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Labored mightily and brought forth…

Rick Barton, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), did a public briefing at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday.  As the media will find it unworthy of coverage, I offer a summary and some reflections on this latest attempt to make State more responsive to current and future needs.

First the good news.  Rick thinks the new bureau needed to tighten the focus that had prevailed under its predecessor, a coordinating office for reconstruction and stabilization.  So 80% of the effort is now focused on just four countries:  Syria, Kenya, Burma and Honduras.  The time scale is 0-365 (CSO aims to stay operational in a country for less than a year).  It seeks to provide both leadership and agility within the State Department using a “conflict” lens focused on peacebuilding in specific contexts.  It also aims to mobilize in the priority countries “silenced majorities,” by funding and encouraging local initiatives without taking them over. CSO treats the local business communities as important potential allies.   Program evaluation is real-time but otherwise a bit vague.

The focus within the four priority countries is also tight:

• in Syria, on nonlethal support to the unarmed opposition;
• in Burma, on land mines, because that is a subject the regime and its ethnic opponents agree on;
• in Honduras, on high murder rates;
• in Kenya, on preventing election violence.

CSO is winding down in Afghanistan, where it had a relatively large presence in recent years.  The focus there is now on transitioning to Afghan leadership.

All of this is eminently sensible given the very limited resources devoted to fragility and conflict at State (Secretary Kerry says $60 million in program funds under the current continuing resolution and a well-informed source tells me perhaps 140 staff).  But that really doesn’t begin to make a serious dent in the issues associated with fragile and failing states, increasingly recognized as posing a wide array of security challenges.  The European Union spends, I would guess, ten times as much.  A one-year time horizon is laughable to those of us who have played on this turf.  Ten years are more like it.  Nor can isolated programmatic efforts on specific issues be effective outside the context of a broader end-state focused strategy undertaken in partnership with the host government and population.

There were other indicators of how limited the CSO effort necessarily is, within an institution that itself is severely constrained.  Rick hopes to give staff two weeks of training per year (compare that to the military!).  He was less than confident that conflict-focused training has reached far into the rest of the Foreign Service, many members of which resist going into conflict zones.  He was pleased to have cut staff and gained some liquidity, so that he could approach ambassadors with an incentive of $1 million or so in hand (that tells you a lot about the nickel and dime availability of liquidity at State).  He noted the importance of urgency in getting attention and resources at State–I regard that as one of the institution’s weakest points, as it allows the urgent to crowd out the merely important.

So here is the major result of the much-vaunted Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.  The elephant labored mightily and brought forth a mouse.  That’s better than nothing,  but it’s not what you expect of an elephant.  That, of course, is where the problem really lies.