Chances are you don’t know much about Central Asia, the club of five ex-Soviet “stans” located just north of America’s bloodiest and most corrupt fiefdom, Afghanistan. Kazakhstan is probably the most famous, thanks to the infamous Borat Sagdiyev. Kyrgyzstan gets a decent amount of news play because of the Tulip Revolution they had in 2005 and then the unnamed revolution and ethnic violence they had last summer. Of the five–Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan–only Kyrgyzstan can lay any sort of claim to being a democracy, and the Kyrgyz democracy is rotten with corruption and heavily dependent upon foreign powers.
The weirdest one has to be Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is a sandy place that used to be quite poor until they discovered they sat on top of an untold wealth of natural gas. When the Soviet empire fell, the Communist First Secretary Saparmurat Niyazov just stayed on for the next 15 years until his death. But given the absence of a communist cult and the addition of natural gas money, the next 15 years were a wild time for the country. Niyazov rechristened himself Turkmenbashi (father of the Turkmen), wrote an autobiography that became a “textbook” for proper living, renamed months of the calendar after himself and his mother, changed the alphabet, and built golden statues of himself. It was a cult of personality so stupid and so eccentric as to almost invite laughter, had it not been paid for and foisted upon his unwitting subjects.
He died suddenly in 2006 and was replaced by an obscure dentist, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov. Surely things would be better under him than the ghastly Turkmenbashi!
WikiLeaks says no. WikiLeaks documents show U.S. authorities calling Berdimuhammedov an extremely paranoid intellectual lightweight who built a $79 million presidential yacht that would have been larger if only the Caspian Sea canals were bigger. This as the Turkmen people continue to live in poverty. Of course, his wife and daughters live in Western Europe.
Elsewhere in the region, WikiLeaks shows General Petraeus being told to suck up to Tajik dictator Emomali Rakhmon, a vile old drunk who has a strange habit of seeing opponents die in jail. Cables also show the U.S. standing idly by as Kazakh dictator and U.S. ally Nursultan Nazarbayev fixes another election.
These are the sort of things desperate empires do as they cling to power whilst fighting disastrous wars at the farthest fringes of their realms. The American war machine needs Manas AFB in Kyrgyzstan in order to keep fighting in Afghanistan, so politicians will be lied to and cheated and ultimately throw money at bad, corrupt contracts in Kyrgyzstan, just to keep the body bags coming. They will suck up to Nazarbayev, just to keep overflight rights. They will add Uzbek Islamists to terrorist watchlists, just to curry some favor.
The Ottoman Empire was once called the Sick Man of Europe. America is now the Sick Man of the World–still represented across the globe, but increasingly stretched thin, increasingly devoid of ideas and money. I look forward to the end of this empire that has brought economic ruin at home and death and destruction abroad.
The Country Estate 