Guns and Butter
2011; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0740277511402805
ISSN1936-0924
Autores ResumoOn April 1 this year, a riot erupted in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province. Infuriated by a Florida preacher’s burning of a Quran, hundreds of Afghans overran a United Nations compound, killing three U.N. staffers and four security guards. The tragic incident was a reminder of how contemporary conflicts are increasingly shaped by a blurring of lines. A bigot on the fringes of American life becomes a player in a war zone on the other side of the world. Angry civilians become tools in the hands of anti-Western insurgents. And aid workers—devoted to improving desperate conditions in a war-torn country—become targets for deadly violence.In a perverse way, the attack—and many others like it—mirror another blurring, one that has increasingly shaped American national-security policy in the past decade. An oversized but overstretched military is being asked to take on a wide range of responsibilities that have historically been handled by diplomats and aid workers. At the same time, an underfunded and unprepared civilian corps has become completely reliant for protection on armed forces and paramilitary security contractors. When soldiers take on the roles of diplomats and aid workers, and when it becomes impossible to distinguish civilian staffers from the heavily armed forces that surround them, the line between military and civilian starts to disappear—for those on both sides of the conflict.In 2007, I spent time in Mazar-i-Sharif during a three-week consulting project in Balkh province, working for an American firm that had been hired by USAID to advise Afghan officials on governance and reconstruction. I was part of a very small team, consisting of myself, an American colleague, and an Afghan counterpart. Yet wherever we went, we were accompanied by a heavily armed, 10-man security detail. We traveled in a convoy—the two Americans in an armored SUV, with one “soft vehicle” in front of us and another behind us. (To my embarrassment and chagrin, our Afghan colleague was relegated to one of the less-protected vehicles.)The intense security was intended to protect us, of course. And there is no doubt that Afghanistan is a dangerous place. But most reasonable observers would have concluded that I was part of a military unit of some kind. Most Afghans—and most Americans—would have been hard-pressed to recognize that I was a “civilian,” somehow distinct from the armed men who surrounded me. Predictably, the arrangement made it rather difficult to communicate effectively with—much less gain the trust of—the Afghans I was ostensibly there to help.I had become a living symbol of a trend that has distorted American foreign-policy during the past two decades, one that will require a significant cultural and bureaucratic transformation to reverse.While working in aid and development in the Balkans in the 1990s, I learned the limits of the “soft power” wielded by diplomats and development professionals. But in the past two decades, the American foreign-policy establishment has tragically overlearned the same lesson. When the Cold War ended, a new consensus formed inside the Beltway. In this view, America’s unrivaled military power was more than just a powerful instrument of national security. It was deemed the single most effective instrument of national policy, and it required more resources to carry out this larger role.Despite hopes and expectations that the end of the Cold War would usher in an unprecedented era of peace, the United States has been involved in at least one war every two years since 1990. Establishing global hegemony has been a costly process. Between 2001 and 2011, combined spending on international affairs more than doubled, from $317.8 billion to $715.4 billion—not including the discretionary spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet less than 13 percent of that increase went to the diplomatic side.A thirst for arms derives from a belief, deeply ingrained in American political culture, that one can never have enough protection. Much of the widely hailed post-Cold War “peace dividend” wound up being spent on America’s already-fearsome war machine. The military-industrial complex and Congress were more than happy to fulfill voters’ pleas for more safety and more security—particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But America’s growing faith in the capabilities of its armed forces was not matched by a renewed commitment to diplomacy, despite plenty of lip-service paid to that goal. As the military won more funding and more influence, the civilian side of the U.S. foreign-policy system—the State Department’s diplomats and foreign-aid officers—lost out in the battle for bureaucratic and policymaking leverage.Competition for resources between the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom is hardly new; nor is the fact that the Pentagon always wins. Sometimes, though, they have proven to be pyrrhic victories. With growing budgets come increased expectations. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the military became the lead agency in massive nation-building operations. “War fighting” now involves an entire array of responsibilities that have little to do with combat—providing basic services, building infrastructure, encouraging the development of civil society and democratic governance. All of those are activities that would traditionally have been considered distinctly “civilian.”Many military officers have served capably, even brilliantly, in these roles. But there is also no doubt that one reason for America’s travails in Iraq and Afghanistan is the fact that its military has been asked to fill a vacuum left by the absence of a fully resourced and well-trained corps of diplomats. Indeed, in recent years, a number of senior figures in the defense establishment have begun pushing very publicly for a reversal of this trend.Since 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has made numerous pleas for increased funding for the State Department. “There are only about 6,600 professional Foreign Service officers—less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group,” Gates lamented at a speech that year. Diplomatic posts have been added since then, but according to a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies, the ratio of military to civilian employees still hovers around 12-to-1.Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also called for a renewed commitment to civilian “soft power.” On a trip to the Philippines in 2008, Admiral Mullen praised the work of USAID and lamented the current state of the civilian foreign-affairs agencies. “The U.S. government is not set up for the wars of the 21st century. It doesn’t reflect the expeditionary world we’re living in. We haven’t recruited, hired, promoted, trained, educated the people in our civilian agencies for the kind of expeditionary requirements and rotations that we are actually doing right now.”Gates and Mullen are at the leading edge of a shift in thinking among policymakers, many of who have come to believe that State Department and USAID programs are essential to protecting the national security interests of the United States. They have found a natural ally in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “For too long we have focused more heavily on one of the so-called ‘three Ds’—namely defense—and less on the other two, diplomacy and development,” Clinton said in a speech in late 2009. “And it has been my goal…to make sure that diplomacy and development were elevated alongside defense.” Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department recently completed its first-ever strategic review, calling for 21st-century “smart power,” which includes strengthening the civilian foreign service, working efficiently through interagency cooperation and conducting more effective oversight.Yet the report did not directly address the fundamental changes necessary for the State Department to regain its place as a respected part of the foreign policy establishment. Specifically, State has still not adequately communicated why it has distinct value. Nor has it embraced the reorganization that must be implemented if it is to become more effective.Nevertheless, Secretary Gates has supported Clinton in reestablishing the significance of State. In a memo to Clinton in 2009, Gates argued for what he called “a new model of shared responsibility and pooled resources for cross-cutting security challenges,” proposing that State and Defense jointly oversee $2 billion in stabilization funds that were appropriated by Congress toward efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Congress ignored this plea and scrapped the proposal, because it felt the State Department was not equipped to manage these funds.Gates is leaving office, to be replaced by Leon Panetta, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a veteran Washington operator. Panetta is thought to have a good working relationship with Clinton, whose husband Panetta served as chief of staff in the White House. It will fall to Panetta to maintain the momentum toward coordination built by Gates and Clinton.An attempt to rebalance civilian and military components of the foreign-policy system began during the second half of the George W. Bush administration. The disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan forced the issue, even in an administration far more hospitable to military interests than diplomatic ones. Bush increased the State Department budget from some $10 billion in 2000 to $36.2 billion in 2008, hoping the increase would serve as a “force multiplier.” President Obama has gone even further, bringing the 2010 State Department budget to $51.6 billion.Still, those increases are mere drops in the enormous bucket of spending on national security. Although there is extra funding for Iraq and Afghanistan—about $600 million, most of which is controlled by the Secretary of Defense—the State Department still struggles for resources. The Defense Department takes a whopping 95 percent of the National Defense Authorization budget. The remainder is split between the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the State Department and USAID. After all is said and done, State is left with a meager 7.2 percent of the funds. Much of the budget gets eaten by State Department operations, about $16.3 billion, while $35.3 billion goes to foreign assistance.More than $35 billion may seem like a lot of money to send abroad, especially given the difficult economic circumstances many Americans are facing. Yet $5.1 billion of that money went to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—countries critical to American security interests—where it is used for education, supporting women in entrepreneurship, building government-management capacity and other initiatives essential to creating stability and reducing the appeal of violent extremism.Public misperceptions about foreign aid help explain why there is little political will for supporting it, much less increasing it. A poll conducted last year by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that 81 percent of Americans overestimate what is spent on foreign aid. When asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, the median answer was 25 percent— a wild overestimation. The actual figure is approximately 1 percent.But the same poll also provides some reasons for hope. When asked to suggest an appropriate percentage of the budget that should go to foreign aid, the median answer was 10 percent—in other words, almost ten times the current amount.Congress, however, is only too happy to exploit public ignorance of the facts. In its tug of war with President Obama to prevent a government shutdown in March, congressional representatives agreed to take $37.8 billion out of the budget. Some $8.5 billion of that was taken from diplomacy and development—without a struggle. Defense spending remained untouched.“We can’t get the focus away from war,” a senior State Department official told me during a recent visit to Iraq. “The Administration listens to the generals and their policy recommendations, forgetting that we [at State] are the seasoned advisors on foreign policy.”What has the lack of adequate funding for diplomacy meant, in practical terms? In 2008, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, released a report on “the crisis in diplomatic readiness.” The report offered a litany of sobering statistics. Fifty percent of diplomatic positions worldwide are empty. There are only 29 officers to administer education programs in 84 countries. Almost 30 percent of the overseas positions that specifically require foreign-language skills are filled by officers without them. (Reflecting on the report in Politico in 2009, eight former U.S. Secretaries of State complained that “sending diplomats abroad without language skills is like deploying soldiers without bullets.”) USAID has also withered. Between 1975 and 2009, the agency’s permanent workforce fell from 4,300 to 2,900. “An agency that once built roads now has only five full-time engineers,” the report’s authors lamented.Embroiled in two wars that involved significant nation-building components, some in the Bush administration belatedly realized this state of affairs was unsustainable. In 2005, President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44, ordering the creation of the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (s/crs) to train civilians for rapid deployment to conflict zones and take the lead in post-conflict transitions. nspd 44 gave the Secretary of State the responsibility to “coordinate and lead integrated United States Government efforts, involving all U.S. Departments and Agencies with relevant capabilities, to prepare, plan for, and conduct stabilization and reconstruction activities.” The idea was a good one, but unfortunately it was under-resourced, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell feared. The initial budget for s/crs was slated at $100 million, in the form of a transfer from the Department of Defense. The money would pay to hire and train some 200 people to be ready for deployment to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But by 2008, the s/crs budget was down to $30 million. Not much changed once Obama took office. According to the Journal of International Peace Operations, “by summer 2010, s/crs looked about the same as it did in 2005. And the office remains unfamiliar to many inside the State Department.”The Obama administration has taken some steps to remedy these weaknesses. The 2010 budget included $140 million for the establishment and deployment of civilian-response teams. The target is to get 250 active members and another 500 on standby. By January 2011, nearly 1,100 American civilians from 27 agencies were working in an official capacity in Afghanistan—up from only 350 in 2005. Unfortunately, most are working on year-to-year contracts, which makes them temporary employees, and most are stationed at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, rather than in the provinces.Yet these renewed commitments have not solved an underlying problem. The State Department has substantial problems recruiting the right people with the right skills. There are several reasons for this. State still “operates in silos,” says Gordon Adams, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center who specializes in the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. Adams describes this as “80 percent a human resources department problem,” citing an outdated, rigid system for recruiting Foreign Service officers that turns away many talented young people—and turns off others.For those who do choose a career at State, opportunities for training are generally limited to culture and language courses. State Department officers are not encouraged to learn about or serve in other agencies, with little incentive to take part in any inter-agency training. “They would most likely lose their ability to be promoted if they did,” says Adams.In the absence of a fully developed pool of civilian talent, both the Army and Marine Corps have tried to plug the gap by training uniformed forces in cultural, language, and development tactics. One initiative, established by the Marine Corps and staffed by each service, is called “AfPak Hands,” and provides training for forces who deploy to Afghanistan. Each armed service contributes members, while civilians are recruited to supplement the effort. “Hands” learn Pashto and Dari, study Afghan cultural norms, and learn the ways of the village and tribal systems in the region. In addition, civilians and military participants learn how to work more closely with each other.Admiral Mullen has described the program as a priority. But according to Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy, in a survey of 127 program participants conducted last summer, 80 gave the program a grade of only 65 percent or less—the lowest score the military deems “success.” Some participants have complained that commanders are not comfortable with the increased risk of interacting with Afghans in less controlled environments, off the base.Even development aid—an aspect of American foreign policy one might expect to be a fully civilian matter—has increasingly come under the military’s purview. According to a November 2007 paper by Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown of the Washington-based Center for Global Development, the military is now responsible for 20 percent of U.S. development assistance. Through commanders’ emergency response funds and what the Defense Department calls “Global Partnership Building,” military funds are now used to build everything from wells and schools to bridges and roadways.One organic reason for these blurred lines is that, far from fitting into neatly divided boxes, the challenges posed by places like Afghanistan and Iraq call for a complex mixture of military and civilian approaches. The key to solving these problems will be better cooperation and coordination between the armed forces and the diplomatic and development corps. The goal of better civil-military integration is not new—nor is the failure to achieve it. Moreover, past efforts have produced some deeply regrettable outcomes. During the Vietnam War, poor civil-military coordination led to the development of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (cords) program, established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. The concept was for a single body of senior officers and civilian advisors to be responsible for coordinating efforts between the Defense and State Departments, CIA, and USAID— no easy task.cords was credited with significantly diminishing the Viet Cong’s influence in many provinces. But it also gave birth to the Phoenix program— a CIA-led “neutralization” initiative that trained and paid South Vietnamese operatives to kill and capture members of the Viet Cong’s “shadow government.” Critics denounced Phoenix teams as “assassination squads,” and the effort’s troubling methods badly damaged the image of cords.Yet the prolonged war in Afghanistan and the bungled occupation of Iraq pushed the Bush Administration to revisit the initial concepts behind cords. The result was the Provincial Reconstruction Team (prt)—an organizational unit composed of military officers, diplomats, USAID workers and other reconstruction experts. The first prts were established in Afghanistan in 2001, and the model was later introduced in Iraq.prts are intended to facilitate nation-building by providing better security outside the capitol, so that development and governance experts can reach populations all over the country. In practice, though, prts are essentially military bases where State Department and USAID personnel just happen to live. This is particularly true of the 28 prts in Afghanistan—almost all under direct military command, with the State Department reporting that military personnel outnumber civilians, on average, by 100-to-1. (The balance is a bit better in Iraq, where there are currently 15 prts, all led by officers from the State Department, with a ratio of military to civilian personnel generally between 20-to-1 and 5-to-1.)There are two reasons behind this imbalance. First and foremost, the prts are in war zones, and security is the paramount concern. But it is also a reflection of the difficulty State and USAID have in recruiting personnel willing and able to take the kind of jobs that require becoming part of a prt. Those who are willing to go are often young and inexperienced—especially when it comes to cooperating with the military and working in a war zone. The military sends its most seasoned soldiers to its toughest battle fields. Their civilian counterparts take a different approach. At State and USAID, the most experienced and accomplished civilians are rewarded with cushy, comfortable posts—Paris, not Kabul.I first visited a prt in the summer of 2007, during my three-week trip to Balkh province as a contractor for USAID. Our team went to Balkh to assess its need for governance and economic assistance, and to advise the provincial governor and his staff. Since prts are the base for USAID development efforts in Afghanistan, we felt it necessary to visit, and spent several hours with the USAID representative there touring the grounds.The prt in Balkh consisted of some 100 Swedish soldiers and a single female USAID worker. Although she had been there for some time, none of the Afghans I spoke with had ever seen her or knew what she was supposed to be doing. At every meeting, the governor’s staff would ask me, “Who are those prt people and what do they do?” The USAID worker rarely left the prt headquarters, because she had to depend on the military for transportation and security. It’s a common dilemma in conflict zones. The movements of American diplomats and aid workers are sharply restricted because they cannot or will not risk venturing out of their compounds without armed escorts.Our visit to Balkh coincided with Afghan Independence Day, August19. We were invited to attend the celebrations and a special dinner hosted by the provincial governor. As my colleague and I walked from our hotel to the nearby banquet hall, the sole USAID representative sped by, escorted by a military convoy of about five cars and several gunners. It looked like a small military parade.Over the years, quite a few diplomats I’ve met in Iraq and Afghanistan have pointed out the wastefulness of deploying them to conflict zones halfway across the world without allowing them actually to engage with the local environment or its inhabitants. “We all could have been doing this work from Cincinnati,” an aid worker told me with a mordant smile after being confined for over two years in a Kabul compound.Different types of civilians deal with their confinement, vulnerability, and dependency on the military in different ways. In Iraq, foreign service officers resent having to conduct diplomacy from behind a bulletproof vest or from inside an armored vehicle—but most just learn to accept it because otherwise they’d get nothing done. Development and NGO staffers take a slightly different approach—getting out, taking risks, and engaging with the population. Contractors who work under USAID oversight are the most likely to increase their autonomy and mobility by making friends with locals and learning who to trust, so they can avoid the “lockdown” condition that traps many government employees. My fellow USAID contractors and I hated being cooped up. We found trustworthy taxi companies and Afghan friends who would help us “escape” from our compounds in the capital. Our willingness to take risks improved our relationships with Afghans tremendously. We earned their respect by not being afraid to venture out into their world.Iraq has all but disappeared from the headlines in the United States. One regrettable result is the fact that few Americans—including foreign-policy professionals—are aware of the surprising progress that has been made there in improving civilian-military coordination. In April 2010, I was granted permission by the office of General Raymond Odierno, at the time the commander of the multi-national force in Iraq, to tour several prts. Odierno’s staff also arranged for me to meet with a number of regional governors to assess the transition from military to civilian control.General Odierno has developed a reputation for taking civilian-military coordination seriously. I found that reputation to be well-earned. The man known as “the Patton of Counterinsurgency” worked closely with the American Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, to develop a comprehensive transition plan to civilian authority. Partially as a result of the improved coordination that characterized General Odierno’s command, civilian casualties were reduced by almost 60 percent, Iraq’s civil war was effectively ended, and the American military began training and turning over security operations to the Iraqis.The improved coordination stemmed in part from systemic changes that were initially implemented by Odierno’s predecessor, General David Petraeus, and his civilian counterpart, Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The men formed a uniquely close working relationship. Their key innovation was the establishment of an Office of Provincial Affairs (opa), headquartered inside the American embassy compound. The opa is staffed with a civilian director and a military brigadier general who ensure their teams work closely together, with equal authority. The opa oversees prts, providing them with development plans and making sure the civilians working there receive adequate support from their military counterparts, especially when venturing into the field.Coordination is still far from perfect, but the two groups seem to be working together much more effectively, especially in the provinces. Sadly, this seems to pose a threat to some Washington-based bureaucrats—civilian and military alike. More than once, I witnessed the State Department or the Pentagon undermine the coordination efforts of diplomats or officers in Iraq, because they felt their colleagues in the field were getting too close to the other side. Near the end of my visit, a civilian official pulled me aside to tell me that Ambassador Hill’s deputies withheld information from their boss because they were disappointed in how close his opa director was with the military. In the official’s words, “they were sabotaging their own efforts and American international policy and interests.”It’s hard to imagine the kind of fundamental changes that might rid America’s foreign-policy system of these flaws—at least in anything close to the near future. The change that’s needed is probably generational. Still, in the short term, there are steps that can be taken to put the system on the right path. One place to start is with the expansion of the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. A fully funded s/crs could be used to spearhead better training in coordination with the military and other agencies so that civilians asked to deploy rapidly to post-conflict zones will know how to plan for and operate in high risk areas, and how to work and communicate with military counterparts.But are there actually ways of changing the institutional culture of foreign-policy bureaucracies to encourage more coordination? I put this question to Lawrence Wilkerson, an independent-minded retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson resigned in early 2005. Although he has become a prominent critic of the Bush administration in which he had served, his answer was a broad critique of a system whose flaws have affected Republican and Democratic administrations alike.Wilkerson told me that there were so many initiatives put forward to help change the workings of the State Department that it was hard to keep track of them. “One was passed on to me by Tom Pickering, the departing Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs,” Wilkerson recalled. “Another was passed on to me by a member of Madeleine Albright’s policy planning staff. Another, I did myself—on the Civil Service and the Foreign Service. Another came in from the Center for American Diplomacy. And there were many others. All reported a dysfunctional department in one way or another—personnel management, training and education, financial planning vis-a-vis foreign policy objectives. But nothing ever changed. There was no political will. It was all very disappointing.”Part of the problem with the kinds of initiatives Wilkerson described is that they focused solely on one part of the bureaucracy—the State Department—instead of considering the larger, systemic issues that plague the policymaking process. In the long term, a radical reformation of the foreign-policy system will be required to produce better outcomes. Our government needs to put its money where its “smart power” mouth is and create a comprehensive national-security structure that supports an alignment of interests instead of endless confrontation. It may take nothing short of the creation of a joint civilian-military agency—an authority superior to both the State Department and the Pentagon.In implementing such a concept, the future of American national-security policymaking cannot afford halfhearted initiatives, or plans driven solely by political considerations. Whether through a reorganization of the foreign-policy system, or a less sweeping reform of its bureaucratic culture, it is time for the nation to work toward a more holistic and inclusive approach to foreign policy—one that allows each participant to be viewed as adding enormous value to the efforts of the other.
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