The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

Iraq and Afghanistan are, relatively speaking, less dangerous than others, this is a shifting mosaic. One can reasonably expect our enemies to seek out and go after the least defended and most inviting targets. Many members of PRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan have to be confined to heavily protected forward bases for their own safety, sometimes for months at a time. They can meet with local officials and villagers only when enveloped by overwhelming security forces (which defeats our broader psychological and ideological object- ives). And far too often, any concrete progress they achieve on the ground — building schools, restoring elec- tricity, etc. — is promptly destroyed by a nihilistic enemy that doesn’t care about the consequences for affected villagers. Under such circumstances, the assignment of Foreign Service personnel to PRTs simply for the sake of having the State Department appear to “do its part” doesn’t make much sense. Worse, it needlessly endangers (and, in a worst-case scen- ario, costs) lives under conditions in which there can be no reasonable expectation of positive gain. Civilian Foreign Service personnel should never be used as “totems” — symbols of a decision by our govern- ment’s most senior political officials that every element of the U.S. govern- ment must be represented on the bat- tlefield in order to signal our deter- mination to do whatever it takes to win. Foreign Service officers are not combat professionals, and no amount of training in combat skills, weaponry and self-protection will ever enable them to be more than hostages to luck in a combat environment. As such, they will also never be more than a burden on those military and security forces who have to protect them, and they are unlikely to be able to sig- nificantly assist in postwar reconstruc- tion and the transition to democratic institutions in the countries where they serve. Assigning Foreign Service pro- fessionals to such environments does not demonstrate commitment on the part of our government so much as a lack of sound judgment. Nor does it send a signal that this administration intends to win in Iraq and Afghani- stan. It merely endangers lives — and not only those of Foreign Service personnel, but also those of the military and security forces who have to protect them. David Passage, a retiree member of the AFSA Governing Board, was a Foreign Service officer from 1966 to 1998. Among many other postings, he served with the CORDS program in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970; was deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war in the mid- 1980s; served as ambassador to Bot- swana from 1990 to 1993; and was the political adviser at the U.S. Special Operations Command from 1993 to 1996. Since retiring from the Service, Ambassador Passage has been a lec- turer and mentor at several U.S. mili- tary schools and training facilities. 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 S P E A K I N G O U T It is the overall security environment that drives how U.S. teams function and what one can realistically expect them to achieve.