Visiting Kabul in 1993, I struck up a conversation with a group of soldiers outside the bombed-out shell of a stately old palace. They were under the command of the Afghan Islamist militant leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and confidently assured me they would soon export their Islamic revolution northward deep into Central Asia, to the storied formerly Muslim lands of Samarkand and Bukhara. At the time, I took these bold declarations to be simple bravado. As the prolific Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid deftly demonstrates in Jihad, I was wrong.
Rashid's previous book, Taliban, a thorough, authoritative exegesis of the then-obscure movement of religious students-turned-warriors, became an international bestseller after September 11. Now comes his new analysis of the role of militant Islam in Central Asia, and Rashid again puts his formidable reportorial powers to work on another little-understood subject: the various "stans" of the former Soviet Union that remain uncomfortably suspended "between Marx and Mohammed," as one scholar of the region has put it.
The countries in question - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan - are beautiful, unsettled, scarred by their Soviet heritage. As Rashid notes, "the vast, empty landscape [of central Asia] dotted with oases of vibrant populations and political ferment, sitting on the world's last great untapped natural energy reserves, is still almost unknown to Westerners as it was to Europeans in the Middle Ages." Rashid sets out to illuminate one of the murkier regions of the world.
Rashid introduces us to Central Asia's very own Osama bin Laden, who goes by the nom de jihad of Juma Namangani. Namangani's Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) aims to bring its holy war to countries across the region; it is, as Rashid writes, "the most potent threat to the Central Asian regimes." This is largely due to one simple, disheartening condition: The various incompetent Central Asian governments have little to offer their people other than an unsavory stew of neo-Soviet policies and spectacular mafia-style corruption. As Rashid explains, "The real crisis in Central Asia lies with the state, not the insurgents."
Those states emerged out of the rubble of the Soviet Union at the same time that a spectacular florescence of Islam was spreading across Central Asia. In Tajikistan, between 1990 and 1992, mosques were opening at the astonishing rate of one a day. The autocratic regimes of Central Asia reacted to this Islamic resurgence with a heavy-handed program of suppression seemingly inspired by Stalin's brutal repression of the region's Muslims six decades earlier. That approach turned out to be a costly mistake.
It was a failed Central Asian state - Afghanistan - that turned out to be the incubator of al Qaeda. Rashid's timely book reminds us that Afghanistan is not the only country in the region threatened by the jihadists.
The Washington Post
