The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

In another African country not named by the investi- gators, civilian embassy officials questioned the rate at which military programs are rapidly escalating and the sizable and still growing presence of U.S. military per- sonnel in-country. A U.S.-labeled backpack, observed on a government soldier undergoing DOD training, under- scored for the Senate investigative staff the potential complications of a too-close association with the country’s military. “It would be a major setback if the United States were to be implicated in support of operations shoring up the repressive regime, regardless of the stated intent of such training,” the report said. Meanwhile, further exacerbating the problem, the investigators found that just as Defense has ramped up its involvement in humanitarian and development aid, State and USAID have had to scale back some opera- tions due to the ongoing “Iraq tax” and budget limita- tions. The Senate investigators reported that “country teams in embassies with USAID presence are far more capable of ensuring sufficient review of military human- itarian assistance projects than those that have no USAID office.” Yet the same report also noted that “budgetary cutbacks at USAID, affecting both personnel and programs, are repeatedly cited as a deficiency in the U.S. campaign against extremism in susceptible regions of the world.” That, in turn, poses all kinds of questions about the direction of U.S. foreign policy and the country’s ability to win the war on terrorism, the investigators argued. “Such bleeding of civilian responsibilities overseas from civilian to military agencies risks weakening the Secretary of State’s primacy in setting the agenda for U.S. relations with foreign countries and the Secretary of Defense’s focus on warfighting,” the report said. Barbara Bodine, who served as ambassador in Yemen at the time of the 2000 strike by al-Qaida on the USS Cole , which left 17 sailors dead, experienced just such a challenge to ambassadorial authority first-hand, as she sought to balance the overall foreign policy goal of main- taining a working relationship with Yemen’s government, F O C U S D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25