Why Didn't Clinton Go to Turkmenistan?

US Department of State, US Embassy Ashgabat

Top: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Town Hall, Dushanbe, October 22, 2011; Bottom: USAID seminar on e-government, Ashgabat, November 2, 2011

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Central Asia October 20-23, visiting Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to discuss issues of regional stability and the State Department's new Silk Road initiative.

Given how important Ashgabat's role has been in assisting the US on the Northern Distribution Network to deliver non-lethal goods to troops in Afghanistan, why didn't Clinton visit Turkmenistan?

That question has been batted around among some Central Asia-watchers, and there was even a rumor that the Turkmen leadership didn't want Clinton to visit last month, even though she was right next door.

An audience member posed the question yesterday
at a conference on Central Asia organized by the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, DC.

Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert O. Blake, Jr., the keynote speaker at the conference, supplied an answer: because the Turkmens were celebrating their 20th anniversary of independence on October 27, and were busy.

Although Clinton was in the area a full week before Turkmenistan's independence day, that seemed a plausible answer. Ashgabat became increasingly conscious of its stated "neutrality" and need for autonomy from the great powers of the world the closer it came to the independence jubilee. So Clinton landing alone without equivalent visits from other world leaders was obviously something the Turkmen leadership wanted to avoid.

Blake stressed that Turkmenistan "plays an important role" with assistance to Afghanistan and is planning to "quadruple the electricity" delivered to its neighbor.

A reporter asked Blake, "Does anyone talk about democracy in this region anymore?" The Arab Spring seems to have attracted most of the discussions about democracy these days.

Blake assured him such issues were raised, and in reply to another question about Uzbekistan's poor human rights record, he gestured to the audience where several Central Asian ambassadors were seated, and said, "We focus on human rights in the region probably more than our partners in the region would like us to."

Most of this focus take place through quiet or Aesopian diplomacy, however. In his congratulatory remarks to Turkmenistan in Ashgabat on the occasion of its independence anniversary. US Ambassador Robert Patterson thanked Turkmenistan for its "positive neutrality" and "constructive relations with its neighbors" but as for human rights or democracy, this was as close as it got:

The United States highly values Turkmenistan’s contributions to regional stability and economic integration. We agree with your government that closer regional cooperation will foster stability and promote prosperity, and we are eager to work with Turkmenistan in further integrating the free flow of energy, goods, and information.

The "free flow of information" isn't about anything like independent media or circumvention technology to defy Internet filtering in Turkmenistan, however, but runs more to staid affairs like the seminar held November 2 with USAID and Turkmenistan's Presidential National Institute of Democracy on "modern technologies in civil service" where Turkmen officials learned about "e-government and e-document workflow management."

It doesn't look as if we'll be seeing any e-release of political prisoners, much less e-democracy or even that promised state-controlled second political party, but perhaps there's an app for that.