Thread: The Tajik Way - Less is More (NY Times)

Interesting think piece from The NY Times

ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/the-tajik-way-for-afghanistan/?src=twt&twt=nytimes

The Tajik Way for Afghanistan?

Foreign peacekeepers and outside powers helped stabilize Tajikistan by cutting deals with warlords, scaling back their aims and concentrating on order. The same “cheap, simple approach� could work in neighboring Afghanistan, an article says.

Afghanistan | “Finish the job� is President Obama’s goal in Afghanistan (news article here). George Gavrilis says look to the north for a way how. Writing in Foreign Affairs, the international affairs professor offers the model of neighboring Tajikstan, which collapsed into a devastating civil war after independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union:
Uzbek women weed a cotton field in the Kabodiyon district of southern Tajikistan.Carolyn Drake for The New York Times Tilling a cotton field in Tajikistan.

Today, Tajikistan is still corrupt and authoritarian, but it is also tolerably stable — stable enough for the international community to forget about it, which is a striking mark of success. The turnaround was due largely to an intelligently conceived and successfully implemented intervention by a small U.N. mission and a core of unlikely bedfellows that included Iran and Russia. Rather than forcing free and fair elections, throwing out warlords, and flooding the country with foreign peacekeepers, the intervening parties opted for a more limited and realistic set of goals. They brokered deals across political factions, tolerated warlords where necessary, and kept the number of outside peacekeeping troops to a minimum. The result has been the emergence of a relatively stable balance of power inside the country, the dissuasion of former combatants from renewed hostilities, and the opportunity for state building to develop organically. The Tajik case suggests that in trying to rebuild a failed state, less may be more.

But here Gavrilis skirts the issue of Pakistan in the Afghan equation — unstable with nukes and insurgent spillover at the border.

Doesn't Tajikistan still have a terribly repressive government, and one of the worst human rights records in the 21st Century? Specifically, their cotton and other agriculture still relies on slavery (both virtual and actual). I remember that our ambassador was subject to a smear campaign before being thrown out of the country, because he wouldn't keep quiet about it.

Originally Posted by iamalondoncrab

Doesn't Tajikistan still have a terribly repressive government, and one of the worst human rights records in the 21st Century? Specifically, their cotton and other agriculture still relies on slavery (both virtual and actual). I remember that our ambassador was subject to a smear campaign before being thrown out of the country, because he wouldn't keep quiet about it.

That's the Uzbeks, who win special points for boiling dissidents alive.

Originally Posted by Rumpelstiltskin

Originally Posted by iamalondoncrab

Doesn't Tajikistan still have a terribly repressive government, and one of the worst human rights records in the 21st Century? Specifically, their cotton and other agriculture still relies on slavery (both virtual and actual). I remember that our ambassador was subject to a smear campaign before being thrown out of the country, because he wouldn't keep quiet about it.

That's the Uzbeks, who win special points for boiling dissidents alive.

I did think I might have gotten muddled up; it was a while ago that I read up on the subject

The problem with doing it that way is that you're not then in a position to dictate who the nation's resources are sold to or where the development cash comes from. In the 'Economy' sections, the proportion of exports to the US wouldseem to be higher in Afghanistan than Tajikistan.

TAJIK LINK

AFGHAN LINK

But, of course, the Afghan government was chosen democratically by the people in free and fair elections.