Putin

Such misrule in Uzbekistan has led to greater resentment and resistance than in relatively unrepressive Kazakhstan. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) has been a problem since the 1990s and has now pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State. Many Uzbeks are fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq; an Uzbek was one of the three suicide bombers in the June 2016 attack on Istanbul’s airport. Terrorist groups exist within Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and are ready to capitalize on a shift in circumstances, especially a sudden, dramatic one like the death of a leader, especially one with no named successor. Though the Uzbek president’s death in September 2016 passed without immediate incident, the death of Kazakhstan’s might not, and besides, as the FSB well knows, crises can be manufactured—a grievance, a slogan, some demonstrations, a few bombs, a video that goes viral.

The state-controlled media make it difficult to gauge the extent of the Islamist threat in Kazakhstan. The government prefers that terrorist incidents be presented and portrayed as the violence of criminal gangs. That leads to certain absurdities, like saying that a suicide bomber who blew himself up in the local security police headquarters was actually a crime boss who did so “with the aim of avoiding responsibility for his crimes.” Uzbekistan plays it just the opposite—it treats nearly all violent acts as those of Islamist extremists, thereby allowing it to crack down on all its enemies, including oppositionists and critics, and as well to attract foreign aid, especially from the United States, in the war against terrorism.

Islamism enters all the Central Asian countries through the Internet, discs, books, and the living word of preachers. Prison, as always, is a great university. Fighters returning from Syria and Iraq enthrall the young with their tales of apocalyptic battles, video games come to life. If educated, well-to-do British and French youth can be radicalized to the point where they would go fight in Syria or commit terrorist acts at home, something of the same sort can easily occur in dictatorial Uzbekistan or authoritarian Kazakhstan.

Paradoxically, the sanctions against Russia seem to be helping ISIS. Part of it is simple math and is exemplified by the former Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A bit smaller than Wisconsin, Tajikistan has eight million people, more than a third of whom live beneath the poverty line. For that reason, more than a million young Tajik men have traveled to Russia in search of jobs. They do the work—repairing streets, construction, shoveling snow, driving cabs—that Russians are increasingly reluctant to do. The remittances they send home account for close to 40 percent of GDP, a frighteningly high percentage.

The sanctions that have inflicted pain on the Russian economy mean there is less work for the Tajik guest workers to do. Something like 200,000 returned home in 2015: 40 percent less money was sent back than in previous years. That alone meant a 16 percent drop in GDP. Nearly a quarter million young men returned to Tajikistan to a situation that was only made worse by their arrival. Those young men will find no opportunities at home and will thus be vulnerable to the appeal of the Taliban and ISIS, which is spreading quickly throughout the former Soviet Union. And it is not only rootless, lost youth who are attracted.

In mid-May 2015 the head of Tajikistan’s Special Assignment Police Force, Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, trained in counterterrorism in the United States, simply disappeared: When he reappeared on May 27 it was in an ISIS video in which he promised to wage violent jihad against Tajikistan. He taunted his fellow countrymen as “the slaves of non-believers” and hurled them a challenge: “I am ready to die for the Caliphate—are you?”

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When Kazakh president Nazarbayev decided to create Astana, his new, gleaming capital, he supposedly chose the inhospitable northern steppe for its location in order to establish a Kazakh presence in territory that was otherwise largely Russian. Russians represent something like a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, a figure that increases to half in the northern and eastern regions that border Russia, what Solzhenitsyn called actually part of Southern Siberia. The Kazakh government has instituted a program to get 95 percent of the country speaking Kazakh by 2020 while retaining Russian as both an official and an unofficial lingua franca. Kazakhstan is like Ukraine, where a great many people who consider themselves Ukrainian cannot speak the language or speak only kitchen Ukrainian at best. But one can speak only the language of the conqueror and still be fierce about independence, as the Irish, for one, have amply demonstrated.

For Putin the north and east of Kazakhstan are important because of their Russian population but even more so because that region borders Xinjiang.