“Incoming is coming in every day, rockets are hitting the Green Zone,” said Jack Crotty, a senior foreign service officer who once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces. […] “It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” Crotty said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?” “You know that at any other (country) in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point,” Crotty said to loud and sustained applause from the about 300 diplomats who attended the meeting in a large State Department auditorium.
Fast forward to today, when the U.S. wants to execute a civilian surge in Afghanistan to accompany the military surge. Guess what? The more things change, the more things stay the same. State and other civilian government employees don’t want to go to Afghanistan, which we are told is the good war, the war that everyone supports, the real battle against al Qaeda:
The Obama administration is finding that it must turn to military personnel to fill hundreds of posts in Afghanistan that had been intended for civilian experts, senior officials said Wednesday. In announcing a new strategy last month, President Obama promised “a dramatic increase in our civilian effort” in Afghanistan, including “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers” to augment the additional troops he is sending. But senior Pentagon and administration officials now acknowledge that many of those new positions will be filled by military personnel – in particular by reservists, whose civilian jobs give them the required expertise – and by contractors.
But unlike the kerfuffle over Iraq, which was characterized as being related to political opposition to the Iraq war, today’s civilian surge fiasco is being blamed on a lack of resources:
The shortfall offers more evidence that the government’s civilian departments have not received enough money to hire and train people ready to take up assignments in combat zones. Unlike the armed services, nonmilitary agencies do not have clear rules to compel rank-and-file employees to accept hardship posts.
Of course the burden to make up for the shortfall of civilian volunteers falls on our soldiers, and in this case, our reservists, thanks to our elite’s unwillingness to shoulder a small fraction of the burden of the so-called good war.
