It sounds like Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld needs to get some New York City lawyers skilled in taking landlords to court out to Uzbekistan ASAP:
Uzbekistan formally evicted the United States yesterday from a military base that has served as a hub for combat and humanitarian missions to Afghanistan since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon and State Department officials said yesterday.
In a highly unusual move, the notice of eviction from Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2, was delivered by a courier from the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, said a senior U.S. administration official involved in Central Asia policy. The message did not give a reason. Uzbekistan will give the United States 180 days to move aircraft, personnel and equipment, U.S. officials said.
This isn’t a merely an unusual move but clearly a setback. If you recall at the beginning of the Afghanistan war this was being pointed to as a U.S. strategical advancement. MORE:
If Uzbekistan follows through, as Washington expects, the United States will face several logistical problems for its operations in Afghanistan. Scores of flights have used K2 monthly. It has been a landing base to transfer humanitarian goods that then are taken by road into northern Afghanistan, particularly to Mazar-e Sharif — with no alternative for a region difficult to reach in the winter. K2 is also a refueling base with a runway long enough for large military aircraft. The alternative is much costlier midair refueling.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld returned this week from Central Asia, where he won assurances from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that the United States can use their bases for operations in Afghanistan. U.S. forces use Tajikistan for emergency landings and occasional refueling, but it lacks good roads into Afghanistan. Kyrgyzstan does not border Afghanistan.
“We always think ahead. We’ll be fine,” Rumsfeld said Sunday when asked how the United States would cope with losing the base in Uzbekistan.
But — and we know this will be a surprise to you — this is not what the operative statements were before:
In May, however, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called access to the airfield “undeniably critical in supporting our combat operations” and humanitarian deliveries. The United States has paid $15 million to Uzbek authorities for use of the airfield since 2001, he said.
The United States has regarded its bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan as vital for operations in Afghanistan. However, the U.S. presence in Central Asia has caused tensions with Russia and China, which joined the five ex-Soviet Central Asian states earlier this month to demand a U.S. deadline for leaving the bases.
U.S. relations with authoritarian Uzbekistan also have been strained by the Uzbek government’s bloody suppression in May of a rebellion in the eastern town of Andizhan, which drew U.S. criticism.
All of this is one more indication of a stark reality: the post-911 world has increasingly been less clearcut as it appeared on Sept. 12. There are often complications that policy-makers face, due to the fluidity of events and domestic factors at play in various nations.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.