Central Asia Online

» see centralasiaonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Central Asia Online looked like a regional news portal and said in its own disclaimer that it was not one. The About page, in the stiff register of a government lawyer: "CentralAsiaOnline.com is a website sponsored by USCENTCOM to highlight movement toward greater regional stability both through bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements." Underneath that it confirmed two things worth keeping. The correspondents filing the stories were paid, and the output carried no copyright, so anyone could reprint any of it.

It was one of eight sites in the Trans Regional Web Initiative, a Pentagon program begun in 2008 and run under contract by General Dynamics Information Technology, which put more than a hundred and twenty million dollars of defense money into foreign-language web publishing. The same program produced Al-Shorfa for the Arab world and SETimes for the Balkans. This one took the five Central Asian republics, then added Afghanistan and a standing Pakistan section.

Turkey watches that region closely, as kin rather than as a foreign beat, and I grew up with Turkish coverage of the Turkic republics in the background. This site was not for that audience. It published in Russian, Persian, English and Urdu, and the Russian edition was the default, because the readers it wanted were reading Russian.

The stories read like a regional wire service that only cares about one subject. Two headlines off the final homepage, in Russian: Kyrgyzstan publishes its first Islamic magazine, and Pakistan freezes bank accounts linked to militants. It carried sport and entertainment sections as well, which filled out the front page.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the line item ~

The journalism about it was harsher than the journalism on it. David Trilling wrote the definitive piece for Foreign Policy in November 2011, noting that the Uzbekistan coverage downplayed the government's rights abuses and promoted its claims about terrorist threats, sometimes contradicting what the US State Department itself was saying that same week.

USA Today ran a long investigation into the program. Then, in the defense authorization act for fiscal 2014, Congress wrote: "None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for fiscal year 2014 for the Department of Defense may be obligated or expended for the Trans Regional Web Initiative." It left two million dollars to pay Special Operations Command for terminating the thing. Joshua Kucera covered it for Eurasianet on 8 January 2014 under a headline about Congress pulling the plug.

~ how long a defunded site keeps going ~

Fourteen months, in this case. Articles kept appearing through 2014 and into the first quarter of 2015, which suggests contracts that had to be run out or a successor program absorbing the staff. The last piece carries the date 13 March 2015. The Internet Archive's final full capture of the front page is from two days later, twelve kilobytes of headlines in Russian with the four language links still across the top.

By March 2016 the same address answered with under four hundred bytes. Today centralasiaonline.com redirects to a Vietnamese football streaming site.

~ what is still standing ~

The beats did not disappear. A second generation of US-funded sites picked them up, all of them running under subdomains of asia-news.com rather than their own brands: Caravanserai for Central Asia, Salaam Times for Afghanistan. Pakistan Forward took the third beat. Two of those three now answer with a page reading "Website Unavailable", and only Salaam Times is still publishing, in Persian.

The language choice is the part that stays with me. A US military program aimed at Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan led with Russian, because Russian is what the region reads, which means the Pentagon spent seven years making its case to Central Asia in the language of the empire that used to run it.

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