movement Party's faction, and Temur Nergadze, a legislator from the Republican Party.”
18 “Revolutions Speed Russia's Disintegration,” Der Spiegel, April 4, 2005. cf. F. William Engdahl, “Revolution, geopolitics and pipelines,” AsiaTimesOnLine, June 30, 2005. I have written elsewhere about the role of the Albert Einstein Institution in the Georgian “Rose Revolution,” in “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11”, Lobster, October 31, 2005.
19 Owen Matthews, “Despotism Doesn't Equal Stability,” Newsweek, April 7, 2010.
20 Peter Leonard, “Heroin trade a backdrop to Kyrgyz violence,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2010.
21 “Kyrgyzstan Relaxes Control Over Drug Trafficking,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7:24, February 4, 2010.
22 “Kyrgyz ex-drug official says ousted leader's brother behind abolishing agency,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, July 3, 2010; citing Delo [Bishkek], May 19, 2010, June 2, 2010.
23 Alexander Cooley, “Manas Hysteria: Why the United States can't keep buying off Kyrgyz leaders to keep its vital air base open,” Foreign Policy, April 12, 2010.
24 Dmitry Sidorov, “To make progress on Afghanistan and Russia, Obama must get Kyrgyzstan right,” Christian Science Monitor, June 24, 2010.
25 Pavel Felgenhauer, “Moscow Opens the Prospect of an Iranian Arms Embargo,” Jamestown Foundation, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 7:73, April 15, 2010.
26 'Violence in Kyrgyzstan orchestrated and well-planned, “Ummid.com, June 16, 2010: “The declaration by the U.N. that the fighting was “orchestrated, targeted and well-planned” — set off by organized groups of gunmen in ski masks — bolsters government claims that hired attackers marauded through Osh, shooting at both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks to inflame old tensions. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said, “It might be wrong to cast it, at least in origin, as an inter-ethnic conflict. There seems to be other agendas driving it initially.”
27 Deirdre Tynan, “Kyrgyz Provisional Government Alleges Bakiyev-Islamic Militant Link,” EurasiaNet, June 24, 2010. General Abdullo Nazarov, head of the National Security Ministry office in the Tajik region of Badakhshan, later denied “reports by some media outlets that Nazarov met in Tajikistan with Janysh Bakiev, former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev's brother, before the violence broke out in Kyrgyzstan.” He “blamed the ethnic clashes on some ‘superpowers’ who he said wanted to ‘ignite a fire’ in Kyrgyzstan in order to embed themselves in the region's affairs” (“Tajik General Denies Involvement In Kyrgyz Violence,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 1, 2010).
28 Tony Halpin, “Snipers and dread linger in aftermath of pogrom,” Times (London), June 16, 2010.
29 E.g. “Involvement of Russian Organized Crime Syndicates, Elements in the Russian Military, and Regional Terrorist Groups in Narcotics Trafficking in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Chechnya,” Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, October 2002, 1: “The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is known to rely heavily on narcotics trafficking over a number of Central Asian routes to support its military, political, and propaganda activities. That trafficking is based on moving heroin from Afghanistan through Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, into Russia, and then into Western Europe.”
30 Andrew E. Kramer, “After Kyrgyz Unrest, a Question Lingers: Why?” New York Times, June 27, 2010.
31 Andrew E. Kramer, “Investigation by Kyrgyz police said to be corrupted; Uzbeks are being blamed for violence that targeted them, rights groups say,” International Herald Tribune, July 2, 2010.
32 Sanobar Shermatova, “Kyrgyz South and Uzbek issue,” Ferghana.ru, June 9, 2010. The story did not identify the mafia leaders. On April 21, Radio Free Europe reported that the Kyrgyz interim government was seeking to arrest a naturalized American citizen, Yevgeniy Gurevich, for embezzling state money together with Kurmanbek Bakiyev's son, Maksim. One month earlier, Italian authorities announced that Gurevich was wanted in Rome for embezzling some $2.7 billion from divisions of Telecom Italia and the Fastweb telecom company (“Kyrgyzstan Wants Business Partner Of Ex-President's Son Arrested,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 21, 2010; cf. “Business Associate Of Kyrgyz President's Son Wanted By Italy,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 10, 2010). Rosa Otunbaeva, then in opposition, denounced Gurevich as “an accountant for the Italian mafia” (“Kyrgyz Opposition Party Demands President And His Son Resign,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 12, 2010). Cf. John Daly, OilPrice.com, July 2, 2010: “On 9 March, the Italian media reported that Judge Aldo Mordzhini in Rome had issued an arrest warrant for Gurevich on charges of embezzling $2.7 billion from Italian telecom companies, money laundering and ties to the Mafia.”
33 Aleksandr Shustov, “South Kyrgyzstan: An Epicenter of Coming Conflicts?” Strategic Cultural Foundation, May 25, 2101. Shustov astutely predicted the June massacres, warning that “the tensions are likely to evolve into a conflict similar in character to a civil war.” Cf. Kramer, New York Times, June 27, 2010: “Former government officials say the new leaders stumbled early in their rule by failing to win over the police or oust commanders appointed by the former president. Bolot E. Sherniyazov, the interior minister, acknowledged difficulties assuming command of the police, but he said in an interview on Saturday that he was now largely in control. ‘I am in command of 80 percent of the Ministry of Interior,” he said. ‘The other 20 percent is still waffling.' The problems first emerged as early as May 13, they say, in a little-noticed but in hindsight critical confrontation after supporters of Mr. Bakiyev seized a provincial government building in Jalal-Abad, a city in the south. Faced with a regional revolt and unable to appeal to the police, members of the government asked a leader of the Uzbek minority in the south, Kadyrzhan Batyrov, a businessman and university director, to help regain control with volunteer gunmen, which he did. In the tinderbox of ethnic mistrust in the south, this decision turned out to be a fateful error, according to Alikbek Jekshenkulov, a former foreign minister, recasting the political conflict in ethnic terms. ‘They got the Uzbeks involved in a Kyrgyz settling of scores,' Mr. Jekshenkulov said. The next day, a crowd of thousands of Kyrgyz gathered to demand that the interim government arrest Mr. Batyrov. ‘Instead of standing up to this mob, they opened a criminal case against Batyrov,' even though he had been responding to the government's plea for help, said Edil Baisalov, who served as Ms. Otunbayeva's chief of staff until he resigned this month.“
34 Aleksandr Shustov, who in May foresaw the June ethnic riots, warned further: “In case a new conflict erupts, Uzbekistan - and, possibly Tajikistan …would inevitably be drawn into it, and thus the escalation … would breed broader hostilities between three of the five Central Asian republics and a serious threat to the region's overall stability” (Shustov, “South Kyrgyzstan: An Epicenter of Coming Conflicts?”).
35 Javed Aziz Khan, “Foreign Militants Active in Waziristan,” CentralAsiaOnline, May 27, 2010. Cf. Einar Wigen (2009) Islamic Jihad Union: al-Qaida's Key to the Turkic World?
36 Ibid.
37 Poonam Mann, “Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan: Will It Strike Back?” Strategic Analysis, 26:2, Apr-Jun 2002: ‘The IMU also gets funds from the Uzbek émigré community in Saudi Arabia. ‘These Uzbek Saudis are very rich, they hate Karimov and they have enlisted Arabs across the Gulf States to help Namangani', says a Tajik politician and friend of Namangani.“
38 Experts differ as to whether the forces underlying jihadism and the drug traffic are the same or different. Russian drug tsar Viktor Ivanov has alleged that “Not a single [instance of] drug trafficking goes on [in Kyrgyzstan] that is not controlled by this terrorist network” of fundamentalist organizations. (“Russian drugs tsar suggests setting up military base in Kyrgyzstan,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, June 21, 2010). Contradicting him, his deputy Nikolay Tsvetkov has asserted, “In general, drugs and political extremism, just as drugs and terrorism, are separate major topics. Obviously, drugs, or more to the point, the billions of drug-dollars are being used to finance and arm bandits in a great variety of ‘ideological’ hues” (“Russian narcotics service official views 9-10 June forum on Afghan drug industry.” Interview by Igor Yavlyanskiy of Nikolay Tsvetkov, deputy chief of Russia's Anti-Drug Service, BBC Worldwide Monitoring, June 20, 2010).
39 “Involvement of Russian Organized Crime Syndicates, Elements in the Russian Military, and Regional Terrorist Groups in Narcotics Trafficking in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Chechnya,” Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, October 2002, 26; citing Aleksandr Gold, “Bishkek, Heroin, Interpol?” Vecherniy Bishkek [Bishkek], 28 December 2001 (FBIS Document CEP 20020107000187).
40 Sibel Edmonds, American Conservative, November 2009.
41 Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 320.
42 See for example the abundant references on the Internet to Dawood Ibrahim, discussed also in Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Macmillan, 2009), 165ff.
43 Congressional Research Service, “International Terrorism and Transnational Crime: Security Threats, U.S. Policy, and Considerations for Congress,” January 5, 2010, 15; cf. Bill Roggio, “Dawood Ibrahim, al Qaeda, and the ISI,” Longwarjournal.org, January 7, 2010: “D-Company is believed to have both deepened its strategic alliance with the ISI and developed links to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), which was designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in 2001. During this time period, some say D-Company began to finance LeT's activities, use its companies to lure recruits to LeT training camps, and give LeT operatives use of its smuggling routes and contacts.66 Press accounts have reported that Ibrahim's network might have provided a boat to the 10 terrorists who killed 173 people in Mumbai in November 2008.67 The U.S. government contends that D-Company has found common cause with Al Qaeda and shares its smuggling routes with that terrorist group.68 The United Nations has added Ibrahim to its list of individuals associated with Al Qaeda.” A rising successor to D-Company is the split-off Ali Budesh gang, now based in Bahrain. In March 2010 Ali Budesh declared an open war, “Operation D,” against Dawood Ibrahim and D-company.
44 Jeremy Hammond, “Role of Alleged CIA Asset in Mumbai Attacks Being Downplayed,” Foreign Policy Journal, December 10, 2008. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), forthcoming.
45 Guardian, April 10, 2010.
46 Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 2010.
47 Sergei L. Loiko, “Kyrgyz riot toll rises to 77: Russia rejects a plea to send troops to quell ethnic clashes in the ex-Soviet republic,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2010, A4. According to Steve LeVine, “Before Kyrgyzstan turned to Russia, it informally asked Washington for military assistance including a supply of rubber bullets to quell ethnic bloodletting in the south of the country, but was turned down” (“Kyrgyzstan requested U.S. military aid and rubber bullets but was turned down,” Foreign Policy, June 13, 2010).
48 Canberra Times (Australia), June 17, 2010.
49 “Kyrgyzstan Risks Turning Into Second Afghanistan - Medvedev,” Voice of Russia, reissued on GlobalResearch.ca, April 14, 2010.
50 ФСКН обвиняет наркобаронов в событиях в Киргизии, “Commersant.ru, June 21, 2010. Cf. “Russian drugs tsar suggests setting up military base in Kyrgyzstan, “BBC Worldwide Monitoring, June 21, 2010: “ITAR-TASS quoted Ivanov as saying that drug trafficking was one of the causes of instability in Kyrgyzstan. ‘A massive flow of drugs from Afghanistan is going through Kirgizia. Osh, the Kirgiz [city of] Dzhalal-Abad, the Fergana valley - that is the region which is unfortunately involved in drug trafficking,' he said. ‘Not a single [instance of] drug trafficking goes on that is not controlled by this terrorist network “of fundamentalist organizations, Ivanov went on.'
51 Daniyar Larimov, “Dmitry Medvedev: Kyrgyzstan has to settle order itself,” Bishkek News Agency, June 25, 2010. Ivanov's proposal was also strongly opposed in Moscow on June 28 by the anti-Kremlin Russian current affairs website Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal (BBC Worldwide Monitoring, June 29, 2010).
52 RIANovosti, July 1, 2010, supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring.
53 Sergei Blagov, “Moscow Accuses West of ‘Narco-Aggression,‘” International News and Security Network, April 1, 2010.
54 “Russian defence minister calls for fight against drug trafficking,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, February 3, 2002. Cf. “The Drug Flow from Afghanistan Is Skyrocketing!” Website report from Delo [Bishkek], April 24, 2002 (FBIS Document CEP20020425000145).
55 Sergei Blagov, “Moscow Accuses West of ‘Narco-Aggression,‘” International News and Security Network, April 1, 2010.
56 “Afghan drug trade threat to global stability -Russian drug chief,” RIANovosti, June 8, 2010; “Viktor Ivanov: The real price of Afghanistan,” Independent (London), June 10, 2010.
57 See Andrei Areshev, “The Afghan Drug Industry — a Threat to Russia and an Instrument of Geopolitical Gains,” The Global Realm, June 15, 2010.
58 James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: “United States military commanders have told Congress that…only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”
59 Nick Mills, Karzai: the failing American intervention and the struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007), 79.
60 New York Times, October 27, 2009.
61 See Matthieu Aikins, “The master of Spin Boldak: Undercover with Afghanistan's drug-trafficking border police,” Harper's Magazine, December 2009. Cf. Richard Clark, “United States of America, Chief Kingpin in the Afghanistan Heroin Trade?” OpEdNews, December 4, 2009, (no longer viewable at http://www.opednews.com/author/author8235.html): “What we have is essentially a drug war in Afghanistan, and US forces are simply helping one side against the other. Unbeknownst to American taxpayers, drug lords collaborate with the U.S. and Canadian officers on a daily basis. This collaboration and alliance was forged by American forces during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and has endured and grown ever since. The drug lords have been empowered through U.S. money and arms to consolidate their drug business at the expense of drug-dealing rivals in other tribes, forcing some of them into alliance with the Taliban.”
62 This route is of major concern to Russia. It is however secondary in importance to the so-called “golden route” that “goes overland from Pakistan's Balochistan province across the border into Iran, then passes through the northwestern region, which is inhabited by Kurds, and finally into laboratories in Turkey, where the opium is processed” (Syem Saleem Shahzad, “Opium gold unites US friends and foes,” Asia Times Online, September 2, 2005). Some of this heroin also reaches Russia through the Caucasus.
63 Cf. “Narcotics,” Institute for the Study of War (2009): “Poppy cultivation is now exclusively limited to the particularly Pushtun provinces in south and southwest, particularly Farah, Nimroz, Hilmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul.”
64 “Introducing Badakhshan,” Lonely Planet, February 17, 2009.
65 Fabrizio Foschini, “Campaign Trail 2010 (1): Badakhshan – drugs, border crossings and parliamentary seats,” Afganistan Analysts Network, June 19, 2010.
66 Kiurk Semple, “The War on Poppy Succeeds, but Cannabis Thrives in an Afghan Province,” New York Times, November 4, 2007.
67 Vivienne Walt, “Afghanistan's New Bumper Drug Crop: Cannabis,” Time, April 1, 2010.
68 Vladimir Radyuhin, “Russia: victim of narco-aggression,” The Hindu, February 4, 2008; quoting John MacDougall, “Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan,” Agence France-Presse, February 23, 2008, emphasis added.
69 “Kyrgyz ex-drug official says ousted leader's brother behind abolishing agency,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, July 3, 2010.
70 “Moscow's Terror Fighter,” Newsweek, April 1, 2010.
71 Michael Smith, “Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal,” Bloomberg, June 29, 2010: “Wachovia admitted it didn't do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That's the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history – a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product. ‘Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations, ‘says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.”
72 Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor,” Observer, December 13, 2009.
73 Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 27-33, 59-66, 185-99; Scott, Road to 9/11, 124-25.
74 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), xxiv; David C. Jordan, Drug Politics: Dirty Money and Democracies (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 109.
75 U.S. Congress. Senate, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess. The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, September 30, 1992, 17.
76 Senate, The BCCI Affair, 241.
77 Scott, American War Machine, forthcoming. An early example was the Kincheng Bank in Taiwan, part-owner of the CIA proprietary airline CAT Inc., which supplied the forward KMT bases in Burma which managed the local drug traffic. The Kincheng Bank was under the control of the so-called Political Science Clique of the KMT, whose member Chen Yi was the first postwar KMT governor of Taiwan (Chen Han-Seng, “Monopoly and Civil War in China,” Far Eastern Survey, 15:20 [October 9, 1946], 308).
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