The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 29 Republic and South Sudan still host employees who serve a year or two in a dangerous location while their families stay stateside. Whole of Government: Agencies Everywhere! “Whole of government,” another concept born of 9/11, briefs well, but it is hard to put into practice in the diplomat’s West- phalian world of nation-states and Washington’s federal system. A foreign policy meeting at the White House these days is very likely to have a dozen or more domestic agencies represented, each with its own agenda. I recently reviewed the staffing at sev- eral larger embassies in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East as part of prepping the U.S. military to work with our embassies. They were surprised to see how many agencies can be present overseas. While some agencies have long been part of the Foreign Service family, others are GWOT newcomers, like the many Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice law enforcement entities. These agencies have their own com- munications channels and legal authorities, and often have many regional responsibilities. And they are a serious problem for the chief of mission, who may not have visibility into, much less control over, their activities. Diplomatic Security and the Fortress Embassy When DS Assistant Secretary Taylor explained the global war on terror to the American Bar Association in 2002, after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, he said this: “We must also fight terror with every diplomatic, eco- nomic, law enforcement and intelligence weapon we have in our arsenal. We are using all these weapons in a coordinated, comprehensive campaign against the terrorist menace.” The fact that GWOT and its whole-of-government approach was articulated by the head of DS should not be lost on anyone. It signaled the ascendance of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, previously focused on protecting embassies and investigating passport/visa fraud, as a policy force at State and ushered in a culture that was inward-looking, preoccupied with security, suspicious of locals and unwilling to take risks. With GWOT, new terms entered our diplomatic practice lexi- con: personal security details (PSDs), bad guys / violent extremist organizations (VEOs), things that blow up (VBIEDs, IEDs, EFPs). Crash-and-bang courses became a part of FACT (Foreign Affairs Counter Threat) pre-deployment to war zones training. DS got funding to build its own counterpart to the Foreign Service Institute on the grounds of a Virginia National Guard base. New embassies were built, often outside city centers, with substantial setbacks, anti-ram barriers, blast-proof walls and layers of local security guards. Diplomats began to operate from fortress chan- ceries, insulated from the local population, sallying forth only with an RSO-approved security package. American ambassa- dors, with some exceptions, cannot even drive themselves while in country. The days of informal meetings at cafes and restau- rants, or just sauntering among the local people, are rarer than in the past depending on the threat profile of one’s post. Mission Creep, aka Nation-Building We Americans are cursed with the belief that our purpose in life is to remake the countries to which we are assigned more like our own. This stems from our post–World War II successes in Germany and Europe at large, Japan and, later, Korea. Once the U.S. military had succeeded in regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, instead of declaring victory and going home, American diplomats went to work on nation-building. In none of the three cited cases did we prepare for this mission; nor did we succeed. In all three, this was mission creep, taken on as a follow-on to consolidate the military’s battlefield successes. And all three cases displayed a failure to take the long view of our core national interests. Today we are witnessing the lamentations from U.S. diplo- mats who served in Kabul about how all the good things we did there at great sacrifice of Afghan and American blood, financed with American taxpayer money, are going to be lost with our withdrawal. One should recall that we went to Afghanistan to deal with al-Qaida, not transform the country. The latter is a diplomatic practice that needs to be discontinued. Similarly, eight years of U.S. military and civilian presence in Iraq with 150,000 troops and, at one point, 25 provincial recon- struction teams (PRTs) and a massive USAID effort, left little to brag about. Or take Libya: A well-intentioned effort to avert a massacre of civilians in Benghazi ended up making matters far worse, with a flood of weapons and mercenaries ensconced in Syria and North Africa / Sahel and an American presidential bid derailed by the death of an ambassador. Since the Foreign Service personnel pool is more like a puddle, the cost for the Iraq surge was stripping other posts of critical staff.