The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2017 71 yielded a better result. Given that NATO achieved all its original goals and suf- fered not a single casualty… I regarded the Kosovo campaign as an unqualified success and an unexcelled model of coalition warfare.” In 2002, as the Taliban were driven from Kabul, Secretary of State Colin Powell sent Dobbins as an envoy to the Afghan opposition, to produce from its “various strands” agreement on a new Afghan government. This he did, extracting for a time coherence not only from Pashtun and non-Pashtun elements but from the United Nations, NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House, as well. The United States did not sustain its effort, and drew down its forces. The National Security Council considered peacekeeping a failed concept, a belief as unshakable as it was uninformed. “The preceding decade,” Dobbins writes, “had seen successful peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Mozambique, Libe- ria, El Salvador, Namibia, Cambodia, Albania and Macedonia.” But the George W. Bush admin- istration had lost interest. When the president called for “a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan,” there was “no follow-up, no increase in U.S. assistance, and no effort to galvanize a broader interna- tional effort.” Only in his second term, after terrible reversals in Afghani- stan and Iraq, did the administration approve a surge in troop levels and embrace nation-building “with all the zeal of a convert.” Dobbins retired in April 2002 and joined the RAND Corporation. After the death of his wife, however, he returned to State as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. At State in 2013, “I found everyone much younger except the few people I knew, who seemed much older.” He also found everything much bigger; a staff meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry had more than 100 participants, and his own staff was of similar size. Despite the resources, his job was frustrating and unrewarding. He left, apparently for good, in 2014. Critics of the State Department often cite an inability to learn from mistakes. Dobbins, reflecting on his career, laments a refusal to learn from success—in nation-building, coalition warfare, democracy promotion and other lately unpopular ideas. A lack of persistence, he suggests, is fatal to American efforts: “Insanity [is] doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results; but in diplomacy, if one does not keep trying to solve intractable problems, there is zero chance of success.” That is a lesson worth learning. n Harry Kopp, a former FSO, was deputy assistant secretary of State for international trade policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations; his foreign assignments included Warsaw and Brasilia. He is the author of Commercial Diplomacy and the National Interest (Academy of Diplomacy, 2004) and The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association (FS Books, 2015), and the co- author of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service (Georgetown University Press, 2008, 2011 and 2017).