the commission estimated that Rumsfeld’s repositioning plan would actually cost closer to $20 billion.28
Other criticisms of the Global Posture Review center on the intangible relationships that form the bedrock of the American military empire and the distinct possibility that the Pentagon will irretrievably damage them. The international relations commentator William Pfaff predicted, “For every foreign intrusion into a country, particularly one so dramatic as establishing a military base, a nationalist reaction can be expected.... Expanding the base system encourages Washington’s tendency to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism, as well as to political problems.”29
Exactly what Pfaff feared happened in Uzbekistan in the summer of 2005. In 2001, the Uzbek government had granted the United States use of the Karshi-Khanabad base, an old Soviet airfield close to the Afghan border in southeastern Uzbekistan (known to the Pentagon officially as “Camp Stronghold Freedom” and unofficially as “K- 2”).30 Uzbekistan was the first of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia to agree to help the United States after 9/11. Heavy use was then made of the facility to support Special Forces operations in Afghanistan and to fly intelligence and reconnaissance missions over that country. About 800 U.S. military personnel were deployed at K-2, which was a typical American “foreign operating site.” In 2004, the United States spent $4.6 billion on military equipment for Uzbekistan and more than $90 million on so-called International Military Education and Training for Uzbek forces. The other main American base in Central Asia, at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, was not as useful as Karshi-Khanabad for ongoing military operations because Kyrgyzstan does not have a common border with Afghanistan. The only alternative, building a base in adjoining Tajikistan, where the United States has permission for emergency landings and occasional refueling, is less attractive due to the lack of good roads into Afghanistan.31
Since the breakup of the USSR in 1991, however, Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, has presided over one of the harshest dictatorships in the world. The Bush administration made use of this reality for a while. The capital Tashkent became a regular delivery point for CIA renditions, thanks to the well-established reputation Karimov s regime has for torturing prisoners. In 2003, Britain recalled its ambassador Craig Murray after he publicly denounced Uzbekistan’s abysmal human rights record. Murray disclosed that the Uzbek government’s specialty for prisoners kidnapped by the CIA was boiling them alive. The ambassador’s deputy, sent to talk to the CIA’s Tashkent station chief about this, was told, “The CIA doesn’t see this as a problem.” The Pentagon took the view that “Uzbekistan has been a good partner in the war on terror.” In 2002, the State Department quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat, despite Karimov’s repression of Islamic fundamentalists.32
By 2005, this official American endorsement was being offset, in Karimov’s eyes, by the activities of some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) paid for by the U.S. government’s National Democratic Institute in Washington. He was alarmed and suspicious, probably accurately, that one wing of the Bush administration was secretly financing opposition movements in his country, hoping to bring to power an even more malleable government. Such efforts had already helped overthrow governments in Georgia in 2003 (the Rose Revolution), in the Ukraine in 2004 (the Orange Revolution), and in nearby Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 (the Tulip Revolution).33 In particular, the protests that drove President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan into exile alarmed all of the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, since they were, if anything, more vulnerable to charges of ignoring human rights and being indifferent to popular aspirations for democracy than he was.
In Uzbekistan, demonstrators broke into the city jail of Andijan on May 12, 2005, and freed a group of local businessmen the government had charged with Islamic extremism. Fearing another bloodless revolution, this time in his own country, President Karimov promptly used his Unequipped and trained troops to massacre at least five hundred unarmed demonstrators and bystanders. Relations with Washington rapidly soured. On July 29, the Uzbek government delivered a written request to the U.S. embassy to withdraw from the Karshi-Khanabad base by January 25, 2006. In late September 2005, after discussions with President Karimov in Tashkent, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said that the United States would comply “without further discussion.” On November 21, 2005, the last U.S. airmen formally returned control to the Uzbek government and flew out of K- 2.34
What had happened in Tashkent set off reverberations throughout Central Asia, particularly in Bishkek, the capital of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, which is the home of our sole remaining air base in the area. In light of Uzbekistan’s expulsion of the Americans, Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev decided to impose a hundred-fold increase in the rent he charges the United States for the use of Manas Air Base (called by the air force “Chief Peter J. Ganci Air Base” after the highest-ranking officer of the New York Fire Department to perish in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers). The annual fee went from $2.7 million per year to $200 million. Bakiyev said that there would be “no room for haggling” and that he would evict the Americans if they did not come through. As of July 14, 2006, the U.S. government had agreed to pay as much as $150 million in total compensation over the next year for use of the base, but no agreement had been reached.35 Given the number of uncoordinated U.S. military-politico activities around the world, many more requests for us to get out or pay up will likely be forthcoming.
More serious than the closing of any FOSs or CSLs would be our expulsion from one or more MOBs. That might spell the beginning of the unraveling of America’s military empire. Germany has long been one of the more hospitable nations toward the huge American military presence. However, because of the Bush administration’s irritation with former chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s public stance on Iraq, the United States began making plans to close thirteen army bases in Germany.36 Current designs are to reduce air force personnel in Europe from 29,100 to 27,500, navy personnel from 13,800 to 11,000, and army personnel from 62,000 to 24,000.37 This will have serious economic consequences for the city of Wurzburg and its suburbs (home of the First Infantry Division, which is to return to the United States in mid-2006) and for Wiesbaden (home of the First Armored Division, which will depart the following year). If some Germans see these withdrawals, and the accompanying German job losses, as payback for Berlin’s opposition to the unilateral attack on Iraq, other Germans are pleased to see our troops leave. In 2005, Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of the Social Democratic Party and one of Germany’s most charismatic politicians, said, “We are not a sovereign country; as long as the U.S. can operate from here, we are a participant in the Iraq War.”38
In contrast, the United States chose not to close any of its bases in Italy, in a period when then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was one of President Bush’s most loyal allies. In fact, the Global Posture Review calls for moving U.S. Naval Headquarters in Europe from London to Naples, rather than to Spain as originally planned, because the new socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero decided in 2004 to withdraw all 1,400 of his country’s troops from Iraq.39
There have, in fact, been many more public and official protests in Italy about the American presence than in either Germany or Spain. These include demands by the regional president of Sardinia that the navy remove its 2,500 military personnel from La Maddalena island at the northern tip of Sardinia, a base since 1972. Despite being a well-known resort area and a national park, La Maddalena plays host to American nuclear submarines that are anything but a tourist attraction, particularly after one of them, the USS
Mainland Italians have been made nervous by reports published in the national daily
