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.”[361] 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?”[362]
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.
In the event of turmoil and terrorism—homegrown or stimulated from without—following on the death of Kazakhstan’s leader, Putin, his modernized military now well tested in Ukraine and Syria, will have at least two good geopolitical reasons for incursion.
The first is connected with the ideas of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, who is revered and reviled as the creator of modern geopolitical theory: revered because of the pioneering quality of his ideas and reviled for making them too categorical and because the Nazis used them to justify their doctrine of lebensraum. Mackinder is known to Russian historians and the history-minded Putin for his theories, but also because he was British high commissioner for Russia in late 1919 and early 1920, traveling through the south of the country during the thick of the civil war, urging London to support the Whites against the Reds, for which, on his return to London in 1920, he was knighted.
Mackinder’s fame rests not on a grand opus but on “The Geographical Pivot of History,” an article published in the April 1904 issue of The Geographical Journal in London. He did, however, publish books in which he developed his theory of Europe, Asia, and Africa as one big “world island” surrounded by a “world ocean.” History was made in the world island, hence Mackinder’s famous formulation:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.[363]
In his book The Revenge of Geography Robert Kaplan identifies the Heartland’s exact location:
“Kazakhstan is Mackinder’s Heartland.”[364]
If Russia were in danger of becoming no more than China’s gas station and lumberyard, Putin would be sorely tempted to seize control of northern and eastern Kazakhstan. That would mean controlling the thousand-mile-long border with China, specifically with Xinjiang. The following political situation, whether genuine or concocted by Russia, could turn temptation into action:
The president of Kazakhstan suddenly dies. There is still no known successor chosen nor any mechanism in place to select one. Homegrown Islamists seize the moment to unleash terror in the cities and seize the considerable amount of weapons-grade uranium that Kazakhstan is known to possess. Feeling threatened as Christians, the ethnically Russian population of northern and eastern Kazakhstan calls on Moscow for help, and Moscow is only too glad to oblige. The world is presented with a stark choice: which flag will fly over the region—the white-blue-and-red of Russia or the black banner of ISIS?
The Islamists will also have used the moment to stir up China’s Uighurs, who after years of China’s “Strike hard” policy are ready to strike back. China will now depend on Russia to maintain border security to keep its energy imports and manufactured exports moving; it will also depend on Russia to cease the flow of arms to the Uighurs. The balance of power will have shifted significantly in Russia’s favor.
Chance, cunning, and the willingness to use force will have made Russia what it has so longed to be since the fall of the USSR—the equal of China and thus of the United States, one of a new Big Three, the Triumvirate that rules the World Island and the World Ocean, that is to say, the World.
PART SIX
THE TWILIGHT OF PARANOIA
362
Deidre Tynan, “Central Asia Is a Sitting Duck for Islamic State,”