Regimes like that basically play on colliding interests and on the incompetence of external actors to buy time and squeeze the most out of them. They’re smart, you know. Karimov and many of the regime’s other key figures are former Soviet apparatchiks and, as such, able to get through Byzantine intrigues. And his spawn use their calendar babe charms to wind foreign academics, jetset figures and diplotwats around their finger.

But in the end, they indeed dig their own grave. What the mobsters in Tashkent do is basically not different from the behaviour of scores of propped-up African dictators and warlords like Mobutu, Savimbi and Siad Barré, who were once useful against ‘Communism’, understood their strategic importance very well and eventually became so arrogant and embarassing that they shot themselves in the foot. We know what happened then and at the detriment of whom.

Like the Tashkent regime, they were also quite good at playing with feeling of guilt games about ‘colonialism’ and ‘patriotism’ when it suited all when they had no scruples to loot and sell out their fiefdoms to fioreign interests when it suited them even better. They’re smart but they’re also doomed. And they know it.

Ironically, I know European left-wingers who think Karimov is great because he booted out the US military five years ago. :) This says more about the desperate state of the left than about Karimov though.