Another terror in the making

Turkestan or central Asia, an immense tract of mountain, steppe and desert from the Caspian Sea to the Chinese frontier, is one of the least known regions on Earth. Notoriously closed to Europeans in the 19th century, then conquered by Tsarist Russia, it was turned into a giant collective farm by Stalin in the 1920s. In the process, a vivid Islamic culture has been ruined as comprehensively as the lake that receives its rivers, the toxic dust-bowl known as the Aral Sea.

At the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the five Turkestani republics - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan - were never going to follow the route of the Baltic republics towards economic liberalisation and democracy. There was no tradition of democracy at all.

What the 60 million inhabitants of Turkestan got instead was a revival of Islam, that had lain dormant for 70 years, and some of the most brutal, autocratic and corrupt regimes on Earth. All but one of the republics are ruled by wooden and paranoid ex-communists and only Tajikistan, riven by civil war between 1992 and 1997, has the makings of a representative system. The villain of the book under review is Islam Karimov, president of the richest and most populous republic, Uzbekistan, whose brutal persecution of ordinary Muslims has created a violent extremist backlash.

Ahmed Rashid's Taliban was the best book to hand when the world became interested in Afghanistan on 11 September, but it was also out of date. Rashid's contention was that unless a stable government was created in Afghanistan, his own native and nuclear Pakistan would be " Talibanised". We do not know whether Osama bin Laden has survived the US assault of last autumn and winter, whether the Taliban can regroup or whether Afghanistan can be settled under the Karzai government, but for the moment Rashid's conclusion looks quite unlikely.

In this book, the same scrupulous analysis leads Rashid to a conclusion that also seems to me a little unlikely. He argues that the Farghaneh Valley, a great cotton plantation with 10 million inhabitants straddling Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that is the heart of central Asia, could become the new cockpit of Islamic fanaticism, a sort of pre-11 September Afghanistan.

The core of Rashid's new book is two whizz-bang chapters on the former Soviet paratrooper Juma Namangani and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which conducted skilled and bloody campaigns of violence and kidnapping in the summers of 1999 and 2000 in the valley and the surrounding mountains. This story is told nowhere else. However, these campaigns succeeded in part because Juma and his men could retire each autumn - with the aid of Russian helicopters, don't ask me why - across the Oxus into the sanctuary of Afghanistan.

That is no longer possible. The collapse of the Taliban means Juma has lost his access to Bin Laden's money, young Arabs or Pakistanis at a loose end in Bin Laden's camps, military training and the heroin trade, which built the IMU into such a force. We do not even know whether Juma and his men survived the battles of last November.

Meanwhile, it has been clear since at least 1995 (in Indian-occupied Kashmir) but particularly since last autumn in Afghanistan that the international brigades of so-called "Arab Afghans" - part mercenaries, part fanatics - do not capture "hearts and minds" in the countries in which they operate. The IMU is not a popular movement any more than the Taliban. It has no political or economic programme, but exploits the rage of young men at the hopelessness of their condition and the cruelties of Karimov.

The IMU, and the more mainstream Hezb ul-Tahrir (which is such a hit at freshmen's fairs at colleges in the British Midlands) promote an Islam derived from Saudi or Pakistani ideologies, which has little echo in Turkestan. For example, some zealots have tried to force Uzbek women to change their brilliant dresses, the most beautiful costume in the world, for the all-over tent known as a chadari or burqa. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence (ISI) have, anyway, been obliged since 11 September to stop playing silly buggers with the radicals in central Asia if they want to stay friends with the US. To cap it all, Russia, China and the US are now co-operating against what they call terrorism as never before.

All these points are made by Rashid. Even so, he expresses the hope that, for fear of Juma and his like, the international community will push thugs like Karimov to improve their human-rights record.

That sounds optimistic.