Just days after the recent armed provocations in Uzbekistan’s Andijan region, provocations that a mysterious group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for, several news agencies at a time have offered a suggestion on who could have stood behind the developments. According to what they see as a lead, those who attacked the local building of the National Security Council and the city Department of Internal Affairs in the town of Hanabad on the 26^th of May 2009 had come from Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, which border on Afghanistan. Now, if the suppositions advanced are true, then it is both Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries that are facing the threat of military and political destabilization.

More than one development in the neighbouring countries of Central Asia and the Middle East in the run-up to the Hanabad armed clashes indicates the “Pakistani connection”. In early May the Pakistan Army stepped up fighting against the Taliban units in the Swat valley, in the northwest of the country. The crisis situation in Pakistan’s north-west, bordering on Afghanistan, was largely provoked by the 2001 new war in Afghanistan. When pressure on the Taliban units increased, they began to move out to Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, which enjoy ample self-government powers and are under poor central government control all along, ever since the British Empire came into being. Both the Afghan Taliban movement members and the Tribal Areas residents are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns, so it took them little to establish contact.

In the Tribal Areas Taliban units set up a network of training centres to train fighters against the official Afghan government and for action in Central Asia and the North Caucasus. According to N. Zamarayeva of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies, foreign nationals of Arab and Central Asian origin made up almost 20% of the Taliban’s combative force. Taliban was joined by the armed units of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan under Tahir Yuldashev, the units that have fought on the Taliban side against the US and NATO troops since 2001. It was than that the Taliban began to clash with the Pakistan Army. But General Pevez Musharraf, at the helm in Pakistan from 1999 to 2008, feared an aggravation of internal contradictions and chose not to step up military action against the Taliban, concluding instead peace treaties with the field commanders, whenever possible.

But tension between the Pakistan Army and Taliban fighters began to grow as of 2005 because the Taliban had grown stronger by then, on the one hand, and because the US Air Force planes started pounding on Taliban deployment sites in the Tribal Areas increasingly often, on the other. By September 2006 Taliban and Al-Qaeda had established control over the larger part of the North and South Waziristan provinces and proclaimed the creation of a Sharia-based Islamic State of Waziristan there. Yet another military operation against the Taliban by reluctant Pakistan Army units again proved futile. In September 2006 Islamabad and the tribal chiefs of Waziristan made peace by signing an agreement whereby Taliban supporters pledged not to provide shelter for foreign fighters, stop crossing the Afghan-Pakistani border and attacking Pakistani troops, while the government in Islamabad pledged to call off the military operation against the Taliban and set free all imprisoned fighters. However, the numbers of fighters crossing the border to attack the coalition troops have since noticeably increased.

But under the new President Asif Ali Zardari the Pakistani authorities, too, tired to appease Taliban. In the middle of April 2009 President Zardari signed a peace agreement with the Taliban whereby Sharia Islamic law should be in effect in the Swat valley, while the Taliban pledged to cease fighting and make no effort to capture other regions of Pakistan. But shortly afterwards the peace agreement was broken and the Taliban attempted to establish control over the areas just 100 kilometres away from Islamabad. The Pakistan Army retaliated by launching a large-scale military operation on the 2d of May to seize control over the Swat valley. Bitter fighting flared up for the valley’s largest city, Mingora, which the Taliban fiercely defended. According to official reports, some 1,000 fighters had been killed by the middle of May, while the number of refugees had reached 2 million.

Fighting in the Swat valley had obviously caused to move back to Central Asia part of the units of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Tajik opposition who rejected the peace agreement terms. That this is so is born out by some clear marks in the current situation in Tajikistan.

On the 15^th of May the Tajik authorities launched the Poppy-2009 operation to struggle with opium-growing and fight the drug dealers’ activities in the Rasht valley, about 150 kilometres away from the republic’s capital city Dushanbe. Meanwhile the “Eurasianet” Website quotes “some local observers” as saying that what had really prompted the operation was the return to the valley of field commander Mullo Abdullo (Abdullo Rahimov), who gained prominence during the civil war in Tajikistan and has been of late in hiding in Pakistan. He is said to have brought along some 100 fighters. Following the conclusion of the 1997 peace agreement Mullo Abdullo moved to Afghanistan, but was obviously forced to move further south, to Pakistan, after the US had started its military operation against Taliban and Al-Qaeda. That the true reason for the Poppy-2009 operation is the return of Mullo Abdullo to Tajikistan, the “Eurasianet” says, is borne out by the arrest, on the 17^th of May, of the former activist of the United Tajik Opposition Muzaffar Nuriddinov, the unusually long time the operation is due on (until late November) and also the fact that opium poppy has never been cultivated in the Rasht valley because of an adverse climate.