The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

M A R C H 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 ter to actively engage the private sec- tor, schools and universities, NGOs and private individuals in the work of diplomacy. “This is a critical national security priority, and to succeed we will need the support of the Congress, the American people and of concerned men and women throughout the coun- try,” Rice declared. “We will be saying more about the need for support from Congress in the next month as budget times approach,” she added. In his remarks, retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who served as co- chair of the committee’s State De- partment in 2025 Working Group, pointed out that the report increases the department’s already great re- sponsibility, giving the Secretary of State four separate organizational hats: diplomacy, foreign assistance, public diplomacy and reconstruction and stabilization. That the committee felt its mission to be critical is clear throughout the report, which concludes: “Urgent steps are needed to ensure that the Department of State has the financial and human resources necessary to effectively represent America’s inter- ests in an increasingly complex world. The committee believes that its rec- ommendations represent a rare and critically important opportunity for bipartisan institutional reform of our foreign affairs institutions. Seizing this opportunity is an urgent Ameri- can imperative.” Kenya: Understanding the Election Crisis More than a month after the dis- puted Dec. 27 national election, with more than 250,000 people displaced and about 1,000 dead, unrelenting violence threatens to unravel one of Africa’s leading nations. At this writing, former United Nations chief Kofi Annan had made some progress in bringing President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga into a structured dia- logue that aims to resolve immediate political issues within four weeks. Annan confidently asserted that the damage caused by prolonged chaos and destruction could be resolved in a year. It is, by all estimates, a tall order, as Annan knows. “We must tackle the fundamental issues underlying the disturbances — like equitable distrib- ution of resources — or else we will be back here again after three or four years,” he told journalists in Nairobi. The December election pitted Kibaki’s Party of National Unity against Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement. In addition to the presi- dential contest, more than 2,500 can- didates vied for 210 seats in the National Assembly. Members of local councils were also elected. The turn- out was the highest on record, about C Y B E R N O T E S 50 Years Ago... Expanding and diversified overseas activities, public and pri- vate, of our energetic nation mean today that 1 percent of all Americans are living in foreign countries and that all government agencies have interests and responsibilities in this microcosm. In this radically changed post- war environment State cannot, although admittedly with prime responsibility in the foreign field, singly muster the cohesive pull upon its various peers in Washington. — Roy M. Melbourne, “Coordination for Action: On the Operations Coordinating Board,” FSJ , March 1958. Site of the Month: www.overseasvotefoundation.org Overseas Americans have a unique new advantage in this year’s election in the form of the Overseas Vote Foundation and its one-stop, free online resource ( www.overseasvotefoundation.org ). A nonprofit founded in 2005 with the help of a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts and run on a volunteer basis since then, OVF’s mission is to increase overseas and uniformed services voter access to registration and associated services by safely leveraging the Internet. The OVF Web site, launched last October, helps guide overseas voters through the maze of rules to successfully register and participate in federal elections. OVF promises to do this “faster, more easily and accurately than ever before” with a user-friendly registration and absentee voter application, an election officials directory and a voters’ help desk. The site also offers updated news on overseas voting and links to nonpartisan information on candidates and issues. An estimated four to six million Americans, civilian and military, live and work abroad. Yet a federal study in September found that barely one-third of the nearly one million absentee ballots requested by Americans overseas in 2006 were actually cast or counted.