Strongman, The

the territory of the Central Asian states.’
    The Americans were confused by the conflicting signals. Suddenly the presidents of the Central Asian states, not counted among the world’s greatest democrats, became everybody’s favourites. Putin sent his national security adviser, Vladimir Rushailo, to sound them out. Bush sent his under-secretary of state, John Bolton, to the Uzbek capital Tashkent to win over President Islam Karimov, a man accused of some of the world’s most heinous human rights violations. The Americans were in no mood to quibble about such things now. Rice recalled later: ‘With Uzbekistan it just became a problem of what would be the price. Karimov needed money and he knew he had us over a barrel.’ And indeed, Bolton apparently found him bending over backwards to oblige: ‘I [was] all prepared for how hard it will be and he said, “Why aren’t you asking for a permanent base?” ’ 14
    That was precisely what the Russians, and not just Sergei Ivanov, were worried about: the prospect of an American ‘presence’ – limited access to Central Asian bases for the purposes of their campaign in Afghanistan – turning into something more permanent, something more political.
    Ivanov recalls: ‘We were concerned that once the Americans had a presence in the region, then “democracy promotion” would start. We know those countries very well – they were part of the same country [the Soviet Union] – and as we say in Russia, “the orient is a very intricate place”. We were afraid that political processes that were not very advantageous to us could start. And that proved to be true later. The leaders of those countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan – started complaining to us, because they had given the Americans everything they needed, but then they started working with opposition groups, building democracy.’ 15
    This was one of the earliest indications that under Putin Russia considered the prospect of democracy on its borders threatening.
    On Saturday 22 September Putin called his defence and security chiefs together for six hours of crisis talks at his dacha, hidden in the woods on a cliff-top overlooking the Black Sea at Sochi. Putin argued that it was not only in Russia’s interest to help America, but also in Russia’s self-interest. For one thing, Moscow had long been disturbed by the rise of Islamic forces in the Central Asian republics, fomented in part from Afghanistan. Russia itself could never again put military boots on the ground in Afghanistan after its catastrophic war there in the 1980s, but if the Americans were going to do it for them why should Russia oppose? Sergei Ivanov recalls: ‘We were counting on getting help in return. We knew where the training camps were in Afghanistan. I mean, we knew the exact map coordinates. Those camps trained terrorists – including those from Chechnya and Dagestan, as well as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan ... We were counting on the Americans to liquidate those camps. Or they would capture the terrorists and send them to us.’
    Secondly, Putin linked the 9/11 attacks to the same worldwide terrorist threat that he faced in Chechnya. Supporting the Americans could only help garner support for (or at least mute criticism of) his own campaign against terrorism. The Russian leader had already spoken to the Americans about the links between al-Qaeda and the Chechen Islamists – indeed he claimed that Osama bin Laden himself had twice been to Chechnya. Now the Russians had a chance to help the Americans wipe out some of the sources of trouble within Russia itself. ‘We all have to understand,’ Putin told his team, ‘that the situation in the world has changed.’
    The hardliners were won over. ‘Even the doubters agreed,’ Putin said in an interview. ‘New circumstances meant we had to help the Americans.’
    After four hours, Putin left the meeting to call the American president and inform him of their decision. ‘It was a substantive conversation,’ Putin recalls. ‘We agreed on concrete steps to be taken straight away, and in the long term.’ He offered Russian logistical help, intelligence, search-and-rescue missions if American pilots were downed in northern Afghanistan, and even the right to military flights over Russian territory for humanitarian purposes. Most importantly, he told Bush: ‘I am prepared to tell the heads of government of the Central Asian states that we have good relations with that we