the Soviet Union and the proliferation of countries whose names end in -stan. Kerry is not the first and will not be the last public official to become lost in Stanland.
Lost in Stanland
So where is “Stanland?”
The imprecise reference is to a vast swath of Asia, stretching from Turkey to the western border of China, populated by a bewildering assortment of ethnic groups that give their names to an equally bewildering collection of provinces, autonomous republics, and countries. Remembering them all—not to mention finding them on a map—is a challenge, even for people who are supposed to know these things, such as diplomats and international relations experts.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but, after traveling to Central Asia many times since the mid-1990s, I have a sense of place. I pity those world leaders doing the airport tarmac press conferences on the ten-Asian-countries-in-ten-days tours. It’s Tuesday, so this must be Tajikistan.
It’s similar to the geographical confusion brought on by the end of European colonialism in Africa a half century ago. It wasn’t enough for the imperial powers to surrender their political and economic dominance. They also had to learn postcolonial geographical vocabulary. It’s not Upper Volta any more. It’s Burkina Faso, and its capital is—get ready to roll those vowels—Ouagadougou.
“As a generality,” writes the Central Asia scholar Karl E. Meyer, “Americans think of the world in terms of seaports and airports, whereas Central Asians and their neighbors look inwardly to a vast realm tied together by caravan routes, rails, mountain passes, rivers and nowadays oil pipelines. Americans commonly dwell in a perpetual present, while inhabitants of the Asian heartland and their imperial former masters inhabit a gallery where whispering voices never cease recalling past triumphs or prior humiliations.”4 To travel writer Colin Thubron, one of the first Westerners to travel in the region after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was intangible, a historical and geographical paradox:
Even on the map it was ill-defined, and in history only vaguely named: ‘Turkestan’, ‘Central Asia’, ‘The Land Beyond the River’. Somewhere north of Iran and Afghanistan, west of the Chinese deserts, east of the Caspian Sea . . . this enormous secret country had turned on itself. Its glacier-fed rivers . . . never reached the ocean, but vanished in landlocked seas or died across the desert. The Himalaya cut off its mountains from any life-giving monsoon where the Pamirs rose in a naked glitter of plateau, so high, wrote Marco Polo, that no bird flew there and fire burnt with a pale flame in which you could rest your hand.5
We all construct mental maps of essential information, and our maps are shaped as much by culture and pragmatism as by physical features and political boundaries. Of course, we all know about other places, but they don’t appear in our mental maps, not even on the fringes, unless they seem relevant. Even though Afghanistan has been embroiled in conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1979—or, to take a longer historical perspective, since the first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42—it was not on most Americans’ mental maps before September 11, 2001.
As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan were the only “stans” we had to remember, the map was reasonably manageable. Then Mikhail Gorbachev came along. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us fourteen new countries (plus Russia) including the five “stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. We can be grateful the Soviet Union did not break up any further, or we would have to deal with Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan (now Russian republics). Or that Armenia did not adopt its native name, Hayastan. Or that the Central Asian republics themselves did not splinter, with Karakalpakstan breaking away from Uzbekistan.
If we struggle to remember the “stans,” is it more helpful to think about “Central Asia”? It depends. In terms of geopolitics, it’s a more elastic region, partly because it is (apart from the Caspian Sea) landlocked, so has no coastline for demarcation. Since September 11, Afghanistan has often been classified as Central Asia. The north of the country, bordering Uzbekistan, has a large ethnic Uzbek population; in the east, Tajiks are a significant minority. By religion, culture, and language, the Uighurs of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region have more in common with the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz than with the rest of China, and Uighur nationalists dream of reuniting with their neighbors in a Greater Turkestan region. The Caspian Sea clearly divides the Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, although some policy experts lump them together as “Central Asia and the Caucasus.” What about Mongolia? Ethnically, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are Mongols. Unlike other regions that can be neatly subdivided, Central Asia is amorphous, expanding and contracting as it is viewed through different political, social, economic, and cultural lenses.
MAP 1.1 Central Asian republics (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
In this book, I use the narrow political definition of Central Asia to refer to these five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Since 1995, I have faced the challenge of trying to explain the region to colleagues, students, and friends. After one trip to Kyrgyzstan, a colleague insisted I had been in Kurdistan (which does not yet exist, except in Northern Iraq and in the maps of Kurdish separatist movements).
“No, K-oe-rg-oe-zstan,” I replied, trying to wrap my tongue around the challenging Russian vowel “ы” in the first and second syllables. I gave the ten-second profile. “Poor country, former Soviet Union, borders China, beautiful mountains and lakes, nomadic herders with sheep and horses, lots of meat in the diet, bad hotels, slow Internet, very hospitable people.”
You would have thought the conflict in Afghanistan would have focused the attention of Westerners on the countries next door, but unfortunately it hasn’t. Just as medieval European maps tagged vast regions of Africa, Asia, and America as terra incognita, the five Central Asian republics are a geographical blank between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west and China to the east. To many Westerners, my travels in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan might as well have been on another planet. I had simply been in “Stanland.”
It’s difficult to know why we have so much trouble with the “stans.” The suffix, derived from a Persian word meaning “place of,” is similar in meaning to “land” in English, German, or Dutch. We have no problem distinguishing England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Finland, Poland, and Switzerland, and maybe even Greenland, Friesland, Rhineland, and Lapland. So why can’t we find Turkmenistan, let alone Balochistan, the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces?
Maybe it’s because we’re not as globally minded as we suppose. American ignorance—or perhaps ignore-ance better describes it—of the geography of Central Asia was famously lampooned on the cover of the December 10, 2001, edition of the New Yorker magazine, three months after September 11 (see page 10). The “New Yorkistan” cover satirically depicted the five boroughs and individual neighborhoods, mixing local and Yiddish names with suffixes common in Central Asia and the Middle East. Starting from their original idea, Bronxistan, the creators Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz took readers on a stroll in Manhattan’s Central Parkistan, hailed a cab at Taxistan (LaGuardia Airport), speculated in real estate at (Donald) Trumpistan, celebrated cultural diversity in Lubavistan (named for a branch of the Hasidic Jews) and Gaymenistan, and then ventured to the outer suburbs of Coldturkeystan and Extra Stan (traveling through Hiphopabad, passing by the Flatbushtuns and the district of Khandibar).6
Why are the “stans” important? In a 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” delivered at Britain’s Royal Geographical Society,
