A combination of leadership shortcomings and inadequate funding is undermining US diplomacy in Africa, an internal State Department review has found.

“Embassy platforms are collapsing under the weight of new programmes and staffing without corresponding resources to provide the services required by new tenants and requirements,” warns the report issued last week by the department’s inspector general.

Personnel at American embassies in Africa and in the State Department’s Africa Bureau in Washington are being “swamped” as they attempt to respond to “seemingly endemic conflicts from Sudan to the Congo” as well as to an “onslaught” of US military and development activity in Africa, the report adds.

“The US military is stepping into void created by a lack of resources for traditional development and public diplomacy,” the inspector general warns.

That finding appears to confirm charges by some independent analysts that American policy toward Africa has grown increasingly militarised in the years since the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.

And these critics suggest that the Obama administration is continuing to move in that direction, despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emphasis on development issues during her recent seven-nation Africa tour.

The State Department’s own critical review also echoes and amplifies complaints about the Africa Bureau that specialists outside the US government have been voicing among themselves for years.
The inspector general’s assessment traces the bureau’s current weaknesses to revisions in the US worldview following the Cold War. This analysis implies that Africa came to be seen as less significant to Washington once the United States’ global competition with the Soviet Union ended in 1990.

“After the Cold War, the department opened many new embassies across Central Europe and the former Soviet Union without gaining any new personnel,” the report says. “Congress reduced diplomatic and development budgets as well,” leading to State Department staff shortages worldwide.

“Not even the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam halted the decline in experienced staffing at US missions in sub-Saharan Africa; leadership and management suffered perceptibly,” the inspector general continues.

But the bombings did lead to greatly heightened security at American embassies in Africa, with the result, the report observes, that “the fundamental ability of diplomats to understand and analyse the continent was correspondingly restricted.”

“The United States appeared ill-prepared to deal with the post Cold War-era, including terrorism and failed states in Africa,” the evaluation adds.

The 2001 attacks inside the United States did result in major changes in Washington’s approach to the world, the study says. One of the outcomes was the establishment of Africom, a “well-funded” US military command for the continent.

Africom’s budget of $763 million in the coming fiscal year, compared to the Africa Bureau’s allocation of $226 million, is enabling the US military to take on roles previously played by American diplomats and civilian development experts.

The inspector general’s report contrasts the work of Africom’s “military information support teams” (Mist) with what it describes as the “failure” of the State Department’s 10-year-old effort to integrate public diplomacy into its operations. “Mist teams have exponentially more money to spend in a country than do embassy public affairs offices,” the report says.

The United States has also greatly increased spending on development and health initiatives in Africa at the same time as it has been building military capacity, the inspector general notes.

The report points to “extraordinarily generous but unbalanced increases in US efforts to halt the spread of killer diseases in Africa, notably HIV/Aids and malaria, and the entrance of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which supplanted the traditional development role of the US Agency for International Development (USAid).”

These undertakings have placed additional responsibilities on Africa Bureau personnel in Washington and in the field even as staffing shortfalls remain unaddressed, the report finds.

The State Department approach to Africa programmes lacks a long-term perspective, the study continues.

“Policy planning focuses on near-term contingencies, such as outbreaks of violence, upcoming elections, or ailing leadership. While the United States helps feed Africa, it is not focusing as it might on helping Africans feed themselves; even laudable HIV/Aids programmes spend more on medication than prevention,” the report says.

Africa’s severe and unrelenting problems heighten the challenges faced by US diplomats on the continent, the inspector general observes.

“The difficulty of work was compounded by 76 evacuations due to actual or threatened outbreaks of violence in the last decade alone,” the report notes.

Despite its critical tone, the study offers praise for the work of the Africa Bureau and cites a few specific successes.

“The Bureau of African Affairs performs well in light of having to manage the constant, exhausting crises that characterize much of its work,” the inspector general states.

A decade-old State Department peacekeeper training programme for military units in selected African countries is singled out in the report as a highly successful initiative. The work of this African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (Acota) programme is described in the report as “a seminal development that is transforming Africa.”

For all its candour in evaluating the performance of the Africa Bureau, the inspector general’s report refrains from naming those whose leadership abilities it impugns. But the report can be read as implicitly critical of Jendayi Frazer, who headed the Africa Bureau from 2005 until early this year.

The inspector general’s investigation, which was carried out between April 20 and June 5, notes that “a confident, experienced acting assistant secretary [Phillip Carter]...opened the bureau to renewal” during his five-month tenure following Frazer’s departure in January.

“The welcome management style of the acting assistant secretary and a willingness to encourage discussion, indeed dissent, and the almost universal respect bureau personnel hold for him helped temper the pressures of work and transition. Bureau morale was on the upswing,” the study observes.

Carter was in turn succeeded by Johnnie Carson, whom the report describes as “highly qualified” and “perhaps the best known and most popular of the [Africa Bureau’s] senior career officers.”