The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

four-person offices staffed by Foreign Service officers with excellent language and cultural skills, operating wholly in the open, could give us a much better sense of what is really going on in vast parts of the world where ter- rorists have taken up residence.” He believes that the information these posts could generate would be a tremendous bargain, especial- ly considering how failure to “connect the dots” had already “proved costly beyond our worst nightmare.” Thomas Barnett, author of the provocative The Pentagon’s New Map (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004), is the ultimate believer in transformational diplomacy. Barnett sees success for the United States in the battle against extremism as coming down to the ability to bring the dis- connected “gap” countries, into the successful and con- nected “core.” On a tactical note, he similarly believes that the majority of the information we need to find and fix terrorists is readily and openly available if we would only position ourselves in the right places. In his trade- mark slash-and-burn style, Barnett questioned in a recent speech the yield of the covert services in the war on ter- ror, suggesting that most of what we need to know “is not a secret; all you have to do is ask people or go live with them.” In his book he suggests that to achieve this, “the State Department is in desperate need of its own trans- formation. Unlike a Treasury or Justice [Department] that is forced to keep up with changes in the private sec- tor, the State Department has become a seriously ossified culture operating in an ever-changing global landscape.” The Force of Events While not employing the kind of micro-posts envi- sioned by Pickering, Hill and Barnett, the department has been forced by events in Iraq and Afghanistan to flat- ten its structure to meet the requirements of post-conflict societies. The concept of placing civil-military teams in the field to help quell an insurgency or assist with post- conflict stabilization is not new. It was the basic concept behind the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program in Vietnam, which placed up to 1,100 civilians in all 250 districts and 44 provinces of South Vietnam to coordinate reconstruction efforts and provide a kind of “shadow government” for the struggling Saigon regime. The concept was sketched out but not employed in Somalia, and was used in a very limited way in the Balkans; it is the basic operating method for United Nations peace- keeping missions. However, Washington treated all of these operations as once-offs, so there was no template or orga- nization to implant a field presence throughout a country when we began the Afghan stabi- lization program. Rather, it evolved out of simple neces- sity when it became clear fairly soon after the fall of the Taliban that the Afghan government would not be fully functional in the provinces for years and, in order to avert a fallback to the chaotic conditions that spawned the Taliban, the international community would be forced to fill in the breach. The military had been carrying the reconstruction load, primarily with its very skilled civil affairs teams, but there was a desire on the part of Afghans to see the operation move away from a uni- formed occupation and in the direction of a civil partner- ship. There was also a need for an expansion of the mil- itary skill sets that were then available, and the military was anxious to return to its core functions and not carry the entire reconstruction load alone. The Provincial Reconstruction Team concept was born and, from all indications, has been a very successful way to further sta- bilization and create the needed support for the new Afghan government. PRTs are currently being led by a number of NATO nations throughout Afghanistan and include a mix of civilian specialists, generalist diplomats and military security personnel. The combined civil-military teams that are now being led by diplomats in Iraq similarly developed without any overarching plan, propelled forward by the simple evolu- tion of events on the ground. In the summer of 2003 Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer found himself trying to govern a country that was highly resistant to foreign domination, without any civil- ian teams to insert in order to take the edge off the mili- tary occupation. International members of his staff with experience in the Balkans and East Timor devised a fair- ly logical structure of regional teams in each of the coun- try’s 18 provinces under three large headquarters in Basra, Mosul and Hilla. The teams were to include gov- F O C U S 52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 6 The civil-military teams that are now being led by diplomats in Iraq developed without any overarching plan.