US State Dept. is "its own enemy": report

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Responsible Statecraft
19 Jul 2023 21:19

A recent report of the US withdrawal from Kabul reveals the State Department's chaos.

US Marines board a transport aircraft headed to Kandahar, Afghanistan as British and US forces withdraw from a complex in Helmand province in 2014 (AFP)

The US has been building a fantasy empire where its military is overpowered and outranks all militaries across the world, but this empire has resulted in what author Gordon Adams calls a series of self-inflicted wounds – Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan being the most recent.

Part of civilian diplomatic and assistance institutions' ineffectiveness is unorganized as the State Department has constantly rejected reform proposals. A prime and living example, according to Responsible Statecraft, would be the unclassified version of the latest report about the chaos in Kabul, in August and September 2021.

Government reports and self-reform documents don't use previous reports as reference, which means that for instance, the work done over the years by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction is not cited - which is important since it includes a detailed report as to what went wrong when the US left Afghanistan.

The State Dept. has transferred ways of new offices onto the old, without implementing changes even if the matters being transferred compete with what they're being transferred to.

Imposing non-reform-accepting officials and coordinators to mend problems is part of the problem itself. The author states that this is what occurred in Korea in the 1990s and the Balkans when he was in the White House, and things didn't turn out well.

The newest Afghanistan report says that the Department’s Operations Center (mainly a central communications office) needs to be in charge when a crisis evacuation must be planned for Americans or citizens of another country. However, the office of the Undersecretary for Management plays a big role, which entitles them to handle it as well. An individual at the top level of the Department in charge also needs to be in the loop in addition to the Defense Department.

Not only so, but the Regional Bureaus at State should “provide overall leadership of a task force” with a suggestion of the need for a “single, principal-level [senior] crisis leader and a single crisis communicator.” Consular Affairs, the section of the State that handles visas and citizen services also has an equity in this.

Just self-disrespect

Other offices will believe that they have a say in who's the boss and would want to keep new ones from coming in. These offices didn’t make it into the report.

This involves a senior-level official with remnants of an existing file, the Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security Democracy and Human Rights, and under them the majorly underpowered Bureau for Complex Stabilization Operations (CSO) at State.

The State Dept's problems will just roll over to every report like this one, if not fixed, and will expand "the Rube Goldberg architecture of ineptitude" at State, per Adams. The Defense Dept will attempt to expand and insert itself in roles as the “can do” section that has not been able to “do” anything for over 40 years. Responsible Statecraft relays that the State Department has no respect for planning and does not have the talent to do so either.

Foreign Service Officers are not good at planning or strategizing. On the other hand, the Defense Dept is a planning organization; the State is not.

Funneling in more money for diplomacy and more diplomats, such as has been done for the past 20 years, will not mend this disorganization and will not help nurture the critical element in the toolkit of US statecraft.

The unchanging "changes" that the Afghanistan report proposes will not make another evacuation plan better or more organized, since it will create more lessons to learn and thus more reports rather than mending the issues from the root.