The Uzbek Principle

Craig Murray, the British ambassador relieved of his post in Tashkent, is by all accounts a flamboyant character. He does not fit the stereotype of the discreet dark-suited plenipotentiary who makes friends with foreign leaders, secures lucrative contracts for British business and writes soothing telegrams home. Instead, the former emissary to Uzbekistan has seriously rocked the diplomatic boat -- castigating his Foreign Office masters for Britain's feeble response to Uzbekistan's human rights abuses.

When last week the Financial Times disclosed his latest salvo -- a private protest that Britain's intelligence services use information extracted by torture from political prisoners in Uzbekistan, his bosses decided enough was enough.

There are two stories here, and, though intimately connected, they should not be confused. The first is about whether Murray overstepped the diplomatic mark in attacking the unsavory regime of Islam Karimov or whether the British government wants to silence all dissent about its unpleasant compromises in the fight against terrorism. The second is about how far the West should travel in sacrificing principle to realpolitik.

The first of these will be settled eventually in the courts, as Murray intends to take legal action. I have heard competing versions of what everyone admits was a strained relationship during his two years in Tashkent. The establishment view is that he overplayed his hand. The Foreign Office supported his vocal public criticism of arbitrary imprisonment and torture, but he did not know where to draw the line. He had the right to challenge policy made in London but, once decisions had been taken, had the duty to represent the government's position. If that created for Murray a crisis of moral conscience, the honorable course was resignation.

An alternative narrative says that the present government confuses disagreement with disloyalty. Public servants are expected to implement rather than argue. And, if they fall out of line, they can expect ruthless retribution. Thus, when Murray first sparked controversy more than a year ago, he was recalled to London to face no fewer than 18 disciplinary charges. All were connected with an unconventional (by Foreign Office standards) private life or with his management of the Tashkent embassy rather than with policy disagreements. All were subsequently dropped.

Either way, a powerful light has been shone on the grubby moral compromises that Britain is making in the pursuit of strategic objectives. The Foreign Office does not deny that confessions extracted by torture in Uzbekistan's prisons are used by its intelligence services, declaring that it would be "irresponsible" to ignore any information about terrorist threats. That is gruesome reasoning -- "casuistry," in Murray's description -- that leads others to ask: Why not torture prisoners in the West if lives may be saved as a consequence? We have seen the result in Abu Ghraib.

Nor does the British government seriously dispute that Karimov's repression has got worse since he forged his new alliances with the West after Sept. 11, 2001. There has been no counter to Murray's claim that at least two prisoners were "boiled to death." Instead, there is the familiar diplomatic shrug that says "needs must."

Uzbekistan's strategic significance is obvious. Since the al-Qaida attacks on the United States, the West has rediscovered the importance of Central Asia. In this latest version of the 19th-century Great Game, Uzbekistan provides a vital base for U.S. operations in neighboring Afghanistan. U.S. financial aid provides a bulwark against Russian influence. For his own reasons, Karimov is an enemy of Islamist extremism. So, on the age-old principle of "my enemy's enemy is my friend," we must be friends with this particular tyrant. Sure, there are criticisms of his human rights record and the U.S. State Department has suspended a small portion of America's aid package. But these are token gestures against the huge financial and political support for Tashkent.

This approach is deeply flawed, as dangerous in the long term as it is unethical in the short. The assumption is that, in places such as Uzbekistan, realpolitik and moral sensitivities are in inevitable conflict and the West must choose strategic interests over consciences.

But we have been here before. The same logic saw the United States support the Taliban in Afghanistan and, along with the Europeans, arm Saddam Hussein against Iran. How dearly we have since paid for such geopolitical realism; and we have still to see the bill for the diplomatic blind eye the West has now turned to Russian repression in Chechnya.

So history repeats itself. The so-called war on terrorism, like the Cold War before it, becomes the excuse for a foreign policy that is at once immoral and ultimately self-defeating. Do not the same political leaders now propping up Karimov proclaim that repression is terrorism's best friend, freedom its most lethal enemy? I could have sworn Tony Blair has said as much a dozen times. Perhaps Murray made the point a touch too bluntly for some tastes. But his political masters cannot escape from its truth.

Philip Stephens is a columnist for the Financial Times, where this comment first appeared.