Mother Jones: In the valley of the dictator: Uzbekistan's Soviet-style leader is now a vital America

Flights to Uzbekistan are few and far between and tend to touch down in the dewy, predawn darkness. First impressions in those sleepy hours can be understandably fuzzy, but just about the first thing you see will impress upon you why Washington policymakers can locate this lonely Central Asian state on a world map.

After all, Uzbekistan has no oil to speak of, while rampant corruption has kept investors away from the natural-gas and mineral reserves buried beneath its deserts and snowcapped mountain ranges. There isn't even a McDonald's to show that American multinationals have planted their flag here.

What Uzbekistan has going for it is real estate--a prime location, right next to Afghanistan. And the C-17 cargo plane that you taxi past on the pockmarked runway--its fuselage camouflage-green, U.S. Air Force stars blazing from its stout tail fin and wings--makes it perfectly clear why this remote nation is enjoying its day in the geopolitical sun as a staging ground for U.S. military operations. The 10th Mountain Division, when it is not mopping up pockets of Taliban resistance or setting its sights on Iraq, now calls Uzbekistan home.

All this makes Uzbekistan's once ostracized leader, Islam Karimov, an indispensable ally in the war on terror--one of the growing number of regional dictators, potentates, and warlords that are America's new best friends. Not since the Cold War has the United States faced such foreign-policy dilemmas and forged alliances with such a strange assortment of bedfellows. The maneuvering spells a return to realpolitik, post-9/11-style, one big gray area that seems to grow more complicated by the month.

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this. President Karimov's style of governance borrows more from Genghis Khan than Thomas Jefferson, and his jails have a well-earned reputation for being among the harshest in the world. Justice in Uzbekistan may be swift, but it is by no means blind.

I had the opportunity to witness the Uzbek version of due process when I attended the trial of a dozen young men accused of trying to overthrow the state. They were huddled in a large iron cage in the court room and bore the characteristic bruises and welts that accompany legal proceedings here. Their crime was alleged membership in the Hizb-ut Tahir, a banned Islamic organization that has sprung from the picturesque but heroin-plagued plains of the Fergana Valley, near the Kyrgyz border.

The men were called on to read their confessions, which they had already signed while being interrogated. One defendant, however, deviated from the prepared script. He had been caught in possession of a Hizb-ut Tahir leaflet. An earnest man in his early 20s, he wore studious, round-rimmed glasses. The left side of his face was purple and swollen. He wasn't a member of the outlawed group, he said, suppressing tears. He had simply picked up the pamphlet out of curiosity. The judge appeared unmoved. He sentenced him to 18 years of hard labor.

Depending on whom you believe, the Hizb-ut Tahir is either an inoffensive grassroots religious movement or a dangerous breeding ground for fanatics and terrorists bent on creating a Taliban-style theocracy. The truth is probably somewhere in between, judging by the anti-Semitic and anti-American Hizb-ut Tahir literature translated by the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent. Regardless, President Karimov has taken advantage of the global war on terror to round up thousands of people across Uzbekistan under the pretext of making Central Asia safe from fundamentalism. How much the crackdown is motivated by his desire to stamp out potential political dissent is difficult to say, since Karimov has a habit of arbitrarily extending his term by postponing national elections.

But there has been nothing ambivalent about the support from Washington, which these days is filled with Karimov apologists. In March of 2002, Karimov met personally with President Bush in the Oval Office. As national security and the war on terror have come to trump all other concerns, the thinking in the State Department seems to be that if the people of Uzbekistan have to pay the price for our safety, so be it. It's a surprisingly strong argument, given the current climate in America. At a time when civil liberties are being curtailed on the home front, why should the Bush administration or the American people worry about the plight of pious Muslims on the other side of the globe?

There is only one, equally compelling, response to that question, put forth by groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. By turning a blind eye to religious repression and supporting governments like Karimov's that exploit anti-Islamic sentiment for political ends, could we be contributing to the radicalization of young Muslim victims of torture and imprisonment? Could we inadvertently be sowing the seeds for a generation of future bin Ladens?

Matthew Brzezinski ("In the Valley of the Dictator," page 62) spent seven years in the former Soviet bloc, where he was the Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He wrote about that period in his book, Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier.