The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

42 SEPTEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL self, addressing how to strengthen subnational governance and counter corruption. In considering how to accomplish this with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the memo says the work will be done “working with Karzai where we can, working around him when we must.” This approach was absurdly unrealistic, but it was often followed in the field. Visiting military teams scattered about Afghanistan in 2010, I frequently found Americans depicting the Kabul government as irrelevant to their operations. They had the money and the power in the field, and they would establish the policies they thought best. In many conversations, I tried to point out that this would not work because President Karzai had the ultimate power to hire and fire provincial officials. He would use that power when he felt the foreigners were going too far in undermining him. Further, Karzai was engaged in a complicated game of politi- cal maneuvering to keep various competing Afghan political leaders and tribes under his control and to prevent others from becoming too strong. A local governor might be incredibly corrupt, inefficient or both; but if he was in place for a politi- cal purpose Karzai deemed essential, Karzai would retain that official. In this case, as in so many others, Kabul politics trumped policies made in Washington. Today, little remains from an incredible amount of work by military and civilian teams in the districts of Afghanistan. Clearly, some policymakers have avoided the tendency to conceptualize policy without regard to the ground reality. For- mer Secretary of State James Baker was noteworthy for his ability to listen to others closely enough to understand how to close a deal. And it is the realistic perception of how to work with for- eigners that is one of the strongest attributes of good diplomats, if our leaders will only make use of it. A Mechanism for Surging Staff Of the lessons unlearned despite repeated examples, the most glaring involves the State Department’s inability to surge staff, the failure with which this essay began. America’s diplo- mats are fully deployed. There is no reserve, nor even an excess over positions to allow for much long-term training. Then, when emergencies arise that need large increases in staff in the field, State will have to augment its personnel. This problem has come up over and over. With the possible exception of President Donald Trump, who added military per- sonnel to existing interventions but didn’t start a new one, every administration since Truman’s has undertaken foreign interven- tions. The usual conclusion is that we won’t do it again, so we don’t need to learn anything from the experience or prepare for the next one—and then we do it again. Even in the overlapping Afghanistan and Iraq wars few lessons were imported from one theater to another. A single example is the history of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs). Despite these having begun in Afghanistan several years before PRTs were initially fielded in Iraq, virtually no effort was made to import lessons learned from one war to the other. The initial problems of staffing, organization and support in Iraq were generally treated as new problems with new efforts at solution uninformed by reflection on what had worked or not worked in Afghanistan. When the Afghan and Iraq staffing surges ended, there was no effort to study either the problems or successes of the efforts to field large numbers of civilians. The so-called 3161 mecha- nism (named after the section of law that provided the hiring authority) produced some very gifted and talented officers, and some who had to be sent back as unfit. The length of time needed to hire staff varied widely, with some moving quickly to deployment and others waiting months to be hired. There is a certain amount of legend about the causes of problems, but no systematic study has been done to identify ways to improve the process should the need arise again. State’s one major effort to provide a contingency mechanism, the creation of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabiliza- tion (S/CRS), now transformed into the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, has gone through repeated changes of mission and organization without settling on clear goals. The reasons for this are many and outside the focus of this article, but the bottom line is that State still lacks a clear organizational model for how to staff interventions. The two decades since 9/11 have brought many changes in the world and in the practice of diplomacy. We will manage the chal- lenges of the changes better if we study and learn from the past. Considering the examples above, we have some way to go. n It is the realistic perception of how to work with foreigners that is one of the strongest attributes of good diplomats, if our leaders will only make use of it.