Franklin Pierce Huddle Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 6 of 8
Tell us a little about Tajikistan, the country that you are based in as a representative of the United States.
Six-and-a-half million people. It has beautiful mountains, ranging up to almost 25,000 feet. Other than, Nepal, India, China, and Pakistan, it has the highest mountains in the world. It has mostly cotton and a mixed and agricultural economy. The Tajiks are of Iranian background. It was always a poor country, even in the Soviet Union. It was sort of an Appalachia, as it were. So it's had a tough time, partly because it had an internal civil war, fought in part by those who were more conservative Islamics versus the Soviet holdovers.
People are very friendly. I often go out to the villages to shoot photographs,
for example. 
I
eventually made postcards for the government.
You brought some of the photographs, so why don't we show them to our audience. Can you tell us a little about this? This is a typical ...
That's a typical Tajik. For the last year, every weekend, I would go out and shoot different villages. After a year, I printed the cards and gave the money to charity, which it turned out to be the villages themselves. We went back and found the village; we lined up all the villagers in clumps. "Okay, everybody up to this height; everybody up to this height, everybody up to this height." And then we gave out a hundred sweaters, a hundred fur hats, a hundred ...
So, a little volunteerism being practiced by the representative of the U.S. government?
Well, it was a nice thing to do. These are nice people, and I'd gone out ... you know, people are always taking pictures, but it's nice to give something back.
And this is a picture of the countryside? Absolutely ...
That's just a picture of the countryside. But you can see how beautiful it
is. The same flowers you have on Mount Rainier, as some noticed.
That's forty-five minutes from Dushanbe. One reason I did this was to encourage
the government to print its own postcards, using my photos for free, so that
they could attract the tourist industry.
I'm curious. You said you're always looking for information, by going on the streets and even asking people who come for the first time. How does photography help you see things about this country where you are ambassador?
I'm not sure. I usually take a Polaroid camera along, and then I take pictures of people and give [the Polaroids to] them. Especially in rural areas, where they've sometimes never seen a photograph before, people will start jumping up and down like a pogo-stick, as they see their image starting to form on a piece of paper. From there, that's an icebreaker.
When President Rakhmonov of Tajikistan went to the Oval Office about a month
ago, I went there with him, and he had this picture right here, the same picture,
to give to President Bush. I had given him one. 
I
said, "Give it to President Bush, so they can see what this place looks
like. Tell him it doesn't look like East Texas." Actually, I think it was
a very nice icebreaker: "What does my country look like?" Once you've
looked at a photograph, you have some sense of the backdrop.
In this part of the world, we must have a mixed set of goals, some of which have to take priority over the others. After 9/11, quite obviously, our security concerns took priority, and the war in Afghanistan. What difference does that make for somebody like you, as the ambassador? How does it affect what you have to do and the way you do it?
In a sense, we have counter-terrorism. There's a large transit narcotics problem from Afghanistan. But, in a sense, there was continuity, because although we had more focus -- there were U.S. troops in the region, there were intelligence operations going on, we were concerned about safeguarding the leftover Soviet Union era, the nuclear assets, but at the same token, rule of law, promotion of free and fair elections, democratic norms and things that you and I in the States would take for granted -- that had always been something that was of concern to us, and it remains.
In other words, the last time I talked to the [Tajik] president, for example, I said, "We've made our relationship a lot closer because of this horrible accident of fate, that you were next door to Afghanistan at a time when we had reason to go after the leadership of Afghanistan; but if you, as a distant country from us, and we are to have real relationship, our values are going to have to be closer together. Our democratic ideals are out there for you to work towards."
So that has been the hard, sort of "retail" work of trying to continue. We have a lot of different programs, democracy-building programs. There are many, many NGOs, including some from Berkeley.
Is there a conflict, in the sense that we want the leadership there to be part of the war on terrorism on the one hand, but democratization can make them more vulnerable within their own system? Is that fair, or how do we work that dilemma?
What you're saying is very few people vote themselves out of a job, and I would like to think that, first of all, the better leaders will survive if they give the electorate a chance to vote them up or down. And that if they don't think they'll survive, they'll shape up and improve their programs to the degree that they will be able to survive at the ballot box.
I don't think it would destabilize Tajikistan at all to have an open election. I think rather, the opposite. I think it will firm that country up. Quite frankly, they have started from a low base, in the sense it was a poor country, but they made a lot more progress over the last year than some of the other countries in the region. In part, I think, we are listened to. We're seen as a counterbalance to Moscow. Unlike the other Central Asian countries, Tajikistan continues to have Russian troops there. They came in during the civil war and by mutual agreement they have not yet left. But Tajikistan is anxious that they not have a policy that's exclusively Moscow-centric.
Are Western nongovernmental organizations important on the ground there?
Absolutely.
How does that happen, and what makes their participation in this democratization effort helpful?
We have $40 million, $50 million, perhaps, say, of assistance that goes towards everything from building irrigationals to promoting rule of law, to rewriting business code, to promoting regional and local elections. Usually, the U.S. AID and the other entities within the United States government don't do a lot of the basic pick-and-shovel work themselves. We get NGOs involved -- CARE, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders, PRAGMA. They, in turn, do the work directly. In Tajikistan, there are forty or fifty of these that we work with regularly on specific programs.
Beyond the war on terrorism, why is this country and the broader regions strategically important to us?
What we've learned from a year and a half ago was that every region of the world is strategic now; you can no longer write off one area as of no potential strategic importance to the United States. After all, Central Asia is distant from the United States. It doesn't sit astride the absolutely key transportation or oil quarters of the world. But it has a role to play. That's the way I would phrase the question.
At some time in the past, did Islamic fundamentalism in its extremist form take hold in Tajikistan?
Tajikistan is where retro-Sovietism comes up against Islamic fundamentalism. You have a situation where, on the one hand, the country was the beneficiary of almost a billion dollars a year of, in effect, transfer payments from Moscow, in the Soviet Union days. So the place was relatively well off. So there's a certain retro-Soviet thinking that sometimes comes into play. By the same token, you have Islamic fundamentalism spilling over from Afghanistan and to a lesser degree from Iran. Both countries were meddling in the Tajik internal polity. Eventually they had a civil war, which was complicated, but many of the combatants on the losing side -- the non-current government side -- were represented and were funded by either the Taliban or by Khomeini and Iran, or his ilk.
What is our relationship with Islamic groups that are not part of the extreme elements that are, obviously, our adversaries? Are we able to work with Islam and the religion in that country, so that they do not see us in the way that the extremists might paint us?
Yes. I think that Tajikistan, actually, is relatively easy, because when the civil war was settled five years ago, the current government brought the Islamic opposition elements into the government. They gave them cabinet portfolios, some of the quite important ones. There's a formal opposition, which is headed by a former Muslim combatant. He comes over to my embassy; he shows up at our functions. I've gone to call on him, and so on. [During] Ramadan, for example, I had a dinner, and the dinner included the opposition. It included the Deputy Prime Minister and several other cabinet ministers for what was a social occasion, but they were there.
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