How much do you know about Kyrgyzstan?

Me neither. That is, until two weeks ago, when a small item in USA Today announced that the Pentagon has confirmed it is building a permanent new air base in the former Soviet republic.

On the face of it, this seems unremarkable. As the military campaign in Afghanistan has continued, so have U.S. efforts to build more permanent military alliances in the region.

Except that this has nothing to do with Afghanistan, with whom Kyrgyzstan does not share a border, and everything to do with China, whose border will be a mere 200 miles from the new air base and with whom the Bush Administration has spent its first year eagerly promoting a new arms race.

Kyrgyzstan is the easternmost of the "stan" countries, all sharing their Islamic faith and Turkic languages (as do Uighur minorities in China's westernmost Xinjiang province.) Kyrgyzstan also has a significant Russian Orthodox minority, which, under and since the Communists, has tended to run things. It has less than five million people in a very landlocked, very mountainous, very dry, and very cold region slightly smaller than Kansas. The various new Central Asian countries, like most colonialist creations, have boundaries that completely ignore traditional ethnic territories--in this case, intentionally, as they were created by Stalin in the '20s to keep the various tribal groups at each others' throats.

As they remain; the US is wading into a complex region about which it knows very little. Previously, and ironically, the only notable attention the US has paid to the tiny country of Kyrgyzstan came in a State Department Country Report last year critical of its pseudo-democratic government's abuse of military tribunals--specifically, the use of such tribunals to prosecute prospective presidential rivals (including a former vice-president) before Pres. Askar Akaev's easy re-election in Oct. 2000.

The details--including the barring of the three leading opposition parties--are all ably spelled out at Human Rights Watch's web site (www.humanrightswatch.org). Kyrgyzstan also made HRW's list of a dozen countries that have used the diversion of the world's attention to commit human rights abuses in the wake of September 11, mostly directed against Islamic fundamentalists in the south of the country, near the Chinese border region.

In the post-September 11 world, all human rights abuses, including state terrorism, are forgiven by the US in the name of "fighting terrorism." Including forgiving the misuse of military tribunals by a pseudo-democracy headed by an illegitimate president. But September 11 isn't the pivotal event that makes Kyrgyzstan important.

More important by far is President Bush's decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty. That allows the US to proceed with testing and development of the National Missile Defense program, presumably to defend the US mainland against long-range missile attack. But the bigger purpose behind dismantling ABM is Theatre Missile Defense, the forward-deployed, short- and medium-range system meant to protect US soldiers, bases, and allies around the world. Under a 1997 agreement between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin exempting TMD development from the ABM, and with the full support of the Democrats, the development of TMD is much farther along.

The only thing that presently prevents these small regional TMD systems from being bundled together in one computer-coordinated, short-range, first-strike weapons system surrounding the planet is the ABM treaty. Which will be gone in June.

And, thus, Kyrgyzstan. Along with US bases in South Korea, Okinawa, and Australia--and offshore carriers--the Pentagon's brand new air base will allow the US military to completely encircle China.

It's hard to imagine a more threatening and provocative strategy, at exactly the time China has also been released from any arms control obligations imposed by the ABM or other treaties. It is a ready-made prescription for a new arms race and endlessly escalating Pentagon budgets, at best, and apocalyptic disaster, at worst. China, it should be obvious, is now (despite its own abysmally totalitarian government, or perhaps because of it) a critically important trading partner of the US. But an arms race, to military planners, has an independent logic, and to lawmakers with pork to procure, an arms race is the best sort of business.

There is, of course, the small matter of the War On Terrorism. Having the United States associate itself with yet another despotic government intent on victimizing Muslims--and where the armed resistance is linked with the same intricate network of Islamic warriors bin Laden tapped into--is hardly going to help prevent anti-American terrorism. There was much talk in September, you'll recall, of the greater awareness Americans would now have for what was being done by our government in our name in other parts of the world; It certainly hasn't been evident, and our government's behavior certainly hasn't improved.

But Kyrgyzstan, in the view of the Pentagon and White House, is small potatoes; China is the prize. And why not? We used Afghanistan to goad the Soviets. And look how well that worked.