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Send the state department to war - -

By Max Boot

Send the State Department to War
Published: November 14, 2007

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

THE State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments” since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone.

While maintaining military power remains important, even more crucial goals are aiding moderate Muslims, countering enemy propaganda, promoting economic growth, flexing our political and diplomatic muscles to achieve vital objectives peacefully, gathering intelligence, promoting international cooperation, and building the rule of law in ungoverned lands.

The government developed expertise in many of these areas during the cold war, but those skills were lost as budgets were slashed and jobs eliminated during the “peace dividend” decade of the 1990s. Because civilian capacity has been so anemic, an undue burden has fallen on the military — something that soldiers understandably resent.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recognizes the problem and has tried to reorient the State Department. She has, among other steps, moved diplomats out of Western Europe and into the developing world, set up a “war room” where Arabic-speaking diplomats can address the Middle Eastern press, and fostered a clumsily named Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization to plan for nation-building assignments.

Such efforts, however, are unlikely to succeed because they run counter to centuries of State Department tradition that emphasizes liaison work with established governments rather than creating governments from scratch or communicating with foreign citizens over the heads of their leaders.

Modern management theory holds that small, tightly focused organizations are likely to be more effective than large conglomerates that try to do a million different things. If we apply that insight to the State Department, it would make sense to undo some ruinous consolidations that occurred after the cold war, when the United States Agency for International Development was placed within the State Department’s sphere of influence and the United States Information Agency was folded into the department outright. No wonder our capacities in nation-building and strategic communications have withered — their practitioners are second-class citizens behind traditional foreign service officers.

The information and development agencies should be made independent again, and their resources expanded. The Agency for International Development, in particular, has seen a precipitous decline in personnel. In the 1960s, it had 1,900 officers in South Vietnam alone. Today it has only 1,200 to cover the entire world, forcing it to rely mainly on contractors. If we expand its ranks, it could become our lead nation-building agency, sort of a global FEMA, marshaling the kind of resources that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To buttress the growing corps of government reconstruction experts, we should have civilian reservists on call who could be summoned by the Agency for International Development in an emergency like military reservists. They could bring expertise in municipal administration, sewage treatment, banking, electricity generation, and countless other disciplines needed to rebuild a war-torn country. President Bush endorsed this notion in his last State of the Union address, but too little has been done to turn it into reality.

One of the most important shortages we have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan is in experienced police officers who can train local counterparts. Much of the job has fallen on the military police, whose troops are too few in number, and on civilian contractors, who are of uneven quality. We need to fill the vacuum by creating a federal constabulary force — a uniformed counterpart to the F.B.I. that, like the Italian carabinieri, could be deployed abroad.

Its efforts could be supplemented by municipal policemen if we pass a law allowing the federal government to call up local police officers without loss of pay or seniority and to compensate hometown police departments for their absence. Along w



    
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