I couldn't tell if Ferghana.ru was laughing or cursing (maybe both) when they wrote this article: Bob Gates saves US base from Kyrgyz authorities.
Secretary Gates flew in from Afghanistan, compared base agreements between the U.S. and other countries with base arrangements in Kyrgyzstan, and then announced their parity to the Kyrgyz press. After the analytical plea for fairness, he then stepped up the flattery, saying that Kyrgyzstan's efforts were vital for world counterterrorism. It's not all flattery, of course: it happens to be true.
Next week, Undersecretary Boucher is coming to convince Kyrgyzstan not to talk ugly about the U.S. at the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, and more importantly, not to honor SCO requests to oust the US from Ganci.
It would be nice, somewhere in these meetings, if Kyrgyzstan would be able to say something about the role the US has to play in the role of counterterrorism in their back yards, and also what the SCO is providing for Kyrgyzstan that the U.S. has not shown a willingness to provide. That could be, for starters, a little border security and narcotics interdiction in Afghanistan that would specifically target Kyrgyzstan's problems. But I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth. It looks like that may have happened already.
