FSO Peter Van Buren led a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq, didn’t like what he saw, wrote about it, and got slammed. At least that’s how he sees it. His account of “How the State Department Came After Me” was published on the Foreign Policy magazine website on September 29. It’s worth reading.
No, not Jimmy Carter. Carter Sahib, writes Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the August 13 edition of the Washington Post, is Carter Malkasian, a civilian contractor to the Department of State who worked as a political advisor to U.S. troops in the Garmser district of southern Afghanistan.
Malkasian was part of the civilian surge that placed more than a thousand employees of State and USAID, including foreign service officers, civil servants (including many from Agriculture, Justice, Commerce, and other agencies), and contractors into the field to work with U.S. forces and in Afghan society.
Chandrasekaran’s story reads like an Officer Evaluation Report (OER) by a boss determined to get his man promoted. The “uncommonly effective” Malkasian played “a critical role” in bring peace to Garmser. He “single-handedly cajoled influential tribal leaders and mullahs” and “won the trust of skeptical residents … persuading them to reject the insurgency and support their government.”
But even after allowances for hyperbole, the story is a remarkable account of what a well-schooled, well-trained, language-proficient civilian can accomplish politically in a zone of conflict. In the most telling paragraphs of the story, Chandrasekaran writes:
[Malkasian] also shaped the Marine campaign here in a way no civilian has in other parts of the country. He served as a counselor to each of the battalion commanders, influencing decisions about when to use force, and helping them calibrate it with a political engagement strategy. He built such credibility with the Marines — the result of spending so much time in Garmser — that if he urged a different course of action, they almost always complied.
“We need a Carter Malkasian in every district of Afghanistan,” said Maj. Gen. Larry Nicholson, a former top Marine commander in Afghanistan. “You can surge troops and equipment, but you can’t surge trust. That has to be earned — and that’s what Carter did,” Nicholson said. “He provided a continuum of trust that was essential in turning around Garmser.”
Malkasian left Afghanistan in August 2011 after two full years in the field. His replacement, says Chandrasekaran, has not been identified. The U.S. is preparing to cut back its military forces in Afghanistan, pulling out and not replacing the troops that were introduced in the military surge of 2010. The future of the civilian surge, which began at the same time, is uncertain.
Candidates signing up for the foreign service written exam must choose among five fields or cones in which they want to compete. The choices are consular affairs, economic affairs, management, political affairs, and public diplomacy.
According to the director of the board of examiners (BEX), the most competitive cones — the cones with the most candidates per job opening — are political affairs and public diplomacy, with virtually no difference between them. There is also little competitive difference between the consular and economic cones. The management cone is the least competitive.
The competitive order may change as the needs of the service demand more or fewer people in particular cones, and as candidates shift their preferences.
The director of BEX says that many candidates do not understand what economic or management officers do, which may explain the relative lack of applicants in those cones. She says the Department is trying to explain those jobs more clearly on its website and in its recruitment efforts generally. She also says that the competitive differences among the cones are overshadowed by the competition across the board: about 20,000 people take the written exam each year, competing for about 800 jobs.
Successful candidates are hired in the cone they chose when they signed up for the test, and they can expect to serve the bulk of their careers in that cone. Changing cones after hiring is difficult and rarely approved, although out-of-cone assignments are fairly common. The standard (and sound) advice to candidates is to choose a cone in which you want to work, regardless of the competition.
Michael Mandelbaum, in an August 9 postscript in Foreign Affairs, argues persuasively that “the recent deal over the debt ceiling guarantees that the U.S. government will reduce its spending on foreign affairs.” No surprise there, but Mandelbaum moves to the more debatable conclusion that lower spending means lowered ambitions, a much greater reluctance to engage in military intervention, and a consequent retreat from the kind of nation-building that the U.S. has pursued in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti. Nation-building, he says, is unpopular, does not build nations, and contributes little to U.S. well-being.
Mandelbaum, the Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is certainly correct that military intervention and nation-building have become unpopular. That 2003 bumper sticker, “World Peace through Military Victory,” has gone the way of the Hummer on whose bumper it was stuck. But the argument that U.S. nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan brought more benefit to those countries than to the U.S. may not apply in less costly and less violent situations: in Haiti, Congo, Sudan, or the former Yugoslavia.
No president may be willing to launch another pre-emptive war or war of choice for many years. But when a deteriorating political situation or power vacuum in a strategically important region threatens to create opportunities for hostile elements to gain new material, psychological, or diplomatic assets, U.S. policy makers will look for ways to affect the course of events. A trained and rapidly deployable civilian or civilian-military cadre, like the Civilian Response Corps that is under construction in the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the Department of State, will be a desirable – and inexpensive – tool of U.S. policy. Whether Congress will be sufficiently farsighted, and the administration sufficiently determined, to fund and staff this force is an open question. The record so far (see Chapter 10 of Career Diplomacy) is not especially encouraging.
On July 21, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HFAC) voted out HR 2583, the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 by a vote of 23-20. On July 26, the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations voted out a fiscal year 2012 State-AID appropriations bill. The authorization measure provides guidance, but the appropriations bill, when enacted, provides funds.
The authorization bill, according to the committee’s website, is based on the FY 2011 continuing resolution (which, because no budget or appropriations bill for FY 2011 were enacted, governs FY 2011 spending). The committee authorized $6.4 billion less that the President requested for 2012, and $4.8 billion less than 2010 spending levels.
The appropriations bill would cut more deeply. According to the committee’s press release, the bill provides $38.9 billion in discretionary funding, or $12.3 billion less than the administration had requested in its FY 2012 budget proposal, submitted in February. Among the areas cut:
The committee’s press release says that the bill “halts new hiring at USAID and stops expansion of facilities overseas associated with that hiring.” The bill also ends the pay increases that were intended to give members of the foreign service stationed outside the United States the same adjustment over their base pay that they would have received if they had been stationed in Washington. (Under the national “locality pay” policy, the base salary of federal employees in Washington is bumped up because living costs in the Washington area are above the national average.)
Neither the authorization bill nor the appropriations bill is likely to become law in the form in which it emerged from committee. The Democratic Senate will not adopt bills that so clearly reflect Republican priorities. But the administration’s February budget request is itself so dead that the president himself has effectively disowned it and denied its paternity. Given the fiscal turmoil and partisanship that have engulfed Congress, it is quite possible that in fiscal year 2012, as in fiscal year 2011, funding will come only in an omnibus bill and/or in successive continuing resolutions, adopted late amid rancor and confusion.
With the foreign affairs budget under enormous pressure, the Department of State has launched an effort to connect spending on diplomacy and development to U.S. economic well-being, specifically to jobs.
Secretary Clinton on July 12 gave the first of at least three planned speeches on this topic. She spoke to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a supportive business-oriented advocacy group. The Secretary linked U.S. exports to U.S. jobs, and tied U.S. commercial diplomacy to both. Here are some key passages:
State and USAID are engaged in commercial diplomacy that leverages our global presence to help our companies compete and win. The State Department has over 1,000 economic officers and over 400 locally employed staff around the world, as well as 200 people in our Economic Bureau in Washington, who wake up every day asking how they can break down barriers and find opportunities for American workers and businesses. Old-fashioned door-to-door salesmanship still works in the 21st century. That’s why our embassies and the businesses they work with feel keenly the cuts that we have suffered to the Foreign Commercial Service. We are working to fill that gap on resources….
[W]e will be merging our economic work into a new under secretariat for economic growth, energy, and the environment, including a new bureau for energy and natural resources. We are also revising the Foreign Service entrance exam to ensure that we select top economic talent and build our economic literacy from the bottom up. And we are urging American companies to roll up their sleeves, get out there, and engage with the economic opportunities that are emerging across the world.…
The 1 percent of our budget we spend on all diplomacy and development is not what is driving our deficit. Not only can we afford to maintain a strong civilian presence; we cannot afford not to.
The full text of the Secretary’s speech is available here.
Under Secretary for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats briefed the press on the same topic on the same day. His remarks are posted here.
Mitt Romney’s campaign website includes a strong endorsement of soft power, a term coined by Joseph Nye of Harvard to describe the diplomatic power of attraction, or the ability to induce others to do what you want without coercion or bribery. The website says that US ability to muster soft power is “hampered by a complicated foreign policy bureaucracy that divides authority across agencies.” His solution? “[P]lace all diplomatic authority in a given region under the charge of one envoy. This will ensure accountability and effective, unified strategies.”
Romney’s proposal for regional super-envoys is not new, but it has proven difficult to carry out in the past. Regional envoys have been unable to exercise control over the agencies that operate in their regions. Agency representatives who must answer for the resources entrusted to them by agency heads and by Congress are reluctant (to put it mildly) to yield authority over those resources. Would a Romney administration be able shift responsibility for the use of resources deployed in a region from agency representatives to a regional envoy? Maybe. There’s always a first time.
Secretary Clinton, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that “since January 2009, we have tripled the number of diplomats, development experts, and other civilian specialists on the ground in Afghanistan, and we have expanded our presence out in the field nearly six-fold.” But, she added, “We have now reached the height of the civilian surge.” And she tacitly acknowledged the problems the Department has experienced in Afghanistan: “Any effort of this size and scope will face considerable logistical challenges. And we have worked hard in the last two and a half years to strengthen oversight and improve effectiveness. We have, frankly, learned many lessons, and we are applying them.”
Oddly, the highly publicized office of the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization (S/CRS) has not been much involved with Afghanistan. The office is responsible for developing the Department’s capacity to field and lead interagency civilian “contingency” operations, to bring political stability to places where recent, imminent, or actual conflict threatens U.S. security interests, exactly what the civilian surge in Afghanistan is meant to do. But Secretary Clinton placed the interagency civilian operation in Afghanistan in the hands of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a position filled initially by the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and now filled by Ambassador Marc Grossman. As the U.S. presence in Afghanistan enters a new phase, responsibilities may gradually shift. Whether the U.S. maintains its large civilian presence in the field even as the military withdraws, and whether direction of that presence passes from the ad hoc special representative to the more institutional office of the coordinator (which the Secretary would like to upgrade to a bureau, for which Congressional approval is required), are open questions. The answers will signal whether the expeditionary foreign service, much touted by two administrations, will become a permanent feature of U.S. diplomacy, or whether the skills and knowledge acquired in Iraq and Afghanistan, like those acquired in the CORDS program in Vietnam forty years ago, will dissipate and be lost.
A number of readers have asked when the new edition of Career Diplomacy will be available for the Kindle reader. The publisher, Georgetown University Press, has submitted files to Amazon for conversion to Kindle format. The timing of release of the Kindle version now depends on Amazon, but it should be a matter of weeks, not months.
Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the only Foreign Service Officer to become Secretary of State, died on June 4 at age 80. The sage of Charlottesville, as he was called in his later years, was smart, courageous, demanding, amazingly energetic, profane, wise, shrewd, loyal to his boss and loyal to his troops. He was a friend of Career Diplomacy, for which he wrote the blurb posted on this site’s home page. The obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the interview by Leonard J. Saccio for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, are good places to begin to gain an appreciation for life and contributions of this great man.
News, information, and occasional comments about the U.S. Foreign Service are posted here, to keep readers of current on what has happened since the book went to press. (Read more...)