Shipping Out

Some of the big news yesterday was that the Obama administration is going to send a lot more civilian federal employees to Afghanistan. I tended to think of that from a workforce perspective, but fortunately Spencer Ackerman is around to put this move in the context of diplomacy and counter-insurgency tactics. He writes of the leaders of the civilian surge:

These are two serious heavy hitters. Galbraith -- who basically uncovered the Kurdish genocide of 1987-8 (read about it in now-White House aide Samantha Power's first book) -- is one of the leading lights of the global human-rights movement. Ricciardone, a former ambassador to Egypt who's a foreign-service rock star, helped establish the post-Coalition Provisional Authority composition of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq. What's more, they're going to be joined by Tim Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and another diplomatic eminence with Iraq experience. These are people you go to when you want to send a message about the importance of diplomacy.

According to DeYoung's piece, this isn't just a diplomatic plus-up, it's a plus-out. (Ugh sorry I sound like Tom Friedman.) That is, these diplomats (and agronomists and legal experts and others) aren't going to be clustered in Kabul. They'll be sent around the country, including down south in Taliban and insurgent strongholds. The idea, evidently, is to roll back the insurgency's ability to outgovern the Kabul government in those areas. That's a big cultural shift toward a more deployable, activist State Department.

I think the State Department is going to see huge changes in the next several years: there will be more staffing, but there will also be a lot more asked of the Foreign Service. I just hope that the administration will take action with workforce planning in mind.