U.S. policymakers increasingly view Central Asia as a transit point to somewhere else. ~Tom Malinowski

, “How Not to Run an Empire”

We can grant that concerns about the abuses of Bakiyev’s regime took a backseat to the need to retain an air base for supplying Afghanistan. But why was it necessary to seek Bakiyev’s favor so obsequiously in order to keep the U.S. lease at Manas? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Early in 2009, not long after Obama had been sworn in, the Kyrgyz parliament voted to end the U.S. lease at Manas, because the U.S. military presence in Kyrgyzstan was the cause of some accidents and civilian deaths in the vicinity and so was deeply unpopular. Of course, it didn’t help that any of the business generated by activity at the base primarily benefited members of the ruling family, whether it was Akayev’s or Bakiyev’s. All of this predated Bakiyev’s electoral fraud and the discontent that exploded this past week on account of utility rate hikes. Analysts obsessed with the sinister power of Moscow focused entirely on a Russian loan to Kyrgyzstan, which was supposed to have been the reason why the U.S. would have to leave, and missed the broad popular discontent with Kyrgyzstan’s role as a transit point for an American war. When Bakiyev changed his position and permitted the continuation of the lease in exchange for more rent, the U.S. became reliant on Bakiyev even more than it had ever been on Akayev. The habit of definining U.S.-Kyrgyz relations around the basing issue to the exclusion of everything else and the unpopularity of the base itself predated Bakiyev and they long predated the political turmoil of recent years.

As I wrote in February 2009 in The Week:

The quality of the U.S.-Kyrgyz relationship had already worsened considerably long before the Russian offer of aid, and it was the base that was a major cause of the deterioration. As Kyrgyzstan’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Baktybek Abdrisaev explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, U.S. interest in Kyrgyzstan became narrowly focused on the base to the detriment of all other issues, including human rights—which meant that the entire bilateral relationship was sure to suffer disproportionately once the base became a flashpoint of controversy.

If the U.S. would like to have sustainable and stable good bilateral relations with Kyrgyzstan, it should not reduce those relations to the issue of U.S. use of Manas. In other words, the U.S. should not treat Kyrgyzstan as a transit point or a satrapy, but should treat it as a sovereign state struggling with the political consequences of becoming a willing ally in the war in Afghanistan.

P.S. As it happens, Mr. Abdrisaev co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post that was published yesterday. It is also worth reading.