A Central Asianist distills decades of research into an interactive digital timeline

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States opened two military bases in Central Asia to support its war in Afghanistan. The first was the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, opened in October 2001, followed two months later by the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan (later known as the Manas Transit Center). Karshi-Khanabad closed in 2005, after the Uzbek government opened fire on Muslim protestors in Andijan, and the United States (reluctantly) pressured the Uzbek government to clean up its human rights record. The Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan closed in July 2014, after the Kyrgyz government finally gave in to prolonged pressure from Russia to evict the U.S. troops stationed there.

More than a decade after the last U.S. soldiers left, the legacy of those military bases lives on. There’s a geopolitical perspective—Russia and China have thwarted U.S. attempts to reinstate bases in the region. And there is an environmental aftermath—veterans’ groups in the United States and Uzbekistan are suing the U.S. Department of Defense for information about environmental toxicity at the base in Uzbekistan, which the groups believe may explain high rates of cancer among troops that served there.

To document this evolution, former Harriman director Alexander Cooley (Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, Barnard College) and Emma Larson (MARS-REERS ’25) created an interactive digital timeline of U.S. military bases in Central Asia, published on the Harriman Institute website in fall 2024. “A timeline is a naturally-fitting tool to scaffold the rise and decline of something,” said Cooley, who has been researching U.S. military involvement in Central Asia since he joined the faculty at Barnard in fall of 2001.

During his first semester, he taught the large university-wide “Introduction to International Politics” class. On the day of his second lecture, 9/11 happened. “And it takes me down this research path of writing about some of the behind-the-scenes tradeoffs that are being made with these [Central Asian] governments to establish military access,” Cooley said. One such tradeoff involved a transnational fuel-smuggling ring in Omsk, Russia, that supplied the Manas facility in the late 2000s, at a time when the Russian government was trying to close the base. “So, on the one hand, you have the geopolitical tug of war,” said Cooley. “On the other hand, behind the scenes, you have this fuel smuggling ring where everyone’s working together and making a load of money.” These dynamics inspired Cooley’s second book, Base Politics, about U.S. military influence abroad.

The nuances of a 23-year period that encapsulates a shifting geopolitical landscape are difficult to capture with writing alone, Cooley and Larson said, and the timeline allowed them to put seemingly disparate developments together in a comprehensive way. “You can add in geopolitical events that are not completely about the military bases the way you couldn’t in an essay,” Larson said.

Cooley said the timeline summarizes years of his research and can serve as a first step for researchers and journalists interested in the U.S. military presence and wider geopolitical dynamics in Central Asia.

“The military presence is a vehicle to talking about all the political and social dynamics and upheavals going on at the time,” he said.

Cooley and Larson said they will continue adding to the timeline as events unfold. “We want it to be adaptable, to be a breathing, evolving thing,” said Cooley. ◆

View the Central Asia Military Base Timeline here.

Featured photo: Concertina wire lines the perimeter at the Transit Center at Manas, Kyrgyzstan, in December 2013. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons courtesy of the U.S. Air Force