``...I write: By the way, this is the reason the Kremlin has been so in favor of the US actions. There are radical Islamic movements who want to establish theocracies in most of the Central Asian countries, and are fond of blowing stuff up...''
Chris Doss
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In case any one else is interested in this component of radical Islamic movements, Ahmed Rashid, `Jihad, the Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia', goes into all the gory details for some 245 pages. Rashid, notes in the Preface, ``...This book had just gone into editing at Yale University Press when the Pentagon and World Trade Center were attacked...'' (xiv)
>From the concluding chapter:
``Under better economic and social circumstances, such movements would have had little public appeal or impact and would have remained on the fringe of the Central Asian Islamic world, just as the HT [Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islame, Party of Islamic Liberation], remains marginalized in many other Muslim countries. It is the particular circumstances of the crisis in Central Asia that have pushed IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] and the HT to center stage and provided young people with alien role models. Yet as the threat increases, the Central Asian regimes have become more intransigent and less willing to address the pressing needs of their people. As the public becomes more angry and frustrated, the ruling elites continue to ignore the need for change. `A failed state is not a dying state, although it can be that too. A failed state is one in which failure of policies is never considered sufficient reason to reconsider them,' warns Pakistani diplomat and scholar Ashraf Jehangir Qazi. Qazi could be talking about any state from Pakistan to Afghanistan to the Central Asian republics.'' (244p)
It is very grim, but fascinating reading. I think what emerges out all the detail is of course the above conclusion about failed states, and oddly how all that applies here.
Kelly once noted that it seemed there was a lot more talk about economics these days than say in previous decades. I think that's right in general, even if it sounded a little odd to mention on an economics list. This constant subsumption of all social policy, all cultural aspirations and ideals to their economic base within which the ruling elites due to their overwhelming wealth have absolute power has in effect accomplished an totalitarian-like suppression of all public discourse and expression and pulled those potential discourses into the web of more or less irrelevant neoliberal policy positions. You can have any color you want, as long as it's black. That's the beginning and end of all community and national aspirations, discourses, and debates.
The complete absence of addressing any issue within the established political parties beyond its economic implications for Empire or outside the bounds of the most hidebound social dogma, is an example of a failed State, where the failures of neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism are `never sufficient reason to reconsider them.'
Chuck Grimes