UNLIKELY ALLIES

Washington Post: When the Cold War reached Central America in the 1970s, the United States found itself in a dilemma that was to haunt it for 15 years: Communist insurgent movements threatened to take power in several countries, but the only available U.S. allies were corrupt dictatorships whose brutal tactics in fighting the rebels only worsened the situation. Now, as a new global struggle against terrorism gets underway, the Bush administration is basing some of its military operations in a part of the world where a similar collection of presidents-for-life and torture squads holds sway. The former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan, like Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua, are ready to join the United States in fighting a common foe: extreme Islamic insurgents. But as before, there is a risk the dictators' help may do more harm than good.
The three former Soviet republics bordering on northern Afghanistan -- Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan -- are all authoritarian states. Turkmenistan's president-for-life, Saparmurad Niazov, has established a florid cult of personality and hinted that he deserves billing with Biblical prophets. But Uzbekistan's strongman, Islam Karimov, ranks highest for cruelty, having imprisoned thousands of innocent Muslims in his country for attending mosques that lacked state sanction or for reading religious literature not approved by the state. Karimov has wrecked his country's economy with statist management, driven away the IMF and wasted or stolen much of the economic aid money supplied by the West.
Common enemy: Yet Karimov's Uzbekistan seems to be emerging as the strongest U.S. ally in Central Asia. It has allowed U.S. planes and troops to deploy on its territory and may serve as a staging base for military operations in Afghanistan. The reason is fairly simple: Karimov also is threatened by an Islamic extremist movement that allegedly is supported in part by Osama bin Laden. President Bush named the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as one of bin Laden's allies in his recent address to Congress, underlining that the United States and Uzbekistan have a common enemy.
Even before Afghanistan became a central security concern, the Clinton administration chose to tolerate Karimov and the other Central Asian autocrats, offering them military cooperation and economic aid in the hope of winning access to their rich supplies of energy and other resources. Now the Bush administration will be tempted to be even more understanding of Karimov's excesses. But it should not be. Uzbekistan's crackdown on devout Muslims risks making the problem of terrorism worse rather than better, and conspicuous U.S. support for its dictator would invite an anti-American backlash.
Now that Central Asia is a focus of U.S. security interests, the administration should work to curb abuses of human rights by allied regimes in the region and promote steps toward democracy. The hard lesson of the Cold War was that only democratic regimes that respected human rights proved reliable American allies -- and only they were able, in the end, to defeat insurgencies by extremists promising to remake the world.