آیا تو نمی بینی که بدن خود را دارند می سوزند متروک و پر از حسرت

Рӯзи Артиши миллӣ муборак! Happy National Army Day!

Ok, so I’m a few days early, but from the TV messages (often featuring soldiers and equipment from countries as non-Tajik as Russia, Kazakhstan, and Abkhazia) on state-run TBC, to Rudaki Ave being blocked yesterday so hundreds of soldiers could pile in front of the massive Ismail Somoni statue in practice for Saturday, you know what’s coming. An outpouring of support for the country’s armed forces, a full two decades after their founding. And what a twenty years it’s been…

Being American, I am by no means qualified to make quips about a country “ worshipping” its army. Tajikistan has been through some pretty awful things since independence, topping the list is the civil war that firmly destroyed what little infrastructure it originally had, and is probably the biggest cause of the country’s many snafus. With 2014, and the disaster that is likely to be post-ISAF Afghanistan on the horizon, the army is going to be getting a lot more focus, both at home and abroad.

But…

The army’s not innocent. Nothing in Tajikistan really is (or, I’d argue, could be); but this force, the one that keeps such baddies as Islamic terrorism out of the country, also lets in quite a bit of drugs. Corruption’s bad, and when it’s not things being done through omission (or actively so), the army was the force that mercilessly came down on the city of Khorugh in late July, killing somewhere between 70 and over 200 people. Arguments could made the latter was a case of “national security”, but there’s no argument that the helicopters and snipers shooting at civilians was excessive.

I've said before that Tajikistan has the tools and the innate abilities to improve itself. I’m hesitant of saying that the army should be a vehicle for that, just because the army as such a force can either be good (South Korea, I say tentatively) or really, really, really bad (pretty much every other country that did that). The point I want to make is that, while the Tajik government throws what I can only assume are hundreds of thousands of somonis into pomp and circumstance, maybe they could adjust that towards just benefitting the soldiers and their families? Or working towards something, anything, that doesn't look like glorified cock-waving…these people deserve better.

Hopefully I’ll do something exciting soon so I stop writing about conceptual nonsense. But with the weather looking horrible every else but the capital…don’t count on it.

As always: Ташаккуру Худо ҳафез.