There was no 21-gun salute, no honour guard, no full-dress White House press conference, no black-tie White House dinner, not even a real photo-op with President George W Bush.

Such was the welcome accorded Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, who opened his military bases to US military aircraft and at least 1,000 US Army Rangers during the military campaign in Afghanistan and pledged even more support to Bush's ''war against terrorism''.

Instead, Karimov got a 45-minute chat with Bush Tuesday before being politely and discreetly ushered to the door and sent on his way Exhibit Number One

The combination of those regional ambitions and a terrible human rights record makes Karimov Exhibit Number One for foreign-policy analysts who worry that Washington may repeat Cold War-era mistakes by forging alliances of convenience with governments whose policies may aggravate precisely the problems which it says it is trying to combat.

''Propping up Uzbekistan as a regional hegemon not only would fail to address but would actually exacerbate a key source of Central Asian instability: the domestic political repression that fosters the radicalisation of Islamist movements and galvanises popular support behind them,'' according to Pauline Jones Luong of Yale University and Erika Weinthal of Tel Aviv University in Israel, co-authors of an article in the latest edition of the influential magazine Foreign Affairs.

At the urging of US diplomats, Karimov took some symbolic steps on the eve of his trip here — notably, officially registering a long-standing domestic human rights group — to show he is not insensitive to Washington's concerns.

But most regional experts dismissed the move as a token. They point to Karimov's failure to follow through on a pledge last summer to release 1,000 political prisoners and his recent manoeuvre to add two more years to his term in office, to 2007. Washington denounced the ploy but, by the following week, announced it was tripling aid to US$160 million for the year. Three weeks later, Karimov got his White House invitation.

''There is no reason to give away benefits like assistance or summit without some strings attached,'' said Elizabeth Andersen, HRW's Europe and Central Asia division director.

However, the strings that Washington has decided to attach are connected in the first instance to the Pentagon, where Karimov was greeted Wednesday by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and an honour cordon.