To the Secretary
Page 26
In a chapter full of incredible stories of other people and places, it seems appropriate to end with the most mind-boggling—an American private citizen’s impersonation of a U.S. member of Congress—a bit of mischief perpetrated on the unsuspecting country of The Gambia, a tiny West African nation. Business consultant Richard T. Hines, lobbying for World Air Leasing, which hoped to run transatlantic and subregional flights out of the capital, Banjul, hoodwinked the Gambian president into believing he was a member of Congress.
When the chargé d’affaires attended a large celebration for President Yahya Jammeh, she was shocked to see Hines sitting next to the president at the head table. Hines awarded the president a pin from the 82nd Airborne Division that he “happened to have with him at the time.” The Gambia’s newspaper of record carried a banner headline the next day stating “President Jammeh Receives U.S. Award for Fight against Terrorism.”
The embassy’s account of what it called a “surreal episode” is blistering in its condemnation of Hines’s “charade.” The chargé read Hines the riot act at breakfast the following day, and Hines and the World Air Leasing CEO left. The chargé then had to explain Hines’s ruse to the permanent secretary at the president’s office. The post reported that the official was grateful for the information but said he would not be advising President Jammeh of the problem—at least not right away. Passing the buck, he said that since the Gambian embassy in Washington had organized the trip, it would be up to the Gambian ambassador to write a letter to the Gambian government explaining what had happened. Perhaps wisely, he said he would only discuss the problem with the president after receipt of the letter.” 66 The 2004 episode came to light when the post (by then staffed with new personnel) was asked in 2007 to confirm the accuracy of a New York Times story that mentioned the Hines escapade.
CORRUPTION AS A SECURITY THREAT
For citizens in Western democracies, it is hard to imagine endemic corruption. While the U.S. has had some spectacular scandals (Enron, Madoff, etc.), most Americans still believe they can go to the post office and mail a package, reasonably confident that their money will not end up in the postal worker’s pocket. Most Americans get driver’s licenses, register their vehicles, and pay taxes with confidence that the various fees will be collected and credited. Students engaged in the annual rite of university applications are fairly sure that stuffing the envelope with extra cash will not enhance their chances. No one pays to be hired by the Department of Homeland Security thinking they will earn back ten times more through bribes.
The intensity of embassy reporting about how things work elsewhere did not seem to be matched by an intensity of interest on the Washington side. The Pentagon’s willingness to welcome the very tainted Czech minister of defense suggests an “unfortunate but inevitable” attitude, or a willingness to subordinate procurement irregularities to the higher priorities of keeping the Czech military committed to coalition activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other stakeholders, including Congress, missed opportunities to engage the countries the United States most wanted to work with, including allies like Italy. They didn’t see how corruption made unreliable partners. And they clearly did not see how it posed a grave security risk to the United States. In countries where cooperation is for sale, promises mean nothing and vaunted partnerships are phony.
The rigidity of entrenched corruption kills the promise of possibility—of progress, investment, and justice. In the words of a Saudi interlocutor, “The lack of transparency, nepotism, tribalism all exist. I have no doubt that a corrupt official is just as much a terrorist as those that blow things up, considering the damage they inflict upon society.” He pointed to the Saudi justice system as a source of much discontent. “If I don’t feel my rights will be addressed in a system that is free of corruption there is something wrong.” 67
Chapter 8
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IRAQ:
Diplomacy in a War Zone
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We have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of one billion people.
—Secretary Condoleezza Rice
January 18, 2006
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THE WASHINGTON ROOM WAS THRUMMING WITH negativity. The civility implicit in the phrase “town hall meeting” belied what had turned into a nasty no-confidence vote from foreign service rank and file on the George W. Bush administration’s effort to staff a diplomatic offensive in Iraq four years after coalition forces had removed Saddam Hussein from power. Officers angrily challenged Harry K. Thomas Jr., the director general of the foreign service, on the threat to use the tactic of directed, or forced, assignments.
At issue was the immediate need to fill forty-eight positions in Iraq, but, as is often true in quarrels, much more was in play. The State Department had determined it needed 250 foreign service officers in Iraq by summer of 2008, and at the time of the town hall meeting on October 31, 2007, it had filled only 202. In an e-mail notice to officers around the world, Thomas said the department would begin directed assignments to fill the anticipated shortfall. Additional messages were sent to about 250 officers who were told they had been selected as “highly qualified” for the vacant positions. If enough of them did not volunteer, the letters said, some would be ordered to serve in Iraq.
By tradition, officers have always volunteered for postings. They are “worldwide available” and routinely go to some of the most challenging countries in the world. But until Thomas’s directive, the only time the State Department had ever resorted to directed assignments was in the Vietnam era. Technically, the State Department has the right to send its diplomats anywhere. Officers agree to be worldwide available when they join the foreign service.
Posts are classified as nonhardship, hardship, and greater hardship according to a complex scale weighing danger, health, and living standards. There are rules governing “fair share assignments,” ensuring that officers cannot hop from Paris to London to Rome. In reality, ambitious officers often avoid those cushy and touristy spots. It’s hard to make an impact, and the mostly routine kinds of issues the United States manages in Western European embassies are unlikely to earn promotions. At the meeting in 2007, the point of contention was really over hardship and greater hardship posts. The latter are sometimes unaccompanied assignments, meaning married officers must leave spouses and children behind. The rise in the number of unaccompanied posts caught officers by surprise. Many had made a life in Africa or Latin America, exposing their children to international schools, foreign languages, and a deep dive into foreign cultures. For some, the idea of leaving family behind was unthinkable.
The meeting reverberated like an earthquake and revealed a wide rift between the State Department’s leadership and the officers, unusual in an organization that values tradition and collegiality. A poll taken by the American Foreign Service Association, a professional group that is the exclusive bargaining agent for the foreign service and perhaps best known for its Foreign Service Journal publication, revealed that only 12 percent of FSOs believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fighting for them. She had followed the highly popular Colin Powell, whom many officers felt had taken a hit for the White House after he told the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Some felt Rice was too close to President Bush and lacked sufficient independence and managerial experience to run the building. The anger at the town hall, if nothing else, exposed a simmering communications problem between Rice and her FSOs.
Objections to Iraq service came down to three factors: proportion, preparation, and purpose. Some officers charged that the size of the Baghdad embassy, vaunted as the world’s largest, was Bush administration hubris at its worst. Why, they argued, should it be bigger than the U.S. embassy in China? Within the Middle East, how could it compare with America’s long-standing relationship with Israel, or with the strategic importance of Egypt o
r Saudi Arabia?
The number of diplomatic positions in Iraq had increased every year since the new embassy opened in 2004, and the expansion of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) outside Baghdad—from ten to twenty-five—required still more foreign service officers. Each PRT was a multi-agency unit comprised of military officers, diplomats, and reconstruction experts with skills ranging from medical, electrical, water, agriculture, and more. The PRTs, led by the State Department, were meant to serve as a counterinsurgency bulwark by taking resources far outside the capital and shoring up provincial and municipal civil society. The staffing requirements were rapidly creating an unsustainable demand, especially as these twelve-month assignments meant the State Department was dealing with near-constant turnover in-country. Officers argued that simple arithmetic made it impossible to fill Iraq slots, given an officer corps of fewer than seven thousand and nearly two hundred diplomatic missions worldwide.
Preparation was also a divisive issue. At the time of the town hall, most officers were getting only a few weeks of training before departure, clearly inadequate for a post with so many challenges. Typically, training would last several months and include at least courtesy-level language lessons and area studies, but need dictated that nearly all officers were sent without knowledge of Arabic. This runs contrary to foreign service culture, in which acquiring a language is often an indispensable part of the job. Officers invest years working on hard languages such as Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean, and most assume they will serve multiple tours and become regional specialists, building political and economic knowledge to go with the language. Forcing, for example, East Asian language speakers to do tours in Iraq seemed to devalue their expertise and place them in a region for which they had no preparation. Longtime Latin American and African hands felt the same way.
The biggest objection concerned the purpose and goals of the United States’ mission in Iraq. Having heard the domestic political debate over the futility and distaste for nation-building, the U.S. embassy in Iraq symbolized nation-building on a grand scale, and in 2006–2007 the military clearly had the lead role. This was a significant shift for many diplomats, whose work with military personnel began and ended with the routine presence of a defense attaché office at embassies. Foreign service officers were uncertain about what they would be allowed to do, what would be safe to do, and to whom they would report. Who was the real chief of mission—was it the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, or the general, David Petraeus?
This was not a silly question. Former Iraq ambassador Christopher Hill, who succeeded Ryan Crocker and served in Iraq from 2009 to 2010, analyzed the pressure points between the diplomatic and military presence at some length. “U.S. goals in Iraq, increasingly economic ones, were often set by senior U.S. officials, including senior military generals, who had neither the expertise nor the patience to slog through the no-man’s land of economic development projects and capacity building. The military had become the largest dispenser of foreign aid in Iraq for programs whose primary and more sober purpose was to convince the Iraqis not to shoot at our soldiers.” 1 Hill said the embassy had “a reputation for being supersized” out of a misplaced need to keep pace with the military. “Story after story came back from Iraq of people having little to do, of sitting around in endless meetings and writing telegrams that no one wanted to read.” 2
Apart from the tension between diplomats and the military, there was mounting evidence that the State Department had not adequately prepared for the consequences of Iraq service. The department’s medical unit had yet to ramp up to assist officers with war-related ailments such as posttraumatic stress, and support for officers’ families staying behind was minimal. FSOs had an overall sense that despite lofty talk at the top, the department was just as unprepared as its officers, asking something it had not fully thought through, and which it had certainly not communicated to them.
A small resident press corps works out of the State Department building, and to the everlasting woe of the foreign service, the disastrous town hall was covered by reporters whose subsequent stories portrayed foreign service officers as shallow, spoiled, and selfish.3 What might have been a valuable opportunity for State Department leadership to explain the idea behind a new “expeditionary” foreign service degenerated into a scene in which management looked arrogant and FSOs looked whiny, especially in comparison to troops who served multiple tours without complaint. While the news stories mentioned legitimate problems, such as a recently returned Iraq officer who said the State Department would not authorize her medical treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder, other comments were less helpful, ranging from the much-publicized complaint that Iraq service is “a potential death sentence,” to “who will care for our children?” 4
It was a bad day for the foreign service. No amount of blogs, op-eds, or letters to the editor from FSOs enthusiastically serving in Iraq could undo the damage. A little-known fact is that fifteen hundred diplomats had already served in Iraq from 2002 until the day of the meeting in late 2007. Many officers disagreed with those who had been most vocal. By the end of the day, fifteen more had volunteered for the forty-eight unfilled positions, and soon all forty-eight had been quietly filled with no need for directed assignments.
The real story is that many FSOs went to Iraq because they wanted to serve there and were intrigued by the policy challenges and attracted by the resources at their disposal. In an organizational culture in which promotion is predicated on an ability to manage people and money, Iraq service offered plenty of opportunities. Many of those who served were enthusiastic about their stints, and some went back for more. Hill’s memoir supports the notion that many officers were glad to go, and he described his office colleagues volunteering and his phone ringing with offers from FSOs who wanted to serve with him in Iraq even before his ambassadorial nomination had been made public.
Of course some officers were attracted by the danger and hardship pay, which allowed them to double their salaries. Hill noted that the bureaucratic pressure to fill Iraq slots had begun to have unintended consequences.
The people who served repeated tours in Iraq as opposed to those who simply wanted to check that box, were often seen as those who could not get jobs elsewhere, or who viewed Iraq as a place to go to line up a next assignment to a cozy job in Europe. The State Department’s personnel system had been skewed as a result of Iraq, with those who had returned being offered jobs ahead of everyone else . . . Iraq, it was said, had also become a kind of French Foreign Legion, where after a particularly unsuccessful assignment somewhere, a person could wipe the slate clean and start afresh. 5
The era of the “expeditionary” foreign service seemed to have arrived almost overnight.
Hill’s predecessor in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who served from 2007 to 2009, had exerted enormous pressure on the State Department, Congress, and anyone who would listen for more resources, especially in the form of FSOs. Crocker served as the Iraq surge began in 2007 and was determined to ramp up the embassy’s capacity to match the military. This meant staffing twenty-five PRTs as well as the large embassy. The cables he sent reveal exasperation with a bureaucracy that was overwhelmed by personnel demands and slow to meet his needs. All ambassadors try to be advocates for their posts and seek more resources from Washington on the theory that it never hurts to ask, but Crocker was unique in having the world’s largest embassy along with Washington’s affirmation that staffing Iraq was a policy priority. That didn’t mean it always worked well.
Crocker’s desire for more officers embraced nation-building at its most fundamental level. “The success or failure of the Iraqi government will depend in large part on its ability to function well and to deliver services to Iraqi citizens. That makes ministerial capacity building an essential part of our strategy,” he wrote in 2007, following up with a torrent of numbers explaining and describing the work of some 214 officers he said were essential—just to work on ministerial capacity building.6
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p; In another cable, he excoriated the State Department’s personnel system for its failure to meet a staffing deadline. Crocker took this issue so seriously that he ordered his embassy’s Office of Provincial Affairs (OPA) to update the staffing document twice a day. His enumeration of the problems illustrates the bureaucratic challenges of such ambitious staffing goals. Crocker was incensed to learn that PRT team leaders were rejecting a significant number of candidates, sometimes because of qualifications and sometimes because they lacked the facilities to support them (billeting, transportation, security, etc.). “Under no circumstances will a position not be filled or diverted without the express permission of the ambassador,” he wrote. He fulminated over bureaucratic snafus. “Furthermore, various offices in Iraq and Washington were keeping their own tallies of surge staffing that were often inconsistent and resulted in confusion. To address this problem OPA now has a single transparent manning instrument that is maintained by one person, with a back-up, and accounts for the status of each position in each phase.” 7
But as an illustration of how quickly personnel needs can shift, just two years later Embassy Baghdad was describing to Washington how it would handle a drawdown from sixteen PRTs to only five, and a reduction of some seventy officers. Three of the PRTs—Basrah, Erbil, and Kirkuk—became full-fledged U.S. consulates. Drawing from President Obama’s February 27, 2009, speech at Camp Lejeune, the embassy focused on timing, coordination, pace, and sequence. In a prescient observation, it noted, “It has become clear that security issues (and related costs) are going to be among the most difficult. If, in 2012 and beyond, we assess that diplomats require a security footprint as heavy as is required in 2009 (but without military support) we will need to annually reassess the viability of some of the enduring presence posts.” 8