#CentralAsia #history #AhmedRashid

1 Conquerors, Khans and Communists

As it had been so many times before, the fate of Central Asia was to be decided. The khans, or chiefs, of the great tribes - the Kazakh ordas, the Mongol hordes, the Uzbek Shaybanis and the Tajik clans - were gathering to discuss their fate on a cold winter's evening. They arrived wrapped up in great fur coats and fur hats with earflaps that stretched across their faces hiding them from view. Flurries of snow swept across the earth as the chiefs, with their advisers and bodyguards in tow, greeted each other with the customary Muslim warmth.
An honour guard, its members shivering in the cold, went through an elaborate military drill to welcome each delegation. Their hands were close to freezing as they grasped their weapons and brought them level to present arms to the guests. In one corner of the arrival ground a band of musicians played the national anthems of the tribes and traditional tunes. In between the arrival of the delegations, the musicians clapped their hands to keep warm and rubbed their lips to prevent them chapping. In another corner young girls, dressed in elaborate and colourful costumes, waited to present frozen flowers to the guests.
Tonight the khans would feast together, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by carpets and silk pillows, and discuss the critical situation informally, gauging what the others felt and what positions they were likely to take in public.Tomorrow there would be a grand tribal assembly, the ulus or majlis or jirga - there are many names for it - where they would all present their views.The leaders that gathered that night were the heirs of the conquerors of the world, men such as Genghis Khan, Babar and Tamerlane. Their ancestors were also some of the greatest scientists, poets, philosophers and mystics that the steppe has ever produced.The majority of these leaders had never seen the sea: they lived in a landlocked region among the highest mountain ranges in the world, the harshest deserts and the most lush oases ever tilled by man.Yet that night there was a strange tension in the air, a disquiet and nervousness that old-timers had never seen before. Some of the leaders looked fearful, which was hardly normal for the warriors of the Central Asian steppe.
The setting for the meeting was Ashkhabad, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. The chiefs were the old communist party bosses and now presidents of the republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The date was 12 December 1991.The reason for the meeting was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These heirs of Genghis Khan's warrior nomads and Stalin's communist party machine had suddenly been orphaned; everything they had known for the past seventy-four years was disappearing before their eyes. Four days earlier at a dacha near Brest, 3,000 kilometres away, presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shuskevich of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) had signed a treaty formally disbanding the Soviet Union and creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In getting rid of the 1917 Revolution and the legacy of Lenin, these Slavic leaders had not bothered to inform or consult with their fellow republican presidents in Central Asia.
Whereas once the Muslims of Central Asia had decided the fate of Russia, now the Slavs were taking their own decisions and seemed prepared to dump Central Asia in the process. That day, shivering on the airport tarmac in Ashkhabad as I watched each delegation arrive, the band strike up and the honour guard salute, I witnessed people's palpable fury at the Slavs and, in particular, the anti-Russian feeling. There was talk of racial discrimination, of ethnic o and the Cross, were again coming to life. Once again history was repeating itself.
The next day at Ashkhabad the five presidents of the Central Asian republics sat down together at a press conference and declared, more or less, that they had eaten humble pie. On a long, elevated platform, presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Rakhmon Nabiev of Tajikistan, Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan said that they were willing to join the CIS, but on the basis of equality. They demanded that they too be made founder members of the CIS. There was not a word of anger against Russia or Yeltsin - in public the leaders swallowed their resentment. Russia was still too powerful to annoy. A week later, on 21 December in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, the new CIS was formed with eleven out of the fifteen former Soviet republics becoming members. The three Baltic republics were gone for good and Georgia stood aloof. The Soviet state had ceased to exist.
The life blood of the Soviet state had been ebbing away ever since the August coup attempt in Moscow. That had been carried out by Communist hardliners to prevent President Gorbachev signing a new Union treaty that would have still retained some of the close links between the republics.The irony was that the failed coup ensured that public opinion in Russia and Ukraine, the two most powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, demanded that they leave the Soviet Union altogether. It was as though a mother was preparing to see her children drown. 'Why should we bailout these strife-torn regions of Central Asia, who share nothing with us - least of all our religion. We would be much better off on our own, for then Russia could become a great power again,' said an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, one of the principal economic advisers to President Yeltsin. If this was the mood in Moscow in the offices of the highest in the land, the mood in the streets was even more militandy in favour of Russian independence.
Decades of indoctrination, about the principals of the Soviet State and its internationalist duties had been thrown out of the window. Central Asia in particular was no longer considered part of the great and glorious Soviet motherland, but instead was seen as culturally, racially and in religious terms totally separate from Russia.The socialist premiss of equality, and specifically that the poorer regions of the Soviet state should be developed to become equal to Russia, was now nothing but a naive and expensive policy that was draining the Russian exchequer. The new Soviet man whom communism was supposed to create was now suddenly reduced to defending ethnic frontiers.
The leaders meeting in Ashkhabad knew well the present mood amongst the Slavs, which was being pandered to by leaders such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk, and they were furious. Since the August coup attempt, the Central Asian leaders had backed Gorbachev in his demand for a strong centre. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was in the forefront of those arguing for a strong centre in order to keep the military, the nuclear arsenal, the currency and the economy under a single control. He was firmly backed by other Central Asian leaders - except for the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, who six months earlier had supported the idea of a loose commonwealth structure instead of the Soviet state.
Delegation members spoke in private about how Yeltsin had abused and humiliated them by secretly going ahead with the Minsk treaty. The leaders spoke bravely of how they would form a new Central Asian common market. 'All the Central Asian states must get together to form a new confederation or our economic development will be stalled,' said President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. 'A Central Asian community is the need of the hour,' echoed the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akaev. Yet everyone knew that for the time being these were merely words. Their faces showed their real fears. Since 1917 Central Asia, the land of the greatest trading routes in history, had become little more than an economic colony for Moscow, producing cotton, metals and other raw materials for the Soviet economic powerhouse. When that powerhouse was seen to be built on sand, Central Asia had nowhere else to turn. By thousands of threads, from electricity grids to oil pipelines to telephone lines, the Central Asian republics were tied into Russia. Moscow was an economic and financial spider's web from which no leader on that day could ever see himself disentangled.
That night in Ashkhabad there were no celebrations. 'We are not celebrating, we are mourning, ' said a Turkoman Foreign Ministry official. 'The future is extremely bleak. The West will help Russia and other Slav republics to survive, but who will help us? ' asked a member of the Uzbek delegation. Here was the final and tragic irony. The break-up of the Soviet Union had given Central Asia that very independence that their forefathers had struggled for, but they were hesitating to eat from it. Economically dependent on Moscow and politically desirous of a strong centre that would guarantee a peacekeeping role for the CIS army, the five states were now faced with rebuilding their economies, forging independent foreign policies and ensuring some degree of foreign aid. The communist bureaucracies that these leaders had risen from had only known subservience and dependency on Moscow for the party line. Now there was no line and no party. All lines had been cut.
Moreover they were all faced in varying degrees with radical Islam, assertive ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic rivalries, and now had to create their own security forces to maintain law and order. Kazakhstan had suddenly become an independent nuclear power - for the only reason that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were based on its soil. When Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and Pakistan hailed Kazakhstan as the first independent Muslim state to have nuclear weapons, that only added to Nazarbayev's nervousness. Anti-Russian feeling amongst the local populations had to be contained so that it would not create a new bloody battleground and a further excuse for Moscow to abandon Central Asia. There was a large and powerful Russian minority in every republic, the largest being in Kazakhstan where it formed nearly half the population.These Russians faced their own crisis: whether to brave the coming ethnic storms in Central Asia or to migrate back to Russia, a move that could trigger off large-scale economic disruption in the republics because it was the Russians who were the technical brains and manpower behind the economy. All these problems, for which the former communist bureaucracies were ill prepared, came as shops emptied fast and food shortages grew.
If the end of tsarist Russia was a turning point for Central Asia in the first part ofthe twentieth century, because it introduced the region to the modern era and a new ideological and economic system, then the end of the Soviet Union has been an equally traumatic turning point, for it created five new independent states in the heart of Muslim Asia. Whereas the transformation of Central Asia after October 1917 was carried out with an unprecedented degree of bloodletting, which decimated the population, the transformation in December 1991 took place without a single dead body in the streets. It was a remarkable way to achieve independence, even though just a few months later Tajikistan was to be in the grip of a brutal civil war.

Today Central Asia comprises five independent republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From its beginning in 1917, the Soviet state never included Kazakhstan in Muslim Central Asia, preferring to give it a non-Asian identity by linking it closely to Russia and Siberia.Today, however, the Kazakhs themselves and the world at large believe they are very much part of the region. Central Asia covers an area of 3,994,300 square kilometres which includes some of the most sparsely populated regions in the world. Its population of only 51 million people includes more than 100 different ethnic groups, from Germans and Austrians to Tibetans and Koreans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks. Uzbekistan has a population of 20.5 million, and Uzbeks form substantial minorities in all other
four republics. There were some 10.6 million Russians living in Central Asia in 1992, but there has been a large-scale exodus of Russians from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan because of fears of ethnic violence and Islamic fundamentalism.
Tashkent and Ashkhabad, the capitals of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have long urban histories but the other three capital cities, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Alma Ata in Kazakhstan and Beshkek in Kyrgyzstan, were created by the Bolsheviks to give a sense of ethnic identity to those nationalities. Uzbekistan contains all the most famous historical cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand. They were the seats of nomadic empires and settled kingdoms in the past, as well as being centres in the development of Islam throughout the region. For centuries the hundreds of madrasahs, or Islamic colleges in Bukhara and Samarkand attracted students from as far away as Morocco and Indonesia. Bukhara is seen by many Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and the most important city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Central Asia was also the birthplace of Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam which spread rapidly to Africa and Asia.
Central Asia lies at the heart ofthe Eurasian continent. Completely landlocked, it borders Iran and Aghanistan to the south, China to the east and Russia to the north and west.The main Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges in the south and theTien Shan mountains in the east. There are no fixed boundaries in the north: where the Kazakh steppe merges into the Siberian steppe in a flat landscape that is punctured with numerous lakes. Although thousands of rivers start in the mountains, only two rivers travel for any length and finally reach the landlocked Aral Sea.The Amudarya, the Oxus river of ancient mythology, originates in the Hindu Kush range, runs along the southern-border of Central Asia skirting Afghanistan and Iran, and reaches the Aral Sea after a journey of 2,500 kilometres. The Syrdarya or Jaxartes river originates in the Tien Shan (where it is first called the Naryn river), passes through the Ferghana valley and journeys north of the Kyzlkum desert to reach the Aral Sea after travelling 2,200 kilometres. Thousands of smaller rivers flow down from the mountains but their waters disappear into the sands of the great deserts.
The lands between these two rivers, which today comprises Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have produced the main developments of Central Asian history and culture. Both these broad rivers formed formidable frontiers for the ancient world. The Amudarya divided the Persian empire and its culture from the Turkic nomadic empires of the Central Asian steppe.The same river later formed the frontier for the Tsar and the communists, separating Central Asia from first the British empire in India and then the Muslim world to the south. Meanwhile the Syrdarya formed the only northern barrier for the Persian, Greek, Arab and then Turkic kingdoms in Central Asia, protecting them from nomadic invasions from Mongolia and the Gobi desert.
All the mountain ranges of Central Asia and Afghanistan converge at the Pamirs, known as the Roof of the World, mountains which until only recently were considered to form one of the most inaccessible ranges because of its height, its snows and its freezing temperatures. In the eighteenth century the Pamirs were called the Third Pole, after the North and South poles, because they were so unknown. The Tien Shan and Kun Lun ranges run north and east from the Pamirs.
It was only in the 1850s that Russian explorers first set foot on the Tien Shan, locally called the Mountains of the Spirits because of the voices that seemed to emanate from their glaciers. Marco Polo was the first Western traveller to traverse the Tien Shan range. 'Even by daylight men hear the voices of the Spirits and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments. Travellers make a point of staying close together,' he wrote. The Kun Lun were known in ancient Chinese mythology as the Celestial Peaks.
In the centre of the region lie two of the largest deserts in the world. In the south, covering much of present-day Turkmenistan, is the Karakum or 'desert of black sands', which covers 350,000 square kilometres of some of the most arid terrain on earth, where rain is so rare that rainstorms are events recounted decades later by the local nomads.To its north in present-day Uzbekistan is the Kyzlkum or 'red sands' desert, which covers another 300,000 square kilometres and is one and a half times the size of Britain. Despite the scarcity of water, both these deserts have distinctive fauna and flora, as well as being home for some of the toughest nomadic tribes in the world, in particular the Turkomen.
As fearsome as the mountains and deserts are, so the valleys are lush, fertile and capable of producing an abundance and huge variety of crops. In 1900 the total irrigated land in Central Asia was an estimated 46,000 square kilometres of which 12,500 square kilometres lay in the oases of Bukhara, 9,000 square kilometres in the Ferghana valley and 300 square kilometres in and around Khiva. Ancient irrigation was carried out by digging wells and using the wheel system to raise water, as well as the kareez method, and by taking water from the rivers. Agriculture in Central Asia has always been carried out around oasis settlements where water was readily available. Each oasis was a selfcontained economic unit and autonomous except for the barter trade with surrounding nomads and the caravans that passed through them. Oases were frequently devastated or ransacked by the nomadic armies sweeping through, but it took them only one or two agricultural cycles to revive. It was only in the eighteenth century that the pauperized local rulers of Central Asia began to squeeze farmers for taxes and tributes.
At the heart of Central Asia is the Ferghana valley, once a cohesive economic unit but divided in the 1930s by Stalin between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The valley is 300 kilometres long and 170 kilometres wide and its history, the power of its princes and mullahs and its ability to mount sustained resistance against all outsiders, has made it the political and Islamic nerve centre of Central Asia. With a population of 7 million people, the narrow valley is the most densely populated region in Central Asia. The Soviet regime changed this natural geography of oasis settlements by irrigating vast areas of the steppe for cotton and grain cultivation. The project was initially highly successful, but the lack of planning and foresight later created massive problems which the Soviet regime refused to acknowledge and which are only coming to the surface today. Acute water shortages, pollution, the drying-up of lakes and seas, desertification and environmental catastrophes brought on by nuclear waste are only some of the problems that these newly independent republics now face. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that the nomads have always lived at one with their environment. The nomad's respect for the environment is unmatched anywhere in the world. Thus the callousness with which the Soviet system treated the land has been particularly galling to the nomadic population.
Much of the world's ancient history originated in Central Asia for it was the birthplace of the great warrior tribes that conquered Russia, Europe, India and China. Later we look in greater detail at the history of the individual races of Central Asia, even though it is difficult to split the ancient history of a region that, until Stalin, considered itself as one geographical and even historical entity.
For example, in the history of which modern day republic does one include the story of Alexander the Great or of Genghis Khan, two conquerors who affected the whole region, or the story of the Saminid kings who laid the foundations for the lasting influence of the Persian language and culture in Central Asia? Later we attempt to discuss these figures according to the regions where they had the most influence.
However, a brief outline of Central Asian history is necessary if one is to understand the cut and thrust of its present-day politics.
To the classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, Central Asia was known as Transoxiana, or the region beyond the Oxus river. The Oxus was only one of many ancient names given to the Amudarya river.
To the Arabs Central Asia was known as 'the land between two rivers' - the Syrdarya and the Amudarya.
To the English Elizabethans it was known as Tartary.
It was the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller and writer Ibn Battuta,who coined the word Turkestan, meaning 'the land inhabited by Turks'.
The nineteenth-century British writer Rudyard Kipling called Central Asia the 'Back of Beyond'. The Chinese built the Great Wall of China precisely to keep out the tribes from Mongolia and Central Asia.
European writers wrote about Central Asia without having the slightest idea what it was really like and often even where it was.
The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in his verse drama 'Tamburlaine the Great' describes Central Asia and the exploits of Tamerlane in some detail, much of it wrong. Nevertheless, Marlowe's poetry helped to build the image of awesome power and megalomania that Central Asian leaders came to represent. As 'Tamburlaine' says in a more modest moment:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Poets such as John Milton and the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped build up the mystique of Central Asia in European eyes.
Writers such as G.A. Henty and Kipling described it in their adventure novels as a barbaric, unpredictable region - even though neither had ever been there.
For the European outsider, Central Asia was a land where the imagination could run riot and take whatever liberty it liked, so few Westerners ever travelled there.
In one way or another Central Asia has always gripped the imagination of outsiders, whether they be Muslim or Christian, European or Asian. For the West it has epitomized the mystery of the Orient and the wide open spaces of the steppe punctuated by bazaars, ruthless tyrants and nomadic armies.
In the nineteenth century Central Asia was permanently etched in the minds of British schoolboys because the Great Game played between the Russian and the British empires led to numerous adventure stories about the region.
For Muslims Central Asia has epitomized the distant and inaccessible, but still the second holiest region after Saudi Arabia - steeped in Islam and mysticism, and the originator of so many Muslim races.
For the Russians it has been a reminder of one of the most painful parts of their history, as they lived for centuries under Mongol rulers and their successors, the Tartars. Russian mothers still use the threat 'the Tartars are coming' to frighten little children into bed or into doing their homework. Russian prejudices remain deeply ingrained. Ethnic riots in Central Asian cities are still described by Russian commentators as 'riots between rampaging mobs' or 'crazed Islamic fundamentalists'. In 1990, after ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, no less a person than the Soviet interior minister Vadim Bakatin described them as 'a reflection of primitive and medieval nationalism'.The same kind of nationalism being espoused in the Baltic republics or Ukraine at the time was never described in such a way.
Central Asia has always been different. At the heart of the history of Central Asia is not the story of princes and their courts, but the story of the nomad and his horse. In recent years Soviet archaeological research has pushed back the date when man first began herding animals in Asia to around 4000 BC. It is now thought that the horse was first domesticated in the Ukraine and that the cult of the horse spread rapidly eastward.
During the Neolithic Age, between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Central Asia saw the development of mixed farming in which tribes hunted, herded and grew some crops. Based around the Caspian Sea these tribes developed pottery and stone tools as they steadily moved eastward into Central Asia.
Recent excavations at Altyn Tepe, near present-day Ashkhabad, revealed Neolithic settlements whose peoples traded with Persia and Mesopotamia in the Middle East. Later, pure pastoralism developed as tribes wandered further afield from their oasis settlements looking for pasture for their ever-larger herds of animals.
From around 1700 BC a distinct nomadic culture emerged. The evidence of unearthed burial mounds points to the importance given to horses and camels, which were killed and buried alongside their owners.
Later, between 1700 and 1000 BC, mounted nomadism became common, with the training of horses for war and their harnessing to chariots once the spoked wheel had been invented. When the Hittites conquered Anatolia in 1286 BC, mounted warriors and chariots were used for the first time as part of the established battle order.
The Saka tribes settled around the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were the first mounted nomads to found a dynasty in the region.
At its height around 800 BC, this dynasty ruled an area including that of modern-day Iran, western Turkey and Central Asia. Squeezed by growing Persian power, the Sakas later retreated into the Pamirs and the Tien Shan mountains, in the region today known as Kyrgyzstan.They remained here until 200 BC, when they were finally conquered by the Persians.
From 700 to 300 BC the Scythian tribes, who were settled north of the Syrdarya, swept southward conquering Central Asia and then India and Syria. The Scythians became the main antagonists of the Persian kings and later Alexander the Great, but today there is little evidence of what became of them; they must have been assimilated into the great ethnic melting pot of Central and South Asia.
The early Persian kings were the first to demarcate Central Asia, now inhabited by the offshoots of the Saka tribes. They divided the region between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers (darya means 'river' in Persian) and stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pamir mountains into three distinct regions. From west to east these were Chorasmia, Bactria and Sogdiana.The latter included modern-day Tajikistan, eastern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, while Bactria included much of present-day Uzbekistan.The Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC was to rule Central Asia for the next two hundred years, until the arrival of the Greeks.
It was in Bactria that Zoroaster, who was born in modern Azerbaijan, first appeared with a new reIigion of fire worship. Zoroastrianism spread rapidly through Bactria Ind Sogdiana and was later adopted by the Persians.
The single aberration in this history of invasions from the east and south was the arrival from Europe of the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After defeating the Persians, Alexander conquered Bactria and Sogdiana between 329 and 327 BC. Alexander left an indelible mark on Central Asia, founding cities, promoting Hellenic culture and creating far greater uniformity within the region than it had ever known before. One of his successors, General Selucucos, founded the Selucid dynasty which ruled Bactria and large parts of Sogdiana.
In 239 BC another Greco-Bactrian kingdom was established which ruled from the Afghan city of Balkh. The Bactrians were to be finally overthrown by nomadic invaders from the east in around 140 BC.
Meanwhile the western region of Central Asia in present-day Turkmenistan continued to be ruled by the Parthian dynasty which was based on the Saka tribes. In 224 BC they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. With the southern belt of Central Asia firmly under the control of the Persians, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century BC by successive waves of more Sakas, who continued south to Aghanistan and India. After these invasions, Buddhism also arrived and much closer contact was established between Central Asia and China to the east and India to the south.
In the eastern region of Central Asia in what is now Kyrgyzstan, "'the Sarmatian nomads with their Siberian animal culture moved south from Siberia and dominated the region from around 500 BC onwards. The first raids into Central Asia by Chinese princes took place around 100 BC and for a time they captured the Ferghana valley and imposed an annual tribute of 1,000 stallions on their victims.The Chinese were convinced that the famous horses of the Ferghana sweated blood. These horses were not only highly prized in the Chinese army, but also served as models for all horse sculpture across China.
In time both the Sarmatians and the Chinese were pressed from the rast by the Huns, the forefathers of the Mongols, who came out of the Gobi desert to occupy Kasghar in Xinjiang around 200 BC, crossed Central Asia and reached the Volga river in Russia by AD 400. Their empire - the first nomadic Mongol empire - stretched from Korea to the Ural mountains in Russia. The descriptions of the Huns fit the modern Kazakhs, who retain the same stocky physique and still have the largest mean head size of any people in the world. The Hepthalities, orWhite Huns, went on to conquer eastern Europe and parts of India, and in the fifth century Huns settled on the Danube rallied around their chief Attila and marched on Rome.
As the Huns moved westward, the vacuum in the east was filled by the Turkic tribes, who began what was to be a series of invasions westward spread over several centuries. The Turkic tribes originally inhabited the Alatau mountains in eastern Central Asia, from around 1000 BC onwards.
The word Tur or Turkic was given by the Chinese to signify all those nomadic tribes who occupied the region from Mongolia to the Black Sea and who posed a threat to the Chinese empire. Raids by the early Turkic tribes forced the Chinese to build the Great Wall of China. Around AD 200 these tribes turned around from attacking the Chinese in the east to attacking the oasis towns in Central Asia to the west. Some Turkic tribes settled in the Ferghana valley. By AD 500 these Turkic nomads were to defeat both the Persian Sassanids and the remainder of the Huns in the western part of Central Asia. Meanwhile eastern Central Asia was in the hands of the Uighur Turkic tribes, who set up a nomadic empire that straddled the border between present-day former Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang.
Soon after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Central Asia was invaded by the Arabs of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. Crossing Persia, the Arabs first defeated Zubil, the Turkic king of Kabul, and then, crossing the Oxus for the first time, defeated the Sassanids at Merv in AD 651.The Arabs began the process of converting Central Asia to Islam, and some 50,000 Arab families arrived to settle in Merv.
The second wave of Arab conquests began in 705 when Bukhara and Samarkand were conquered. By 713 the Arabs ruled over the Ferghana valley and had ventured as far east as Kasghar.
The Zoroastrian fire temples in Samarkand and Bukhara were destroyed as the conquered people converted to Islam. The Arabs ruled Central Asia from the kingdom of Khorasan, which covered what is today western Afghanistan, northern Iran and Turkmenistan.
The Arab capital was at Merv, near the present-day Turkoman city of Mary. Merv, called the Queen of the World, developed as a major centre of Islamic learning under the Arabs and later the Seljuk Turks, until it was destroyed by the Mongols.
The Arab conquests saw a flowering of Islamic thought, philosophy and mysticism which was to turn Bukhara into a city second only to Mecca for its religiosity and learning. Al Bokhari (809-69), the philosopher and commentator on the Koran, wrote the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, which is still revered as one of the most important works in Islam. As the Arabs drove northwards, the Chinese were expanding into eastern Central Asia, and in 751, at Talas, the Muslim Arabs and the Chinese at last met in batle.The decisive victory of the Arabs ensured that the Chinese would encroach no further into Central Asia than Xinjiang.
By AD 900 several independent Muslim kingdoms had sprung up In Central Asia. The most important of these dynasties were the Persian Samanids who ruled from 874 to 999 and made their capital at Bukhara, from where they acted as patrons to one of the greatest periods of Islamic art, culture and science that Central Asia was ever to see.The Samanids were descended from Saman, a Zoroastrian from Dalkh in Afghanistan, whose son Ismail captured Khorasan and later the whole of Persia.
With a well-organized army and bureaucracy, the Samanids built up extensive trading links with Europe and China, thus regulating the Silk Route. During Samanid rule Central Asia became a recognized entity, considered to be not at the edges of the world but It the very centre of the known world, and which armies, merchants and peoples travelling from west to east had to traverse. With physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians such as AI Biruni and poets such as Firdausi, the Samanid court left an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture that was not to be eroded in Central Asia until the advent of communism.
The defeat of the Samanids by AIptgin, a Turkic officer of slave origins who formerly belonged to the Samanid army, saw the end of Persian political domination in Central Asia and the advent of Turkic domination. At Ghazni in Aghanistan the Turkic tribes created the Ghaznavid dynasty, which was to rule over a region that included parts of Central Asia and India. Its strongest ruler, Mahmood of Ghazni, undertook seventeen campaigns into India between 1001 and 1024 and conquered much of Central Asia. A series of invasions from the north by fresh Turkic tribes brought the Seljuk Turks to centre stage. The Seljuks first settled near Bukhara before they moved south.They captured Merv and then defeated the Ghaznavids in 1041, establishing an empire that spread as far as Turkey. By 1055 the Seljuk chief,Tughril Beg, stood outside the gates of Baghdad.
For over 200 years the Seljuks ruled from the Pamirs to Iraq, thus uniting for the first time under Turkic hegemony Central Asia with Persia and the Arab world. At the height of Seljuk rule, King Malikshah (1072"-92) ruled from Kasghar to Jerusalem and protected the booming trade along the Silk Route between Syria, Central Asia and China. The Seljuks were challenged and finally defeated by the Mongols under Genghis Khan.The Seljuk execution of Genghis Khan's envoy in 1218 and the murder of 450 Muslim merchants who had traded with the Mongols led Genghis Khan to attack their domains in Central Asia. Seljuk high-handedness is thus often blamed for the Mongol onslaught over Asia and Europe that was to follow. When the Seljuks and other Turkic tribes had moved westward they left behind in the Gobi desert their kinsmen, the Mongols, who gradually came to inhabit the region south of Lake Baikal.
Genghis Khan, born in 1155, succeeded in uniting the local tribes and in 1206 he was elected the Great Khan at a tribal meeting which adopted the name Mongol for a new tribal confederacy.
Later called the Golden Horde, this confederacy included all the tribes that today make up the major ethnic groups in Central Asia.
The exception are the Tajiks who derive their ancestry directly from the ancient Sogdians.The ancient Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkomen were the warriors, whilst the Uighurs formed the bulk of Genghis bureaucracy because under Chinese influence they had developed a written script and a code of laws, which Genghis Khan was to adapt to Mongol needs.
Nobody in Central Asia or Europe could imagine what was about to appear over the horizon. The Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing 30,000 people and burning the city to the ground in the process. In Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, 'You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God, if you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you.'
In the next twelve months the whole of Central Asia fell to the Mongols. In 1223 an army of Tartar tribes led by Mongol generals defeated far superior Russian forces at the battle of Kalka and then pushed on through Russia in the dead of winter, finally reaching Hungary. The conquest of Russia was not to be avenged by the Russian princes for another three hundred years, until Ivan the Terrible captured the Tartar capital of Kazan in 1552. The Tartars were the heirs of the Mongols. It is ironic that, despite untold massacres carried out by the Mongols and the destruction of entire cities, Genghis Khan was a strong protector of trade and the Silk Route between Europe and China across Central Asia. During his lifetime, under a 'pax mongolica' merchants could travel from Korea to the Crimea in absolute security, not least because entire populations had been decimated along the way. The cost of this peace is now estimated to be about 5 million people who were killed by the Mongols. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided Central Asia into two - the khanate ofTransoxiana in the west and Turkestan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to be perhaps the most important and lasting cultural influence in the region.
Taimur, or Tamerlane as he is known in the West, was born in 1336 and did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old. Born south of Samarkand amongst the Barlas Turks, Tamerlane captured most of Turkestan by 1380 and then moved south to Persia and India, west to Russia, and eastward to China. In 1393 he captured Baghdad. Two years later he took Moscow. As he conquered he moved the cream of the vanquished regions' intelligentsia and craftsmen to Samarkand, where he began to build the grandest capital city of ancient Asia. Tamerlane established the Timurid dynasty, and his grandson Ulugh Beg continued his artistic and intellectual traditions, turning Samarkand and Bukhara into the seat of all learning in the decorative arts, architecture, poetry, philosophy, painting and astronomy.
After two thousand years the military machine perfected by the nomads of Central Asia appeared to be finally running its course. Except for slight variations, their weapons had not changed for centuries. The short and powerful bow with which a rider could shoot off dozens of arrows accurately from the saddle, the dagger and small shield remained the same. From around AD 600 the short sword for close-quarters fighting was replaced by a steel sabre. Only in the seventeenth century did the introduction of firearms change the weaponry and tactics of nomadic warfare. The nomads' standard dress of pantaloons, wide at the waist and fitted into knee-high leather boots with a high heel, together with a long shirt, barely changed except for differences of style amongst the various ethnic groups.
A similar dress was adopted by Muslims in India during the Mogul empire. Elaborate saddles and harnesses for the horses made of leather, fur and a felt underlay had become standard by the thirteenth century. With the Huns ruling in central and western Europe, the Goths in Spain and Italy, and the Avars in Hungary, it appeared for a time that the whole world was in the grip of Central Asian nomads. They influenced Eropean military tactics and weapons, and European attitudes to the use of cavalry. Amir Khusrun, a Muslim writer living in India in 1389, gave historians a vivid description of the Mongol army on the move, which was similar to many of the nomadic warrior armies of Central Asia:

There were more than a thousand Tartar infidels and warriors of other tribes, riding on camels, great commanders in battle, all with steel-like bodies clothed in cotton; with faces like fire, with caps of sheep-skin, with their heads shorn. Their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel. Their stink was more horrible than their colour. Their faces were set on their bodies as if they had no necks. Their cheeks resembled soft leather bottles, full of wrinkles and knots.Their noses extended from cheek to cheek, their mouths from cheek bone to cheek bone.Their moustaches were of extravagant length.They had scanty heards around their chins. The King marvelled at their beastly countenances and said that God had created them out of hell-fire.

The Timurid dynasty was to be replaced by a new tribal grouping, the Shaybani Uzbeks. The Uzbeks were of mixed Turkish and Mongol blood and part of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, but they had remained nomads, untouched by the civilizing influences of urban life. Under their dynamic chief Mohammed Shaybani, who was born in 1451, the Uzbeks united other tribes and then defeated the Timurid heir Babar at the decisive battle of Serpul, near Samarkand.
This battle was to change the course of Indian history, for Babar went on to conquer Afghanistan and India and to found the Mogul dynasty in Delhi. In a brief decade, from 1500 to 1510, the Uzbeks defeated the Turkomen and the Persians, thus extending their empire to much of Central Asia and northern Persia.
But Persian power was again on the rise with the coming to power of the Safavids, who ruled from 1501 to 1722 and who changed the state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam - a step that considerably reduced Persia's influence in Central Asia. Persia's main challenge was to contain Ottoman power in Turkey and Uzbek power in the north - the Uzbek chief Mohammed Shaybani was killed in 1510 in battle against the Safavids. In any case the Uzbeks soon broke up into smaller principalities, and the frequent wars of succession amongst them led to the evolution of three khanates, based on the cities of Khiva in the west, Bukhara in the centre and Kokand in the east. With the discovery of the sea route to India, the importance of the Silk Route had declined and, semi-forgotten, Central Asia slipped into a limbo.
Russia had made its opening move eastward as early as 1552 when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan from the Tartars and massacred the entire population. Ivan built Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square to commemorate the victory and topped its domes with onion shapes to symbolize the severed heads of the turbaned Tartars.
The battle and its grim memento was to be etched into Russia's collective memory for ever. As one writer has noted, the only time after 1552 that Russian forces ever retreated in the face of Muslim power was four centuries later in Afghanistan.
Ivan the Terrible swept on in 1556, taking Astrakhan, the strategically important city where the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea. Military expeditions were then mounted beyond the Ural mountains and into Siberia.Within a century, by 1650, the Russians had reached the Pacific, subduing the Siberian khanate along the way. Over the next two centuries the Muslim tribes in Central Asia were rolled back by a Slav crusade.
Peter the Great seized Dagestan, along the Caspian Sea, in 1723, which began a long and bloody war by Russia to conquer the Caucasus, which was to last until 1859 because of the spirited resistance put up by Caucasian guerrilla leaders such as Mullah Shamyl (1797-1871).
By the time Russia could claim that it had complete control of the Caucasus, it had also moved steadily southeastward into present-day Kazakhstan, building forts and roads and making treaties with local chiefs.
By 1750 the Russians had built forts over some 2,500 kilometers from Gurev, on the northern tip of the Caspian Sea, north to Orenburg and then east as far as the Alatau mountains and the town of Ust-Kamenogorsk (see map). Meanwhile the Russians had also expanded southward from the Siberian steppe as far as Lake Balkash. The Kazakhs were the first to be subdued, through a series of treaties with their chiefs between 1731 and 1740, but the three main Kazakh ordas or hordes still provided formidable resistance to Russian settlers.
As with Siberia, the pressure to conquer Central Asia was a mixture of imperial policy, ambition to rule the entire continent east of Moscow, and unrelenting economic pressure from merchants, bankers and Industrialists.The expansion into Siberia was fuelled by the hunger for land, furs or 'soft gold' and the sudden requirement by the Tsar for penal colonies.
In Central Asia, Russian expansion was fuelled by the military-bureaucratic apparatus which suddenly found itself, at the end of the war in the Caucasus, without an enemy to fight. Senior officers of the 200,000-strong Army of the Caucasus lobbied at the Tsar's court for permission to advance eastward.
At the same time, under Tsar Alexander the Second (1855-81), a similar aim was given to foreign policy by Foreign Minister Prince A. Gorchakov. In his first memorandum to the Tsar he wrote that Russia should turn away from Europe and expand its national interest in Asia, even at the price of confronting the British empire.
Merchants had been trading with Central Asia since the time of Peter the Great, and they had already discovered the merits of Central Asian cotton when the American Civil War (1861-65) suddenly cut off American cotton supplies. Merchants demanded that Moscow advance into Central Asia to secure cotton supplies.They increased the yield by importing Russian farmers and more scientific methods of cultivation. The abolition of serfdom in Russia had created a huge potential free peasant class, who wanted land, while Russian industriaIists were anxious to sell their goods to Central Asia. Once the economic and military imperatives had been determined, the court and the intellectual elite produced the necessary moral justification so common to other empire-building states in the colonial era.
Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75), a history professor at Moscow University, became popular for preaching the superiority of the Russian race and its civilizing mission in Asia. Other historians and writers joined him, helpIng to build an intellectual consensus for an aggressive, expansionist IlOlicy on Russia's borders.
The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845 in St. Petersburg and largely manned by retired military officers, used its expeditions to Central Asia to advocate seizing the region. Pyotr Semyonov (1827-1914), vice president of the society and himself an explorer of the Tien Shan range, argued for an expansionist policy on the basis of Russia's need for military security. He was later given the title 'Tyan-Shansky' by the Tsar in recognition of his work in opening up Central Asia.
The Russian Orthodox Church demanded that Russia end the slave trade in Khiva and bring Christianity to a barbaric people. For a time in Moscow everyone believed that it was Russia's manifest destiny to move into Asia and expand the empire.
None other than the great Russian novelist and humanist Feodor Dostoevsky was to write in 1881:

...the Russian is not only a European, but also an Asiatic. Not only that; in our coming destiny, perhaps it is precisely Asia that represents our main way out. In Europe we were hangers-on, whereas to Asia we shall go as masters. In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us thither.

The first expedition to the east had been a disastrous attempt by Peter the Great to conquer Khiva, in 1717, in which an entire Russian army was decimated. Another military expedition, sent out in 1839, also failed, but from then on the Russians followed a more cautious policy.They advanced east along the Syrdarya river building forts and subduing local tribes, and also moved west from the Tien Shan mountains which they had reached from Siberia. The two prongs of this move converged on Chimkent, which was captured in 1864;
Kyzl Orda, the main seat of Kazakh resistance, had fallen in 1853 and Vierny, now Alma Ata, was founded a year later. The Land between the Two Rivers was now encircled from three sides and the Russians moved in to conquer the rich agricultural heartland of Central Asia that comprises modern Uzbekistan.
Military campaigns were mounted to capture Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868: Bukhara became a Russian protectorate. Meanwhile campaigns against the Turkomen in the south resulted in the capture of Khiva in 1873.
Finally Kokand, in the east, fell in 1876.
Russia's advance into Central Asia had been watched with great trepidation by another great colonial power, Britain, which scrambled to try to capture Afghanistan in a bid to hold back what it feared would be a Russian advance on British India.
Thus began the Great Game between Russia and England which was played out over the vast landscapes of Afghanistan, Persia, Xinjiang and Central Asia. Sensing the coming tensions, Russia quickly legitimized its presence in Central Asia.The conqueror of Central Asia and its governor-general from 1867 to 1881, General K.Von Kaufman, signed a peace treaty with the khan of Khiva abolishing slavery and making Khiva a vassal state. A similar treaty was signed with the emir of Bukhara. Britain tried to trump it in neighbouring Xinjiang by signing a friendship treaty with the emir of Kashgar to ensure that the Russians did not try and move further east into Chinese Turkestan.
Russia also legitimized the borders of Central Asia with its new neighbours. In 1860 a Sino-Russian treaty established the border with Xinjiang. This was to divide permanently the ethnic groups that spanned that border: the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uighurs and others.
Russia neutralized the Persians by signing a peace treaty with Teheran in 1881, after the Russian army had defeated the Turkomen. In 1887 Russia began a long series of demarcations of the Afghan border with the British, to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer zone between the two Imperial powers.
The rivalry between the two had intensified after Moscow began laying tracks for the first railway lines in Central Asia, which in twenty years were to traverse the whole region.
The strategic 1,400-kilometre railway line from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand was completed in 1888 after its creators had overcome the enormous problems of building a track in waterless deserts.When the railway line reached Merv and then Kushk on the Afghan border, Russia was only 112 kilometres from Herat in western Afghanistan, which created near-panic in London and Delhi. Russian hawks insisted that a track be laid to Herat while British hawks managed to persuade their government to take the British railway line up the Khyber and Bolan passes in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan to the border with Afghanistan. British military historian Major-General Henry Rawlinson saw Russia advancing towards India 'like an army investing a fortress', and when news leaked that the Russian general M. D. Skobelegv had put forward a plan to the Tsar to Invade India through Afghanistan with just 15,000 men, there was consternation in the British Parliament and in the press.
The pressure from the British in India ensured that Moscow quickly Integrated Central Asia into the Russian empire. Within a few years Central Asia had become a cotton-growing colony for the textile mill owners in Moscow and a virgin market for manufacturers of Russian consumer goods.
It was a vast dumping ground for unwanted Russian firm labour, former serfs and political dissidents as well as a playground for adventure-seeking soldiers, priests, explorers and mountain climbers.
Unlike the British or French colonists, the Russian empire-builders had no seas to cross and no natural barriers to block their absorption of Central Asia. There was no organized state power In the region to hinder their advance and no foreign competition to Interfere with their economic exploitation of the region.
Russia had the vast steppes of Central Asia all to itself. By merely controlling the great navigable rivers and key mountain passes and by building railways, Russian access and political control were assured. Geography had given Russia a vast new hinterland that had incalculable natural resources and unparalleled strategic military depth.
Many Russians and a significant school of thought in England led by Sir Halford Mackinder, the founding father of geopolitics, viewed Central Asia in much the same way as the Mongol hordes did: that Central Asia was the centre of the world. 'It is the greatest natural fortress in the world defended by polar ice caps, deserts, arid tableland and mountain ranges. It was the largest landmass in the world and whoever controlled it exercised enormous power because they were not dependent on sea power.
It was the centre of political gravity because it enclosed more frontiers than any other region in the world - those of India, China, Europe and the Middle East. Although overstated, these were appealing notions for Russian and English strategists, who pushed for their respective expansionist policies in Central Asia. This debate about the 'heartland' was only vindicated during World War Two, when Central Asia gave enormous depth and space to Russia's defence and allowed the country to recover industrially from the fury of the German blitzkrieg.
However, like all usurping powers Russia faced unrelenting resistance from the people. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads periodically rose in revolt against the new Russian farm owners who were seizing their grazing grounds. Revolts were crushed by the army and thousands of nomads were killed; many fled to China to escape persecution.
The Turkomen continued a hit-and-run guerrilla war in the desert that continued unabated until the 1930s.
The Tajiks and the Uzbeks under various political guises - first Pan-Turkism and then Pan-Islamism - resisted the Tsar's policies just as fiercely.
The history of this resistance, which is described in much greater detail later in our discource, was studiously ignored by first tsarist and then Bolshevik historians. The collective memory of this resistance is now playing a major role in shaping the future of the newly independent republics. The brutal repression and exploitation by Russia, which in arable areas led to the cultivation of cotton replacing all major food crops, plunged Central Asia into a grave economic crisis.
When on 25 June 1916 the Tsar ordered the mass mobilization of Central Asian manpower between the ages of nineteen and forty-three to carry out labour duties in the rear of the Russian army that was locked in battle with Germany, this simple edict was all that was need for a generalized revolt. Within a few months Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads were waging an all-out guerrilla war against the Russian army. But without coherent leadership and common goals, and with vast distances to be covered to maintain communications, the revolts were suppressed - with great bloodshed, the slaughter of entire villages and the hanging and forced deportation of thousands of rebels north to Siberia.
Nevertheless the political divide between Russia and Central Asia had grown enormously in the process and a new local leadership of intellectuals, tribal chiefs and merchants formed new parties and military organizations across the region. Prevalent amongst them was the desire for independence, not just from tsarism but from Russia itself.
Russian colonialism had led to an intellectual revival amongst Muslims, especially in the cities of present-day Uzbekistan.
Fierce debates erupted between those who believed in a purely Islamic revival in Central Asia and those who believed in an independent united Turkestan under a Pan-Turkic nationalist leadership.
Others, particularly Tartar intellectuals, were sympathetic to a socialist revolution, which they hoped would not only do away with Russian oppression but also rid their own societies of feudal and tribal elites.
At the heart of these debates was the reformist Jadid movement, begun in 1883 by the Crimean Tartar Ismail Gasprinsky and later led by Uzbek and Tartar intellectuals. The Jadids believed that only by modernizing Islam, spreading education and allowing greater freedom to women could Central Asian Muslims combat growing Russian influence and shape their own future.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917 there was considerable hope in Central Asia that Lenin's promises of self-determination meant that Russia would now grant either full independence to Central Asia or at least much greater autonomy. In Lenin's first appeal to the 'Muslims of Russia and the East' on 5 December 1917, he linked the Bolshevik programme, particularly the right of selfdetermination, to the revolt in Central Asia against tsarism. But the Bolsheviks' real attention was directed to Europe, where they believed the incipient insurrection in Berlin would quickly engulf Europe in revolution. Only in late 1918 did Stalin write the first articles in Pravda focusing attention on the revolutionary potential of Central Asia, which could help consolidate the Bolsheviks. A Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, or 'Narkomnats', headed by Stalin had been created in November 1917, but it had failed to address Muslim nationalist feeling in Central Asia. Only after the hopes of revolution in Europe had diminished did Moscow create the All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations in the winter of 1918-19 to direct the developing civil war in Turkestan.
Tashkent, a city with a population of 200,000 Muslims and some 50,000 Russian settlers, was the centre of Turkestan's political life. Russian workers and soldiers overthrew the Provisional Government on 31 October 1917 (Julian calendar) and established the first soviet in Central Asia, but local Muslims were not invited to join it. They held a separate Muslim Congress which demanded autonomy for Central Asia but was ignored by the Tashkent Soviet. Muslim leaders then held an important congress in Kokand in December 1917 and announced the formation of the Provisional Autonomous Government of Turkestan, which would seek independence from Russia. Thus within a few months two centres of power had emerged, the wholly Russian and communist centre in Tashkent, and the Muslim and clearly nationalist Turkic centre at Kokand. Ethnic and religious differences had already divided Central Asia. In February 1918 Kokand was attacked by troops of the Tashkent Soviet, who slaughtered the city's inhabitants. The direct result of this brutal assault on the aspirations of Central Asian Muslims was the creation of the Basmachi Muslim rebel movement.
The Basmachis were local guerrilla groups led by mullahs, tribal chiefs and landlords who resisted Soviet rule across the whole of Central Asia and sustained their unequal struggle until the 1930s. By 1919 there were some forty Basmachi groups with some 20,000 fighters strung across the steppe from Ashkhabad to Ferghana and Dushanbe. Lenin's appeals to local Russian communists to be more sensitive to Muslim demands, such as his June 1920 appeal 'On Our Tasks in Turkestan', were ignored. As well as joining the Basmachis, Turkic nomads also joined the White armies in great numbers. By ignoring Muslim demands, the Bolsheviks gave the White armies, now fighting the Reds across much of Central Asia, a major recruiting base.
But the White generals, helped for a time by a dozen foreign countries who wanted to see Bolshevism destroyed, failed to capitalize on this support because their slogan, 'Russia one and indivisible', alienated the Central Asian Muslims and their dream of independence. By 1920 the Civil War was largely won - because tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers crossed lines and joined the Red Army after being appalled by White Russian attitudes and atrocities.These Muslim troops believed that the new communist era promised greater freedom and development for Central Asia. It was a hope that was to be dashed within months of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power.

#History #China #PersianEmpire #TurkicEmpire #MongolEmpire #RussianEmpire #SilkRoute #Eurasia #Transoxiana #FerganaValley #Uzbekistan #Tajikistan #Turkmenistan #Kazakhstan #Kyrgyzstan #Islam #MilitantIslamism #Jihad #CentralAsia #URSS #SovietUnion

from: Jihad : the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia
by: Ahmed Rashid

2 Conquerors and Saints: The Past as Present

The ethnic, political, and religious factions now vying for control in Central Asia have a history almost as old as the Central Asian civilizations themselves. Since around 500 B.C., when Darius I added the region known as Transoxiana (present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) to the Persian Empire, to the 1920s, when Stalin forcefully divided the region into the five socialist republics that correspond to the current independent republics, Central Asia has been a center for war and empire, art and culture, religion and commerce.
Much of the reason for Central Asia's rich history is geographical: its huge landmass lies at the heart of the Eurasian continent. In ancient times it was considered the center of the world, linking China with Europe by means of the famous Silk Route. In reality this consisted of several routes, forged to allow merchants to carry goods by camel caravan across the two continents. But the travelers transported more than silk or spices; they also spread new technologies—such as papermaking, gunpowder, and silk weaving— new ideas, and new religions. The religion of the ancient Greeks, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism, Manichaeanism, and most of the major ideas of Islam have at one time or another found a home in Central Asia. It is the prevalence of the various ideas on Islam, in particular, and how they have been received by the various rulers of the Central Asian landmass, that are essential to an understanding of the conflicts that threaten the region today.

The Importance of Geography

Central Asia's greatest strength in the past— and its greatest problem today— is that it is landlocked, bordering Iran and Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, and Russia to the north and west. The vast Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountain ranges in the south, and the Tian Shan Mountains in the -est along the border with China. There are no clear geographical boundaries in the. north, where the Kazakh steppe merges into Siberia.
Central Asia was once known as "the land between the two rivers'' for the two major rivers, the Amu Darya (Oxus) and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes), that bounded much of its territory before emptying into the Aral Sea. These two rivers have created formidable geographical, cultural, and political boundaries that separated Central Asia from the rest of the world even as the Silk Route connected it.
The Amu Darya, for example, divided the nomadic Turkic and Mongol empires in Central Asia from the Persian Empire to the south, and helped act as a buffer— along with an independent Afghanistan— between the British Empire in India and tsarist Russia. Recently it has marked the border between Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The Syr Darya has protected Central Asian kingdoms from periodic invasions from Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Rivers are not the only natural boundaries.
Central Asia lies at the crossroads of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Pamir Mountains, which cover 93 percent of today's Tajikistan; the Tian Shan Mountains, stretching to the east and north of the Pamirs; the Himalayas to the southeast; and the Hindu Kush to the south.
The legendary traveler Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs in 1273 on his way to China, dubbing the range the Roof of the World. "Ascending mountain after mountain, you at length arrive at a point, where you might suppose the surrounding summits to be the highest lands in the world. ... So great is the height of the mountains, that no birds are to be seen near their summits. Here there live a tribe of savage, ill disposed and idolatrous people, who subsist upon the animals they can destroy and clothe themselves with the skins," wrote Polo in his memoirs.
In the center of this vast, magnificent landscape of mountains and steppe are two of the largest deserts in the world.
In the south, covering much of Turkmenistan, is the Kara-Kum (black sands) Desert: more than 135,000 square miles where rain falls approximately once a decade.
To the north, in Uzbekistan, lies the Kyzyl Kum (red sands) Desert.
But between these bleak wastes lush, well-irrigated valleys provide oases around which settlements and cities have grown, each oasis a self-contained economic community whose citizens traded with the local nomads and caravans that passed through. The harsh, sparsely populated landscape made Central Asia ripe for conquest but difficult to rule: empires rose and fell periodically throughout its history.
The geographical face of Central Asia remained largely untouched until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the region became part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russians and later the Soviets changed the landscape, building massive irrigation networks flowing from huge reservoirs to support cotton agriculture between the Amu and Syr Darya rivers. Although in the process they created irretrievable environmental damage and pollution that have eventually resulted in acute water shortages, the drying up of lakes and rivers, and further desertification, the water routes were for many years essential sources of agriculture and food. Today those irrigation networks lie broken, hostage to the political battles that divide the region.
Central Asia currently comprises five independent republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, whose fiercely disputed boundaries were drawn by Stalin as part of his divide-and-rule campaign. Its landmass of 1,542,200 square miles hosts a population of just 52 million people, representing more than one hundred ethnic groups, from the predominant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks to Germans, Koreans, and Tibetans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks, who make up 72 percent of Uzbekistan's 22 million people as well as substantial minorities in all the other Central Asian republics. Before the breakup of the Soyiet Union, there were also some 10 million Russians, comprising one-fifth of the population, many the result of forced relocation by Stalin, as another means of weakening the power of the region's ethnic groups. A large number of these Russians have migrated to Russia since 1991.
But the heart of Central Asia has always been the Fergana Valley. Just two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, the fertile valley has for centuries been the home for the largest concentration of people. Today it has 10 million inhabitants, 20 percent of the total population of Central Asia.
The emperor Babur, who conquered Afghanistan and founded the Mogul Empire in India in the fifteenth century, was born in the Fergana Valley, describing it in his memoirs as the closest place to Paradise on earth. From his splendid palaces in Delhi, Babur would recall the 140 varieties of grapes and watermelons produced in Fergana. Valley horses were prized as cavalry mounts by nomadic tribes and empire builders as far away as China.
More than crops and livestock flourished in the Fergana Valley. Fergana has also traditionally been the center of Central Asia's political and cultural Islam, producing saints, scholars, mystics, and warriors whose knowledge and learning spread across the Muslim world.
The bordering city of Osh, today the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan, was a seat of Islamic learning in the tenth century. Legend has it that the large mountain in the center of the town was blessed by King Solomon; it still bears the name Takht-i-Sulaiman (Seat of Solomon) and was long a site of Muslim pilgrimage. To the west lie the ancient Muslim capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. The 360 mosques and 113 madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) of medieval Bukhara produced scholars who spread their faith throughout Russia, China, South Asia, and the Middle East. In the words of a medieval proverb: "The sun does not shine on Bukhara, it is Bukhara that shines on the sun." Even after Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in 1868 there were still 100 madrassahs in Bukhara, with some 10,000 students.

History of Conquest

The history of Central Asia is a tale of conquest, of Mongol "hordes" and Arab holy warriors who swept across its steppes and crossed its mountains and, for a time, enfolded it within the largest empires in the world. Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan: at one time each of these conquerors added the territories of Central Asia to his vast empire, founding dynasties that survived for centuries— until the next invader arrived.
Early Central Asian history is dominated by the rivalry between the Persians to the south and the Turkic tribes to the north, who vied for control of the rich oasis cities. The Persian Empire under Darius I added Transoxiana to its territory around 500 B.C. but the Persians were ousted for a time by Turkic nomadic invasions from Siberia and Mongolia. These tribes had originally (beginning in about 1000 B.C.) inhabited the Alatau Mountains in eastern Central Asia. (The Chinese began using the word Tur or Turkic to identify all the nomadic tribes who posed a threat to their empire— the ancient origins of the word Turkistan [home of the Turks], used even today to identify Central Asia.) The resurgent Persians next fell victim to Alexander the Great, who conquered Bactria and Sogdiana (ancient Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan) between 329 and 327 B.C., founding the modern-day city of Khujand. Alexander consolidated his control by urging his men to marry local women; he himself married a Sogdian princess, Roxana. Alexander's Greco-Sogdian heirs created the Bactrian Empire, which governed a large part of Central Asia and Afghanistan between 300 and 140 B.C. The western region of Central Asia (presentday Turkmenistan) was ruled by the Parthians, a tribal dynasty based on the Saka tribes, whose empire lasted until A.D. 226, when they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. Meanwhile, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century B.C. by successive waves of Sakas, who in time were driven out by another tribal group of nomads from the Gobi Desert: the Hsiung-nu, the forefathers of the Mongols. The Hsiung-nu had spread west after defeating the Uighurs, another tribal confederation who at that time ruled present-day Xinjiang Province and western China. Continuing their westward march across Central Asia, the Huns, as they were now called, reached the Volga River by a.d. 400. Their empire— the first nomadic Mongol empire— now stretched from Korea to the Volga.
In the fifth century the Huns invaded Europe under their chief Attila and marched on Rome. As the Huns moved westwards the vacuum in eastern Central Asia was once again filled by invading Turkic tribes, who continued their incursions for several centuries. These nomadic invasions from Mongolia and western China have left behind few traces of their empires or culture, and little is known about the political system they erected to rule their vast landmass. Invariably, they would arrive to conquer and then move on eastwards whilst other tribes arrived to take their place.
One nomadic empire did leave some impressive traces: the Kushan Empire, which dates from the first and second centuries A.D. and also included northern India, Iran, and present-day Xinjiang Province in China. In the second century the great Kushan king Kanishka became a patron of the Mahayana school of Buddhism, which was the first to humanize the figure of Buddha. (Previously Buddha had been depicted only by symbols, such as the prayer wheel.) Massive and beautiful stylized Kushan Buddha statues have been unearthed in archaeological digs in the twentieth century in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is also noteworthy that in keeping with the religious tolerance that has always characterized Central Asia, the Kushans allowed Zoroastrianism and Hinduism to flourish alongside Buddhism.
For the first several centuries A.D., then, various groups contended over Central Asia: Huns, Sassanians, Turks, and Chinese, who invaded the Fergana Valley. But the next important series of incursions began around 650, when the Arabs came, bringing with them the new faith of Islam. During the next hundred years they sent invading forces into Transoxiana, capturing Bukhara and Samarkand. In 751 an Arab army defeated a Chinese army at Talas, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, decisively ending Chinese ambitions and establishing Islam in Central Asia, although the Arabs themselves did not remain to found substantial kingdoms in the region.
Independent Muslim kingdoms sprang up in the oasis cities. The most significant of these was the empire of the Persian Samanids (874-999), who made their capital at Bukhara. With a well-organized bureaucracy and army the Samanids regulated and expanded the Silk Route, spreading the Persian language and making Bukhara a trade, transport, and cultural center of the Islamic world. Physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians like Al Biruni, and poets such as Firdausi ensured that the Samanid court would leave an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture, an importance that would not be eroded in Central Asia for centuries.
The Samanid Empire came to an end with the arrival of a new wave of Turkic tribes. The Ghaznavids (based in Ghazni, Afghanistan) took over Khurasand, the Qarakhanids captured Bukhara, and later the Seljuks arrived to defeat them and conquer Central Asia and Turkey.
By 1055 the Seljuk chief Turhril was standing outside the gates of Baghdad. For the next two hundred years the Seljuks ruled the area from the Pamir Mountains and the borders of China to Iraq, uniting Central Asia with the Persian and Arab worlds for the first time under Turkic hegemony.
The Mongol hordes (ordas) were the next to sweep through the region. In 1218 the Seljuks had executed an envoy of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and murdered 450 merchants who had been trading with the Mongols. The infuriated Mongols set out to conquer the Seljuks, and historians have subsequently blamed Seljuk high-handedness for the Mongol onslaught that followed. Under Genghis Khan the Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing thirty thousand people. Standing before a pile of heads in Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, "You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God. If you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you." The Mongols continued eastwards, adding Russia and parts of Eastern Europe to their empire. Then, having conquered this vast area, they settled down to exploit it. They developed the Silk Route, which had broken down during the incessant invasions, building resthouses along the way and instituting a postal service. Under the Mongols it was possible for caravans to travel in safety from Istanbul to present-day Beijing. For the first time since the conquests of Alexander the Great, Europe was linked with Asia. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided the region into two khanates: Transoxiana in the west and Turkistan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to leave the most significant cultural influence in the region. Timur (Tamerlane), who did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old, created the first indigenous empire in Central Asia. Timur was a Barlas Turk who had been born near Samarkand, and he made the city his capital in 1369. After he had conquered Central Asia, he added India, Persia, Arabia, and parts of Russia to his empire. Samarkand was already one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of 150,000, and under Timur it became one of the architectural marvels of the world as well, for Timur brought in artisans and architects from all the conquered regions. By now, after almost four hundred years of Turkic rule, the region had become established as the center for Turkic influence in Central Asia and of resistance to Persian cultural and political domination. Timur even replaced Persian with the Jagatai dialect of Turkish as the court language. The Shaybani Uzbeks, who traced their genealogy back to Uzbek Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, created the last of the great nomadic empires in Central Asia. In 1500 they defeated the Timurids (descendants of Timur) and set up their capital in Bukhara. Under Shaybani rule Turkic (Uzbek) language and literature flourished. The great Uzbek poet Mir Alisher Navai (1441-1501) created the first Turkic script, which replaced Persian.
After the sixteenth century, weakened by the decline of the Silk Route as sea routes opened linking Europe to Africa and India, the Shaybani Empire began to erode. Large empires and strong rulers were no longer needed to ensure the safety of the Silk Route, whilst the dramatic loss of income from the traffic in trade meant that rulers were no longer capable of keeping large standing armies and expanding their kingdoms. In addition, the conservative ulema (Islamic scholars, who had enormous influence over daily life) banned innovations in education and science, further marginalizing Central Asia. The Shaybani Empire gradually degenerated into a collection of small, squabbling, city-based fiefdoms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these emerged as three separate but weak khanates— Khiva, Kokand, and Bukhara — in which the khans (rulers) later established dynasties: the Kungrad in Khiva, the Mangyt in Bukhara, and the Ming in Kokand. The impoverished khans survived by the slave trade and the imposition of exorbitant taxes on the population.
It was inevitable that the tsars, seeking to expand their Russian empire, should eventually look to Central Asia. By 1650 the Russians had annexed Siberia and reached the Pacific Ocean. In the next two centuries Russia moved to conquer the Caucasus and Central Asia. Peter the Great invaded the Kazakh steppe in 1715 and began building Russian forts, the first at Omsk in 1716. By 1750 all the Kazakh khans, who saw the Russians as their best security against the marauding Uzbeks, had signed treaties with Moscow. The Russian expansion was fueled by the empire's vast military bureaucratic apparatus, which had subdued the Caucasus and was now without a role even as the tsars eyed the potential resources of Central Asia: minerals and cotton. When the American Civil War (1861-65) cut off vital cotton supplies to Russian factories, the urge to conquer Central Asia was irresistible. At the same time Russia was watching with apprehension the steady expansion of the British Empire in India from Bengal towards Afghanistan. This was the era of the Great Game —the vast power struggle between Russia and Great Britain for control of Asia that used Central Asia and Afghanistan as pawns in their efforts to outmaneuver each other, building influence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was established as buffer between the two empires of Russia and Britain.
In the brief period between and 1876, Russian armies captured Tashkent and much of modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, although the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan remained open, and tribal leaders and bandits frequently took refuge in one another's territories— a tradition that is being revived today amongst the Islamic extremists of Central Asia and the Taliban. The Russians established the province of Turkestan, whose capital was Tashkent and which was ruled by a governor general appointed by Moscow. They left the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva as autonomous political units, dependent on Russia. Whilst the settled regions were easily conquered, the nomadic tribes continued to resist for several decades, and periodic revolts broke out in the Fergana Valley. In 1885 Russian troops crushed a revolt in the valley towns of Osh, Margilan, and Andijan led by a Sun Dervish, Khan Tura. The most serious threat to Russian rule arose in May 1898, when twenty-two Russian soldiers were killed in Andijan by Islamic rebels. The revolt spread to other towns before Russian troops arrived and brutally quashed the rebellion.
As a way of controlling the region, the Russians began resettling Central Asia with ethnic Russians and Cossacks and turning the rest of the land over to cotton production; in 1891 alone more than a million Russian and Cossack farmers were settled on Kazakh lands adjoining Siberia. The Russians developed large cotton plantations by means of vast irrigation projects. New industries manned by Russian workers were also introduced, and Central Asia was linked with Russia through a railway network that for the first time brought the Russian Empire up to the borders of Afghanistan, Iran, China, and British India. Tsarist rule ended in a holocaust of suffering for the peoples of Central Asia. In 1916, with the region facing a massive famine, a revolt broke out after Moscow tried to draft Central Asians to fight for the tsarist army in World War I. The government also increased taxes and forcefully appropriated wheat from the region. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads, who saw no reason why they should fight in Europe for the tsar, were the first to rebel, and the revolt soon spread across Central Asia. But as with previous rebellions, tsarist troops brutally suppressed it, killing tens of thousands of people in the process. In the Tian Shan Mountains a Cossack army carried out reprisals against the Kyrgyz, slaughtering flocks, burning down villages, and forcing huge numbers of Kyrgyz to flee across the border into Chinese Turkestan. Even today the Kyrgyz identify the 1916-17 repression as the worst period in their history, in which as much as a quarter of the Kyrgyz population was slaughtered or forced to flee.
But when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Central Asia had no desire to become part of the new Soviet Union. Central Asians resisted Sovietization more fiercely than most other regions, with the Muslim Basmachis ("bandits"), as the Bolsheviks termed them, leading the struggle. By 1929, however, when the Basmachis were finally defeated, the map of Central Asia had been forcibly redrawn into five soviet republics, and the centuries of wars for control of the region seemed to have come to an end. That too was to change.

Islam in Central Asia

The people of Central Asia are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hannafi sect. Shia Muslims make up a small minority in some of the great trading cities, like Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as in Tajikistan, where the Ismaeli sect, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, can be found in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of the Pamir Mountains. (The Ismaelis also occupy adjacent areas south of the Pamirs in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Since 1991 Central Asia has also seen a meteoric rise of militant Islamic sects, each with its own brand of orthodoxy and sharia (Islamic law), and this phenomenon has obscured one of the most important aspects of traditional Central Asian Islam— its tolerance. Characterized by major advances in philosophy, ethics, legal codes, and scientific research under largely liberal political rulers, and spread through a vast region by Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, the Islam of Central Asia took many forms. Early Central Asian Muslims coexisted in relative peace not only with one another but also with the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who had established pockets of civilization in the region.
Perhaps the most important Islamic movement to arise in Central Asia was Sufism: a form of Islamic mysticism that preached direct communion with God and tolerance towards all other forms of worship. Sufism originated in Central Asia and Persia soon after the Arab invasions. The name derives from the rough woolen cloaks worn by the early Sufi brothers (sufi means "wool" in Arabic), who inherited some of the symbols of pre-Islamic nomadic mystics. The Sufis encouraged popular participation in Islam through their opposition to authority, intellectualism, and the mullahs (clergy).
Sufis urged all Muslims to experience God directly, without the intervention of priests or scholars— an important factor in the spread of Islam amongst Central Asia's sparse, nomadic population. The Sufi orders, or tariqas ("the way"), are best defined as "brotherhood[s] of Sufis who have a common pedigree of spiritual masters, ... in which elders initiate disciples and grant them formal permission to continue a common school of thought and practice."
Sufis invoke God through the zikr, vocal (or sometimes silent) prayers, Dervishes—another Sufi sect— perfected into an art form. Many of the tariqas evolved into secret societies with their own codes of behavior and prayer. The tariqas played a major role in reviving Islam in the thirteenth century after the Mongol destruction, and they continued to sustain Islamic faith and practice centuries later in the Soviet era, when Islam was driven underground by the authorities.
The most important tariqas are Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Yasawiyya, and Kubrawiyya.
The Qadiriyya, probably the oldest extant order, was founded by Abd al-Qadir. A minor tariqa in Baghdad in the twelfth century, the Qadiriyya moved to Central Asia, becoming particularly strong during the thirteenth century, and then spread to Afghanistan and India. Central Asian Qadiris were centered mainly in the cities of Transoxiana.
Kubra, the founder of Kubrawiyya, was martyred in the Mongol massacres in Central Asia in 1221. The Kubrawiyya order took strong hold in Khorezm (present-day Uzbekistan).
The Yasawiyya order was founded by the poet and mystic Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166 and is buried in southern Kazakhstan. Their main influence was in the Fergana Valley and amongst the southern Turkic tribes.
Muhammad ibn Baha ad-Din Naqshband (1317-89), the founder of the Naqshbandiyya tariqa, is still the most revered mystic and saint in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Even today his tomb outside Bukhara is the most important place of pilgrimage in Central Asia.
Unlike other Sufi sects the Naqshbandis, though mystics, believe in active missionary work and political activism; many led revolts against the tsar and the Communists. The leader of the 1898 revolt in Andijan was a Naqshbandi.
The Sufi orders spread their message to China via the Fergana Valley and to India and the Arab world through Afghanistan. Sufi spiritual leaders, especially the Naqshbandis, vied with the traditional ulema, who tended to be fiercely opposed to them, for influence amongst local rulers. And influence they had: the rulers of the Turkic dynasties would seek validation for their rule from the leading Sufi saints. The relationship of ruler and mystic, in the words of Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, tended to be "fraught with tension," for Sufi mystics saw themselves as eternal rulers, more powerful than the most autocratic temporal ruler.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the leading Naqshbandi families (leadership in the sect was frequently passed down from father to son) served as political advisers and spiritual guides to many of the khans who governed the increasingly fragmented Central Asia. Some of these Sufi families became rulers themselves. Many became rich and corrupt in the process, one of the reasons for the Jadid reforms in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Naqshbandi political activism played a major role in influencing militant Islamic movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and most recently the Fergana Valley.
But beyond the oasis towns and valleys, the spread of Islam on the Central Asian steppe was slow and sporadic. Islam did not come to the Kazakh steppe until the seventeenth century, and even then the predominant Sufism incorporated ancient shamanistic traditions of the nomadic culture, such as the veneration of animals and nature. Although Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian kings, was discouraged by the Islamic invaders, elements continued to thrive on the steppe, taking on an Islamic coloring, as well as in Iran and India.
Thus, early on in the history of Islam two branches of the religion emerged in Central Asia: the traditional, conservative, scholarly Islam of the settled areas and the oasis cultures that was dominated by local rulers and the ulema, and the much looser, less restrictive Islam of the nomads that still favored Sufism and pre-Islamic traditions.
As historian Fernand Braudel noted, "Islam is essentially an urban religion. So Islam consists of a few densely populated regions, separated by vast stretches of empty space."
Even today the nomadic Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen tribes are far less Islamicized— and much less susceptible to Islamic radicalism— than their ethnic counterparts in the settled oasis areas.
The Arabs who brought Islam Central were soon displaced by Persian and Turkic tribes, each of whom adopted Islam. Of the two, for many centuries Persian was the dominant influence, lasting until the Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia around 1500. The Safavids changed Persia's state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam— step that considerably reduced Persian influence in Central Asia. In addition, Persia became preoccupied with combating the challenge of the Ottoman power in Turkey on its western borders, and Persian leaders therefore paid less attention to Central Asia.
Nevertheless, the earlier Persian empires had left an enormous legacy in Central Asia in the arts, language, poetry, and sciences. Not until the Shaybani Uzbeks, who aggressively made their empire more Turkic, did Persian control and influence in Central Asia wane. The only vestiges of Persian ethnicity remaining in Central Asia today are the Tajiks, who speak Persian and are proud of their Persian culture and heritage. But the tension between Persian and Turkic culture continues, both in the competition for influence in Central Asia between Iran and Turkey and in the ongoing disputes between Tajikistan and Turkic Uzbekistan over Tajiks in Uzbekistan and Uzbeks in Tajikistan, and over borders. Many Tajiks assert that the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which Stalin handed over to Uzbekistan, should rightfully belong to Tajikistan. For they are Tajik cultural and historical centers.
Central Asian Islam became less dynamic under the tsars, not because Central Asia's new Russian masters tried to interfere with the Islamic clergy, law, or practices but because they wooed them with modern advances: industry, education, technology. The Russians also supported the ultra-conservative ulema, whilst at the same time settling millions of ethnic Russians in the region to try and make good Russians out of Central Asians.
But the new colonial masters were only partly successful. The introduction of Western ideas and sciences paved the way for a modernist reinterpretation of Islam by the Jadids, a reform sect of Tartars whose inspiration was Ismail Bay Gasprinski (1851-1914), founder of the influential Tartar-language newspaper Tercuman in 1883. Based on Usul-i-jadid (new educational principles), Jadidism was one of the many intellectual Islamic reform movements that swept the colonized Muslim world in the late nineteenth century. All sought in varying degrees to reconcile the problems associated with exposure to Western modernism with Muslim religion and culture, particularly for Muslims who lived in colonies ruled by non-Muslims. These movements, in India, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan, were primarily anticolonial and pan-Islamic, but they also advocated religious reform, modern education, and an understanding of the sciences.
Jadid teachers and scholars in Tashkent and the Fergana Valley founded new schools with modern curricula: math, the sciences, theater, poetry, and Russian and Turkic literature, as well as traditional Islamic subjects. They staged plays and operas and published a number of newspapers that helped revive the Turkic languages and develop a modern Turkic culture. The literature they generated analyzed local history, culture, and politics in a modern way for the first time. This embrace of modernism brought the Jadids into conflict not just with the Russians but also with the ulema, whom they considered reactionary and obscurantist. For their part the Russians had encouraged the ulema to continue their practice of a conservative interpretation of the sharia as a way of countering anti-Russian Islamic and nationalist movements.
For all their success the Jadids remained an intellectual rather than a mass movement, divided over ideology and politics. When the 1917 revolution came, some Jadids backed the Bolsheviks because they sought to throw over the tsarist empire and saw in the Communist ideology a chance of greater freedom, the adoption of modern ideas, and education whilst others resisted them because of their lack of respect for Islam. The Jadids who joined the Communist Party after 1917 played a critical role in helping build indigenous Communist parties in Central Asia, but it did them little good. The Soviets termed the Jadids bourgeois reformers and banned their literature. When Stalin came to power he began a steady purge of Jadids; the last Jadids were eliminated in the massacres of 1937. During the brief cultural flowering after independence in 1991, Uzbek intellectuals attempted to republish and popularize Jadid writings, but they were quickly suppressed. Uzbek President Islam Karimov discourages all attempts to renew interest in Jadidism, although the movement has immense relevance in today's discussion of the way Islam, nationalism, and democracy can coexist in Central Asia.

Mad Men

On the evening of October 4, 1957, Neil McElroy was enjoying cocktails in Huntsville, Alabama, fresh from a doomsday tour of the United States. McElroy, who was about to become the secretary of defense, was chatting with the army general John Medaris and the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun during a casual reception held as part of McElroy’s tour of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. It was one of many visits the secretary designate and his entourage were making around the country as he prepared to lead the Pentagon.
Huntsville should have been the least memorable stop for McElroy, who had been traveling the past few weeks in a converted DC-6 transport aircraft reserved primarily for the secretary of defense. Along the way, he was plied with fine liquor and deluxe accommodations, all while getting a crash course in overseeing a military at the dawn of the age of nuclear Armageddon.
The new position was a big change for McElroy. His last job was heading Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. McElroy, who had no prior experience in government, was one of the “industrialists” Eisenhower had brought to the capital in the belief that business-style leadership could help straighten out government.
The media had not been kind to McElroy after Eisenhower picked him to head the Pentagon. The native Ohioan had made his name in the nascent field of “brand management,” penning a famous letter admonishing Procter & Gamble executives on the importance of promoting the company’s soaps to the proper consumer markets so that the products would not compete with each other. “Soap manufacturer Neil McElroy is president’s choice to succeed Wilson,” The Milwaukee Journal declared on August 7. Another report mocked McElroy’s experience in advertising, saying that he had been responsible for “vital activities in persuading housewives to buy one bar of soap or another.”
Now McElroy and his entourage were being wined and dined across the country by military officials pitching their soon-to-be boss on the importance of their aircraft, missiles, and bases in case of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union—all in between plenty of martinis. At Strategic Air Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, they were greeted with a table covered in whiskey, ice, and “fixings,” before being shown the control room, where military commanders could launch a nuclear attack. Later, General Curtis LeMay, the head of Strategic Air Command, personally piloted a demonstration of the new KC-135, a refueling aircraft, for McElroy and his staff.
At Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert north of Los Angeles, the group met General Bernard Schriever, the head of the Western Development Division, which was responsible for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. McElroy and his entourage took an immediate liking to the air force general, who was “extremely able” and could “shoot golf at par.” In Colorado, at North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known by its acronym NORAD, the group was assigned luxury suites at the Broadmoor, whose mountainview rooms were stocked with bottles of scotch and bourbon. The next day they were briefed on the calculus of a survivable nuclear war, where commanders had to weigh the lives of three million civilians versus protecting a key military site. It was a world, McElroy’s aide, Oliver Gale, wrote, “where horror is as much a part of the scene as manufacturing cost is in the soap business.” The final stop on McElroy’s itinerary was Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, a quiet southern town in Alabama whose economy was rapidly shifting from cotton mills to rocket production. General Medaris, commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was polite but unimpressed by McElroy. The problem with a businessman is that he can “become a sort of czar, surrounded by subordinates who carry out his orders and obey his whims without daring to question his judgment,” he wrote in his memoir just a few years following that meeting. “This gives him the illusion that he knows all the answers. He rarely does, outside his own general field.”
Neither were McElroy and his staff impressed with the army general, who sported a black mustache and was known for dressing in old-fashioned officer riding breeches. Medaris was a “salesman, promoter, who pushes a bit more than might be considered palatable,” wrote Gale, who worked for McElroy at Procter & Gamble and was following him to the Pentagon. Coming from an advertising man, the description was telling. Medaris was trying to sell the services of von Braun and his group of German rocket scientists, who were now based in Huntsville but could not seem to shake their Nazi past. “Von Braun was still wistful about what would have happened if [the V-2s] had all gone off,” Gale recorded in his journal, “not because he was sorry that Germany did not win the war (apparently) but because he was sorry his missiles, his achievements, had not been more successful.”
Even in Huntsville, the Germans found themselves stymied by the military, starved for funds, and frozen out of the space work they desperately wanted. They were stuck working, yet again, on suborbital missiles. The problem was not scientific know-how but classic bureaucratic rivalry. By the fall of 1957, von Braun’s army group had developed the Jupiter-C missile, a four-stage rocket that could have been shot into orbit, if only the army was allowed to launch it. It was not, and so the fourth stage of von Braun’s Jupiter-C was filled with sand, rather than propellant, to ensure it would not leave the atmosphere. Medaris had reason to be skeptical of the incoming defense secretary and his visit. McElroy was replacing Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, another captain of industry appointed by Eisenhower. As defense secretary, Wilson threw himself into budget cutting with a passion, carrying out Eisenhower’s New Look defense policy, which emphasized advanced technology, such as nuclear weapons and airpower, over conventional forces. Yet satellites, in Wilson’s view, were “scientific boondoggles.” He did not understand what purpose they would serve for the military. When Wilson had visited Huntsville, army officials tried to impress him with their work, only to have the money-conscious defense secretary interrogate them on the cost of painting wood in his guest quarters.
With McElroy’s visit in the fall of 1957, just days away from becoming secretary of defense, it did not seem apparent to Medaris that the new Pentagon chief would chart a different course. As Medaris, McElroy, and von Braun exchanged pleasantries over drinks, an excited public relations officer interrupted the party with news. The Russians had launched a satellite, and The New York Times was seeking comment from von Braun. “There was an instant of stunned silence,” Medaris recalled.
News of Sputnik was a surprise, but it should not have been. In 1955, the Eisenhower administration announced plans to launch a small scientific satellite as part of the upcoming International Geophysical Year, which would run from July 1957 to December 1958. Not to be outdone, the Soviets countered with their own satellite launch plans. It was always a race, but one in which the United States assumed it had a natural advantage. The Soviet Union could not produce a decent automobile; how could it possibly hope to best the United States in rocket science? In the meantime, American plans for a satellite launch had fallen behind schedule.
However flawed the Soviet Union’s consumer goods industry, the regime had an advantage when it came to military and space research. An authoritarian state could focus resources on a specific goal, like a satellite launch, without the bureaucratic wrangling or public pressures that afflicted a democracy like the United States. The Eisenhower administration, prompted by its civilian scientists, wanted to keep its scientific satellite launches separate from its missile programs, even though the underlying technology was nearly identical. That was why the White House opted instead for the navy’s Vanguard, much to von Braun’s disappointment.
Now, with the soon-to-be defense secretary in front of him, and Sputnik circling overhead, the words began to tumble out of von Braun. “Vanguard will never make it,” the German scientist said. “We have the hardware on the shelf. For God’s sake turn us loose and let us do something. We can put up a satellite in sixty days, Mr. McElroy! Just give us a green light and sixty days!”
“No, Wernher, ninety days,” Medaris interjected.
McElroy had been the guest of honor, but now everyone circled von Braun, peppering the German rocket scientist with questions. Was it really true that the Soviets had launched a satellite? Probably, von Braun replied. Was it a spy satellite? Probably not, though its size and weight, if accurately reported, meant that it could be used for reconnaissance. And what did it all mean? It meant that the Soviets had a rocket with a sizable thrust, von Braun said.
The general and the rocket scientist spent the rest of the evening trying to persuade McElroy to let them launch a satellite. It is likely that the details were well beyond the grasp of McElroy, who had no background in technical issues. The conversation did impart to McElroy at least the importance of the satellite launch, which he might have otherwise missed. At first glance, the satellite did not seem like an immediate threat to the incoming defense secretary. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds and its sole function was to circle the earth, emitting a beep that could be tracked from the ground. For McElroy, the man most closely tied to the response to Sputnik, the launch was something of a fascinating footnote to a pleasant cocktail party. His aide, Gale, devoted more space to describing a recent evening meal of exotic seafood on the coast of California than he did to the world’s first satellite launch. Yet Sputnik was about to trigger a chain reaction that, by the New Year, would engulf all of Washington.
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Years later, a myth emerged that the Soviet “artificial moon” immediately prompted people around the country to stare up at the sky in fear and apprehension. “Two generations after the event, words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite,” a NASA history covering the time period states. “The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria.”
In fact, there was no collective panic in the first few days following the launch. It was not immediately clear—except to a small group of scientists and policy makers—why the satellite was so important. For those involved in science and satellites, like von Braun and Medaris, the Soviet satellite circling the earth was proof that politics had hampered the American space effort. Yet for most Americans, the beeping beach ball initially produced a collective shrug.
That Sputnik failed to shake the heartland to its core was best demonstrated in Milwaukee, where the Sentinel’s bold large-type headline on October 5 announced, “Today, We Make History.” In fact, the headline had nothing to do with Sputnik but referred to the first World Series game to be played in Milwaukee. News of Sputnik was buried deep in the paper’s third section, where the reporter noted merely that news of the unexpected launch had “electrified” an international meeting in Washington to discuss satellites.
In the days following the launch of Sputnik, the Washington bureaucracy moved in slow motion. Eisenhower’s attention in the weeks leading up to Sputnik was focused on much more earthbound matters. The standoff over the first attempt to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, under court order had ended with the president’s sending in federal troops. By comparison, the launch of a satellite armed with nothing more than a beacon did not initially seem like something that was going to capture public attention. At a National Security Council meeting held on October 10, Eisenhower listened as his advisers hashed out ideas for responding to Sputnik. Perhaps the administration should emphasize “spectacular achievements” in science, like cancer research? Or the successful launch of a missile that could travel thirty-five hundred miles? Few in the administration seemed to understand what the Soviets had instinctively grasped: the psychological power of a space launch. General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the United States should not become “hysterical” over Sputnik. Eisenhower saw Sputnik as a political stunt. He also knew something that the public did not know: in addition to the military’s rocket programs, which were public, the United States had been secretly working on the development of spy satellites, which would prove much more important for the strategic balance than a silver ball beeping from the heavens. In the weeks following Sputnik, the administration’s policy was simply to downplay Sputnik’s importance. General Curtis LeMay called it “just a hunk of iron,” and Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, derided concerns over a space race as “a celestial basketball game.” The more that the administration tried to dismiss the Soviet accomplishment, the more fodder it gave for political opponents to accuse Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union. For Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Senate leader, Sputnik was an opportunity to be fully exploited. In his memoir, Johnson wrote that he got the news of Sputnik while hosting a barbecue at his ranch in Texas. That evening, he walked out with his wife, Lady Bird, to look for the orbiting Soviet satellite. “In the West, you learn to live with the Open Sky,” he later wrote. “It is part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed alien.” When Johnson looked up in the night sky, what he saw was not Sputnik but a heavenly political gift that would allow him to hammer the Republicans in the months, and possibly years, ahead. “Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” Johnson proclaimed. Eisenhower, who had so deftly managed his image as a political leader, found himself stumbling. From a technical standpoint, he was more right than wrong. Though the Soviets were somewhat ahead of the United States in booster technology, the United States had a number of strategic advantages that were not known to the public. In addition to the spy satellite technology being developed, the CIA the year before had begun flying a reconnaissance aircraft in the earth’s stratosphere. By flying at seventy thousand feet, the Lockheed U-2 spy aircraft was designed to evade detection by ground radar while flying over the Soviet Union and capturing pictures of military bases. The aircraft—and the flights—were top secret. Also secret was that the U-2 flights had already proved that the “bomber gap”—a suspected Soviet advantage in bombers—did not exist. With news of Sputnik, Eisenhower worried about a perceived “missile gap.”
Eisenhower refused to be swept up in mass hysteria, however. “Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota,” he told a throng of reporters, just days after the Soviet launch. The administration only helped its critics by providing confusing and contradictory statements about the importance of Sputnik. In that initial press conference, Eisenhower claimed that the “Russians captured all of the German scientists in Peenemunde.” In truth, the United States through Operation Paperclip had taken the cream of the crop, but the Germans in the United States were stuck filling the fourth stage of their Jupiter-C with sand. As the weeks passed, the staid articles about Sputnik gave way to sensational coverage. Drew Pearson, the American writer known for his influential Washington Merry-Go-Round column, claimed that “technical intelligence experts” were predicting that the Soviets might try a moon launch on November 7, to commemorate the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. “The same missile that launched the 184-pound Sputnik, our experts say, also could shoot a small rocket 239,000 miles to the moon,” Pearson wrote. “The Russians might fill the nose cone with red dye and literally splatter a Red Star on the face of the Moon.”
Pearson’s moon prediction was an outrageous conflation of conjecture and exaggeration, but on November 3, just a month after Sputnik, the Soviets indeed launched a second, larger satellite. Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika on a one-way mission to space. It was taken as purported proof that the Soviets would soon be able to launch a man in space (though unlike with Laika the dog, sending a human into space would require the ability to bring the person back safely to earth). The launch sparked panic in the United States and worldwide protests from animal lovers.
Sputnik tapped into a narrative that artfully wove Hollywood, science fiction, and good oldfashioned fearmongering. The public understood that satellites were somehow connected to the ability to launch ICBMs, but the subtleties of terms like “throw weight,” or the payload a ballistic missile could carry, were not readily apparent. It took some time, politics, and editorializing, but within a few weeks the American public’s initial curiosity and mild apprehension over Sputnik turned to full-blown panic. Eisenhower was right about the science, but he had misjudged the national mood. The administration’s response to Sputnik was a mess, but one thing was clear: the solution was going to be formulated by a soap maker from Cincinnati.
—
McElroy arrived in Washington just in time for peak Sputnik hysteria. The new defense secretary’s first few weeks at the Pentagon were marked by an endless parade of military chiefs and presidential advisers, all making suggestions about who should be in charge of space. The air force, not surprisingly, wanted to be in charge of a nascent aerospace force. The navy, which was stumbling with Vanguard, argued incomprehensibly that space was an extension of the oceans. And the army wanted to conquer the moon. Another proposal envisioned creating a tri-service organization. None of the suggestions made a particularly convincing case for ownership or offered a solution to the mismanagement that had led to the current crisis.
One meeting in particular appears to have resonated with McElroy shortly after he arrived at the Pentagon. Ernest Lawrence, the famed nuclear physicist, along with Charles Thomas, a former Manhattan Project scientist and the head of the agribusiness company Monsanto, visited the Pentagon chief and over the course of a meeting that lasted several hours proposed that the secretary establish a central research and development agency with responsibility for all space research. It was a concept that drew on the legacy of the Manhattan Project, the World War II– era government project to build the atomic bomb.
McElroy latched onto the idea, likely because it sounded a lot like the “upstream research” laboratory he had established at Procter & Gamble. Whether the visitors’ suggestion sparked the idea—or merely reinforced a thought he already had—is impossible to know. But on November 7, McElroy wrote to his chief counsel to find out if, as defense secretary, he had the authority to set up a research and development agency without seeking new legislative authorities. The answer from counsel was yes, although it was not clear Congress would agree. By the time McElroy showed up on November 20 on Capitol Hill, his idea had a name, and it was called the Defense Special Projects Agency, a space agency that would make sense of the various rocket programs and other space technology ideas. The new agency would consolidate the Pentagon’s missile defense technology and space programs while also pursuing, as the defense chief put it, the “vast weapon systems of the future.” Many of the members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee were not enthusiastic about this proposal. Fearful of military pressure to hasten an arms race, Eisenhower had purposely selected the panel to represent the interests of the scientific community over military advisers. The scientists on the committee were not necessarily against the Pentagon’s consolidating its rocket programs, though they wondered whether it made sense to place ballistic missile defense and space programs all in one agency. As one committee member put it, missile defense was an urgent priority, while there was “no urgency on Mars.”
More fundamentally, the science advisers were concerned about placing the space agency under military control. They eventually acquiesced, likely because James Killian, the president’s newly appointed science adviser, supported it. The panel did convince the president that a civilian agency, not a Pentagon agency, should ultimately be responsible for nonmilitary space programs. Eisenhower, in his approval of the new organization, made clear that “when and if a civilian space agency is created, these [space] projects will be subject to review to determine which would be under the cognizance of the Department of Defense and which under the cognizance of the new agency.”
The reception within the corridors of the Pentagon to the Defense Special Projects Agency was ice cold. The military services viewed it as an attempt to usurp their authority and steal their money. The new agency was a threat to their turf, and their budgets, and they quickly went on a public offensive to undermine support for the proposal. The air force general Schriever told Congress the new agency would be a “very great mistake.” If the military wanted to prove that it did not need a centralized agency for rocket programs, its best bet was to prove that it could launch a satellite into space on its own. To that end, in December, all eyes were on Vanguard, the navy satellite that Wernher von Braun had warned McElroy was doomed to failure.
—
On December 5, 1957, in the midst of Washington battles over the creation of a new research agency, hundreds of reporters and curious onlookers gathered at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the launch of Vanguard. When Sputnik launched in October, John Hagen, the director of the Vanguard program, admitted the navy rocket was five months behind schedule but blamed the Soviet head start on “unethical conduct,” as if a surprise satellite launch were the equivalent of cheating at a tennis game. Now, after hurried preparations, Vanguard Test Vehicle No. 3 was ready for launch. Yet the day of the scheduled launch, technical problems kept pushing back the countdown, and America’s best hope for catching up with the Soviets became the butt of jokes. The Japanese newsmen called the rocket “Sputternik,” the Germans dubbed it “Spaetnik” (a play on the German word for “late”), and the jaded news crews from Washington, D.C., christened it “civil servant,” because it “won’t work and you can’t fire it.” Finally, the next day, December 6, the countdown to launch began. As the count reached zero, Vanguard lifted off. From beaches just two or three miles from the launch site, hundreds of eager people gathered to watch and cheered as shooting flames marked the liftoff, though giant plumes of smoke obscured their view. The few dozen or so official viewers gathered at a hangar not far from the launchpad could see exactly what unfolded: they watched as the navy’s rocket lifted a few feet up and then exploded in a massive fireball, toppling over into the sand. In a sad testament to the failed launch, the satellite itself was thrown out of the third stage of the rocket during the explosion and was found not far away, still emitting the beeping signal that was supposed to mark the United States’ first foray into space.
The day of the Vanguard disaster, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a rare note of “non-concurrence” to the establishment of McElroy’s proposed research agency—a bureaucratic expression of extreme disagreement. Had Vanguard not just gone up in a literal ball of flames, he might have had a stronger argument. The new defense secretary held firm, and the next month Eisenhower formally approved the creation of the new agency. McElroy agreed to just one small change to his proposal: to avoid confusion with other, similarly named endeavors, like the Office of Special Operations, the new division would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.
ARPA was still an idea more than an organization, and not everyone in Washington was optimistic that a new government bureaucracy would be the solution. The frenetic days leading up to the new agency’s opening its doors were a mix of highs and lows in the space race. On January 31, 1958, the von Braun team, which had finally been allowed to join the space race, successfully helped launch Explorer 1, based on its Jupiter-C, putting in orbit the first American satellite. That success was quickly overshadowed by the second attempted launch on February 5 of the navy’s Vanguard, which broke apart just shy of a minute after launch.
On February 7, ARPA was officially founded with an intentionally vague two-page directive, which established it as an independent agency that reported directly to the secretary of defense. The directive mentioned no projects, or even specific research areas, not even space. “The Agency is authorized to direct such research and development projects being performed within the Department of Defense as the Secretary of Defense may designate,” the directive read. The only hint as to the ultimate purpose for this new agency came just weeks earlier during President Eisenhower’s State of the Union address: “We must be forward looking in our research and development to anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future.”

#RocketScience #ARPA #DARPA #USA #ColdWar #history #Mcelroy

Scientia Potentia Est

Michiaki Ikeda was a chubby-faced six-year-old when the nuclear age smacked him in the face with a blinding flash of light. Just as he was stepping out of an elevator at Nagasaki Medical University’s hospital, a nuclear weapon code-named Fat Man detonated seven hundred meters away from him. The bomb had the explosive equivalent in force of more than twenty kilotons of TNT and flattened almost everything within a kilometer radius. The concrete hospital building was mostly left standing, but the majority of the people inside were killed. The steel elevator shaft likely saved his life.
When he came to, it was pitch-dark, and the first sensation he recalled was the sound of something burning. Then the smell of smoke reached his nostrils, bringing him to his feet. As he stumbled out into what had been the hospital’s corridor, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he realized he was standing on dirt. The wood floors had been blown away. In the corner, he saw a nurse on the ground surrounded by shattered glass, and her face covered in blood. To Michiaki, it was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood over her head. Yet her eyes were open, and she was staring at him.
“Call the ambulance service,” she ordered, her expression a mix of shock and rage.
He looked around, but all he could see were shards of glass and wood panels blown from the ground. He crawled out a window frame and stepped down into what had been, just a little while before, a tranquil garden with water. Now, as he looked up, he could see some trees were toppled and the ones that still stood were in flames. When his eyes moved from the burning treetops down to the ground, the scene was pure horror. The hospital’s garden was strewn with corpses with hair burned into frizzy clumps. Some had eyeballs hanging down on their cheeks, and faces with their lips and flesh burned away, leaving the teeth and jaw exposed. There were some bodies with stomachs bloated to twice their normal size, and others with internal organs spilling out.
He fled the burning hospital grounds and instinctively started walking toward the city, thinking he would find help. Instead, he found more horror. The main boulevards of Nagasaki were cluttered with debris of blown-out buildings. The living were walking, their arms dripping with scorched flesh outstretched in front of them to avoid the pain of having burned skin touch their bodies. Dazed, they walked down the street, calling for water and looking for help that was not there.
Three days earlier, the United States had dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy, which used highly enriched uranium, on Hiroshima, instantly killing some seventy thousand people.
Many more would die later from burns and radiation sickness.
Nagasaki had not been the primary target of Fat Boy, a plutonium implosion bomb. A B-29 Superfortress, Bockscar, was planning to drop Fat Boy on the city of Kokura, but cloud cover forced the pilot to divert to Nagasaki, a secondary target.
Nagasaki’s natural geography of mountains and valleys protected part of the population, preventing many of the immediate deaths that took place in Hiroshima, but the city center was devastated.
Along with a bomb, a second airplane flying over Nagasaki dropped canisters containing scientific instrumentation. The canisters also contained copies of a personal letter several Manhattan Project scientists addressed to a prominent Japanese scientist. “You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material,” the letter, written by the nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, read. “Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland.”
In Japan, the bomb had now decimated two cities. Six-year-old Michiaki was fortunate: miraculously uninjured, he was found by a nurse and taken to a bomb shelter in the mountains, where he was eventually reunited with his family. Michiaki did not know anything about what had happened that day. He only knew that this was not like the other bombings the city endured during the war, a routine so common that residents often ignored the sirens warning of enemy aircraft. “I had no clue what a nuclear or atomic bomb was—that something like that existed,” he recalled. “I just thought it was many, many big bombs that had fallen.”
—
The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was the third atomic device ever detonated. The first atomic explosion, called the Trinity Test, was conducted in secrecy on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Americans learned about this new weapon after Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 of that year. The New York Times announced the nuclear age to the world with the headline “First Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan; Missile Is Equal to 20,000 Tons of TNT; Truman Warns Foe of a ‘Rain of Ruin.’ ”
In Japan, however, what little news was reported about Hiroshima was only that incendiary bombs were used.
Speaking the day the bomb on Hiroshima was dropped, President Harry Truman revealed not just the existence of this terrifying new weapon but a massive project conducted in secrecy to build it. Across the country, over two and a half years, as many as 125,000 people had been involved in this secret project, Truman announced. Many workers did not even know exactly what they were working on, only that it was an important war project. “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,” he said, “and won.”
Truman was right: Less than a week after Nagasaki was bombed, the Japanese emperor announced the country’s unconditional surrender, telling the nation in a broadcast speech that despite great sacrifice “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” More directly, he acknowledged the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying “the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
A few weeks after the Japanese surrender, Herbert F. York, a young physicist who had been one of the thousands of workers on the secret project Truman had referred to, brought his father to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium had been enriched for the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The work inside the plant itself was still secret, but its existence no longer was. Standing at the top of a hill, York pointed down proudly to the facility hidden in the valley below, where he had labored in secret for two years of the war. “We have made war obsolete,” he triumphantly told his father. It did not take York long to realize he was completely wrong.
In Japan, the power of the atomic bomb left people feeling helpless. In America, for that brief moment, it made people feel invincible. The idea that this same powerful weapon could soon threaten the United States had not yet sunk in. It would soon. The United States might have beaten the rest of the world in building an atomic bomb, but the Germans during the war had achieved something that the Americans, British, and Soviets had not: a guided ballistic missile. The V-2, a liquid-propelled rocket developed by Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists, could travel more than two hundred miles, with an engine thrust eighteen times greater than anything the Allies had achieved. The Nazis used it to terrorize England during the war.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of World War II, and it also marked the beginning of a new war for scientific talent and engineering. The atomic bomb had proved that knowledge was power, and whatever nation had the most knowledge would have an edge in the next war. The Soviet Union might have been allies with the United States in its victory over Germany, but the two countries’ interests diverged even before Japan surrendered. In Germany, the Soviets and the Americans were already engaged in a race to capture knowledge.
—
Standing in Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof in 1949, twenty-eight-year-old William Godel paused to admire the grand arches and curved glass above the train terminal. Outside, most of the city was still many feet deep in rubble—the aftermath of bombing during the war. It was not just the station’s neo-Renaissance design Godel was admiring but also the fact that it had survived the war with only superficial damage. The strategic bombing of Germany had been highly effective at causing civilian casualties but not at stopping the industrial war machine.
“Hey, you,” an American woman snapped. “Come put this baggage aboard and I’ll give you a cigarette.”
“Jawohl, gnädige Frau,” Godel answered, picking up her bag. As he carried it to the train, he walked with a slight limp—a war injury, something not uncommon to see in a German man his age in Frankfurt; Germany was flooded with crippled veterans. The train station was also filled with Americans, mostly military service members and their families stationed in Germany. The Americans who walked through the station were smartly dressed, whether in military uniform or civilian clothing. The Germans, on the other hand, shambled about the train station in threadbare suits. Germany was still under Allied occupation. The Americans controlled Frankfurt, and many still harbored a deep resentment of the Germans.
Sometimes the Americans would tell him a compartment was for “Americans only.” Godel was accustomed to being given orders by Americans in the train station, and the woman’s request to carry her bag was a relief; it meant that he was passing for what he was meant to pass for: Hermann Buhl, a former member of Germany’s Wehrmacht, and not an American covert operative. The young American was posing as a German veteran so he could slip across Soviet-occupied areas in Germany and Austria, and even into the Soviet Union, recruiting Russian and German scientists, engineers, and military officers to work for the United States. His German was fluent, but not native, good enough to pass with the Americans and Russians, and even Germans, in many cases. German veterans could quickly figure out he was not really exWehrmacht, but that did not so much matter; they had other things to worry about in the late 1940s. “It was a high-risk undertaking, replete with forged documents, black-market funds, bribery, loose women, and all manner of illegalities and immoralities,” he later wrote. He was also on his own when it came to the Russians. “Don’t get caught,” one army general told him, “because I cannot help you worth a damn over there.”
Godel’s work was under the larger rubric of Operation Paperclip, the military intelligence program that was scooping up German scientists and engineers to bring to the United States. The project, so named for the paper clip attached to each scientist’s dossier, had already garnered the biggest bounty: von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. At the end of the war, von Braun had actively sought out the American military, knowing that he and his team would likely fare better with the United States than with the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1945, the Soviets dispatched specialized military intelligence teams to Germany to gather anything that could be found in the way of military technology, including missiles, radar, and nuclear research. The Soviets took Peenemünde, where von Braun and his rocket team had been based, but they had already fled, taking much of their design work with them. “This is absolutely intolerable,” Joseph Stalin said. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde; but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and
and more inexcusable?”
The Soviets eventually took whatever they could, sending hundreds of German personnel back to the Soviet Union, not to mention trainloads of equipment. The Soviets’ hunt for technical expertise was broad, but it also lacked focus. As von Braun put it, “The Americans looked for brains, the Russians for hands.”
In Germany before the war, von Braun had been part of a visionary group that dreamed of building rockets for space travel but agreed to work for the military, and eventually the Nazis, on weapons. In going with the Americans, he hoped again to work on space travel. Instead, von Braun and more than a hundred other rocket scientists were taken to the United States, initially to Fort Bliss, Texas, and relegated to showing the Americans how to build and operate the V-2. Unsure of what to do with the Germans, and unwilling to give them money to design new rockets, let alone fulfill von Braun’s ambitions of space travel, the Americans allowed his team to languish in the South.
The Soviets did not suffer from indecision, however. Using captured German know-how, the Soviets moved forward swiftly with designing rockets that could travel even greater distances than the V-2. “Do you realize the tremendous strategic importance of machines of this sort?” Stalin told a senior Russian rocket scientist after the war. “It could be an effective straightjacket for that noisy shopkeeper, Harry Truman. We must go ahead with it, comrades.” In the Soviet Union, the goal was clear. “What we really need,” said Pavel Zhigarev, the commander in chief of the Soviet air forces, “are long-range, reliable rockets that are capable of hitting the American continent.”
As the Soviets moved forward with their ballistic missile program, William Godel, disguised as Hermann Buhl, was on a parallel mission: trying to collect intelligence on Soviet military capabilities. He was growing increasingly convinced that the American military was pursuing weapons based on its own bureaucratic interests and not based on what intelligence was telling it was needed.
William Hermann Godel was born as Hermann Adolph Herbert Buhl Jr. on June 29, 1921, in Denver, Colorado, to Hermann Buhl Sr. and Lumena Buhl, German immigrants. Hermann Buhl Sr. died of pneumonia in 1931, and Lumena soon married another German immigrant, named William Frederick Godel, who ran his own insurance business and prior to World War II served as the German consul in Denver. The next year, Lumena’s new husband legally adopted his stepson and, at the suggestion of the judge, officially changed the boy’s name to William H. Godel. Relations between the two were icy at best. At one point, the younger Godel built a shack in the backyard to avoid living in the same house as his adoptive father.
After high school, Godel attended the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell and then, later, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He initially went to work for the War Department’s military intelligence division, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Godel was commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps and participated in the initial landings in the Pacific. He was wounded twice, including at Guadalcanal in January 1943, where he was hit by a hand grenade. The fragments shattered the bone in his left leg and destroyed a good portion of its muscle. He was awarded the Purple Heart and sent back home to recuperate. For the rest of his life, he would need a leg brace and walk with a limp.
Godel desperately wanted to stay in the Marine Corps and insisted he was fit to serve, but by 1947, after a series of medical reviews, he lost the battle. The wound in his left leg was still not completely healed, and Godel was forcibly retired from the Marine Corps, declared medically unfit for service. He made enough of a name for himself that after the war General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, recruited Godel to Washington to work as an intelligence research specialist for the army focusing on the Soviet Union.
It was a chaotic but exciting time to be involved in intelligence. Before the war, intelligence was regarded as something of a dirty business. “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail,” Secretary of State Henry Stimson declared in 1929, when explaining why the United States should halt its cryptanalysis work. Pearl Harbor and World War II might have discredited that view, but there was still nothing approaching a robust intelligence machine even after the war ended. There were, however, powerful personalities lobbying for power, particularly those who formed part of a close-knit community of military and intelligence operatives who had served together in World War II. Men like the air force brigadier general Edward Lansdale, a legendary spy, and William Colby, the future director of the CIA, emerged during this period. So, too, did William Godel.
In 1947, Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which attempted to impose order on the bureaucratic chaos that emerged after World War II. The war had created a multitude of people and organizations vying for power, and the legal reorganization was supposed to bring some clarity with the establishment of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency while also streamlining the Department of Defense and creating the Department of the Air Force, splitting it off from the army. The National Security Act, in reality, simply spawned an array of new organizations all competing for resources. The army, the navy, and the newly created air force all claimed ownership of rocket and missile research, while the CIA also saw a need for military technology that could collect intelligence on the Soviet Union.
The most important of those new technologies was, as Stalin rightly pointed out, an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. It would be a categorically different military capability; by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union was building bombers that could carry nuclear weapons to the East Coast of the United States, but they could also be potentially detected and intercepted. In the United States, computer scientists were already hard at work developing computer systems that could link radars together, to allow the military to stop incoming Soviet bombers, but there was in the 1950s no existing technology that could conceivably stop an ICBM attack. Even if a missile were detected by radar, the military would have just seconds to respond, and then there was little to be done to stop it: it would be like trying to shoot a bullet out of the sky.
In the immediate years after World War II, there was initially little enthusiasm in the White House for investing in such long-range missiles. In 1947, President Truman, who had promised to bring federal debt under control, slashed the military’s rocket and missile programs. Funding was tight, and it was being fought over. The army, the navy, and the air force all had their own rocket and missile programs, each with justifications, often tenuous, for why that work properly belonged to them. The seeming triumph of American technology was short-lived. The United States had spent millions gathering up German technical talent, but when von Braun proposed research to his Pentagon masters to build more complicated rockets or—his ultimate goal—to design rockets that could travel into space, he was refused. It was a time of “professional gloom” for him and his team.
Yet the Soviets by 1949 had already developed a new ballistic missile, called Pobeda, or “Victory,” that could fly higher and carry more than the V-2 rocket. That same year, on August 29, the Soviet Union set off its first atomic bomb on the Kazakh Steppe, ending America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons. A little more than a month later, China fell to communism, and in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman, who thought he would demilitarize, was suddenly left dealing with twin threats of a Soviet nuclear and conventional buildup in Europe and a growing communist threat in Asia. The only choice for politicians in Washington seemed to be developing weapons even more powerful than those that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
—
On November 1, 1952, Herbert York made a call to the nuclear physicist Edward Teller with a brief message. It was “zero hour,” York told Teller, who was watching a seismometer at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Fourteen minutes passed, and then Teller called back with his own coded response: “It’s a boy.”
That “boy” was Ivy Mike, a 10.4-megaton hydrogen bomb that had just exploded in the clear blue waters of Eniwetok Atoll, vaporizing the island of Elugelab and creating, as Richard Rhodes described it, “a blinding white fireball three miles across.” The device, designed by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that went off in Hiroshima. York, the young physicist who just seven years earlier had proudly told his father that war was obsolete, was now in charge of recruiting the scientists to design a new class of weapons whose power was so great that at one point it was feared the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and vaporize the oceans. Ivy Mike was a test of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, known as the Super. This new bomb did more than create a new generation of superweapons; it also eliminated one of the last arguments against developing ICBMs. Thermonuclear weapons with yields in the many-megaton range meant that accuracy was no longer critical; with a big enough bang, hitting the target precisely was not as important. And once the thermonuclear weapon could be reduced in size, the military did not need bombers to haul weapons over long distances; it could pack them on an ICBM.
Three days after Ivy Mike exploded, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was elected president in a landslide, running on a campaign that focused heavily on battling communism. “World War II should have taught us all one lesson,” he declared. “The lesson is this: To vacillate, to hesitate—to appease even by merely betraying unsteady purpose—is to feed a dictator’s appetite for conquest and to invite war itself.”
By the time Eisenhower took office in January 1953, the Korean War was already drawing to a close, and he was alarmed by the growth in the federal budget. In the past two decades, spending had grown twenty-fold to more than $80 billion, and over half of that was going directly to the Pentagon. To rein in military spending, Eisenhower instituted a policy called New Look, which turned to nuclear weapons as a cost-effective way to offset drawdowns in conventional forces. It was fortuitous timing for rocket enthusiasts. Von Braun and his team had moved in 1950 to Huntsville, Alabama, where they were finally working on a new missile, called the Redstone. In Washington, Eisenhower was met with a flood of reports and panels making the case for rocket technology: both as weapons that could reach the Soviet Union and as a way to carry satellites into space. Rand, a newly established think tank funded by the air force, produced a series of reports proposing an earth-orbiting satellite as a military capability. Because satellites did not yet exist, there was still a question of national sovereignty: Would a satellite that flew over another country, such as the Soviet Union, be regarded as a violation of its airspace?
In 1954, the Technological Capabilities Panel, appointed by Eisenhower to look at the potential of a “surprise attack” by the Soviet Union, offered a solution: the United States would launch a purely scientific satellite as a pretext to establish “freedom of space,” which would then pave the way for military satellites. With all three of the military services developing separate technologies, the question was which should get to build the first rocket to space.
—
As the military services battled over a nascent space program, William Godel in the 1950s was in the midst of a different war in the intelligence world. Back in Washington, D.C., he worked as an assistant to General Graves Erskine, the Pentagon’s director of special operations. Godel quickly earned a reputation as the go-to guy for special assignments, particularly those that combined intelligence with science. Whether it was recruiting foreign scientists to work with the Pentagon or formulating plans for Operation Deep Freeze, which established the American presence in Antarctica (and earned him an eponymous plot of frozen water, the Godel Iceport), Godel was known as a man who could get things done.
Godel was also often called in to deal with the turf wars in areas like psychological operations. Frustrated by the lack of coordination for such operations—covert and overt—across government, President Truman in 1951 established the "Psychological Strategy Board" and appointed Godel as a member. The job brought Godel into periodic battles with the CIA, though many of them were petty. Official correspondence from the time mentions CIA officials clashing with Godel about everything from the CIA director’s refusal to attend a Pentagon function for visiting dignitaries to whether the CIA was providing a Hollywood studio with film footage of American prisoners of war held in North Korea. But the infighting was bad enough that Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, banned Godel from his buildings.
It might have been run-ins like those that prompted a security investigation into Godel, something that was not unusual in an era when information dug up from background investigations was used as a blunt weapon to oust political enemies. In 1953, Pentagon security officials interviewed Godel after reports surfaced that his adoptive father had been a Nazi sympathizer.
While denying the allegation, Godel also distanced himself from the man who raised him. “I didn’t care for him,” Godel said. “I had no personal association with him other than as a man who has been very nice to my mother since I left in ’38.”
The investigation did not stop Godel’s upward trajectory in government, however. In 1955, Donald Quarles, then the assistant secretary of defense for research and development, assigned Godel to the National Security Agency, a part of government so highly classified at the time that its existence was not even acknowledged. The NSA had been established in 1952, bringing together the communications intelligence and code-breaking capabilities that had emerged from World Wars I and II. Like the rest of the Defense Department, the NSA was being scrutinized by the Eisenhower administration, which was unhappy with the quality of strategic intelligence. Godel was supposed to help straighten out the NSA’s overseas operations and cut back ineffective foreign bases. For Godel, the NSA assignment combined his twin interests in intelligence and technology. In a later unpublished interview, Godel had a simple description of his mission: he was a hatchet man. In 1955, the year Godel was assigned to scale back the NSA, a copy of his security interview, which included questions raised about his adoptive father’s Nazi sympathies, was sent over to the FBI at the personal request of J. Edgar Hoover to review. It is unclear what the FBI chief was looking for, but two years later Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson wrote back to Hoover: “Glad to know you think [Godel’s] doing a fine job.” Godel’s role by then had earned him consideration for a top slot at the NSA.
Godel might have been doing a fine job, but the NSA, like the rest of the defense and intelligence community, was about to become embroiled in yet a new crisis. The same year that Quarles sent Godel to revamp the NSA, he also appointed a panel to decide which rocket proposal would take the United States into space. The problem was that there was no civilian rocket program; only the military services were developing the technology that could launch a satellite into space. The air force’s plan was to launch an ICBM into space, and the army proposal would have involved relying on former Nazi scientists working at a military arsenal. The navy’s rocket, while the least mature, had the advantage of not being associated with a weapon. In the end, the panel passed over the army’s German rocket team and the air force’s ICBM, selecting instead the navy proposal, a rocket that was still in development. “This is not a design contest,” an outraged von Braun protested. “It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit, and we are way ahead on this.”
Von Braun’s concerns were ignored, even as over the next two years the navy fell behind schedule. The delays did not spark much concern among America’s political leaders, and particularly not for President Eisenhower, who still believed that the United States was ahead of the Soviet Union.
Then, in the fall of 1957, the CIA and the NSA were monitoring Soviet launches of intermediate-range missiles from Kapustin Yar, in western Russia, unaware of a much more important launch that was being prepared in Kazakhstan. Twelve years after winning a scientific gamble on nuclear weapons, Americans were about to face the reality that the horror the six-year-old Michiaki experienced in Nagasaki could soon reach the continental United States. The United States would no longer be invulnerable, and war was anything but obsolete.

#ColdWar #history #WernherVonBraun #ICBM #NuclearWar #TrinityTest #Alamogordo NewMexico #Hiroshima #LittleBoy #Nagasaki #FatMan #IvyMike #Thermonuclear #satellite #WilliamGodel #NSA

If there are to be yet unimagined weapons affecting the balance of military power tomorrow, we want to have the men and the means to imagine them first.
—JAMES KILLIAN, science adviser to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Science as science should no longer be served; indeed scientists ought to be made to serve.
—WILLIAM H. GODEL, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1975

Guns and Money

In June 1961, William Godel set off on a secret mission to Vietnam carrying a briefcase stuffed with cash. At a stopover in Hawaii, he converted some of the cash to traveler’s checks to make space for a small bottle of liquor that he carried with him on business trips. Even that did not quite leave enough room, so he moved some of his secret Pentagon papers to another case to make space for the bottle. The money, $18,000, was for a classified project that would play a critical role in President John F. Kennedy’s plan to battle communism in Southeast Asia.
At thirty-nine years old, Godel still wore the short buzz cut of his Marine Corps days, but his reputation had been forged in the world of intelligence. A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agency’s new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting. Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stations— something he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australia —or, in this case, winning the support of South Vietnam’s president for a new American proposal. Bill Bundy, a former CIA official and White House adviser, called Godel an “operator” with a “rather legendary reputation for effectiveness” working overseas.
At five feet ten inches tall, Godel was not a physically imposing figure, but he had a way of impressing both admirers and enemies with his presence. “He was one of the more glamorous people to stride the halls of the Pentagon,” recalled Lee Huff, who was recruited by Godel to the Defense Department. Godel was never the most famous man in the Pentagon, but for several years he was one of its most influential. And by the early 1960s, that influence was focused on Southeast Asia.
Godel arrived to the summer heat of Saigon, a congested city of semi-controlled chaos where cycle rickshaws, bicycles, mopeds, cars, and other motorized contraptions wove through the packed streets like schools of fish in a sea. The city was booming economically and culturally, even as it attracted an increasing number of American military advisers, spooks, and diplomats, who were looking to advise South Vietnam’s president on how best to run his newly independent country.
Parisian-style sidewalk cafés still dotted the main city streets, and the city’s French colonial heritage was reflected in everything from the fresh baguettes in the local bakeries to the city’s grand villas. Vietnamese women dressed in the "áo dài", the formfitting silk dress worn over pantaloons, mixed easily with teenage girls clad in miniskirts. It was still several years before the influx of American troops would provide a boon to the city’s brothels, or frequent Vietcong terrorist attacks in Saigon would drive patrons away from sidewalk cafés, but signs of that unrest were on the horizon. In December of the previous year, the Vietcong bombed the kitchen of the Saigon Golf Club, marking the start of a series of terrorist attacks in the capital. In neighboring Laos, a civil war fueled by Soviet and American involvement was spilling over into Vietnam. More disquieting was that the Vietcong, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam, were getting weapons from North Vietnam, using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the illicit supply route that snaked through Vietnam’s mountains and jungle, and parts of Laos.
Godel had been traveling frequently to Vietnam for more than a decade. What made this trip unusual was that he was now working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by its acronym, ARPA. Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself. Godel figured if ARPA could not battle the communists in space, perhaps it could beat them in the jungles. President Kennedy had taken office just five months prior and was still in the process of formulating a new policy for Southeast Asia. He had already decided to support South Vietnam’s anticommunist president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who hailed from a family of Mandarins, the bureaucrats who ran Vietnam under Chinese rule. The month before Godel’s trip, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited South Vietnam’s president, calling Diem the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” and in April, Kennedy sent four hundred Green Berets to South Vietnam to serve as special advisers, helping to train the South Vietnamese military and the Montagnards, the indigenous tribes who lived in the country’s central plains. Diem was a deeply religious man, a lifelong bachelor who chose politics over the priesthood. Some in Western circles regarded him as an out-of-touch crackpot; others, like Godel, saw him as a flawed but promising leader. In the early 1960s, South Vietnam was already battling a communist insurgency, but it was a war being fought in the shadows; that summer, astronauts and celebrities still dominated the covers of Life and Time magazines. Yet there were hints that this new conflict was beginning to occupy America’s leaders in Washington. The October 27, 1961, cover of Life magazine featured a soldier peering out from jungle underbrush with the caption “GI trains for guerilla warfare.” The cover lines read, “Vietnam: Our Next Showdown.” Guerrilla warfare was precisely why Godel was in Vietnam. The money he carried with him to Saigon was a down payment on an initial $20 million that the American government expected to allocate for a combat center to develop technology suited for fighting insurgents in Vietnam’s jungles. Located in Saigon and run by ARPA, the combat center would be used to help American military advisers and South Vietnam’s military. Godel, however, was not just focused on Vietnam; ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center was the starting point for a global solution to counterinsurgency, relying on science and technology to guide the way.
The cash in Godel’s bag, and his list of proposals for Diem, would alter the course of events in Vietnam and more broadly lay the groundwork for modern warfare. From stealthy helicopters that would slip over the border of Pakistan on a hunt for Osama bin Laden to a worldwide campaign using drones to conduct targeted killings, Godel’s wartime experiments would later become military technologies that changed the way America wages war. His programs in Vietnam, many of which arose from that meeting with Diem, would be credited with some of the best and worst military innovations of the century. Within just a few months of that trip, Godel would bring over to Vietnam a new gun better suited for jungle warfare, the Armalite AR-15. He would also send social scientists to Vietnam, hoping that a better understanding of the people and culture would stem the insurgency. Some of Godel’s work became infamous, like a plan to relocate Vietnamese peasants to new fortified villages, known as strategic hamlets. That plan became one of the more resounding failures of the war. Similarly, ARPA’s introduction to Vietnam of chemical defoliants, including "Agent Orange", is now held responsible for countless deaths and illnesses among Vietnamese and Americans.
At its height, the ARPA program he established employed hundreds of people spread across Southeast Asia —more than five hundred in Thailand alone—and then expanded later to the Middle East. The program sought to understand the roots of insurgency and develop methods to prevent it so that American forces would not have to get involved in regional wars they were unprepared to fight. ARPA developed new technologies, sponsored social science research, and published books on counterinsurgency warfare that would later influence a new generation of military leaders fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than any single technology, Godel’s single-minded promotion of the need to understand the nature of guerrilla warfare would have an impact decades later, when the army general David Petraeus, and his advisers known as the “strategic whizzes,” found themselves studying the writing of David Galula, whose seminal work, 'Pacification in Algeria', was published in 1963, paid for by ARPA. Four decades before Petraeus made “counterinsurgency” a household phrase, Godel created a worldwide research program dedicated to insurgent warfare that dwarfed anything done in the years after 9/11.
The nascent counterinsurgency program Godel started inadvertently played a critical role in shaping the future agency whose name would become synonymous with innovation. The Vietnam counterinsurgency work eventually became the backbone of ARPA’s "Tactical Technology Office", the seminal division that would produce stealth aircraft, precision weaponry, and drones—the fundamentals of the modern battlefield. The space age might have given birth to ARPA, but Vietnam thrust the agency into the center of Cold War strategic debates, and it was Godel, more than any other ARPA official, who shaped the agency’s future.
Yet it was not all counterinsurgency. In the early 1960s, the esoteric agency Godel helped build was planting the seeds for work that would bear fruit many years later. In the first two years, Godel helped create the agency’s space program, providing cover to the world’s first reconnaissance satellite, a top secret project. He also persuaded the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite and helped build a worldwide network for nuclear test monitoring. By the end of the decade, a descendant of one of ARPA’s first projects, the "Saturn rocket", would launch Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo 11 astronauts on their journey to the moon. And just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in "command and control", which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.
Godel’s seminal role was largely expunged from the record in later years, and his name rarely mentioned in official materials, forgotten except by a few loyal friends and dedicated enemies. The AR-15, the weapon that Godel personally carried over to Vietnam, eventually became the M16, the standard-issue infantry weapon for the entire U.S. military. The rest of Godel’s Vietnam-era work would be dismissed as a onetime diversion for an agency now more closely associated with high technology than strategic thinking. His story did not fit an agency touted as a model for innovation. Yet the real key to the ARPA legacy lies in understanding how all these varied projects—satellites, drones, and computers— could come to exist in a single agency.
—
The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) sits on a compound in Langley, Virginia, made famous by countless movies and television shows. The NSA’s massive headquarters is ringed by barbed wire and located on a military base in Maryland. Yet the agency responsible for some of the most important military and civil technologies of the past hundred years resides in relative obscurity behind a generic glass facade at 675 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia. The unremarkable office tower stands across from a dying four-level brown-brick shopping mall that houses a mix of fast-food restaurants and discount stores.
Behind the nondescript exterior of the office building, just beyond the guards, is a panoramic wall display that covers more than fifty years of the agency’s history. It begins in the fall of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into orbit. "Sputnik", as the satellite was called in the West, did little more than emit a simple beep. But that beach-ball-size sphere orbiting harmlessly around the earth touched off a storm of news reports that shook the American people’s feeling of invulnerability by demonstrating that the Soviet Union might soon be able to launch a nuclear-armed missile that could reach the continental United States.
?As the story goes, Sputnik sparked a national hysteria, and the American public demanded that the government take action. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower in early 1958 authorized the establishment of a central research agency independent from the military services, whose bickering had contributed to the Soviet Union’s lead in space. This new agency, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was the nation’s first space agency—established eight months before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The organization today known as DARPA—the D for “Defense” was added in 1972 (and then dropped, and added again in later years)—has grown into an approximately $3-billion-a-year research agency, with projects that have ranged from space planes to cyborg insects. The display in the lobby is a monument to more than fifty years of this unusual government agency, which has produced marvelous and sometimes terrifying technological achievements: precision weapons, drones, robots, and networked computing, to name a few. By thinking about fundamental problems of national security, DARPA created solutions that did far more than give the military a few novel weapons. In some cases, the agency changed the nature of warfare; in others, it helped prevent the nation from going to war.
By thinking about how to deal with Soviet conventional military superiority without resorting to nuclear weapons, it introduced the era of precision weaponry. By looking for ways to detect underground nuclear explosions, it revolutionized the field of seismology and enabled the negotiation of critical arms control treaties. And by exploring ways to improve nuclear command and control, it created the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet.
Not all solutions are so tidy, however. In trying to tackle the problem of communist insurgency, DARPA embarked on a decade-long worldwide experiment that ended in failure. It is tempting to carve out unsuccessful work, like the counterinsurgency programs, by claiming this was an aberration in the agency’s history. Here we argue, however, that DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together. What made DARPA successful was its ability to tackle some of the most critical national security problems facing the United States, unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review. DARPA’s history of innovation is more closely tied to this turbulent period in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it delved into questions of nuclear warfare and counterinsurgency, than to its brief life as a “space agency.” Those two crucial decades represent a time when senior Pentagon officials believed the agency should play a critical role in shaping world events, rather than just develop technological novelties.
The Internet and the agency’s Vietnam War work were proposed solutions to critical problems: one was a world-changing success, and the other a catastrophic failure. That muddied history of Vietnam and counterinsurgency might not fit well with DARPA’s creation story, but it is the key to understanding its legacy. It is also the history that is often the most challenging to get many former agency officials to address. DARPA may brag about its willingness to fail, but that does not mean that it is eager to have those failures examined.
—
DARPA is now more than sixty years old, and much of its history has never been recorded in any systematic way. One effort was made, in 1973, when DARPA approached its fifteenth anniversary. Stephen Lukasik, then the director, commissioned an independent history of the agency to better understand its origins and purpose. The final document was regarded as so sensitive that the authors were only authorized to make six copies, all of which had to be handed over to the government. Although it was supposed to be an unclassified history, the new director was aghast at what he felt was an overly personal account; he stamped the final product as classified and locked it away. It took more than a decade for it to be released.
Agencies, like people, make sense of themselves through stories. And like people, they are selective about the facts that go into their stories, and as time passes, the stories are increasingly suspect and often apocryphal. No other research organization has a history as rich, complex, important, and at times strange as DARPA. Whether it was a mechanical elephant to trudge through the jungles of Vietnam or a jet pack for Special Forces, DARPA’s projects have been ambitious, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Some of these fanciful ideas, like the concept of an invisible aircraft named after a fictional, eight-foot-tall rabbit, actually succeeded, but many more failed. At some point, the successes, and the failures, began to get smaller, because the problems assigned to the agency grew narrower. The key to DARPA’s success in the past was not just its flexibility but also its focus on solving high-level national security problems. DARPA today runs the risk of irrelevancy, creating marvelous innovations that have, unlike previous years, little impact on either the way the military fights or the way we live our lives. The price of success is failure, and the price of an important success is a significant failure, and the consequences of both should be weighed in assessing any institution’s legacy. Conversely, if the stakes are not high, then neither the successes nor the failures matter, and that is where the agency is in danger of heading today, investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact on national security.
Current DARPA officials may disagree with this pessimistic assessment of the agency’s current role or argue about which failures, and successes, should be highlighted. Yet the research for our work is based on thousands of pages of documents, many recently declassified, held in archives around the country, and hundreds of hours of interviews with former DARPA officials. Most past directors share a very similar sentiment: DARPA continues to produce good solutions to problems, but the problems it is assigned, or assigns itself, are no longer critical to national security. To understand why this narrowing of scope happened, it is important to examine the real history of DARPA. The agency’s origins may begin with the space race, but DARPA’s legacy lies elsewhere.
Godel and his trip to Vietnam were seminal to the agency’s history—both its high and its low points. That trip helped create the modern agency and its greatest and worst legacies. Yet Godel’s story is one that DARPA officials today do not talk about, or even know about. It is a story buried in long-forgotten court records and has been nearly written out of the agency’s history, because it no longer fits the narrative of DARPA as an agency dedicated to technological surprise. Yet it is a story that illustrates the true tensions within DARPA, an agency

#ARPA #DARPA #USA #Vietnam #ColdWar #history

In the near future, imagine a world where your health is continuously monitored, not through bulky devices but through an invisible graphene tattoo. Developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, these tattoos could soon detect a range of health metrics, including blood pressure, stress levels, and even biomarkers of diseases like diabetes. This technology, though still in its infancy, promises to revolutionize how we monitor health, making it possible to track our bodies’ responses to everything from exercise to environmental exposure in real-time.

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, is key to the development of these tattoos. They are flexible, transparent, and conductive, making them ideal for bioelectronics. The tattoos are so thin and pliable that users won’t even feel them on their skin. In early tests, graphene electronic tattoos (GETs) have been used to measure bioimpedance, which correlates with blood pressure and other vital signs. The real breakthrough here, however, is the continuous, non-invasive monitoring that could enable early detection of conditions that usually go unnoticed until it’s too late.

While still requiring refinement, this technology is advancing rapidly. Graphene still amazes us, but it’s no longer just science fiction. Soon, these tattoos could be a part of everyday life, helping individuals track their health and enabling better preventative care. Since we’re hackers out here – but this is a far fetch – combining this knowledge on graphene production, and this article on tattooing with a 3D printer, could get you on track. Let us know, what would you use graphene biosensors for?

Original photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

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