The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

expertise acquired on the job. In several countries, embassy officials say that the time required to bring military personnel up to speed, monitor their activities, and prevent them from doing damage is not compensated for by contributions they make to the embassy team. There are notable exceptions to such criticism. In Lebanon, new military components in the embassy provided information on appropri- ate routes in connection with the emergency evacuation of several thousand Americans during the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006. On the issue of Section 1206 funding, regional pro- grams initiated by the combatant commands are not receiving the same embassy input as bilateral programs. In the case of the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, at least one embassy did not realize that its country had been selected to receive assistance until well after the president announced it in May 2006. The ambassador subsequently objected to the assistance and prevailed. In the case of the Gulf of Guinea Initiative, the embassy team that covers São Tome & Principe did not know that its participation was being considered until well into the process. EUCOM briefed the ambassador a month after the president’s announcement and gained the ambassador’s support. (Preliminary findings of a GAO report on 1206 funding are to be completed in January 2007.) Further, Equatorial Guinea, a problematic coun- try that is situated in the strategic Gulf of Guinea, was on the original presidential list of Section 1206 countries before being removed following congressional scrutiny. Whether the mix of military and civilian foreign assis- tance is appropriate is another issue. In the Caribbean, for example, there will be some $7.5 million in Section 1206 funding for the Dominican Republic for interceptor boats and maritime communications and training, while only $800,000 in U.S. funds is going into public diploma- cy. If the terrorist threat is the transit of people and equipment across the island and into the United States, Senate staff questioned whether it would be wiser to spend as much money on public information and an informants’ program as on trying to intercept a couple of boats making their way to the United States through Caribbean waters. In this case, as in others, it is clear that Section 1206 funding, while useful to address drug-traf- ficking and a future potential ter- rorist threat, is not the [kind of] time-sensitive, urgent need that cannot wait for the normal budget process. There is evidence that some host-country nationals are ques- tioning the increasingly military component of America’s profile overseas. In Uganda, a military civil-affairs team went to the northern part of the country to help local communities build wells, erect schools and carry out other small development projects to help miti- gate the consequences of a long-running regional con- flict. Local NGOs questioned whether the military was there to take sides in the conflict. In Ethiopia, military humanitarian action teams were ordered out of the region near the Somali border due to Ethiopian sensitiv- ities that their presence could spark cross-border hostili- ties. Whether the humanitarian task force should try to return is still a source of disagreement within embassy team discussions. In Latin America, especially, military and intelligence efforts are viewed with suspicion, mak- ing it difficult to pursue meaningful cooperation on a counterterrorism agenda. Some ambassadors alluded to problems with broad implications for the role of the Department of State. One ambassador lamented that his effectiveness in rep- resenting the United States to foreign officials was beginning to wane, as more resources are directed to special operations forces and intelligence. Foreign offi- cials are “following the money” in terms of determining which relationships to emphasize, he reported. A prob- lem cited throughout every region is the understaffing of the civilian side of embassies, a situation corroborat- ed by Government Accountability Office findings (“Department of State: Staffing and Foreign Language Shortfalls Persist Despite Initiatives to Address Gaps,” August 2006, GAO–06–894). The military has signifi- cantly more money and personnel and is so energetic in pursuing its newly created programs and in thinking up new ones, that maintaining a management hand on mil- F O C U S 58 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 7 All ambassadors interviewed by the staff, with the exception of [the one in] Thailand, reported an increase in military personnel in their embassies since 9/11.