Broken Frontier

Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?  Ted Rall.  NBM, 2006.

Silk Road to Ruin has a huge advantage over other tough tomes that examine the painful realities of Central Asia: it has the witty and humanistic insight of Ted Rall, who has filled his phenomenal book with cartoons, and five graphic novellas.  Part travelogue and part journalism, this introduction to the politics and people of Central Asia is a must-read for anyone wondering about, or worried about, the future of the United States and the War on Terror.  Too much focus on the Middle East might lead Americans to miss an emerging threat that could be averted.  Broken Frontier recently spoke with Rall about his latest book.

BROKEN FRONTIER:  I teach a Humanities class at the community college, and I spend a day describing the Silk Road in its heyday.  I compare it to the internet as a way of helping students see its role in spreading intercultural influences, information, and goods.  I think it is their favorite lecture.  If I could have you as a guest in my class, and you had a room full of interested young people who don’t want to be handed a bunch of platitudes, what would you tell them?

TED RALL:  The most relevant aspect of the Silk Road is that it’s broken.  The reason it became a trade route was because there was no other way for nomadic people to make a living.  The soil is too poor, and there aren’t enough rivers to sustain an agrarian society.  This is still true today.  They’re suffering from the deforestation of Genghis Khan’s invasion.  The only way you could make a living as a resident of Central Asia for thousands of years, and still today, is to steal from travelers, or travel yourself.  If you follow from East to West, you can see the Chinese blankets increase marginally in price from bazaar to bazaar.  Everyone’s taking their cut along the way. 

The dream was that the Trans-Afghan pipeline project would be “The New Silk Road”.  [Afghanistan’s President] Karzai and [Pakistan’s President] Musharraf have both called it that.  But the Silk Road only works in the absence of strong political borders.  And so it’s broken.  All the Central Asian countries have autocratic dictatorships.  They do internal control really well.  This has stifled commerce and transport.  Right now, the Uzbekis and Tajiks have closed their borders, and are shooting at each other.  The model to move goods across the steppe into Eastern Europe and Russia is broken, so there’s no way for people to earn a decent living except through the extraction of energy resources.  Only Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have the ability to do this.  And they don’t share the wealth.  The Kyrgyz and the Tajiks don’t have oil and gas, but they have water.  If they were to use water were as economic leverage, there would be war.  It’s a witches’ brew of instability, growing resentment, and dissipated hopes.  Tensions are seething under the surface, and the US is making the usual foreign policy mistake of allying itself with corrupt dictators.

BF:  Who should we deal with?

TR:  You want to stand out of the way, let these regimes collapse, and see who emerges.  One of the problems the United States has is choosing sides.  In Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, you have a kind of a Iraq situation.  There are no opponents.  They’ve either been killed, or left, or given up.  In [Kyrgyzstan’s 2005] Tulip Revolution, the secularists would be the most likely inheritors.  There is a substantial minority of Islamists, but they aren’t that radical, not yet. 

The best thing is to do nothing.

BF:  And trust Russia and China to do the same?

TR:  Russia is kind of reacting.  It had forgotten about Central Asia, until the US started building bases all over it.  The US could lean on Russia to do nothing while things shake out.  The people who would really insinuate themselves into Central Asia would be the Chinese.  They are building a lot of infrastructure that helps the people, not the dictators, and people really love that.  The US should try it!

BF:  You document a special kind of hysterically funny third-world lifestyle in the graphic novellas.  If circumstances were to improve in Central Asia, much of that could be lost.  The trains might run on time.  Do you have any regrets over this possible loss?

TR:  Of course!  We all experience regrets for a lost past.  You see old pictures of Times Square, and the horse-drawn carriages look so pretty.  But we know the horses smelled really bad.  One of the first things you confront over there is a colossal lack of respect for your time.  You think a bus is leaving at 11:00 am, and you wait around until 4:00 before it finally takes off.  Then you learn that the buses don’t leave until they’re full.  The flavor of some third world conditions are different in a way that’s well worth experiencing.

But you don’t have to worry about third-world style disappearing.  Most of the people in the world live in third world conditions, and since the world doesn’t have any interest in solving the problem, it’s probably not going to go away.

BF:  You finish the book with a section you called “If You Go.”  Should we go?

TR:  People should go.  Anyone who is curious about the world should go.  Uzbekistan is amazing for anyone interested the artifacts of civilization.  Bukhara and Samarkand have tourist attractions on par with Paris.  If you’re into nature, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are just awesome.  And you’ll learn a lot about a part of the world that few people know about.  And if the US is going to run an empire, then Americans should go out and explore it.

Going out and meeting people can humanize us in the eyes of the world.  I traveled with the Taliban in Pakistan.  After the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and the Taliban were thinking that Americans are evil people who must be killed, I like to think there was one guy who said, “well, I traveled around with this one American, and he was a pretty good guy.”  It’s incredibly important that people from all over the world interact.

BF:  Are you satisfied with the balance between prose and graphics in Silk Road to Ruin?

TR:  I love this book.  I like the balance of prose and graphic novel.  It’s my Central Asia brain dump.  This is why it matters, is important, is interesting, is funny.  Without the graphic novellas, it would be incomplete.  If it was missing photos, it would be hard for people to get it.  If it were missing the prose, how could I make the politics make sense?  I told all the stories I wanted to tell, in the formats I felt were the most appropriate.  I don’t know why more people don’t combine prose, graphic novellas, and photographs.

BF:  Maybe prose writers don’t feel they can do the graphic format justice. 

TR:  I always found cartoons to be much harder to write than prose.  But anyone can do it.  There’s a way to get the ability, which is to read tons and tons of good cartoons. 

BF:  Silk Road to Ruin is a warning, and I wonder what anyone can do to avoid the impending fall out of inattention and wrong-headed American policy.  How can people like my students, and your readers, make a difference?

TR:  Every person has some kind of natural gift.  They can discover it through themselves and their friends.  You’ll know what you can do.  And you’ll find your way.