Episode 47. The US, Kyrgyzstan & Central Asia: General Blaine Holt and Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller Explain How They Worked to Keep the Key US Base at Manas Despite Riots and Political Upheaval & Outline US Interests in this Key Region Bordering China and Russia

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US Military leaders in conversations about their partnerships and how they tackle some of our toughest national security problems. You can find all our podcasts and more information at generalambassadorpodcast.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, and I'm the producer and host of the series. Today, our conversation will be on US security interests in Central Asia, and more specifically the US relationship with Kyrgyzstan. Our guests today are General Blaine Holt and ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller. General Holt was the Commander of the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing and the Transit Center at Manas in Kyrgyzstan from 2009 to 2010. He also commanded the 16th Airlift and the 817th Expeditionary Airlift squadrons. After his work in Kyrgyzstan, he served as Deputy United States Military Representative at NATO. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer at Alchemai based in Seattle, Washington. Ambassador Gfoeller was the US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan from 2008 to 2011. Subsequently, she was the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Army, and also the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Chief of the National Guard Bureau. She has taught at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and is currently the president of American Women for International Understanding. General Holt, Ambassador Gfoeller, welcome to our podcast. I want to thank you, especially, for joining us via zoom for our episode today, where we'll talk about US security interests in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia. To start, I want to give a little bit of background to our listeners. In fact, I suggest that our listeners pull up a map to put all this in context. Kyrgyzstan or the Kyrgyz Republic is a relatively poor country in central Asia. It borders China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Most of Kyrgyzstan was annexed by Russia in 1876. It then became part of the Soviet Republic after the Bolshevik revolution. In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it became independent. It has a population of about 6 million, mostly Muslim, and made up of many ethnic groups. It is still economically dependent on Russia and Russian is one of the official languages of the country. After 9/11, Kyrgyzstan agreed to the establishment of a US base at the Manas International Airport, outside of the capital Bishkek. The U S military used the airfield for refueling, airlift, medical evacuation, and support for US and coalition personnel and cargo transiting in and out of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. So I wanted to start with you General, it's often noted that something like 98% of coalition forces that went to Afghanistan, traveled through the base at Manas. Why was that? Weren't there other ways to get in and out of Afghanistan?

Gen. Holt (03:21): First off, it's great to be here on the podcast with you, but the bottom line answer is there's a lot of ways into every single country and there's a lot of puts and takes that go with that. To back it up just a little bit, a little bit of context. My first time into Kyrgyzstan was as a young captain in 1992, at the fall of the wall, we were standing up embassies all over the place, doing support for the State Department to get into place. When I was standing there looking at the Tien-Shan mountain range, if somebody had told me on that day, that you'll be back here in many years from now, and this will be one of the most important places in geopolitical history right here. And you'll be the commander of a base that, that'll do everything, I would have said no. But the world's largest bed and breakfast is what Manas had become since 9/11, for us in the mobility world, getting air cargo in and out, and really the air is the only way to get to Afghanistan. There's a variety of puts and takes. One of them is not just monetary cost, which is exorbitant if you fly from much further away than Manas, but it's also the wear and tear on a very aging airlift and tanker fleet that we had during the time. So the options to come out of countries like Azerbaijan, maybe Turkey, and others looked very unappealing and more so on the wear and tear on the fleet side. The setup was that four months before I came to Kyrgyzstan, it was announced that we were going to be evicted. And so everybody was calling me up saying, congratulations on your wing command, that you'll never command, since it'll be gone the day you show up. Then I heard from the generals that, by the way, we're going to do a surge, that's coming, and you'll be responsible for 98% of it. So you better figure it out. And so the mission became, quickly, hold the ground, even before I showed up.

Amb. McCarthy (05:02): Well, I wanted to ask precisely about that threat that you faced. I understand that in February, 2009, the then president of the country announced while he was on a visit to Moscow, that he was terminating the agreement that allowed us to have the base. As the US was planning, as you noted, to do a surge, I gather we, the US Government carried out quite a campaign to get the government to reverse its decision. So Ambassador, I wanted to ask you, you were a key figure in this renegotiation. Can you explain to our listeners how you engaged with the leaders of the country to get the decision reversed?

Amb. Gfoeller (05:39): Sure. With pleasure, and Deborah again, thank you for having me on your show. It's a wonderful show and I appreciate it. It's an honor. What you said is exactly correct. While on a visit to Moscow, the President announced that he was closing Manas, you can imagine how the State Department at the highest levels reacted. And I was the point woman to reverse that decision. I was basically told, as I said, at the highest levels, hold onto the base, no matter what. I had developed an excellent relationship with the Foreign Minister, Kadyrbek Sarbayev, a charming man, a China specialist. We really developed a rapport in the past. So as soon as this came down, I ran over to his office and I said, Kadyrbek, you know, this cannot stand. And he said, look, I agree with you. It's a terrible idea, but how can I stand up to my president? So we started a series of negotiations, he and I, and they were basically secret negotiations, trying to figure out what would it take to reverse that decision. Obviously, I don't want to go into anything classified, but part of the reasons for closing the base were pressure from the two main governments represented in Bishkek. You can guess which ones they were. Russia was very vocal about it. For a long time, we thought that Russia was the only one putting pressure on us to leave. After much sleuthing around, I realized that Russia was not the only one, that China was just as involved if not more, but China was very much behind the scenes, which is often their way of doing diplomacy. Whereas Russia has a much different way of doing diplomacy. So I realized that I was up against the two largest countries in the region and it was going to take a lot of effort. The way I handled that is again, I had excellent relations with the two ambassadors. At first, the Chinese ambassador just flatly denied that China was doing anything, but he came around and I said, look, this is not in your country's interests. We are bringing stability to the region. If we can't execute our mission in Afghanistan, then you, the neighbors, are going to be much more affected than the United States, which is oceans away. For short term gain, for a short term feeling of well, we showed the Americans and we kicked them out, you will be destabilizing your own region. And I made the exact same argument to the Russian Ambassador because I thought that that was really the only argument to make, that it was in their self interest for us to stay. But of course the president had already announced we were leaving. So how do you walk that back? As, often in these negotiations, and again, here, I don't want to get even near classified information, there is a monetary aspect. I was given a budget that I would be able to use to increase the rent.

Amb. McCarthy (08:27): That's right, because I remember reading that the rent had to go up substantially.

Amb. Gfoeller (08:31): So I was given a budget by the State Department. I was told okay, up to here, but no further, because as Blaine mentioned, it's very expensive to get into Afghanistan. But at a certain point, if you're paying so much for the base, then it's not worth it. They made the calculations, the State Department, I'm sure with the help of DoD, made the calculations at which point it's just not worth holding onto the base, and we will get other ways of getting in. So it was done very professionally and I was told, okay, negotiate with the Foreign Minister, figure it out. If he won't budge, then we're leaving. That's it. So that's what I did. It was very tense. At the time, he felt that because he was basically pro-American, or at least open to America, some of his colleagues were spying on him. He thought that his office was being bugged. So a lot of our negotiations were done in written form. I would come into his office and I would write something on a piece of paper. Then he would hand me a piece of paper and then he would tear these pieces of paper into tiny, tiny, tiny bits.

Amb. McCarthy (09:34): Did he then swallow them?

Amb. Gfoeller (09:36): Not that I know of, but it's possible. So, you see it was very cloak and dagger, and eventually it worked. And without going into detail, I can say that I saved the American taxpayer millions of dollars because we never did go up to the highest level that I had been allowed to go. We agreed on a much lower level and we also agreed to change the name and that was super important to the President, that it wouldn't be a base anymore, it would be a transit center. And when we had pulled all that together, me and the Foreign Minister, then I met with the President, made the same arguments to him that I had made to the two ambassadors, the stability argument, that you're next to Afghanistan and if we can't execute our mission, you know, your country Kyrgyzstan will be the first to suffer. I explained the monetary adjustments that we were making. And I explained that we were changing the name and after thinking about it, he said, okay. Basically, that's how we did it.

Amb. McCarthy (10:34): Before we move on to some key events that took place during your time together in Kyrgyzstan, I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the country's complicated ties with Russia. Russia itself has a base, also, in the country, and there are a lot of citizens of Kyrgyzstan who work in Russia, sending back money, remittances, that are very important to the country. I understand also that Russia has a very dominant role in the media in the country, cable, TV, television, obviously social media. On the other hand, Kyrgyzstan also seeks to play off Russia and the United States, it belongs to the Russian led collective security treaty organization, for example. So I wanted to ask both of you, can you explain a bit this complicated relationship and tell us how you worked together to push back on Russia's influence to advance US interests?

Amb. Gfoeller (11:27): Well, I would say keeping the base was the most important factor, you know, things change, but back then, it was absolutely crucial. As I explained earlier, having developed a very good relationship with the Russian Ambassador, he would invite me, in fact, when his bosses high level people from the Foreign Ministry of Russia would come, I would be invited to events. So we developed a close working relationship and once he had seen the light, that there really was not any good thing for Russia in kicking us out of the base, we were able to maintain a good relationship. You're absolutely right. Russia is completely dominant in culture in Kyrgyzstan, but a lot of young people at that time were very interested in learning English. Later on, I will discuss how we cooperated with Russia in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]. I think that we pushed back on Russia very strongly by keeping the base, but at the same time, we did it in a non-confrontational way.

Gen. Holt (12:28): To build on that, and keeping with the non-confrontational way. Great militaries have rivalries. There's no secret about that between the Russian and the United States Military over the decades. So I was greeted on my change of command day, presided over by our three-star, with a fly over, a very low fly over, of three Russian fighters. The good folks over at Kant Airbase on the other side of town just wanted to kind of give me a nice hello. And at the reception, the Chinese Defense Attaches were very helpful to point out that we had a great relationship to explore and so I felt that was wonderful and picked up on the challenge. And part of our strategy, Ambassador, was at a much lower level and not in any way, shape, or form touching into the very complicated mission that Ambassador Gfoeller was tackling. We wanted to make more relationships in Kyrgyz society, Kyrgyz culture, And so we wanted to kind of reach out. And there were times when we got into women's groups, we were promoting women's entrepreneurship on the base. Eventually one of those groups, their members would go on to be the interim President, but the Russian influence is pervasive all along the way. So a couple of public diplomacy things, to use State Department parlance, would be going in my dress blues on a live TV program that was not just broadcast in Bishkek to kind of remove some of the mystery about the transit center, but also that was being broadcast into Moscow as well. So one of the things that I thought was really especially wonderful was when the Ambassador and I, and some of our folks, were invited to be included at International Women's Day, where we were invited to get up in uniform and sing America the Beautiful with our airmen. And that was just broadcast all over the place. And it was a lovely event, but I'll stop here with a funny story on the Russian side. As we built out a lot of humanitarian projects and efforts, I thought it might be a very, very calming thing if I could get my counterpart, the Colonel who was running Kant Airbase to maybe touch up with us on some of those humanitarian efforts that we were doing, schools, you know, markets, this type of stuff. So I kept asking for him to kind of contact me, maybe come to Manas and we would work out a plan. And I wanted to do a workup about, well, who is this guy? Where does he come from? And let's figure it out. In the middle of the winter, 14 below Fahrenheit, nobody's flying any airplanes. We knew his birthday was a particular day in December, and I sent an airman out there with a very large bottle of Jack Daniels wrapped up in an aviation map where the front of the aviation map on the bottle had where he was born in Russia. And it was highlighted. Since we're both pilots, he would immediately understand the aviation map. And I sent it with my compliments on the occasion of his birthday and said, isn't it high time you and I had a drink? Why don't you come on out? And let's talk about what we can do together. The predictable outcome happened, the airmen came back with the gift and was told that the Colonel is not at the wing and won't be around for quite some time. And then the very next morning, the Russian Defense Attache, the Colonel there, he called me up, and we'd known each other for most of the year, very good relationship, he called me up laughing and he said, Blaine, that's the type of stuff we do to you. You don't do that stuff to us. I have a Colonel who is very shaken by this. But the end result is we kept chipping away. Now, one month after I left my command, July of 2010, the Russian military over there started actually coming together and contributing to some humanitarian efforts. So we were able to, far away from our capitals, set aside some differences and get to work on something that helped the people there.

Amb. Gfoeller (15:51): Let me follow up on that. Blaine was an amazing diplomat. If he wasn't a Colonel, then he would have been an ambassador. He was such a tsunami of activity in all of this humanitarian aid stuff. As you know, Kyrgyzstan is home to many, many NGOs. It's actually the only central Asian country that has many NGOs and Blaine was in with pretty much all of them, and particularly focusing on women's organizations, women's rights, women's businesses. Kyrgyzstan has a, it's not an egalitarian situation for women. The main thing that they do to women is called bride kidnapping. A woman will be going down the street and a guy will grab her and basically rape her. And then because of the honor of her family, she is forced to marry him. And this happens a lot. We at the embassy did a lot of work trying to prevent that, educating people that this is wrong, et cetera. It's a tribal tradition, but it's very hard to eradicate. Now in some cases to be fair, the girl and the boy already want to be together, but the families, for example, don't want them to marry, or the family doesn't have enough money for a dowry. So they pretend basically that it's a bride kidnapping. But unfortunately in many, many cases, it's a real bride kidnapping. Like I said, Blaine was fantastic on engaging with civil society, which not every military man knows how to do. And it's a beautiful example of, I think, what you're looking for, Deborah, of how the State Department and the Defense Department can work together for the common interests of the United States. Returning to the question about Russia, by holding onto the base, we maintained real military supremacy in Kyrgyzstan because Kant Airbase was nothing compared to ours. It really wasn't.

Amb. McCarthy (17:37): Oh, it was much smaller then.

Gen. Holt (17:39): It was a fixer upper.

Amb. Gfoeller (17:41): Yes, exactly. Exactly. We were state-of-the-art. It was a fixer-upper. Again, working between DoD and State, we maintained something that's very hard, as in soft power/hard power. That was a hard power thing, effective military supremacy in one of the central Asian countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet union. That was a difficult thing to do, as I said before, but we did it.

Gen. Holt (18:03): So I want to be able to just jump in here really quickly and say that I completely am grateful for Ambassador Gfoeller's leadership during that period of time. My reputation in the DoD has been a little more entrepreneurial, let's say, and a little more innovative and unconventional. Sometimes I am certain that there were projects that floated past the Ambassador's desk that she just went, what is that kid doing right now? And why, why is he doing it? And who's going to stop him. And there's a joint interagency task force out there that I call the Department of No. And oftentimes I'd go to General Petraeus and I'd go, well, the Department of No is at it again. All I want to do is feed a few orphans, is that so wrong? And we've got bureaucracy to stop me right cold in my tracks, because obviously this is the wrong thing to do. We should let the kids starve. And he would be, "all right, settle down." And Ambassador Gfoeller would translate that into the diplomatic language that was effective to get what we wanted. I just knew what my outcome was, but I learned a lot from her on how to pursue that in a more effective way with the art of negotiating the interagency of our country.

Amb. Gfoeller (19:05): So General Petraeus, speaking of him, he was a huge fan of Manas and he would come periodically to sort of inspect. But I also think he liked the Tien-Shan mountains. He would go running up a mountain in the snow. The funny thing was that his PolAd [Political Advisor] at the time was my husband. So Petraeus, who loves to tease, would always say that he had just brought him on a conjugal visit. And it had nothing to do with foreign policy or defense policy, but it was just for the Gfoellers to be able to get together. But we got back at him because we took him to this area of gorgeous mountains. We set up a yurt, which is a traditional Kyrgyz felt tent. We set up wonderful tea for him and he decided, no, he was going to run up the mountain. And all of his body guards were so disappointed. They'd been looking at the cookies and the tea and they were thinking, oh no. And then Patraeus turns to my husband says, come on PolAd you know, you've got to run up the mountain too. My husband's like, no, sir. They ride up the mountain and we had our tea, just the two of us. We ate all the cookies.

Amb. McCarthy (20:13): That was your visit, right.

Amb. Gfoeller (20:15): Right, that was our conjugal then. So we got back at him.

Gen. Holt (20:18): When it was the end of my tour. And we'd been through so much. He basically supported me for this, what we call in the military, the brass ring, I'm going to go on and be a Military Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. And I'm supposed to be happy about that. Here I am looking at all that we've done in Kyrgyzstan and I don't want to go. So I went to him privately and I said, sir, please don't do this. We're just getting going. I need another year here. Think of what we can do. We've got to see this through. He said, listen, let me let you in on a little something here. And he's still a mentor to me, to this day, which means he tolerates my insolent questions. But he said, Blaino, you've gone native. There's Lawrence of Arabia and there's Blaino of Bishkek. Okay. So you speak Kyrgyz, you built a yurt, you wear their hats, you got to go home. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And my people behind me, my sergeants and my colonels were all pointing to me going, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get 'em outta here.

Amb. Gfoeller (21:11): That's a great story.

Gen. Holt (21:12): I loved it there. And I'm going back very soon. I've got some business interests there and I'm heading back in the next few months. It'll be my first time back

Amb. McCarthy (21:21): Are you bringing the hat and everything else?

Gen. Holt (21:22): No, I have it. Yes, I have everything.

Amb. Gfoeller (21:24): On a more serious note, I wanted to add one more thing before we go onto the next subject. What I started doing from the first day that I became ambassador is when we have the country team every week, I would always invite the commander of the base to attend the country team. That is not always done because the base was not under Chief of Mission authority. Let me tell you that I got some pushback from State Department people who were at the country team. I even got pushback from the Defense Attache who was military, but reported to me directly. He actually came into my office and he said, ma'am, you know, I'm your only military advisor, or why is this guy also in uniform coming in and basically spouting forth and often disagreeing with me and bringing other ideas to the table and you know, you really should stop doing that. And I said, absolutely not. We have to be as lashed up as possible. The embassy is here for many reasons, but the most important one is to keep the base. For that, I need to know what is going on in the base. The base had had some real problems. At one point a Kyrgyz truck driver was shot pretty much at point blank by an airman, as he was trying to deliver some stuff to the base. Now to make things worse, the Kyrgyz truck driver was an ethnic Russian. It created a huge problem between the United States and Russia. Again, this was before my time, but I had to pick up the pieces. I had to try and glue this all back together again. Then another scandal that the base had, was there was a major on the base who along with other base members was allowed to go out to this pretty famous shopping center where she proceeded to disappear. She was then found several days later in completely different clothing, with dyed hair, out in some cabin in the woods. She claimed she was kidnapped. A Kyrgyz doctor then went on TV and claimed that she had come to him for an abortion. So anyway, the scandal was huge. So when I arrived, there were demonstrations in front of the base by Kyrgyz nationals, demanding that it'd be closed primarily because of the killing of this truck driver and this bizarre incident with the major. Now there was another incident which didn't help matters. Because Manas was so close to the international airport, one of our planes actually drove into the President's plane by mistake. That didn't help the base either. So when I arrived, as I said, I had three major problems with the base. And the only way I was going to be able to solve this and hold onto the base was to get to know the base as much as possible, because the base was out doing its thing without Chief of Mission authority. But when the President is mad, when the image of the base has been gravely damaged, when the Russian Embassy is furious, who do they turn to? They turn to me, you know, that was one of the main reasons I really wanted to be as close to the base as possible and having Blaine there, it was very easy. And a lot of fun.

Gen. Holt (24:32): So the ambassador doesn't know this, but when she gave me the order that there will be no drama on that transit center, it's a lawful order. It's a perfectly reasonable order. It's one that we shared. I went back to my colonels and I said, so here's the thing, our fun bucket's full. We actually can't have any drama. So how are we going to fulfill that? Because I don't know. We've got a lot of airmen. Sometimes a lot of rabble, rousing Marines come through here in our bed and breakfast program. I thought that we did a really nice job, but the Ambassador and I have never had time to get together to compare notes, but there were quite a few times where on the base, we were breathing a huge sigh of relief after something that could have gotten to a place where we were all really hoping it wouldn't. We had some visiting forces, I think the Syrians and the Navy SEALs had an issue that looked like it was going to spill out of the base. And there was just some times when the no drama rule was starting to get a little flexed, but it held for the most part. We did okay.

Amb. Gfoeller (25:28): Well done.

Amb. McCarthy (25:29): Well, the relationship you developed played a critical role in what I wanted to shift to next, which is the major events that took place in the country when you were there. In April, 2010, protests broke out against the administration of the then-President and he fled the country. The opposition set up a temporary government. A few months later, ethnic violence broke out between two major groups. Hundreds were killed and I understand thousands injured. Russia even sent in some troops to protect its small base. How did you manage your missions during this crisis and work together to address what was major upheaval in the country, which could have affected, obviously, our assets there and our people.

Gen. Holt (26:12): From the outset, one of the things in my own analysis before taking command of Manas in the summer of 2009, was that the Bakiyev government was going to find itself, possibly, in some dire straits politically. And the reason that I came to that conclusion personally was just research being done about black market energy reserves, where gas was flying around the region, how some of the contracts were set up, what the regime was doing. And then advisors that I had that were Kyrgyz in country, once I got there, kind of filled in the rest of the picture, which is the people in the country really view the President and the regime as benefiting from the increased rent, but nobody here is seeing any dollars there. So I guess what I'm saying about that is, is that it guides me to go, we've got to invest in relationships. We just absolutely have to. And I think those relationships that we invested in, at least from the military standpoint, in colleges, women's groups, and those types of things really helped us get to a place where there was some trust by that spring when the coup came down. But from the outset I had had our folks planning for what I always call the most likely or the most dangerous scenario. The most likely scenario is Blaino's wrong. There's not going to be any coup it's all just going to go fine. That'll all muddle along and we'll have rises and falls and ebbs and flows and we'll just move along and it'll be okay. And there'll be some things and we'll deal with it. The most dangerous was kind of what ended up happening, which I think could have been far worse had it not been for the coordination that we had between us, Ambassador Gfoeller and myself, and CENTCOM, State Department, Foggy Bottom. We had working groups all lined up, but we had, early on, planned for, okay, so if we've got to evacuate all Americans, if we've got to bring the embassy dependents here, their dogs or cats, whatever, how will we address it? How will we set up for that? How will we get our airborne assets out of here? And, well, we'll be the biggest thing on the news. If that happens, I still owe General McChrystal and General Petraeus a third of the air refueling assets for Afghanistan and bacon's, beans, and bullets to and from the war. So all those things we had been working on for quite some time. We were not flatfooted when all of this came down. In fact, I kind of feel like the pot was boiling very slowly as we got up to that point. I was really grateful that it happened over nine months of my time there because the Ambassador's DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission] and I were always stitched together at the hip and we constantly were transparent with each other, sharing with each other. And so when this came down, I feel like the Ambassador, her interagency team, our team, we had a lot of trust between us. I think trust, confidence, and relationships are always the bedrock of whether you're going to be successful or not. But again, the ambassador is the leader here and without her support for what our operations and how we conducted our operations, we could have been in a different place.

Amb. Gfoeller (28:54): Our first priority in such cases of abject violence is of course taking care of our fellow American citizens who live in country. And what was most disturbing to me was we had almost a hundred Peace Corps volunteers throughout the country in the most remote places. In some cases, in majority Uzbek areas and the Kyrgyz were carrying out a real pogrom type situation, slashing, burning, and killing Uzbeks. And some of our Peace Corps volunteers were living with Uzbek families. My first priority was to get them out. In many cases the places were so remote it had to be done by helicopter. Thank goodness that there is a Ministry of Emergency Situations in Kyrgyzstan that has helicopters that are actually good. I had assiduously courted that ministry, just in case, made sure that they got extra stuff, all legal of course. And when the S hit the fan, I was able to go to the minister of emergency situation and say, you've got to help me get these Peace Corps volunteers out. And he did. So this was an example of cooperating with the host country military. I must say, I'm proud that during all this turmoil, the embassy never shut down for a single day. So any American who was in trouble had somebody on the line that they could call, and we didn't lose a single American citizen, not a single life, not even a single wounded person. That was my first priority during this very trying time, the violence was absolutely horrific. I insisted, much to the dismay of my staff, on actually looking at all of the photographs that we had been able to gather of what had happened. There were pregnant women whose fetuses had been torn from their bodies and later beheaded, there were people who had been burned alive. I mean, the ferocity of these pogroms, basically it was ethnic cleansing, were absolutely shocking and particularly shocking to me because I had always loved the Kyrgyz people, thought that they were the nicest, kindest people, and suddenly once the central power of Bakiyev, who was kind of tamping things down, was gone, all of these undercurrents of hatred suddenly were able to arise.

Amb. McCarthy (31:16): They set up this new temporary government, which I understand the opposition, because the temporary government was the opposition coming in, had been very critical of the security relationship with the ousted president. So how did you go about establishing a relationship with the new temporary government? And related to that, normally we don't recognize governments that come in through a coup, and how did the US go about eventually recognizing this new temporary government?

Amb. Gfoeller (31:45): Well, you're exactly right. While Bakiyev was in power, obviously we had to have relations with him. He was the President. And he was the one who could kick us out of the base. Very important. The opposition was very anti-American because they saw us as kind of being in cahoots with Bakiyev. However, once Bakiyev had fled, they kind of started rethinking a little bit. And again, just as I had made the argument to the Chinese and Russian ambassadors, if we leave, you'll have chaos right on your doorstep, the opposition leaders started understanding that as well. The good news was that our embassy had maintained excellent contacts throughout the Kyrgyz civil society, with our NGOs, and many of the opposition figures, including the future interim president Roza Otunbayeva, were very big NGO figures. So even though they resented our military relationship with Bakiyev, they also were well aware of our tremendous engagement with civil society. Now that they were in power, it was interesting how the hostility receded, because they remembered all the good things we had done. And now they were in charge and they needed to secure their country and they could see now that the American presence was actually leading to stability in their country, in the region. And they began to appreciate it. Whereas before, you know, they'd only seen it through the lens of Bakiyev. The way we handled the legal kind of aspects of the new government, again, let me go back to my relationships with the Russian and Chinese ambassadors, which I believe were crucial, if we needed to organize free and fair elections. But if I had just come out on TV and said, well, we, the United States demand that you have free and fair elections, that would have been very badly understood. So again, I went back channel to the Chinese and the Russians, who have immense influence, and I said, look, I can't do this alone. If you do it alone, it'll look bad as well. If we even do it as a trick, it will look bad because it'll look like the big guys are gunning for the little guy. So I said, how about the OSCE? All three of us are members of the OSCE. It's perceived by many, as a much less controversial organization than the UN. The UN has gotten themselves into some trouble. Plus the UN is so much more unwieldy. I mean, there's so many more countries, there are countries who frankly, don't care about Kyrgyzstan. Whereas the OSCE is much more closer to home.

Amb. McCarthy (34:24): To explain to our listeners, that's the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is a key organization for all of Europe and beyond.

Amb. Gfoeller (34:33): Correct. So then the three of us, working behind the scenes, went to the OSCE and said, you know, could you help Kyrgyzstan organize free and fair elections? And the OSCE said, yes. That is the way, basically, that we went because the elections really were fair. We had some very reputable observers from very reputable countries. We had parliamentary elections, we had presidential elections. The Kyrgyz themselves decided on an interim president who ended up being Roza Otunbayeva, who, as I said, was a giant in the NGO world. While it was a triumph for the first time that a woman would become president of a Central Asian country, that was definitely a triumph, and I welcomed it profoundly, I also thought that the fact that they only give her one year term was sexist. I think that she was a nonthreatening figure because she came from this NGO world. She was not corrupt. And the big boys had to sort out who would be the next president. So while she was the figurehead for a year, they were sorting things out. But that's a different story.

Amb. McCarthy (35:37): I wanted to move on to the issue of China's relationship with Kyrgyzstan. As I noted in the beginning, when we started, Kyrgyzstan shares a border with China. Specifically, it shares a border with China's Xinjiang region. This is the region where many Uyghurs live and the Uyghurs are Muslim and currently the Chinese have reportedly detained more than a million of them and put them in reeducation camps. This is a move that the United States and many other countries have denounced. So my question is, was China a significant factor, and I think you've confirmed that ambassador, during your time. And what is the relationship between the two countries? Again, Kyrgyzstan is mostly Muslim. The Uyghurs are Muslim. How does that play into their relationship with China? If at all?

Amb. Gfoeller (36:23): Certainly when I was there, the relationship was bad, not at the level of government to government, but at the level of the population. The Kyrgyz can't stand the Chinese. I really had people tell me the Chinese will flood our country, rape all of our women, make half Chinese babies, and then just colonize. This was coming from serious people, not the man in the street. They were convinced that China wanted to colonize them. The beginning of this colonization was economic. The Chinese were flooding the Kyrgyz market with really bad and really cheap goods. I'll give you one example. The yurt is a symbol of Kyrgyzstan. It's actually on the flag of Kyrgyzstan. The symbol of Kyrgyzstan has been truly undermined by China. They have flooded Kyrgyzstan with cheap plastic yurts, and for the poor, it's much easier to just buy a cheap plastic yurt than have an old lady in Lake Issyk-Kul make it, and I'll tell you the yurts aren't cheap, because yurts are symbols. At least when I was there, there was huge antipathy towards the Chinese, much differently than towards the Russians. Russians were very much liked as people, maybe the government wasn't liked, but the Russian people and Russian culture were admired and liked and seen as brotherly. So there was a big contrast there.

Amb. McCarthy (37:51): I wanted to ask you more broadly, to wrap up here, what really are US strategic interests in the Central Asia region? And reminding our listeners that includes not only Kyrgyzstan, but also Kazakhstan Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. To put this in perspective, for those of us who pulled out our maps, it's a key area because you've got Russia to the North, China to the East, and to the South, Iran, Afghanistan, obviously, but also futher south, Pakistan and India.

Amb. Gfoeller (38:21): The first thing that comes to my mind is preventing Islamic extremism. The Fergana Valley, which is parts of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, has been a hotbed of Islamic extremism for a long, long time, even predating Al-Qaida and all that kind of thing. People are super fundamentalist there. Frankly, part of the hatred the Kyrgyz have for the Uzbeks is because a lot of the most fundamentalist Muslims in the Fergana Valley are Uzbek. Islam came to Kyrgyzstan recently, about 200 years ago. For that amount of time, the Kyrgyz were able to practice a quite moderate type of Islam, lots of vodka being drunk, not fundamentalist at all. But we, enter Saudi Arabia, which is a country where I spent many years, and Saudi Arabia, when Kyrgyzstan was extremely poor, right at the collapse of the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia came in, built tons of mosques. They were all identical, which is interesting. So you always knew that this mosque was a Saudi mosque. They brought in Wahabi preachers, they started really Islamizing the Kyrgyz themselves, as opposed to having this Islamic Uzbek minority in the South. I think that preventing Islamic extremism in all of its forms is very important in this area. After all, we don't want a repeat of the Afghanistan scenario, 9/11, et cetera, et cetera. What we want, to my mind in this area is stability.

Gen. Holt (39:55): There's a reason that this region, geopolitically and in diplomatic circles, has been referred to as the Great Game for hundreds of years. It's still a very, very important world neighborhood of sorts. The gang is all there. So you've got Afghanistan, China, Russia, Iran, and here we are at the center of this with a swirling of cultures that don't seam up very well. And I think the Ambassador highlighted very well, an example of how that's happened. You know, two other recipe elements that I'll add to the ethnic violence that happened in the South that year were two Islamic extremist groups that are well connected to the Taliban and well interested in seeing chaos ensue in the wake of a failing government. So let's look at the topline players. The Chinese are very committed to the One Belt One Road initiative. At the time, it was just a paper, when we were there, called the Go West Plan of a PhD in China who was discounted by CCP circles, which usually means it's a great paper and they're about to make it policy. And now it's One Belt One Road, and that spiders out of China in all directions from the Mekong Delta up and into this region. But culturally there's a mismatch between the Chinese and the Kyrgyz because the Kyrgyz have an affinity for the Uyghurs, culturally. China actually was applying kind of a little bit of light coercive diplomacy with Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and somewhat to Kazakhstan, getting more infrastructure road projects, hardcore spending and Bishkek would get a few public transportation buses. What I think you find in that is some opportunity. We see stability as a key, but also some of the things that undermine stability, now that we are leaving Afghanistan, but narco terror is something that is very important to the Chinese and the Russians, and coming up the Fergana Valley there with these groups, is very enabled. And so the Russians and the Chinese have interests there. And unfortunately the Kyrgyz are caught in a squeeze play. They're in between. So how they play their own diplomacy going forward is very important. You've already kind of defined what's happening on the other side of the border in China and it's horrific, and nobody wants to see that spill over into Kyrgyzstan. So here's the good stuff that I see on the horizon over the next 10 years. If there's something that I took away from Kyrgyzstan and, in my military career, it's the year of my life. I mean, it really is literally the career year for me, where I kind of changed my outlook on everything. But if there's something I learned about the Kyrgyz people, there's this incredible hopeful young group, the women and the young ones, men and women who were coming up through college, they saw this stuff. They don't have a memory of the Soviet union. They're seeing stuff around them. And we're about to see a big demographic rotation occur in the region. I think diplomatically as an American citizen, just kind of interested in the region, I would say that's our greatest opportunity, is to reach out with a lot of the programs that the State Department has, a lot of the other elements of national power and to try to get some influence in those veins. Because I do think this is not a throwaway region. This is a very important region and all of the major power players seem to agree.

Amb. Gfoeller (43:05): I really would like to agree with the General that the youth is the way to go. Corruption is a huge problem in Kyrgyzstan to the point where I actually requested an attache, she came out and I asked her to craft some anticorruption programs. There's some very serious programs, but the one that I'd like to highlight, because as we're wrapping up, I'd like to bring a smile to people's faces. It was a bunch of cartoons. There were four cartoon characters. It was carefully done. One was obviously an ethnic Russian one was an ethnic Uzbek and two were ethnic Kyrgyz and they were probably around seven or eight years old. So they were children, books were written. I still have my book, as these four little children discuss, you know, why corruption is bad and why when they grow up, they're not going to be corrupt. And then we actually took it a step higher and we had the cartoons on TV. And so little kids can look at Kyrgyz TV and learn at the age of seven or eight.

Gen. Holt (44:07): And the puppets!

Amb. Gfoeller (44:09): And the puppets. There was an anti-corruption puppet. Even back in my day, and in Blaino's day, we were engaging with youth and I mean youth, seven or eight years old. So let's continue doing that.

Amb. McCarthy (44:20): And that's the key element of both our diplomatic engagement and our military engagement that is not often spoken of. We speak grand strategy. We speak of military bases, but working with the next generation is extremely important. Well, I want to thank you both for a fantastic conversation. I frankly learned a lot and pulled out my map several times as I prepared for this. It actually makes me very enthusiastic about taking a trip out to Central Asia, whenever we can go back to traveling. So I will get tips from both of you, but thank you and thank you for your partnership and obviously the great friendship that you established in your work together.

Amb. Gfoeller (44:59): Thank you for having me on, it's been an honor.

Gen. Holt (45:02): Absolute honor to be with you both today. Thank you. And it's great to see you again, Ambassador.

Amb. Gfoeller (45:06): Absolutely.

Amb. McCarthy (45:07): This has been a new episode in the series The General and the Ambassador. Thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, as well as visit our website generalambassadorpodcast.org. We very much welcome input and suggestions on this series. You can contact us at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.