At the tail end of my brief radio interview, I said that Turkmenistan was going to be an interesting place to watch in the near future, as we must see whether or not Uncle Berdi would actually put into place the liberal reforms he hinted at during the run up to his assumption of power. At the very least, he seems open to the idea, asking his bureaucracy to do some promising things, like allowing students to study at foreign universities, trying to revive local research universities, building medical clinics in the severely depressed countryside, and even looking at an increase in tourism.
It may not amount to much (especially with the severe speech controls still in place), but it is an encouraging sign nevertheless. My big question, which isn’t new, is: where is the U.S.? This is a prime example of demonstrating through actions instead of pretty rhetoric and crashing budgets. Central Asia should matter to American policymakers, and there are incredible advantages to positively engaging Turkmenistan. Yet… the White House is silent on the issue. Our loss, I suppose.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Evan Feigenbaum, the deputy assistant undersecretary for Central Asian and South Asian affairs, is apparently the one on doing the most on the ground–in both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan–with fairly positive-sounding results. He seems pretty realistic too, as you can see here. While I can see the benefits of a louder policy, the quiet approach has its pros as well: not stepping on Russian toes, not making it look like energy greed, not being a threatening force in what might be a not totally stable political situation there.
If the best we send is a deputy assistant undersecretary, then we are demonstrating to them how serious we are about engagement. Compare a deputy assistant undersecretary with the Russian Defense Ministry, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and so on. When we send peons to mingle with heads of state, we make ourselves not matter.
That’s true to a certain extent, but Russia and Turkey are less worried about seeming to support weirdo dictators indiscriminately. Also, if we start by sending the lower level guy, and then suggest that if they do something we like, we’ll send the higher-up guy, then there’s a reason for them to do a little reform–it gets them the legitimizing photo-op with Condi or Gates. For a while now we’ve done high-level trips (I’m thinking of Rumsfeld’s, but I’m sure there have been others) to shake hands with folks who are basically glorified mob bosses. It hasn’t gotten us much. Why not make them do a little work before we lavish our attention? People don’t bother spending money on cows if they can get the milk for free.