ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

tasks but rather to have a surge capacity of finding the right people to do them on short
notice. The problem was that the Department recruited a coordinator for the office who
had a much more ambitious concept of it. He started recruiting a staff not just for
potential future conflicts but rather for almost all ongoing conflicts in every geographic
region. This was naturally resisted by many of the regional bureaus in the Department
and started some real bureaucratic battles. It also soon outstripped the resources allocated
to the project. This original coordinator soon left and a more modestly functioning office
now exists. It is, I think, a useful innovation and a concrete example of the kinds of ideas
we tried to come up with under the rubric of transformational diplomacy.
Q: Did you find any of your experience with conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus
useful to you on the Policy Planning Staff?
PERINA: I think that to some degree it was. From the experience of implementing the
Dayton Agreement in Bosnia, I at least knew the key elements that had to be included in
a reconstruction and stabilization effort. But we faced a much deeper cultural divide in
dealing with Muslim and Middle Eastern countries, and the scale of the effort was
another order of magnitude. What we most lacked were not experts on conflicts but rather
experts on the Muslim world. There was a great shortage of such expertise in the
Department. The other Deputy Director on the Policy Planning Staff was, like me, also a
Europeanist by background. We all tried our best to refocus on issues like
democratization of the Muslim world, which was a high priority. I did learn quite a bit
but would still not consider myself an expert.
In October 2004 I went on a trip to sub-Saharan Africa with our resident Africa expert,
Makila James. We visited Ethiopia and South Africa, though a planned stopover in
Nigeria had to be cancelled because of labor unrest in the country. The trip had a twofold
purpose. First we wanted to start annual policy planning consultations with the African
Union. This was successful, and the following year we hosted an African Union
delegation in Washington for the first such meeting. The second objective of our trip was
to look at developments in the Muslim communities of sub-Saharan Africa. This was a
bit of shock. African Muslim communities were generally considered rather moderate but
we found rapidly-growing radicalization, often through the madrassas or Muslim schools
staffed by teachers from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. In Johannesburg, the editor of
a Muslim newspaper who invited us for a meeting in his office almost got into a fistfight
when one of his colleagues objected violently to our presence. On our return, we wrote a
memo to Colin Powell about the radicalization of African Islam. It went into the larger
effort of trying to improve U.S. public diplomacy in the Muslim world, which was
another very frustrating endeavor.
Q: How so?
PERINA: Well because it was such a difficult task and because people just did not want
to recognize the obvious—that much of the anti-American feeling in the Muslim world
and elsewhere was a direct result of our policies in the Middle East, and especially Iraq.
Not many people were willing to say that even though I think many recognized it. The
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