Tangle - Kazakhstan, explained.

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

If you've been reading the news recently, you have probably stumbled across some stories about Kazakhstan. The country is currently in the midst of civil unrest that has left at least 164 people dead,... and more than 5,800 civilians detained. Today, we breakdown what's going on.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.
Starting point is 00:01:00 From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Kazakhstan and some of the riots and protests and civil unrest that's been happening there, why it's happening. This has been a really big reader listener requested issue there's been a lot in the news recently and i don't think enough background information on what's going on so we're going to try and break it down for you today and then give you some opinions some interesting thoughts and commentary from some people across the political spectrum
Starting point is 00:01:58 as always before we jump in i want to start with some quick hits. First up, the White House announced it was giving $308 million of additional aid to Afghanistan, bringing the total U.S. aid for the impoverished country and Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $782 million since October. in the region to nearly $782 million since October. Number two, Richard Clarida, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, resigned yesterday amid scrutiny over financial transactions he made at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Number three, President Biden said yesterday that private health insurance companies will need to reimburse the cost of at-home COVID-19 tests beginning on Saturday. As many as eight per month can be
Starting point is 00:02:46 reimbursed. Number four, Biden will also announce his support for a filibuster carve-out in Atlanta today in order to pass Democrats' voting rights legislation by a simple majority vote. The change does not have the support of Senator Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. Number five, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California, and Senator John Ossoff, the Democrat from Georgia, have both said they are considering a push for legislation that bans lawmakers from trading certain stocks. And that brings us to today's topic, which is Kazakhstan. If you have been reading the news recently, you have probably stumbled across some stories about Kazakhstan. The country is currently in the midst of civil unrest that has left at least 164 people dead and more than 5,800 civilians
Starting point is 00:03:42 detained. Before we get started, I want to apologize in advance. There are some complicated, tricky names here. I've done my best to learn to pronounce them, but you know, if I mess it up and you're a native speaker or something, you can email me and complain. Isaac at readtangle.com. Thousands of people have been detained in Kazakhstan after several days of unrest. Protests started January 2nd over a rise in oil prices. Protests in Kazakhstan sparked by anger over rising fuel prices have intensified this week. The president has ordered security forces to shoot without warning. He is declaring victory and putting down demonstrations with the assistance of Russian troops.
Starting point is 00:04:22 And to a dramatic escalation now in the unrest in Kazakhstan, the president there giving shoot to kill orders for anti-government protesters without warning. So we'll start with some background. Kazakhstan is a large country that sits in Central Asia and borders both Russia and China. It's an arid, mountainous region, and despite its size, just 19 million people live there. For context, it's about as big as Western Europe, which has a population of 196 million people. Kazakhstan has been a part of the Soviet Union, but gained independence in 1991 after the Soviet Union's collapse. Despite having some of the largest uranium and oil reserves in the world, and producing some 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, which is about
Starting point is 00:05:05 2% of the world's crude oil, the average income of citizens there is about 2,800 USD a year. Still, that number is a tad bit misleading given that incomes tend to be higher in cities while many live in poverty in the rural areas of the country. The poverty rate in Kazakhstan has also fallen substantially over the last 20 years. So, who runs Kazakhstan? From 1990 to 2019, Kazakhstan was run by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had strong ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and was a member of the Communist Party. Nazarbayev focused most of his time as president on economic reforms and never embraced democracy. In 2019, he resigned as president to give way to Kazakhstan's current
Starting point is 00:05:45 president, Qasem Yomart Tokayev. Then, Tokayev brought Nazarbayev on to lead his security council. So, what just happened? Well, a few weeks ago, Tokayev announced that he was lifting the price cap on liquefied petroleum gas, also known as LPG. Kazakhs had bought cars that run on LPG because it is cheaper than other kinds of fuel, so the removal of a price cap in oil-rich Kazakhstan was met with fury. The price of LPG doubled almost immediately. Protests are illegal in Kazakhstan without a government permit. Previous demonstrations have been dealt with harshly, according to the BBC, and this one was no different. Russian peacekeeping troops were sent in under the authority of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, also known as CSTO, and some 2,500 soldiers were deployed. It's the
Starting point is 00:06:31 first time CSTO has been used in this manner. So why is the unrest so acute? Well, Philip M. Nichols, a member of UPenn's Russia and East European Studies program, laid out three reasons. First, protesting is in the fabric of Kazakhstan. Many of its citizens have repeatedly hit the streets over economic issues, land sales, or other grievances in the last 30 years. Second, despite being fabulously wealthy, supplying nearly half of the world's uranium and a chunk of its oil, Kazakhstan's wealth is highly concentrated and most Kazakhs don't benefit from the sale of natural resources. Finally, number three, the economic disruption caused by lifting the LPG price controls. So now what? Once protesters hit the streets, it became clear this was about more than just fuel prices. As Nichols put it,
Starting point is 00:07:16 there is an underlying dissatisfaction being acted on. Some tried to tear down statues of Nazarbayev, who has kept a powerful position in government despite resigning. Tokayev responded to the protests by removing Nazarbayev and other top government officials from their posts. He also reinstated the cap on LPG prices. But that has not satisfied protesters. The country has also spent much of the week sealed off from the outside world. Its largest airports are closed or have been taken over by the Russian troops who are part of CSTO. Phone lines and internet services were down, so information coming out of the country has been hard to come by. It's unclear exactly how the situation there might impact the world at large. Tokayev has declared that foreign agents helped prompt the opposition protests,
Starting point is 00:07:57 and given the strong relationship the U.S. currently has with Kazakhstan, that means our supporting those protesters could cause problems. This, obviously, is not a traditional issue to run through the American lens. I actually struggled to find any opinion pieces in English from Kazakh natives. So, below, we're just going to share some excerpts from opinion pieces about what's happening in Kazakhstan that I think add valuable insight. This is not the normal right-versus-left dichotomy. First up, Josh Rogin said in the Washington Post that the West should use Putin's new problem to dissuade him from recklessly starting another crisis in Ukraine. To be sure, Putin has long preached about reasserting Russian control
Starting point is 00:08:45 over all of the former Soviet territories, including Kazakhstan. Putin has said the country was artificially invented by former Prime Minister and President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who founded and ruled it for more than three decades as a thinly-veiled dictatorship, mimicking Putin's own model. Though still pulling strings, the now 81-year-old Nazarbayev has clearly lost control of the situation, forcing him to go to Putin for own model. Though still pulling strings, the now 81-year-old Nazarbayev has clearly lost control of the situation, forcing him to go to Putin for emergency help. For the first time, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, CSTO, has deployed troops inside Kazakhstan, supposedly at Kazakhstan's request to fight regular citizens the government now calls
Starting point is 00:09:22 terrorists. It's still early and much is unknown, but there's a real risk that the Kazakhstan crisis could turn into a quagmire Russia wasn't planning for. Ed Morrissey noted cheekily that Putin is not a fan of popular uprisings. While the U.S. and NATO negotiate to de-escalate the war in Ukraine, Russian troops landed in Kazakhstan overnight to put down a popular uprising against the Moscow-friendly government. Putin ordered it under a collective security agreement with several of the former Soviet republics on Russia's border, but the question will be whether they ever leave. Russian troops now occupy Crimea and parts of the Donbass, a situation that has been ongoing for eight years now. In 2008, Putin sent troops into Georgia and forcefully severed its Abkhazia and South Ossetia provinces. Putin also made it clear that he would use his military might in Belarus if
Starting point is 00:10:11 necessary to keep Putin's toady Alexander Lukashenko in power in the face of a popular uprising there. The Bloomberg editorial board said ordinary Kazakhs have plenty of reason of their own to be angry, and Tolikv would be better off addressing that frustration than trying to violently suppress it. A host of wider grievances helped the unrest spread quickly. Rising inflation has eaten into pocketbooks and deepened already stark inequality, the board said. A wealthy elite is seen as siphoning off much of the country's oil and mineral wealth. State services have languished, even as citizens have been allowed little say in their own governance. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, overrunning government buildings, police stations, and the airport in Almaty.
Starting point is 00:10:58 By Friday, when Tokayev's claimed order had largely been restored, more than three dozen protesters had been reported killed, the board said. Crowds directed their ire in particular at Nursultan Nazarbayev, who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades before installing Tokayev as his successor in 2019. Even after stepping down, Nazarbayev has continued to wield influence as the head of the country's security council, while his family members grew rich In the Wall Street Journal, John Bolton said the West needs to be firm with Putin as he seeks to expand his control. Doubtless, Moscow finds it unhelpful to have a bordering autocracy thrown into turmoil, but the West is badly mistaken and potentially at risk to see the opportunities presented to Mr. Putin, Bolton said. His strategy to re-establish Russian hegemony within the borders of former USSR has been both patient and agile, and Kazakhstan's trouble afford him significant possibilities. This first CS-2 deployment into a member country contravenes its charter, which
Starting point is 00:12:01 refers only to defending against external aggression, Bolton wrote. The initial 2,500-man force is nearly all Russian, and Mr. Tokayev has given orders to shoot to kill without warning. Other Russian operations in Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh, the territories central to the Azerbaijan and Armenia conflict, are also poorly disguised Russian expeditionary forces, helping Moscow sustain conflicts throughout the former Soviet Union. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history,
Starting point is 00:12:45 and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. This prevents countries from reducing Kremlin influence, hampers potential Western investment because of increased political risk, and quite possibly facilitates the reintegration of the independent states into Russia's empire. In DW, Andrei Gurkov said the unrest will deter Moscow's aggression. A Russian military operation on Ukrainian territory
Starting point is 00:13:45 has now become less likely, Kirkov wrote. There are two reasons for this. One is that a Russian military intervention could lead to domestic instability inside Russia similar to the unrest unfolding in Kazakhstan. The other stems from the fact that Russia must now dedicate much more attention to its southern neighbor, Kazakhstan. Until now, Kazakhstan was considered largely a stable country with a dependable government, Kirko said. The fact that thousands of frustrated Kazakhs are now venting their anger should be a warning to the Kremlin. It should compel Russia to consider the domestic implications of a threatened or alleged military operation with which it is currently trying to intimidate the U.S. and NATO. So far, Russia only seems to have weighed upon what
Starting point is 00:14:25 impact such a move would have on its foreign policy and trade. Given the crisis in Kazakhstan, however, Russia may now also have growing doubts over whether its population would back it. The Guardian's editorial board warned of danger ahead. The West's limited influence, but it is not without leverage, the board said. Large sums of Kazakh money are sequestered in London, where British professional service providers enable post-Soviet elites to launder their money and reputations, a stinging Chatham House report noted last month.
Starting point is 00:14:54 Anti-corruption campaigners have rightly urged that as the rich and well-connected flee, law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, and service providers should be watching carefully and reporting freezing and seizing assets as appropriate. The U.S., EU, and UK should also do their utmost to urge the leadership to respect the protesters' rights. All right, that is it for the opinions on today's issue, which brings us to my take. So obviously, the intricacies of the situation in Kazakhstan are not my area of expertise, though I'm certain there's a Tangle reader typing away already, so I'm ready for you. One of the insightful excerpts I really loved while researching this piece came from Penn's Philip M. Nichols.
Starting point is 00:15:46 He said this about the protesters. Kazakhstani people are pretty much like people here, and the things that go on here are the things that go on there. We don't want to look at what's going on there and say, oh, we can make this simple. It's a bunch of ex-nomads who are pissed off about having to pay more for car fuel and are mad at their dictator government. This situation is as complicated as the issues that we have going on here. We need to think about it in the same way, that there isn't a simple explanation, nor is there a simple solution, and these people are not one-issue caricatures. They're complicated people with complicated lives in a fulsome system.
Starting point is 00:16:21 They're just like us, and they're really, really brave. It's cold in Kazakhstan right now, and they're out there every day with special forces shooting at them. You've got to admire that kind of courage. What I can say, having followed so much about Russian and global politics, is that Kazakhstan has long been considered one of the most stable of the Central Asian countries that rose out of the Soviet Union's collapse. Despite its history of civil unrest and the culture of protest that has helped shape the country's destiny, reading about hundreds of people being killed and thousands more jailed in street protests is a truly horrifying turn of events.
Starting point is 00:16:54 Frightening, too, is this first use of the CSTO in a domestic military action, one that could soon be replicated in other former Soviet countries in the region. It seems the punditry is largely divided on whether these developments will deter or embolden Putin. On one hand, it's a reminder of how disruptive a civilian revolt can be, one that often feels on the precipice of occurring even in Russia, where dissatisfaction has been high. On the other hand, Russian troop presence in Kazakhstan may not be temporary, only adding to the long reach Putin has in the region, which now extends across Central Asia. It'd be nothing more than an educated guess to say what is going to happen, but it's a situation worth watching for the rest of the world, even though it may
Starting point is 00:17:33 feel distant and irrelevant right now. All right, next up is our reader question today. This one comes from Tay in Mesquite, Nevada. This is a response to something I wrote in yesterday's podcast and newsletter. So if you don't like putting people who break the law into prison, what do you want to do with them? Are you one of those used social service workers versus police and prisons? Okay, so it's important not to conflate issues here. Okay, so it's important not to conflate issues here. The question of who should respond in 911 calls, armed police, social services workers,
Starting point is 00:18:13 both or somewhere in between, is separate from what to do with people who have already committed crimes. I have a lot of thoughts about both, but in yesterday's reader question, I was referring to the latter, what to do with people who already committed crimes. To start with, you need to work from my baseline, which is that prisons may work as punishment if our model is an eye for an eye, but they do not work as a means of rehabilitation. There are a million different ways to make this point, but the most obvious is that two out of three former prisoners are rearrested within three years, and 77% are rearrested within five years. This is known as the recidivism rate, the rate at which released prisoners are rearrested, and it is startlingly high in the U.S. In Norway, the recidivism rate
Starting point is 00:18:49 is just 20%. To simplify this point further, if your son is cursing regularly and every time he curses you took away his phone as punishment, and then eight out of ten times he got his phone back he started cursing again within five days, you'd likely conclude your punishment is not working. Yet somehow we have not come to that conclusion about prisons, despite the fact that instead of taking a phone away, we are separating people from their families, destroying most opportunities they'll ever have at getting a job, and sometimes subjecting them to abject torture. Given the baseline that our prisons are dysfunctional, inhumane, inefficient, short-staffed, and also do not deter people from committing more crime, there are two fundamental options when it comes to this question. Do we want to reform the prisons we have, or do we want to just use them a lot less? Reformation would
Starting point is 00:19:35 likely mean tearing down and rebuilding many of the jails and prisons we have now. It'd mean moving to a system more like Norway's, where inmates are better prepared to re-enter society when they finish their terms. That is what success would look like. Using prisons less would mean not having 1.8 million people incarcerated at a time, as we did at the end of 2020. If all our prisons were made a city, it'd be the fifth most populous city in America behind just New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. If you think this is a working prison system, I'm not really sure what to say. With rare exceptions like Bernie Madoff, who comes to mind, I don't think non-violent criminals should be in jail at all. If we're going to imprison violent criminals, which is a rational thing to do, we should put them in prisons that make them less violent, not more violent. Right now, we're doing the opposite of that. Obviously, this is not a simple issue, but my point yesterday and the radical view of mine I was alluding to
Starting point is 00:20:27 is that it is crystal clear to me that our prison systems are not working. They are the opposite of working. They're actively making our country a worse place to live for millions of people, preying on the poor, destroying livelihoods and families, and not even coming remotely close to what they were supposed to be doing, which is deterring crime and thus keeping all of us safer. Thus, I think it is pretty reasonable to believe that we should change what we're doing. All right, that brings us to our story that matters for the day.
Starting point is 00:20:58 So with COVID-19 spreading rapidly due to the Omicron variant, one metric many epidemiologists and Americans have been keeping an eye on is the number of hospitalizations. Yesterday, the U.S. hit a grim milestone. Tuesday's total of 145,982 people in U.S. hospitals with COVID-19 broke the previous record from January of 2021. Colorado, Oregon, Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia have now declared public health emergencies or authorized crisis standards of care, which allow hospitals and ambulances to restrict treatment when they cannot meet demand.
Starting point is 00:21:32 The good news is there are still fewer people in the ICU than at the peak of the pandemic. Omicron still appears to be less severe and cause fewer deaths. And many of the COVID-positive cases are people who went to the hospital to treat another ailment but tested positive for asymptomatic COVID upon arrival. All right, and some numbers today. These are from Kazakhstan. The percentage of Kazakhstani population who are ethnic Russians is 20.2 percent. The percentage of Kazakhstani people who are Muslim is 70.2 percent. The percentage of Kazakhs who lived in a rural part of the country is 42.6 percent, and 40 percent is the percentage of the world's uranium output that comes from Kazakhstan. Five is the number of countries that
Starting point is 00:22:18 border Kazakhstan, including Russia and China. And finally, last but not least, our have a nice day section. This one is about the James Webb Space Telescope, which has just begun its flight, but it's already sending home some good news. It's full of fuel. One of the unknowns on the launch was how much fuel would be used, which is dependent on how accurately the telescope was thrown into orbit and then into space. Right now, because of the efficiency or the accuracy with which Ariane 5 put us on orbit and our accuracy and effectiveness implementing our mid-course corrections, we have quite a bit of fuel margin right now relative to 10 years, Bill Aux, the Webb project
Starting point is 00:22:59 manager said, speaking of an earlier fuel estimate. Instead, they estimate the telescope has fuel for 20 years. The telescope is expected to perch 1 million miles from Earth. The telescope is expected to perch 1 million miles from Earth before settling in and observing the distant galaxies. Space.com has the update in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, that's it for the podcast today. As always, if you want to support our work, go to the episode description and pledge to become a supporter. So you like the podcast, you listen to it a lot, you know, we need your help.
Starting point is 00:23:33 Just click a few links in there and see what happens. Either way, we'll see you tomorrow. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com.
Starting point is 00:24:45 Thanks for watching! inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur,
Starting point is 00:25:19 and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.

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