Read Online Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou - Free Book Online

winging across the Atlantic on an overnight flight. I used my ten-hour layover in Moscow to take a cab into the city and spent about one quarter of my money on a laptop. I needed to switch terminals for my second overnight flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In the grungy departure lounge, a priest wearing a coarse brown robe knotted at the waist asked me in English where I was going and promised, unbidden, to pray for me.
    One afternoon the previous fall, Adam and I had sat on a balcony in a teahouse overlooking the bazaar in the old trading city of Kashgar, in northwestern China. A few minutes earlier a wide-eyed eight-year-old bathroom attendant in a mosque across the street had saved me from a beating or worse when, with much frantic hand-waving, he stopped me from pissing in what I had assumed was the cleanest, most pristine urinal in Central Asia. As I backed away from the white-tiled trough, half a dozen men filed into the room and sat down to wash their feet and hands in it before prayers.
    Adam and I reclined on rope beds, drinking scalding tea from small, handleless, bowl-shaped ceramic cups that we refilled from a large metal pot, and plotted our next move on maps spread out before us. As was the case during the heyday of caravan commerce along the Silk Road trading route, Kashgar remained the place where roads from the Indian subcontinent and what are now the ex-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan converged. Our visas were for Pakistan, to the south. But the romantic allure of the old Silk Road cities to the west of us, just over the Tian Shan Mountains, pulled at me with a force that seemed almost gravitational. We ultimately stuck to our planned route and turned south, but missing out on Uzbekistan had gnawed at me ever since.
    Now, less than a year later, my eyes sticky and my mouth tasting foul, I stepped into the hazy early morning sun outside Tashkent’s airport. I flagged down a cab, threw my backpack into the trunk, and asked the driver to take me to the city centre. The Taliban still controlled everything in Afghanistan south of the Uzbek border. To get to Afghanistan, I’d have to first travel through Tajikistan in the east. I planned on spending a day in Tashkent before moving on. My hopes of finding any evidence of Uzbekistan’s fabled history in Tashkent faded the closer we got to downtown. It seemed clear that the historical era most influencing Tashkent’s present was not the majesty of Silk Road empires but the seventy years of Soviet rule. It hung over the city, inescapable, like a bad smell. It was there in the dreary apartment blocks, the planned sprawl, and, most ominously, in the Stalin-like personality cult directed at Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, whose face looked down from billboards everywhere in the city.
    Karimov, whose country’s strategic location next to Afghanistan would soon make him an ally of the United States, was confronting his own low-level Islamist insurgency from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose fighters also fought with the Taliban. Karimov’s methods of dealing with them included the widespread jailing and torture of anyone he feared posed a threat to his rule, including large number of moderate practising Muslims. His secret service agents have boiled prisoners to death.
    The American Department of Defense was willing to overlook these atrocities for years, even if the State Department preferred not to. The United States funded the Uzbek military and trained its soldiers. In return, America was able to use an Uzbek airbase as its staging ground for war efforts in Afghanistan, and the CIA received cooperation from the prisoner-boiling Uzbek security services. American money and aid came with few other strings. Little pressure was applied to force Karimov to democratize his country or scale back human rights abuses. His assistance in the war on terror was considered too