<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/13/americas_other_army>
America's Other Army
Interviews with diplomats in the line of fire -- an exclusive excerpt from
the new book America's Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st Century
Diplomacy.
BY NICHOLAS KRALEV | SEPTEMBER 14, 2012
The mob that had gathered at a soccer stadium descended on the U.S. Embassy
in Belgrade, determined to avenge Washington's recognition of Kosovo -- a
Serbian province until five days earlier -- as an independent state. On that
day in February 2008, the Serbian riot police stationed in front of the
embassy at the request of U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter conveniently
vanished just before the hundreds-strong horde arrived. "The police marched
away, got on buses, and drove away, so when the hoodlums came there was no
one there," Munter recalled.
A part of the embassy was soon ablaze. "One of the protesters who was drunk
managed to get in and burned himself to death," Munter said. Several others
climbed the fence. The U.S. Marines guarding the compound had every right to
shoot, but they managed to drive the intruders away with warnings and
instructions instead. "I was very impressed that the Marines knew how to
make judgment calls as well as to be defenders," Munter, a Foreign Service
officer since 1985 and until recently the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, told
me in an early 2012 interview in Islamabad.
U.S. diplomats saw the embassy attack coming. And as a result of their
preparations, no Americans were hurt during the incident. Only a small crew,
including the ambassador, was still in the building at the time of the
assault. As soon as the protesters tried to penetrate the compound, some of
the Americans began destroying millions of dollars' worth of communications
equipment, which is a standard procedure in such cases, Munter said. The
next day, about three-quarters of the embassy staff and all family members
were evacuated out of Belgrade. "We were fairly sure there would be an angry
reaction" to the recognition of Kosovo "and had made all necessary
preparations," he said. "We had already arranged for hotel rooms and space
at the embassy in Zagreb," the Croatian capital. "We even had space at the
American school in Zagreb for our kids."
Most diplomats, however, aren't so lucky. Preparing for a specific attack on
a U.S. diplomatic facility overseas is almost never possible, and
evacuations are rarely as orderly as the one in Belgrade. The events in
Libya on the night of Sept. 11 this week were a tragic reminder of that
reality. When the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi came under attack, Ambassador
Christopher Stevens
<
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/us-usa-libya-scene-idUSBRE88B1K62
0120912> was trapped in the burning building and reportedly died of smoke
inhalation. Three other U.S. officials were also killed during the assault.
A breach of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo that same day did not result in any
deaths, but the incident significantly
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/world/middleeast/egypt-not-libya-may-be-b
igger-challenge-for-white-house.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss> heightened
tensions between the White House and the Egyptian government.
Munter, who didn't abandon his embassy in Belgrade in 2008, wanted those
responsible for the attack to be punished. Once evidence surfaced that
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica had personally approved the
assault, Munter decided that he was "going to ensure the prime minister was
gone" and that "the best revenge was making sure this guy lost the next
election," which was less than five months away.
Munter determined that the key to weakening Kostunica's 2008 reelection
chances was taking away the support of the Socialist Party of Serbia, once
led by former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Its new leader was Ivica
Dacic, who had once challenged Milosevic for the top post. "We got him to
flip over and join the pro-Europeans," Munter said. "We didn't pay him off;
we just persuaded him. What he really wanted was international legitimacy.
So we got [José Luis Rodríguez] Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister at the
time, and George Papandreou, the future Greek prime minister, who ran
Socialist International at the time, to invite Dacic to visit them abroad,
where they wined and dined him. They told him they would let him in [to the
Socialist International] if he joined the pro-European forces, and he did.
He put a knife in Kostunica's back."
Munter got his revenge: Kostunica's party lost the election. Dacic's party
didn't join Socialist International, the global organization of
left-of-center political parties, but he became deputy prime minister and
rose to prime minister four years later.
Like Stevens and thousands of other U.S. diplomats, Munter has served in
places much more dangerous than Serbia, including Iraq and Pakistan. As he
prepares to retire from the Foreign Service after 27 years, the longtime
diplomat would like Americans to know that modern diplomacy is not all glitz
and glamour.
While U.S. diplomats still spend time in the company of kings and queens,
presidents and prime ministers -- and remain some of the most sought-after
people in foreign capitals -- they also contend with security threats, the
stresses involved in constant relocation, and the challenges of being a
jack-of-all-trades in a foreign land. I have interviewed some 600 Foreign
Service members at more than 50 embassies and consulates in the course of
research for my new book, <
http://americasotherarmy.com/> America's Other
Army. While most said they could not imagine doing anything else, many also
added that being constantly on the move and far from home means giving up
much of what most Americans take for granted.
American diplomats risk their lives just by showing up for work every day.
During my travels researching the book, I heard many stories about
carjackings, kidnappings, robberies, and diplomats being held at gunpoint.
Some have been murdered. On New Year's Day in 2008, John Granville, a
33-year-old officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID), was fatally shot in Sudan while returning from a holiday party at
the British Embassy. In 2002, Laurence Foley, 60, also with USAID, was
gunned down in front of his home in Jordan. In 1968, John Gordon Mein, 54,
became the first U.S. ambassador to be assassinated while in office when he
was shot by rebels in Guatemala. Stevens in Libya was the first ambassador
to be killed in the line of duty since 1979, when Adolph Dubs died in
Afghanistan.
Philip Frayne, a Foreign Service officer whom I first met in Cairo in 2003,
said he was driving to a meeting in Yemen in 1993 when his embassy vehicle
was carjacked by "three guys with Kalashnikovs" pointed at him. "I asked
them in Arabic if I could get my bag from the back seat, but by then they
were already in the car and driving away," Frayne recalled. "About six
months later, someone from the embassy security office saw the car in the
parking lot of the presidential palace -- the diplomatic license plates
hadn't been changed. I don't think it was taken by the president's men, but
it was probably taken by tribesmen and later traded or confiscated by the
presidential forces." That same year, Frayne's boss in Yemen, public affairs
officer Haynes Mahoney, was kidnapped for a week.
Laura Clerici, a now-retired officer I met in Mexico City in 2003, said she
was "ambushed by bandits" in Guatemala in the late 1970s while driving with
three colleagues and six children. "When they saw that the guy from the
defense attaché's office had a handgun, they started shooting at us,"
Clerici said. "Fortunately, all they wanted was our money, but when we got
back, I absolutely fell apart." Still, work in such places gave "richness to
my life that would have never happened, no matter what I had done in
Washington," she said. "I've had one of the most exciting lives anybody
could possibly want."
Top diplomats are the U.S. government's version of firefighters: They move
around the globe rapidly, from flash point to flash point. Just when they
have managed one crisis, it's on to the next assignment. Two years before
taking up his post in Serbia, for instance, Munter had led a team that
taught Iraqi provincial authorities how to govern effectively and trained
local judges how to conduct trials and other court proceedings -- amid
frequent shootings, roadside bombs, and rockets.
U.S. diplomats are charged with an extraordinarily diverse array of
assignments -- and they have the stories to prove it. In 2008, around the
time Munter worked to evacuate the Belgrade Embassy, Yuri Kim was in North
Korea. She accompanied the New York Philharmonic during a rare concert tour
in the communist country. Kim had helped negotiate the unprecedented visit,
which Washington hoped would improve Pyongyang's cooperation in efforts to
dismantle its nuclear weapons program. She was involved in those efforts as
well. This year, now in Turkey, Kim tried to persuade Ankara to use its
influence over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to end the Damascus regime's
violent crackdown on anti-government protesters.
Also this year, in another one of Turkey's neighbors, Iraq, David Lindwall
worked on deals to sell U.S. military aircraft and other equipment worth
billions of dollars to the government in Baghdad. A few years earlier, on
the other side of the world, Lindwall had participated in successful efforts
to reform Guatemala's previously corrupt child-adoption system, which many
Americans use, and to improve child nutrition. In Haiti in 2010, he managed
the search for missing U.S. citizens after the country's devastating
earthquake and helped the local government recover from the disaster.
Lindwall's house collapsed from the seismic shock -- had he been there at
the time, he would have certainly been crushed to death
Gavin Sundwall's first time in a Panamanian jail was in 1998. Two Satanist
killers sat across from him -- one staring at Sundwall with menacing green
eyes, as if sizing him up for execution. Fortunately for Sundwall, he was
just visiting the criminals, who were U.S. citizens, to make sure they were
being treated humanely and to relay any messages to their families back
home. Early this year, Sundwall, now in Kabul, worked to put out major
public relations fires after U.S. service members burned copies of the Quran
and another soldier killed 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children,
in cold blood.
It's hard to imagine how all these people can be diplomats. How can teaching
effective governance, participating in nuclear negotiations, organizing a
cultural event, reforming a child-adoption system, selling weapons,
recovering from a natural disaster, visiting prisoners, and fixing public
relations problems be part of the same profession?
Welcome to the U.S. Foreign Service.
Given the United States' expansive global role, it should come as no
surprise that America's diplomats have to take on an ever-wider variety of
tasks during their careers. The most recent U.S.
<
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_
strategy.pdf> National Security Strategy lays out the core national
interests that an American diplomat is charged with upholding -- the
security of the United States, the country's prosperity, and the values it
stands for (human rights, democracy, and equality). These interests are so
fundamental that there is usually political agreement on them regardless of
which political party is in power. Another document, the first-ever
<
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/153142.pdf> Quadrennial
Diplomacy and Development Review issued by Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton in 2010, elaborates on the importance of the international system to
U.S. interests. It says that to ensure the security of the United States,
the entire world has to be secure and stable because today's threats, such
as terrorism, transnational crime, climate change, and pandemic disease, are
"global, interconnected, and beyond the power of any one state to resolve."
"We cannot expect to be protected by our geographic position, which
historically has been such an advantage for America -- I think Sept. 11
demonstrated that conclusively," Clinton told me. "In order to maximize the
chances that we will enjoy security and tranquility here at home, we have to
be in effect the chairman of the board of the world -- to try to get friends
and allies to work with us, to mitigate problems, to bring about solutions
that neutralize or prevent nonstate actors, as well as rogue states, from
taking actions that put the lives and property of our people and our friends
and allies at risk."
Got that? For the United States to be truly secure and prosperous, the whole
world has to be secure and prosperous -- and that is "the world we seek,"
according to the National Security Strategy. At the same time, the White
House recognizes "the world as it is" and acknowledges that the U.S.
government must deal with it. This is where the U.S. diplomats come in: It's
their job to reconcile the sometimes contradictory goals of protecting
American interests in the short term while also -- somehow -- working to
reshape the world into a more secure and prosperous place for future
generations.
Munter's mobile phone rang at 3 a.m. Sleep was the last thing on his mind,
so he answered the call. "We hear there has been a helicopter crash. Was it
one of yours?" the high-ranking Pakistani official asked. Munter, now the
U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, could not answer the question -- not because he
was uninformed, but because he was sworn to secrecy, at least for another
few hours.
It was May 2, 2011, and Munter had just watched a live video feed of the
raid that killed the world's most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden, just
30 miles from Munter's location in Islamabad. But he was not allowed to say
a word about it to the Pakistani government -- as had been the case for
months -- until the official announcement by President Barack Obama in
Washington.
Keeping the secret had been easy compared with Munter's next challenge --
repairing the already tense U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Those ties had
already been strained to their breaking point about three months earlier,
when an undercover CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, fatally shot two
Pakistanis in what he claimed was self-defense. In the days after bin
Laden's death, it fell on Munter and his colleagues at the embassy to
explain to the Pakistani government and military why they had been kept in
the dark about a foreign military operation on their own territory.
Several days after the operation, Munter was in the office of Gen. Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army's powerful chief of staff. Kayani was
seething. Munter had just handed him a démarche from Washington with "a list
of things" the Obama administration wanted the Pakistani Army to do in the
wake of the bin Laden raid. The U.S. government felt that now it had more
leverage to secure better cooperation from the Pakistanis in the fight
against extremists hiding in Pakistan, Munter said. The Pakistani
government, having been kept in the dark, was still stunned by the raid, and
Kayani knew that accepting the U.S. demands would be seen as capitulating to
the Americans.
So he "tossed the piece of paper" at the ambassador and asked him to leave.
"I've rarely been insulted to my face as a diplomat, but he just threw me
out of his office," Munter said. "'Is this the way you treat people when
they are down?" he recalled the general asking. "He is not a rude man, but
it was about as rude as he gets."
A U.S. diplomat's relations with his host country do not have to be good at
any cost -- but they should at least be business-like and respectful, so the
two countries can work together when necessary. The key ingredient in any
relationship, of course, is trust. That was exactly what Munter had tried to
build with Kayani for months before the bin Laden raid -- not for the sake
of having a good relationship, but because the Pakistani Army's cooperation
could help save American lives. Thousands of al Qaeda militants are believed
to be hiding in Pakistan's border areas with Afghanistan, posing a threat to
the U.S. troops on the other side of the border. Because al Qaeda "can
attack the homeland," it is "vital" to eliminate the threat, Munter said.
The bin Laden and Davis episodes are telling examples of how short-term U.S.
goals in a foreign country can clash with the United States' long-term
mission. Similar examples can be found around the world, including in Russia
and China, where Washington has to play a careful balancing act between its
advocacy of human rights and democracy, and the help it needs from Moscow
and Beijing to address strategic issues, such as the North Korean and
Iranian nuclear programs.
"I would do the bin Laden operation exactly the same way again," Munter
said. "It was worth it, and the president had made the calculation that it
was worth it. But let's not kid ourselves: It did damage the relationship
very badly. There is a set of assumptions when you build a relationship, and
when you talk with people, there has to be someone willing to listen. When
that collapses, running an embassy and trying to get things done is very
difficult, which is why this job is the hardest I've had in the Foreign
Service by orders of magnitude."
------------[ Sent via the dehai-wn mailing list by dehai.org]--------------
Received on Fri Sep 14 2012 - 17:35:47 EDT
