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PD Tomorrow: How to Make It Work, if We Want It to Work

PD Today

Part 5

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

 For twenty years America’s leaders neglected public diplomacy.  After the U.S. had won the Cold War and the USSR fell apart, people who should have known better crowed about the “end of history,” the Secretary of State spoke of the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” in a unipolar world, and USIA was absorbed and dismembered by the State Department. 

 Then history restarted.  Russia got uppity, “cheese-eating Old Europe” rebelled, China and India reinvented themselves, and the Muslim World bestirred itself.  But the George W. Bush administration had already decided, well before 9/11, that the U.S. didn’t need diplomacy, alliances or negotiation to work its will on the world. Raw unilateral power would do. By the end of 2008, America was hated, its wars weren’t going well and its economy had crashed.  The days of go-it-alone were over.  Even the Bush administration knew that diplomacy needed another chance.

Opportunity Still Beckons

 Unfortunately, while the State Department puzzled over what to do with its public diplomacy step-child, the Pentagon began to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on PD simulacra.  The resulting series of highly visible fiascos will undermine the credibility of the real thing for years to come, assuming that the State Department can regain control over communications with foreign publics—or seriously cares to. Unfortunately, nine months into the Obama administration, there is no sign that the State Department’s budget will be proportionate to the need for savvy communications on a global scale.  If State goes hungry, public diplomacy will continue to subsist at starvation level.  Budgets speak.  It looks as if America’s foreign policy will remain over-militarized.

 Discouraging as this is, it’s important to remember that moving money from one department to another isn’t as easy as it should be.  Here’s the conundrum: the president proposes a budget and Congress signs the checks, but the State and Defense Department budgets are processed through separate Congressional committees, each subject to outside influence.  When it comes to lobbying Congress, the Pentagon and its generous contractors are far more adept than Foggy Bottom, especially since State’s limp goody bag attracts very few well-heeled lobbyists. 

Yet, even if the merest fraction of Pentagon funds could be transferred to the State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy to beef up PD staffing and enhance PD programming, that pittance (from the Pentagon point of view) could make a vast difference—providing, of course, the money is protected from the departmental raiders who have made a habit of siphoning PD-intended funds and staff slots into other State Department offices.  Ever since consolidation in 1999, funds intended for educational exchanges and certain cultural programs have been firewalled by law, which is to say, they can be put to no other use.  Yet, as we have explained elsewhere, a well-balanced public diplomacy program is not limited to those highly visible educational exchanges and cultural events.  All public diplomacy funding, including desperately needed budget increases for beefed up information programs and the reestablishment of American centers abroad, should be equally non-fungible.  Otherwise, even if the Pentagon lets more than a few dollars slip through its fingers, public diplomacy’s ability to influence events will continue to be compromised. 

 But we can dream.  Barack Obama’s popularity remains high abroad, his speech in Cairo had resonance in the Islamic world, and his decision to work with the Europeans while also engaging the Russians and Chinese shows signs of paying off.  He may yet wake up to the power of and need for a more securely institutionalized public diplomacy capacity.  However, as time goes on and hard choices are made, his popularity could slip, and his ability to massage budgets would lessen accordingly.  Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton’s travels to India, the Far East, Africa and Latin America have been well-planned and well-received.  Hopefully, as the U.S. withdraws from Iraq and finds a sensible and sustainable equilibrium in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration will realize that fluid situations create great opportunities for public diplomacy, assuming the tool kit is kept well-stocked and at the ready.  To the extent that Obama strenuously reaffirms the values of the rule of law, due process, the separation of powers, open government, the unacceptability of torture, and the inalienable civil rights of every citizen, public diplomacy can help America to regain its dangerously diminished moral and intellectual preeminence.  But the tool kit isn’t ready, because public diplomacy has been systematically neglected for twenty years.  At minimum, the State Department’s organizational chart must be revamped, the PD mission must be explicitly reaffirmed, the budget must be enhanced and protected and leadership recruitment must be based on more rigorous qualifications.

No More Troops for Afghanistan, Mr. President

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I urge you, Mr. President, not to increase our troop strength in Afghanistan.  Indeed, I urge you to announce instead a gradual withdrawal of American forces whose only justifiable mission, undertaken with the support of virtually all Americans and the whole world, was lost at Tora Bora, when a skinflint strategy dictated from Washington allowed Osama bin Laden to slip away.  Since “failure” was unacceptable to the hawks of the day, that mission was allowed to mutate into this ill-conceived war against the Islamist forces known as the Taliban. The hawks have had their day.  Do not listen to them now.

It's a Civil War within Islam

We have, in Afghanistan, thrust ourselves into the middle of a religious war we tragically helped to ignite.  Now, however, this struggle is in no way ours to win or lose.  That’s up to those who have a direct interest in its outcome, the Afghan people.  Arguments about how properly to fight a war against insurgency, debates about how many troops are needed, advisories about how those troops should behave vis-à-vis the local population—irrelevant!  It’s not our war–and we can’t oh-so-nobly win it for the Afghan people either.  If, after eight years of outside intervention, competent or not, the fractious non-Taliban leaders of Afghanistan have been unable to unite around the task of fielding enough tough-minded, battle-savvy men to defeat the resurgent Taliban, there’s got to be a serious lack of something like will, motivation or interest or sense or urgency. Look at it this way: if the Taliban can fight modern troops to a standstill, then five times as many (an arbitrary but not impossible figure if all non-Taliban sheiks, chiefs, warlords and mullahs would work together) non-Taliban fighters, no better equipped but equally determined, could surely push them back, Afghan-style.  It’s clear that fearful village fence-sitters would back a credible non-Taliban alternative.  Memories (and current experience) of Taliban rule are not pleasant.  

As it is, we pour money into Afghanistan, it seeps into the ground like rain after drought, and still the ground is infertile (except for poppy).  There’s a message here.  We are fools and we are being milked.  I imagine lots of laughter at our expense when the Afghan maliks settle down on their carpets, lounge back on their pillows and sip green tea together after a day of smiling and saying yes, yes, yes, to the Americans.

Two Good Reasons

Two things have emboldened me to write so single-mindedly.  What started this trend of thought was the reaction in Pakistan to Taliban-excesses in Swat, including decapitations and mutilations, as well as to the loss of life from dramatic suicide bombings throughout the country.  The militants even dared to threaten the almighty game of cricket.  Little by little the horror dawned.  The Taliban couldn’t be trusted to honor a self-limiting agreement.  As a result, the war against the Taliban and other such militants had become Pakistan’s, which meant that the Army was no longer in the humiliating position of fighting someone else’s war.  When the army finally went after Baitullah Mehsud, it wasn’t head hunting for the U.S. It was defending a way of life more agreeable to the people of Pakistan.  In short, a mission the majority of Pakistanis could support.  (Note to America: you can’t buy loyalty or reliable allies, a lesson that should also be abundantly apparent in Afghanistan.)

The second reason for my strongly urging you, Mr. President, not to send more troops to Afghanistan is related.  It derives from the data in a recent Pew Research Center study.  Over the past six years, and ironically while America’s popularity has been in free fall, confidence in bin Laden’s likelihood to “do the right thing” has plummeted, from about 58% to 28% in Jordan, from 60% to 25% in Indonesia, from 15% to 2% in Turkey, to mention just a few countries.  Suicide bombing and other violence inflicted on civilian populations “to defend Islam against its enemies” has also dramatically lost support.   This trend, it should be noted, can't be traced to the American anti-terrorism campaign. 

WhirledView Weekend - Sunday afternoon at the Lensic with Nobuyuki Tsujii and the Santa Fe Symphony

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The Santa Fe Symphony’s opening concert for the 2009-10 Season last Sunday featured Van Cliburn Competition winner Nobuyuki Tsujii performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor. The twenty one year old blind Japanese pianist is already a sensation in Japan. He burst onto the American scene at the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition in Ft. Worth, Texas where this crowd pleaser shared the gold medal with 19 year old Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang.   

 Tsujii is amazing – not just for overcoming his tremendous visual handicap – but for his wonderfully lyrical interpretation of Chopin, a welcome respite from the hard bitten pyrotechnics of far too many young celebrity pianists today.

 His performance in Santa Fe was filmed by Japanese television for inclusion in a documentary being made about Tsujii for broadcast in Japan.  How much of the  footage from Santa Fe’s Lensic Theater will make the final cut, of course, is another question but if filming a full house, multiple curtain calls, standing ovations, an excellent orchestra, an attractive and unique venue and an encore are indications of audience approval then at least a clip should appear. 

Tsujii’s win makes him the first Japanese ever to have won the 47 year old Van Cliburn Competition.  No wonder, then, that Japanese television decided to make the documentary.

The Eric Holder Defense

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

George Bush lite.  That’s what we’ve got, it seems.  Some of us had hoped that we’d be liberated from the national security state once Barack Obama had been inaugurated as President of these United States.   Instead we’ve got George Bush lite.  As many of us equally feared, even before the election, Barack Obama has become as enamored of the swollen powers of the presidency as his predecessor was.  The seemingly inexorable process toward tsarship maintains its terrifying progress. 

So we should probably, with all due historical perspective, be charitable to Bush, who was simply (or simplistically) more straightforward about the “cult of the commander in chief” and the myth of the “unitary executive,” which reminds me of how Rome clung to the use of the window-dressing term “republic” long after it had become a dictatorship with a thoroughly cowed Senate and plebes lulled by blood sports in the arena.  

Garry Wills notes that “sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal and constitutional diminishment the settled order.”  Supposedly we are citizens.  Yet we cannot make intelligent decisions on the most important issues that face us, because we have minimal access to classified “state secrets” which are subject to impossible clearance regulations despite the enlightened Freedom of Information laws that remain on the books.  Our courts cannot function and people who are arrested cannot defend themselves because evidence is withheld.  Like children, it seems, we are to be protected, and we are expected to trust our protectors blindly. 

But we are not children, and some of us persist in thinking of ourselves as citizens, as “deciders.”  No wonder, with no access to reality tests, so many of us are downright paranoid and most of us are furious. George Will calls Obama an “entangled giant.”  I see him more as a willing accomplice whose susceptibility was evident before the election.  My scorn is not lessened by Will’s much too generous observation that any president “must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief.”  So Will himself is losing heart.  He concludes: “None the less, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made.”

Should be made?  Must be made!  And there is hope.  Barack Obama gave us Eric Holder who, as Attorney General, has made the effort, challenging his boss on major national security issues.  Unfortunately, if Congress will not show backbone, even on the rewriting of the Patriot Act, for example, Holder’s dedication to the rule of law will go nowhere. 

Meanwhile, read David Cole on the torture memos, which the President—that’s President Barack Obama, not President George W. Bush, did not want to divulge.  Here is a critical paragraph from an article deriving  from Cole's book The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, which we all should read, and I will, shortly:

History has shown that even officials acting with the best intentions may come to feel...that the greater good of national security makes it permissible to inflict pain on a resisting subject to make him talk.   History has also shown that inflicting such pain...corrodes the system of justice, renders a fair trail virtually impossible, and often exacerbates the very threat to the nation’s security that was said to warrant the interrogation tactics in the first place.

Secrecy in governance has a similarly corrosive effect.  When inquiries are not prompt and thorough, when conscienceless operatives do anything they're told to do and supervisory officials are not held publicly responsible for their directions, when there is no accountability and no culpability, at low or highest levels, there is no democracy.  Nor are we made safer thereby.  Indeed, we must fear, not only the terrorists, but our own government, which may lock us up and throw away the key.  In the interest of national security, of course.  We can only hope, now, that Eric Holder will keep the faith, since his boss obviously will not. 

The Field: Where Foreign Policy Succeeds or Fails

Public Diplomacy Today

Part 4

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Foreign policy needs and goals are defined in Washington, but foreign policy succeeds or fails in the field.  Attention is sought.  Criticism is met.  Competing influences are neutralized or co-opted. Friends are made. Alliances are built.  Goals are achieved—or not.   It helps hugely when policy is intrinsically attractive.  Being militarily strong helps, too, up to a point. Overwhelming strength is often resented.  It becomes, paradoxically, a disadvantage to be adroitly overcome, since no other country wants to appear to have been coerced.  But raw power flaunted or sheathed, even the U.S. can’t go it alone in today’s world.  Public diplomacy’s role is to move governments by inspiring their citizens to see American goals as good for them, too.

The Trifecta:  Information, Culture, Education

Public Diplomacy in the field, at post, works both directly and indirectly.  It aims simultaneously for immediate and longer term impact, the two time lines corresponding roughly to the two branches of traditional PD work: information and culture.  Sometimes the information function is confused with the manipulations better known today as propaganda, although PD’s need for reliability and credibility makes it more akin to journalism.  Cultural programs are often dismissed as frills, expensive indulgences whose impact is difficult to measure, which is true, but only because conventional polling is at its weakest when assessing qualitative phenomena and complex interactions. Straddling the two, though not customarily administered as such, are the educational programs which involve knowledgeable Americans interacting with foreign audiences, short trips to the U.S. for promising mid-career foreign citizens, youth exchanges, academic exchanges like the Fulbright program and even, until recently, university linkages. 

Informational, educational, cultural—these are the co-equal mutually-supportive elements of an effective PD program.  Properly orchestrated, they enhance the overall American image, making the U.S. better understood and more attractive as an ally.  They create lasting links between individuals and institutions, which keeps doors open and ensures a hearing when tough or sensitive issues need support.   They provide, via all media platforms, relevant, accurate and timely information to foreign publics whose mobilization is critical if American foreign policy goals are to be met.

Planning for Success

Because every country is different—even Canada and the United States differ in ways that would call for modulated communications strategies—a Washington-dictated, one-way, one-size-fits-all approach to public diplomacy, however tempting it might seem to bean counters, doesn’t work. Therefore, once Washington establishes policy priorities, experienced, skilled, perceptive  and imaginative field officers must be trusted to devise ways to sell it. 

In the past, USIA posts were required to submit an annual country plan assessing the state of the bilateral relationship, describing (in cooperation with the entire mission) how the post proposed to nourish the relationship while promoting, according to carefully specified strategies, Washington’s policy priorities and, last but not least, requesting the financial, human and material resources to do so.  Expectations for evaluation and feedback were built in.   Naturally big posts in big countries enjoyed more staff and bigger budgets.  But all posts in all countries were guaranteed sufficient resources—Public Affairs Officer plus American and/or locally-hired personnel; a vast range of highly-responsive, Washington-based backup services; firewalled budgetary authority; the wherewithal to run a full service American Center; an appropriate inventory of up-to-date equipment; and, last but not least, PD-controlled vehicles—to offer a high-quality, well-balanced, year-round program that could and would put America in the best possible light.  

The State Department has a habit of bemoaning the lack of administrative skills among its high level officers—and yet, at every post, there was, for decades, a whole cadre of field-tested managers who were also Foreign Service Officers: the public diplomacy people.  Even fairly junior officers had managerial responsibilities, and anyone who wanted to be a Public Affairs Officer had to be an adroit CEO, a dollar-squeezing CFO, a supervisor with a knack for delegating, a program coordinator, a cultural impresario, a human resources geni, a master of media, a public relations whiz, a social psychologist, a linguist, a self-confident performer—and make it all look smooth and easy to the public, which is why, perhaps, the typical State Department officer found it so difficult to appreciate what those public diplomacy colleagues were doing.  Even today there are calls for outside hires to supply the State Department with managerial talent.  Meanwhile, the superb managers that State acquired when it absorbed USIA, were ignored or devalued.  Many, therefore, retired prematurely.  Although a very few prospered and even became Ambassadors, Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Consul Generals, most public diplomacy operational skills are in a state of disuse bordering on atrophy and will soon be lost, except as recorded in the memoirs of better times. Talk about squandering capital!

The Bad News: America’s good news only Ambassadors

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In case you missed Nick Kralev’s exclusive in the Washington Times September 16, 2009 on the suppression of negative reporting from US Embassies abroad, it is well worth reading.  The story came out of a litany of complaints by an unnamed disgruntled US Foreign Service Officer who is resigning or has resigned after three tours of duty.  If this were just one individual’s lament about the state of working for State that would be one thing.  But it’s not.

According to Kralev, “more than a dozen diplomats serving in Washington and abroad” said “that they agreed with most of” the unnamed former diplomat’s criticisms, that censorship had reached its height during the George W. Bush administration “and that the censorship has continued to a lesser extent in the Obama administration.”

Most of the comments on Kralev’s article with the exception of one by an ex-FSO were insipid, ignorant and/or unrelated – unfortunately par for the course for WT commenters.  But Kralev raises a serious issue that administrations regardless of party need to address.  Kralev’s, by the way, is the kind of report that the Washington Post should publish but rarely does.

 What good do gilding the lily reports do in the long run?

 Here’s the problem: US government analysts require unbiased, hence reliable, information and US Embassy reporting should be at the top of the unbiased reliable reports list.

 Certainly US government foreign affairs analysts draw, or should draw, upon a plethora of different information sources – most overt and a few covert - but traditional Embassy political and economic reporting cables should tell it like it is.  This has become even more important as a result of our increasingly politicized media, shrinking newsrooms and the ever decreasing number of experienced American reporters abroad. 

 Embassy political and economic reports should not advocate a particular policy or hype a particular leader.  There are other ways an Ambassador or chief of mission can do that.  Reporting should be just that, reporting what’s happening on the ground, who said what and why and the context in which events are happening or may happen.

Furthermore, an Ambassador, after all, does have a cable’s last word.  He or she can comment in a cable’s final paragraph or paragraphs stating his or her reservations or objections to a report and why – but no Chief of Mission should stand in the way of a reporting cable’s transmission unless the contents themselves are inaccurate (like erroneous election statistics or results) or the text is poorly written.  Otherwise, if an Ambassador makes a habit of gilding the lily, he or she should be admonished or if the varnishing becomes an epidemic perhaps even recalled.

State Department cables are signed off by the highest ranking person at an Embassy at the time – usually an Ambassador or his or her deputy.

I always thought it was a good thing that the heads of USIA, USAID and other non-State agencies signed off on their own cables or those ancient things called airgrams that went by snail-mail - aka the diplomatic pouch - and arrived two weeks to a month later.  They escaped the bottleneck at an Embassy's top - crucial for timeliness since most USIA communications were purely operational and often required tight deadlines or to tell a story, report an incident in greater detail and without what used to be called "cablese."   

If we thought we needed an Ambassador’s approval before sending out a cable because of the contents – we would get it.  If not, our cables did not languish in his or her in-box waiting for him or her to appear several hours or days later to place initials on paper.     

Other ways information gets back to Washington

Lemon Trees, Olive Trees and Orange Trees: Israel Needs a Better Narrative

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

While both Hamas and Israel may be guilty of war crimes against civilians last winter, a U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded that Israel carried out “a deliberate disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” the people of Gaza.  This, sadly, is not the first time Israel has been accused of gross disproportionality in response to violence originating in Gaza, which is one very important reason why so many people who used to be Israeli supporters are not very sympathetic anymore.

When I was growing up, we were taught in school to admire Israel because hard-working farmers had planted lush, well-irrigated orange orchards in a desert—an arid, neglected, largely uninhabited land that was Jewish by right of prior possession, to say nothing of the blood-bathed, guilt-inducing politics that had brought the modern state of Israel into being.

Those Other Trees

Only much later did I learn of the much-cherished lemon trees that were being burnt or uprooted when Palestinian houses were bombed or bulldozed by the Israeli army.  Or become aware of the countless acres of olive trees, some extremely ancient, that were being destroyed to build Jewish settlements on conquered and occupied lands—and more recently to make way for a wall routed so as to appropriate as much land as possible lest a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine stand-off actually be put into practice. 

Never in school did I hear about Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization whose leaders, years later, would command respect, although evidently their counterparts in Hamas are never to be talked to.  Don't even think about respect!  Furthermore, much to my shame, I preserved for far too long my orange-orchard fantasy by not paying sufficient attention to some very ugly cases of what we now call ethnic cleansing—murderous operations to rid the newly born state of Israel of its inconvenient population of Arabs.  Evidently, the land had not been vacant!

The Eye for an Eye Fallacy

There’s a reason for my willful blindness.  My family was not Jewish, but my political consciousness was pricked to life by the mistreatment of Jews in my own country as well as by what my childish eyes saw in the news reels toward the end of World War II.  As a little kid, I saw the bodies of the dead piled like firewood and the equally skeletal bodies of the barely living clustered at the gates of liberated concentration camps.  At the same time, I also saw signs in America saying “Gentiles only.” I heard neighbors worrying about the neighborhood “going Jewish.” I read about “Jewish quotas” at Princeton and Yale.  And I saw a connection. 

Deconstructing the Interactive Shibboleth

Public Diplomacy Today

Part 3

By Patricia H. Kushis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

USIA, as a communications agency, was quick to understand the usefulness of the computer, of the World Wide Web, of interactive press conferences and panel discussions first via telephone and later via satellite  TV.  USIA showed 16 mm films in the jungle, schlepped monitors and VCRs to provincial capitals where power often came from generators, and sometimes, for extra special 35 mm film occasions, rented whole theaters.  When annual inventory time came around, it took more than a few hours time to account for all the communications equipment required to keep a USIA post running.  Meanwhile, as radio technology improved, USIA kept urging that VOA signals be ever upgraded, though the integrity of VOA news, so hard fought for over the years, was eventually rather sadly compromised.

USIA wasn’t an early adapter in the trendy way the term is currently used, but once a new communications methodology looked as if it would perform reliably from Austria to Zimbabwe, USIA was ready to put it into service.  What’s more, to keep it in service, USIS posts regularly employed highly competent, always available audio-visual specialists and, later, sysops, too, since there is no end to the upgrading of computer systems, once installed. Very seldom did a USIA program have to be delayed much less canceled for technical reasons.  When USIA was ingested by the State Department, one of the glaring differences between the two cultures was USIA’s pragmatic embrace of communications technology and the State Department’s  technophobia. 

Lately however, it often seems as if the State Department is trying to make up for lost time, positioning itself precariously on the other extreme of the spectrum, as current public diplomacy recruits fall all over themselves to prove they can out-Facebook, out-tweet and out-text the most desperate friend-seeker on the block.  But State has failed to hire (or train staff from within its thinning information specialist ranks) individuals conversant enough in information technology to handle Internet social networking while retaining its traditional knowledge workers - the reporters, writers, editors and reference specialists who cover the stories, provide the texts, and ferret out information on specialized topics needed by US Embassies abroad.  

The Aura of the Newest Gadget

We Americans are so in love with gadgetry that, like serial monogamists, we find ourselves going gaga over each new electronic communications device, babbling on and on about the wonders of blogging, texting, twitter and who knows what’s next on the horizon. Camera-equipped cell phones enabling twitter, the latter a recent State Department infatuation, seemed to have come into their own as important electronic media during the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections.  Nevertheless, contrary to fonder expectations, there were some reliability problems. Reports from unknown witnesses, however fervent, can be hard to assess, and even pictures don’t always tell the whole truth.

For example, when TV news channels showed shocking footage of a young woman bleeding to death on a street in Tehran, most everyone assumed she’d been demonstrating against a stolen election.  The truth was otherwise—and even more poignant.  She wasn’t a protester.  She’d been returning home from a music lesson---or at least that was one report.  And then her mother was interviewed.   She had been involved with some of the protesting.  And others weighed in.  Thus, even as texting and instant photo transmissions  were keeping a secretive regime more or less honest, a caveat emerged.  Magical as our new gadgets sometimes seem to be,  pictures and eye-witness data usually need contexting, analysis and info about the source who may or may not be well-informed or  well-intentioned.