A Case For How Sept. 11 Changed The World

Scott Bernard Nelson
Boston Globe

Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia
Ahmed Rashid
Yale University Press

   Belgrade teenager Gavrilo Princip tried to strike a blow for Serb nationalism in the summer of 1914, and instead triggered World War I. At roughly the same time, Russian workers 1,000 miles to the northeast were protesting the social and economic policies of Czar Nikolai II. The two developments ultimately set in motion events that came to define life for much of humanity in the 20th century.
   In “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia,’’ Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid makes a case that the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington could prove to be every bit the catalyst those events nine decades ago were. It’s an iffy proposition, not to mention an impossible one to validate without the passage of time, but Rashid makes a respectable case for it.
   The author of “Taliban,’’ which went from the half-price bin to the international bestseller list almost overnight in September, writes in his latest book’s introduction that “the civilized nations’ battle against terrorism may well define the twenty-first century just as Nazism and the Cold War defined the twentieth.’’ And if that turns out to be true, Rashid continues, “Central Asia is almost certain to become the new global battleground.’’
Huh? Central where?
   The area formerly known as Soviet Asia, the land of the “five stans’’ sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iran to the south and Russia to the north, is a hardscrabble and hard-luck corner of the globe that remains largely in the shadows. Most Americans have trouble pronouncing Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, let alone differentiating the countries from one another or understanding their political dynamics.
   It’s a blind spot that could cost American interests a bundle in the decades ahead. Like Afghanistan, the five stans of Central Asia offer a primordial soup of civil war and radical Islam that breeds fanatical young men ready to martyr themselves for the cause.
   (That cause is the implementation of “sharia,’’ a legal system based on the Koran, across the whole of the Muslim world. The fundamentalist groups, Rashid writes, typically see the United States not only as a nation of nonbelievers, but also as a global bully and a supporter of despotic governments. In any case, American targets in this country and overseas are typically fair game in their eyes.)
   In some regards, though, it’s no wonder the rest of the world has been slow to turn its attention to Central Asia. Despite huge untapped reserves of oil and natural gas, the region is a thicket of shifting allegiances, broken governments, and guerrilla fighters hiding in mountain passes. Even humanitarian groups have had a difficult time dealing with the area’s grinding poverty, thanks in not necessarily equal parts to forbidding geography and uncooperative government agencies.
   Rashid visited the Batken district of Kyrgyzstan, for example, where villagers join armed rebel groups because it’s the only way to get a regular paycheck. Unemployment in the area ranges from 60 percent to 90 percent; Soviet irrigation policies ruined the soil for farming; electricity is available only four hours a day; and there is no industry. “Poverty is playing into the hands of the extremists,’’ Rashid quotes the head of the United Nations’ mission in Kyrgyzstan as saying. “There is nothing like poverty, hunger, and not having access to basic services, such as decent housing, to create discontent.’’
   To greater and lesser degrees, the story Rashid tells is much the same throughout Central Asia. With the exception of Tajikistan, which began tiptoeing toward a representative government in 1997 after a five-year civil war, the region remains in the iron grip of former Soviet apparatchiks — who, naturally, continue with the tactics they learned from their Communist Party bosses. The repression only popularizes the Islamicist rebels in the eyes of most people.
   It’s a complicated tale that became more so in the wake of America’s war on terrorism, since the United States signed up the region’s dictators as allies, and Rashid is the right person to tell it. As a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Wall Street Journal, among others, he has borne witness to the civil war and economic strife that have swept Central Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union. As he did in “Taliban,’’ Rashid weaves his firsthand experiences — including interviews with many of the regional leaders, both governmental and Islamicist — into the story, along with a heaping portion of historical perspective.
   The result, stuffed as it is with names, facts, and figures, is difficult to follow without keeping notes. In the end, though, the payoff is worth the effort. Although some of the details will be lost by the time you turn the final page, Rashid does paint a nuanced picture of an increasingly important part of the planet.
   Will Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan become the world’s next big breeding ground and hideout for terrorists? Will we be embroiled in religious wars for the next century? There’s no way to know, of course, but the best way to avoid it might lie in well-researched analysis like Rashid’s.