The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

fter the horror of the 9/11 attacks, the big, gray U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane landing at Ashgabat International Air- port in November 2001, after a long flight from an Air Force base in Charleston, S.C., was a beautiful sight. True, the plane didn’t have the sleek lines of a fighter bristling with weaponry, but it did have a small American flag on its tail and, in black lettering, “United States of America” along the side — a reassuring sign America remembered that a few of its own were out here in Turkmenistan, at the edge of the new war on terrorism. For the past several years, Osama bin Laden and his al- Qaida forces had been treated as “guests” of the Taliban and had used Afghanistan as a base of operations for terrorist activities, including the 9/11 attacks. So in October 2001, Afghanistan — one of several “hot spots” bor- dering Turkmenistan — became the focus of America’s military response. The C-17 was carrying the first load of humanitarian aid destined for the war-ravaged and drought-stricken Afghan people: pallets of blankets, tents, medical kits and high- energy biscuits, all lashed down with cargo netting. Though the shipment had taken a couple of months to arrive, USAID, Embassy Ashgabat and a variety of inter- national organizations had begun organizing truck con- voys for the aid shortly after the 9/11 attacks. With U.S.- taxpayer funding, the World Food Program opened a bag- ging operation in the western town of Turkmenabat, from which wheat was trucked into the most severely ravaged Afghan regions. While some expected that the bulk of the aid would flow from Uzbekistan across the “Friendship Bridge” at Termez, Uzbek authorities (citing security reasons) frus- trated attempts by international relief groups to use this route. Thus, Turkmenistan became a critical land corri- dor, second only to Pakistan, through which was delivered over a third of the American aid to Afghanistan during the next few fateful months. “Surrounded by Danger” My odyssey in Turkmenistan had begun more than a year earlier, in August 2000, when my wife Eileen was assigned as the political/economic officer to the small embassy in Ashgabat. I took a leave of absence from my position as an attorney with the State Department to accompany her, and used my legal skills to work with USAID. Strategically located in Central Asia, Turkmenistan is about the size of California but with the population of metropol- itan Houston, and sits atop one the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. At the time we packed our bags to go there, it was the most isolated and unex- plored of the former Soviet republics and had only come into existence as an inde- pendent country in 1991. But the United States was already actively working to nudge Turkmenistan away from its Soviet past of one-party rule and a centrally- planned economy. When I arrived, I bought T-shirts from the embassy’s newly established Marine Security Guard detachment. Under a map of the country that showed it surrounded by Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, a slogan summed up the complex geopolitical situation: “Surrounded by Danger —We Got ’em Right Where We 58 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 F O C U S O N C O U N T E R T E R R O R I S M H UMANITARIAN M ERCENARIES I N THE TENSE DAYS FOLLOWING 9/11, THE SMALL U.S. EMBASSIES IN C ENTRAL A SIA SUDDENLY FOUND THEMSELVES ON THE FRONT LINES OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM . H ERE IS ONE ACCOUNT . B Y J OHN W. K ROPF A