The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

28 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL off in a drugstore to ask where Morsi’s family home was located. A kid in the drugstore offered to take him to Morsi’s brother. Trager met the brother and other members of the Muslim Brotherhood. His substantive point in the article was an important one: Despite the military crackdown, the Muslim Brotherhood was alive and well in rural Egypt. But today’s American political offi- cers can’t go on the spur of the moment to some rural village, ask some kid to take them to an unknown destination and hang out with some members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Libya, our embassy closed in 2014 because of violence. Even before the withdrawal, the embassy had been subject to the strictest security of posts in the region, with highly limited staff, one-year tours and the most depressing living conditions I had ever seen in the Foreign Service. The situation gradually improved, and the western embassies began to return—with the exception of the United States and Canada. The United States continued to run its diplomatic operation from Tunisia. Despite numerous requests from the ambassador to both administra- tions, mission staff was not allowed to return on a regular basis, and the bar to meet security standards kept being raised. No one in a position of responsibility would sign off on the embassy’s return. Like those junior officers in Yemen, we have strong senior officers, too; through herculean efforts the ambas- sador met with Libya’s leaders every time they were outside the country, and the United States was still a preeminent influence in that country. But this diplomatic model is not sustainable, because we are cut off fromministries, NGOs and the business community, and from the country’s citizens. It is hard to know, furthermore, whether other countries saw our perceived with- drawal from Libya as a green light for their own intervention. The increasing militarization of foreign policy is not new, but it also received a huge boost from Benghazi. As U.S. forces continued to operate in places where State Department officers weren’t allowed to go, military personnel not surprisingly assumed more and more of the traditional civilian functions. This has been particularly dramatic in northeastern Syria. Even though ISIS has lost territory, 70,000 ISIS dependents, includ- ing 12,000 stateless children, now sit in miserable camps in northeastern Syria. This is an example of the need for preventive diplomacy at its most urgent: to ensure that these camps don’t become a terrorist petri dish and that hundreds of children don’t continue to die every day requires a highly specialized team of civilian specialists working with the U.S. military and with the Syrian Democratic Forces (the Kurds). Yet civilians are only allowed to be present in small numbers, if at all, after an exhaustive internal approval process. Everyday Diplomacy Is Essential The irony is that local knowledge and contacts make us safer. In September 2011, American embassies in the Middle East received frantic warnings that we were to “take steps” because Pastor Terry Jones in Florida was about to burn a Koran. For- tunately, in Egypt Political Counselor David Ranz and Political Officer Peter Shea had cultivated the local Salafis, the most con- servative branch of Islam. The Salafis actually reached out to the embassy about the Koran burning, and Shea negotiated a state- ment that effectively dissuaded them from participating in the protest demonstration and kept in touch with them throughout the day. The chargé also had cultivated excellent host-govern- ment contacts who were responsive to the embassy’s security concerns. These contacts were important factors in the minimal damage to U.S. interests in Cairo as a result of the incident. Recently, when visiting our embassy in Doha, I was reminded of what U.S. embassies do year-round, all around the world: help countries take small but important steps to strengthen their society. With no less than five checkpoints, the compound in Doha is hugely unwelcoming. The staff doesn’t invite Qataris to visit because of the embassy’s location and the long delays to get in. But Doha, at least, is a fully staffed embassy where the chargé is respected and highly visible. While I was there, a young officer briefed us on the steps Qatar had taken to improve its labor laws, inadequate to be sure, but a big step in the right direction. It was clear that the U.S. embassy— and this officer, in particular—had worked with Qatari officials, the United Nations’ International Labor Organization and the private sector, and played an important role in promoting the reforms. Admittedly small potatoes in a strategic sense, an improve- ment in labor conditions in Qatar is not without important implications: now our ally is not criticized as much for its human rights record, and American firms don’t suffer reputa- This diplomatic model is not sustainable, because we are cut off from ministries, NGOs and the business community, and from the country’s citizens.