Hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee- Effective Diplomacy and the Future of U.S. Embassies

Interview

Hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee- Effective Diplomacy and the Future of U.S. Embassies

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REP. PETER WELCH (D-VT): Thank you. I thank each of you for being here. And I've done a little bit of traveling in my one year, and I'm amazed at how wonderful our embassy personnel are, and discouraged that we don't have more of them doing the job.

And let me talk a little bit about training, because I think that obviously is extremely important. And Ambassador Grossman, you have a lot of experience in this. What is it that we need to do, very concretely and specifically, in order to provide a level of training that will meet the current needs for our diplomatic corps to be much more influential in our affairs?

MR. GROSSMAN: Thank you, sir. The most important thing that could be done right away would be to hire the 1,079 people. And the reason I say that, Mr. Welch, is not to avoid the question of training, but to make this point.

Every military unit that you can have an arrangement with has a 15 percent float for training and transit. And that means that they're not stealing from the operational requirements, the readiness of that unit, to have people get the training that they need either to do their current job or to do the job that they might be going on to.

When Secretary Powell came to the State Department, he --

REP. WELCH: No, I understand that --

MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I'm sorry.

REP. WELCH: I actually do want to hear about what if we -- let's assume we hire those folks.

MR. GROSSMAN: Well, that'd be great.

REP. WELCH: What do we need to do to train them?

MR. GROSSMAN: I think, first of all, it'd be a great assumption. Thank you very much. I think there are three very important points.

First of all, language training. There needs to be a fundamental commitment on the part of the Department and, I hope, supported by Congress, on language training.

Second would be the use of new technologies to increase, enhance the capacity of our ability to deal with individuals around societies and to get out among societies.

And third, sir, would be security training so that as we ask people to take more risk, to be out in societies, that they have the capacity to understand the things that they're looking at and protect themselves.

REP. WELCH: Okay. Ambassador Pickering -- thank you very much.

You know, I've been to a couple of the big embassies, and I would -- my sense, in talking to young embassy personnel, is that as much as the security precautions that are being taken are maybe necessary, they're causing them great frustration because people, my sense, who go into the line of work that you've spent a lifetime doing really want to get out and want to interact. And to have to only go out when it's, quote, "mission critical" sort of defeats the whole process of becoming -- of building trust that a successful career diplomat has to do by a kind of acceptance.

And the frustration I have, and I'd really be interested in your comments, is that we're kind of barricading our folks in and not letting them do their job. And it really means that foreign policy is much more politically driven by the (necessities of ?) whoever is in the White House, with diminishing significant input from folks who have devoted their careers to trying to get it right in these countries where we have interests.

MR. PICKERING: Mr. Welch, I agree with your conclusion and, indeed, some of the ramifications of this. And let me just add a few points.

We all know that there are posts where we are locked in, and those are posts where we have ongoing battle, high security threats. And obviously it's up to the ambassadors and the State Department to right-size those, in light of the job, and to recognize we have limited capacity.

A friend of mine from the intelligence community said to me the other day that we in the intelligence community need more State Department insight, more State Department reporting, more State Department contacts. This was because, traditionally -- and I think it is still true -- about 80 percent of the intelligence base of the United States came from State Department reporting, open and classified.

REP. WELCH: Correct.

MR. PICKERING: And I think that that is now missed. That's just one indicator of the value of being able to get out and understand what's going on.

Wherever I worked, I attempted to encourage my officers to understand the opposition, to be in touch with the opposition to know what they were thinking, to understand what currents of opinion were out there, what people were thinking in various areas. And it always seemed to me, as just a factor of evaluation, that you got twice as much value for an hour outside the embassy as you did inside the embassy, and that empowering people to do that.

Russia was a huge country, 11 time zones. Travel was difficult. But we did everything we could to encourage people to travel, to know and understand what was going on across the vastness of that country, as a way of understanding what kinds of things were motivating folks in the Kremlin and in the political sphere and in terms of the economy. So I agree with you.

I think that, of course, policy is made in Washington, but the field must play what I would call nearly a determinative role in Washington's understanding of what is possible and what might be the options. And without that synergy, it doesn't work. If the field is blind or half-blind, the policy can turn out to be something like that, and we have very significant issues.

I would just like to address one other point. Our military friends, because they have the funds and the presence, are doing jobs that are very important but which, over time, at least in terms of the detailed training they were not brought up to do. I think they're doing it well, and I don't want to have this as a note of criticism. But I do believe that the people who spend their lives working on these missions need obviously to have the resources, the presence, the capability, so that it doesn't fall back on the military to have to do these jobs, that it is the partnership that Marc described to you, and that we find a way to bring that together and to integrate it.

And I would just add to Marc's comments, one of the training efforts ought to be to do integrated training, if I could put it this way, across the spectrum, so that people who need to work in the humanitarian area can be trained alongside our military colleagues who are going to have to face that question so that through training and through doctrine they come out as a team, not basically as two separate stovepipes that only meet at the time of crisis. I think those are all important.

And thank you for the chance to make those comments.

REP. WELCH: Thank you, ambassador. Thank you --

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REP. WELCH: Yeah. There has been an emerging almost consensus that there has to be a merger between the military activity and the diplomatic activity; they've got to work hand in glove. And obviously there's got to be a fair amount of cooperation.

But I'd like to challenge that. You know, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, that's two special situations. But by and large, the work around the world of trying to provide humanitarian assistance, and to the extent that the embassies play a role in that and coordinate USAID activities, is by definition civilian, not military. And having people show up in work clothes as opposed to a Humvee or an MRAP to a very rural village sends a totally different message.

And what I'm starting to hear is that with this turmoil in our country about how best to address Iraq, there is a mission creep that's being imposed on the military, so that in addition to them providing -- fighting terrorists and al Qaeda and insurgents, they're being asked, as we saw, to set up and run prisons, to set up and establish a judicial system. I met a 55-year-old career prosecutor from my hometown who was out there trying to set up a judicial system. We've got captains in Ramadi who are trying to figure out how to get the trash collected out there. And that's a kind of mission creep that it's hard for me to see how that'd be sustained, the moment -- when and if it ever comes -- that we come home.

But my question is whether it's really sensible to be acting as though your efforts -- I'll ask you, Ambassador Pickering, because you've probably had the most experience -- should be seen in that way as essentially an extension of a military policy -- and I'll use Iraq as an example -- of trying to win hearts and minds where the State Department folks are an extension of that.

And that, in my view, has a negative impact in the long haul about what is the real work that folks like you do.

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