By Patricia H. Kushlis
A friend clued me into an oped in the Sunday, June 15 Washington Post by James DeHart, a Foreign Service Officer soon to be assigned to an Afghanistan provincial reconstruction team after a year as a Fellow at Georgetown University. I don’t know DeHart and I wish him well on his onward assignment but I also wonder why he is spending the year at Georgetown and not learning (or improving his) Dari, Pashto or whatever other local language is spoken in the region to which he is being assigned and knowledge of Afghan culture at the Department’s own Foreign Service Institute or why he agreed to a PRT assignment in the first place.
Could the answer to my second question be contained in his observation that State Department assignments to war zones are fast tracks up the career ladder and that as war zone vets “rise up the chain and (presumably) gain a bigger say in future personnel decisions, the practitioners of more ‘traditional” diplomacy’” may find themselves second class citizens?
I’m not sure I buy that argument. At least until I see the statistics. I would love to see the numbers that demonstrate that Iraq and Afghanistan State Department veterans are, in fact, getting promoted faster than their peers. If someone can point or e-mail them to me – I’d be delighted. Since this is becoming an increasingly divisive issue in the Foreign Service - based from what I can tell primarily on corridor gossip – a systematic, fact-based, transparent study should be an imperative. But maybe I've just missed it.
I think it is true – or it should be the case – that the vets do, or did, get a nice assignment after a year in Iraq or Afghanistan and an attractive pay package while serving there to boot. This is what they were promised. It is also what has kept the State Department from introducing a policy of forced assignments. But from what I’ve seen with respect to recent Ambassadorial postings, a senior assignment in Human Resources appears to be an easier way thus far to make Ambassador than braving the desert sands in Iraq – or particularly Afghanistan.
Saluting vs thinking
If DeHart, however, really thinks the State Department will place more weight on the “ability to salute” rather than a “liberal arts education” in its recruitment of future diplomats – and this will, therefore, be the cause of a more militarized US diplomatic corps and perhaps approach to foreign policy, I think he needs to think again. The US military has – in my Foreign Service memory – always been one of State’s recruiting grounds.
State also, however, recruits from the Peace Corps, academia, the media, the legal profession, business and an occasional natural scientist. The Foreign Service written exam – with its wide ranging questions – set a high liberal arts entry bar. My own entering class in the Vietnam War era included several former military officers. But they also had liberal arts degrees and knew how to think critically. So, by the way, did others.
That being said, DeHart raises a number of thought-provoking questions that the next administration needs to consider – in particular his concern about the militarization of the service although he sees the problem far differently than I do. Let’s face it George Bush’s approach to foreign policy remains that of leading with guns and steel – regardless of whether tanks and the bombers are the most appropriate way of dealing with problems overseas.
State’s red-haired step-child’s role in this “militarization” game is a given and hard to swallow for those of us who think there are usually other, less costly and more effective approaches, but it also may change. Hopefully, a new president with a different foreign policy team and mindset will rethink the fundamentals as well as reinvigorate USAID and staff it with experts in “nation-building” as opposed to contracting the task out and assigning State Department officers and the military to perform functions for which they are unqualified and unsuited.
An even more insidious problem
Yet I fail to understand why DeHart fails to mention a far more insidious problem. Namely, the mushrooming of Foreign Service Officers assigned as advisors (POLADS) to and students at various US military institutions. There have always been a few – and that’s been good because both parts of government need to understand how the other works and thinks - but the POLAD expansion, I think, has happened just over the past year. What makes it even more questionable, however, is that it is also occurring despite the fact the Department is one-two thousand officers short and is intentionally leaving most posts (except Iraq, Afghanistan and passport services) and the Department itself understaffed.