FP is right. The surge is happening, and the civilian surge will be coming right along with it. All of those folks are gonna need security, and DoS needs to prepare for that big time. I didn’t know that DoS was this bad off, and you would think that there would have been plenty of lessons learned to guide them and prepare them for future needs. WPPS will be big in Afghanistan, and how anyone could have missed the planning and preparation for this, is beyond me. –Matt
Edit: 12/09/09 Check out Danger Room’s post on the same thing here.
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Exclusive: GAO report rips State Department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau
From Foreign Policy
Mon, 12/07/2009
The State Department is tripling its civilian presence in Afghanistan, which will require a huge increase in the amount of security needed to look after those civilians. But State’s bureau in charge of protecting its personnel is already stretched thin and the Afghanistan surge could only exacerbate its administrative and strategic shortfalls, according to a soon-to-be-released GAO report, obtained exclusively by The Cable.
It’s a fact of life that operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are a now a huge part of the mission for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which protects diplomats all over the world. That’s somewhat a legacy of Condoleezza Rice’s “Transformational Diplomacy” initiative, which was meant to expand the U.S. diplomatic presence to include more robust efforts in more dangerous places. Outposts that might have been closed have been kept open, such as in Lahore, Pakistan, putting added burdens on the diplomatic security infrastructure, the report states.
Success in Afghanistan depends on improving the Afghan government and “that makes civilian efforts as vital as military operations and of longer duration,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said just before last Tuesday’s announcement by the president. “We have begun to elevate diplomacy and development alongside defense in our national security strategy, and we are certainly engaged in doing so in Afghanistan.”