There is no safe

It was State’s fault.  That’s the journalistic version of the Accountability and Review Board (ARB) unclassified report on the killing of Ambassador Stevens and three of his colleagues in Benghazi last September.  State has been quick to react:  Hillary Clinton accepts the report and is asking Congress to transfer $1.3 billion from funds that had been allocated for spending in Iraq. This includes $553 million for additional Marine security guards; $130 million for diplomatic security personnel; and $691 million for improving security at installations abroad.

I accept without question the ARB’s conclusions about the Benghazi incident.  They know better than I do when they say officials in Benghazi and Tripoli reacted appropriately and bravely, the facility had inadequate physical security (including a minimal guard force), there was no intelligence suggesting an attack was imminent, and different parts of the State Department failed to provide leadership and collaborate in providing the resources required.

It is on the broader issue of how to protect American diplomats (and other civilians who work abroad on behalf of the United States government) that I would fault this report.  The Board recognized the basic problem:

…the ARB has examined the terrorist attacks in Benghazi with an eye towards how we can better advance American interests and protect our personnel in an increasingly complex and dangerous world….the United States cannot retreat in the face of such challenges, we must work more rigorously and adeptly to address them…American diplomats and security professionals, like their military colleagues, serve the nation in an inherently risky profession. Risk mitigation involves two imperatives – engagement and security – which require wise leadership, good intelligence and evaluation, proper defense and strong preparedness and, at times, downsizing, indirect access and even withdrawal. There is no one paradigm. Experienced leadership, close coordination and agility, timely informed decision making, and adequate funding and personnel resources are essential.

But that is the last we hear of the need for agility.  The paradigm reflected in the report, and in the State Department’s quick reaction, is to pile on more of the same, not to change the way we do things.

Mine is a hard argument to make.  Arguably, Ambassador Stevens was doing exactly what I think is often safer:  moving without too much security, engaging in ways that gave him intimate knowledge of the local situation and not building up a high profile of fixed security investment that makes so many of our facilities obvious targets and limits the mobility and engagement of our diplomats.  The ARB notes:

The Ambassador did not see a direct threat of an attack of this nature and scale on the U.S. Mission in the overall negative trendline of security incidents from spring to summer 2012. His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments.

Ambassador Stevens was handling things the way he thought best.  It did not make him safe.

But that is just the point.  There is no “safe.”  The Ambassador retreated, in accordance with State Department practice, to a hardened “safe haven.”  It wasn’t safe because the attackers set the building in which it was located on fire.  I’ll get in trouble for this, but the Arabic-speaking Chris Stevens might have been safer walking out the back door of the compound and knocking on the first Libyan door he came to.  The odds are 99 in 100 that he would have been welcomed and made comfortable while he awaited rescue.

I do know something about the environment in Benghazi, which I have visited twice since Qaddafi fell.  It is profoundly friendly towards Americans, who are credited with saving the city from a massacre.  I have run along the harbor in Tripoli.  I have driven through demonstrations outside the court-house in Benghazi repeatedly at a snail’s pace, revolutionary flags draped over the windshield and happy Libyans giving the obvious foreigners the thumbs’ up sign.

But there are bad guys in Benghazi as well, and no serious police force, as the ARB report notes.  That’s why the Benghazi facility depended on a militia group for its guard force (with which however the Americans were in a labor dispute, according to the ARB).  Chris Stevens knew all about both the militia and the radicals, as he talked with a Libyan the morning he was killed who had recounted to me a two months earlier the order of battle of extremist groups in Derna, a hotbed of radicalism to the east.  He would certainly have asked his interlocutor (that’s diplomatese for the person you talk to) about extremist groups and the militias.

There are extremist groups just about everywhere these days.  So the State Department reaction is understandable:  raise the barriers to successful penetration of our facilities.  The trouble is there is no guarantee that makes you any safer, and it certainly inhibits engagement.  There is always some level of force that can overcome defenses.  Only a fully capable and committed host government can make a diplomatic facility relatively safe.  An embassy or diplomatic office in a conflict zone soon after a revolution cannot be 100% safe.  Once we have acknowledged that, we should have a serious discussion about what makes it “safer,” and less safe.