September 21, 2009, was a day of blitz diplomacy for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: She had more than eight and a half hours of bilateral meetings to juggle, along with a marathon of press briefings and camera sprays at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. But one of her sit-downs that day required particular finesse. It was with an obscure dictator whose name alone presented a challenge -- Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the president of Turkmenistan. He came into the room with an immediate advantage: The United States needed his help. Clinton needed to convince him to let NATO transports through his country, a move that would ease pressure on U.S. supply lines into Afghanistan and probably save some U.S. troops. The usual approach -- money -- would not work with energy-rich Turkmenistan. It was a test of her skill as a diplomat.

The Turkmen leader, a squat, unimposing former dentist, had arrived at the Waldorf earlier in his new armored limousine. (His minders had planned to rent one in New York, but the rental office would not allow them to drill a hole in the fender to insert a little Turkmen flag. They were forced to buy the machine outright for nearly half a million dollars, a source close to the delegation said.) Having come to power fewer than three years before, Berdimuhamedov was still a novice statesman, impressionable and often bashful in public. His predecessor's death in 2006 led to a murky succession process that jailed the man in line for the post and gave him absolute power. The meeting with Clinton would be his first, and it would prove be a defining moment for his encounter with the West. It did not go well -- either for the dumpy dictator or for the still newly minted secretary of state.

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With the stakes particularly high, Clinton put aside the topic of Afghanistan and energy supplies and began to push Berdimuhamedov on human rights, asking about the hundred or so Turkmen students who'd been kept from studying at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. In doing so, Clinton might have helped push a warming-up dictator back into the cold, jeopardizing a critical supply route to Afghanistan in the process -- and highlighting the difficulties of diplomacy with autocrats whose help the United States needs.

Berdimuhamedov didn't have a lot to live up to when he took over the Turkmen presidency in 2006. Before that, Turkmenistan was viewed in the West as a hopelessly isolated place, or as one Western embassy official called it, "Weirdestan." Its international image was shaped by its hermetic leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, whose zany personality cult was often compared to that of North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Especially toward the end of his 16-year reign, Niyazov's whims became very erratic, and they were usually enforced as the law.

In 2001, he prohibited young men from wearing beards, long hair, or gold crowns on their teeth. Having dubbed himself Turkmenbashi, or Leader of All the Turkmen, he banned recorded music from being played in public places and cracked down on the performance of opera and ballet, which he deemed "unnecessary." Some calendar months were renamed after him and his relatives, and his book of philosophical musings -- the quasi-mystical Ruhnama -- was made part of the core curriculum for students of all ages.

Education was a particularly thorny issue for a dictator who sought to control his population by keeping them ignorant of the outside world, banning the Internet and restricting foreign books. Niyazov's government cut back basic education to nine years from 10, making it nearly impossible for Turkmen students to qualify for admission to educational institutions abroad. So, by Turkmen standards, it was a dramatic advance when the new president extended the school term to 10 years so students could study in foreign countries.

"It was a huge step forward," said one of four senior Western diplomats interviewed on condition of anonymity in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat. "Under [Niyazov] there had been total isolation. Even inside the country travel was restricted. The new president changed this.... But then these students started coming back home with Western ideas in their heads, holding rallies, getting interested in change."

The new president reacted to the Westernization of his students with suspicion: He held 100 Turkmen students back from attending the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, the most egregious example in a wide campaign of small-scale harassment against students attempting to travel abroad. The move was a major disappointment for many Western officials who thought Berdimuhamedov would bring quick and radical change. Still, compared with those of other Central Asian states, Turkmenistan's human rights environment remained fairly mild, and it was improving. There was no opposition, no independent press, only the barest beginning of free enterprise, and a pervasive network of secret police. But violent crackdowns and reports of torture and political imprisonment are not nearly as common as in Uzbekistan, for example, or Tajikistan. Two of the diplomats in Ashgabat therefore felt Clinton's criticism was misguided, an attempt to act as "the world's moral police, which is just counterproductive sometimes," one of them said.

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