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Diplomatic Moves
Rice Pushes Envoys
To Spend Time
In Hardship Posts

JUBA, Sudan -- When America's top diplomat here stopped by the Juba mosque recently for a chat with Imam Ibrahim Abdallah, he found the spiritual leader sprawled under a tree out back, asleep on a mat.

The mosque stop was Robert Whitehead's third house call of the morning -- and roughly the 20th of the week -- for a migratory consul general scrambling to represent the U.S. in this lush and soggy boomtown on the Nile.

After the imam leapt up and smoothed his spotted robe, Mr. Whitehead huddled with Mr. Abdallah and some of his followers in the bedroom of a borrowed house. Mr. Whitehead scribbled in a tiny green notebook as the men expressed fears that the largely Christian regional government wouldn't pay restitution to Muslim-owned shops damaged by rioting last year. Mr. Whitehead, in crisp shirt and tie, promised to poke around a bit and get back to them.

"That's what I call micro-diplomacy," he said outside, tucking his notebook into a breast pocket and heading off gingerly to his next drop-by. Juba's terrible roads, and the nonstop pace, had taken a toll on his aching, 54-year-old back.

The Bush administration sent Mr. Whitehead to Juba in January in the middle of a cholera outbreak to be the region's first-ever full-time U.S. diplomat. His mission: to keep close tabs on a recent peace deal that ended one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars and to promote U.S. interests in a vast area rich in oil but also rife with tribal conflict.

Bob Whitehead has been in the vanguard of a new, very grass-roots push by the Bush administration to make up for the diplomatic damage done by the Iraq war and to try and leave the U.S. better positioned to respond to -- and possibly even pre-empt -- conflagrations of the future. Instead of dictating terms from on high, the administration is trying to nudge along reforms from below, often far from national capitals. And that, goes the new logic, requires making the U.S. diplomatic corps more agile and less hemmed in by the high walls and bureaucracies of the traditional embassy.

Even as she struggles publicly with raging war in the Middle East and other prominent crises, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has quietly made the push a central plank of the administration's second-term drive to promote ground-level change in some of the world's remotest nooks and crannies.

"When the very terrain of history is shifting beneath our feet we must transform old diplomatic institutions to serve new diplomatic purposes," Ms. Rice said in a January speech at Georgetown University that formally launched the effort.

The U.S. has roughly 13,000 foreign-service officers of various stripes posted overseas, the vast majority of whom are bound to desks in America's 230 increasingly fortified embassies and consulates. A fifth of all U.S. diplomats are in Europe, which contains about a tenth of the world's population. Ms. Rice's plan, which she calls "the work of a generation," is to get more of these diplomats out to where America's long-term interests are being decided, be it fighting AIDS in Botswana, bird flu in Turkey, or nuclear proliferation in Pakistan.

But that means moving more U.S. diplomats out of cities like Berlin, Moscow and Rome. Promotion to many senior state department jobs, Ms. Rice said, will even hinge on having spent time in "hardship posts" like Juba.

The initiative has gotten off to a slow start, with just 100 or so positions being moved from European capitals to China, India and a few other developing countries. Some critics charge that the effort will make no measurable difference for an administration whose reputation has been blackened by the Iraq war and the international uproar over U.S. detentions of terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Putting a few more diplomats in remote regions isn't going to matter much" without an increase in funding, says Walter LaFeber, author of several classics on U.S. foreign policy.

Still, the early seeds of this drive are starting to sprout in some interesting places. Across Afghanistan, the State Department has sprinkled senior-ranking diplomats to work on democracy projects alongside U.S. military forces. The U.S. has established special low-infrastructure, one-man "presence posts" in Indonesia and Egypt. There are plans in the works for similar posts in Venezuela, China and India.

But the farthest-flung new outpost is likely here in distant Juba, about 100 miles north of the Ugandan border, where Mr. Whitehead just completed a seven-month assignment. When he arrived in January he set up shop in a derelict compound that the U.S. Agency for International Development abandoned in 1991 after Sudanese soldiers killed several of its local staff. The swimming pool was a vivid green breeding pond for frogs. Only a flimsy fence separated the cluster of six small houses from the thatched huts and goats of the neighborhood next door.

"This was terra incognita for the United States," Mr. Whitehead said. "A blank space on a map."

Juba is a long way from the tiny Indiana town of Plymouth where Mr. Whitehead grew up, the son of a real-estate agent and a schoolteacher. Yet after resigning as an Illinois college English literature professor to join the Foreign Service in 1983, he has spent the bulk of his career in Africa. He was in Goma, Zaire, during a horrific cholera outbreak in 1994, and in Zimbabwe eight years later when hyperinflation tore apart the economy. He was in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, last year when rioters looted shops after the death of the southern rebel hero, John Garang.

Yet he had a far plusher life in those postings than in Juba. In Khartoum he occupied a small mansion, built by a wealthy Italian, with a huge marble foyer and 20-foot ceilings. His house in Zimbabwe -- "the nicest place I have ever lived and probably ever will live" -- sat on a two-acre garden of flame trees and bougainvillea with a lighted tennis court and a flagstone swimming pool. In both places he worked in heavily fortified embassies.

In Juba he worked from a college-dorm-size bedroom with a desk and laptop on one side and pictures of his wife and college-aged son and daughter on the other. He had seen his family, now living in Virginia, for all of eight weeks over the past two years. The last time they lived together was in Zimbabwe four years ago. State Department rules until just recently barred families and spouses from joining diplomats in Sudan.

Mr. Whitehead's mission, as he describes it, was to get out as often as possible, mix with the key players, keep a close eye on implementation of last year's peace accord, and "plant the American flag."

All of which, in a place like Juba, is much tougher than it sounds. Mr. Whitehead began one recent week with a mental checklist. He hoped to get up to Bor, a river town about 100 miles to the north, to meet local officials and look at some recently launched U.S.-funded development projects, including a school for fishermen along the Nile. He hoped to take a short trip south to a town called Kajo Keji, to check in on another U.S.-funded project that included road work, new wells and a women's center. In all, the U.S. has hundreds of projects of varying sizes across Southern Sudan, costing about $200 million a year.

Yet the early word from the United Nations -- the provider of most air transport in Southern Sudan -- was that both trips could be imperiled by rain. Afternoon thundershowers turn the region's few roads into bogs and regularly swamp the dirt runways.

Mr. Whitehead also had a wish list of some dozen ministers he wanted to see on issues ranging from the 2006 budget -- a key sign whether the fledgling government is setting the right priorities and overseeing its money -- to talk of launching a children's basketball program, perhaps with help from the National Basketball Association.

But planning is nearly impossible in a place with few secretaries and no reliable phones, so Mr. Whitehead set off first thing Monday -- jostling along rutted roads in a white Toyota Land Cruiser -- without a single fixed appointment.

Juba and the vast region of Southern Sudan overlap well with Ms. Rice's concept of what she calls "the new frontlines" of U.S. diplomacy. For 21 years, the black and largely non-Muslim south was embroiled in a bloody civil war with the Islamic government in Khartoum. The U.S. then helped broker a grueling peace deal, signed early last year, which gave Southern Sudan a high degree of autonomy and the potential for independence in 2011, meaning that Juba in five years could be the capital of a new country of some 12 million people.

But the area remains up for grabs. Across its 333,000 square miles of lush hills, savannah and swamp, a bit larger than California and Nevada combined, there are barely 10 miles of paved road. Millions of people are still displaced from the long war, and disease rates for everything from cholera to river blindness remain among the highest in Africa. The region has significant oil reserves, but development of many fields is mired in governmental and tribal feuds.

Mr. Whitehead got lucky on his first stop of the week: the ramshackle Ministry of Mines and Industry. The building looked like an abandoned motel, one wing of which has no doors, windows or roof. But Minister Albino Akol Akol was in, and greeted Mr. Whitehead with a big handshake. Mr. Akol begged Mr. Whitehead to provide the government with detailed satellite imagery so they can get a better feel for Southern Sudan's own terrain, including its vast timber forests. Mr. Whitehead said he'll look into it, and urged Mr. Akol in turn to push ahead on firming up a set of rules to guide and protect foreign investment.

When Mr. Whitehead arrived in Juba he methodically set out to meet every minister and vice-minister, every parliamentary committee chairman, the bishop and imam and other religious leaders, and all the top businesspeople. "The idea was to stop in on everyone who mattered," he said. After weeks of tracking people down, he assembled a cadre of a dozen or so "reliables" whom he could trust for good information.

High on that list was Peter Bashir Bendi, a jolly, bearded parliamentarian who holds court in an office just off the airless main hall of Southern Sudan's National Assembly. After Mr. Whitehead dropped by, the two men talked and swapped promises over bottles of Coke as a fan whirred in the corner. Mr. Bendi said he would get Mr. Whitehead a copy of the legislative calendar and the upcoming budget, while the American said he would dig up some money to pay for the printing of hundreds more copies of Southern Sudan's constitution. He jotted a reminder in his little book.

"Bob buzzes around everywhere, like a fly," Mr. Bendi said later, with Mr. Whitehead out of the room. He is most thankful, he said, for the American's insistence that the assembly have a strong anticorruption committee, which is now being formed.

Mr. Whitehead acknowledges that Southern Sudan is very hospitable territory for what he does. The anti-Americanism one finds increasingly in Arab countries is largely absent in this largely non-Arab, non-Muslim half of Sudan. While many other countries are now sending representatives to Juba, no one else has the resources to rival the U.S.

A few drop-bys later, Mr. Whitehead pulled into the rutted dirt lot outside the Ministry of Legal Affairs. In a breakthrough earlier that day, a surly ministry assistant had set up an actual appointment for him, at 4:00, to catch up on a number of draft laws with the minister. But 20 minutes later, after being harangued by a drunk, there was still no sign of the minister. "Pox on him," Mr. Whitehead said under his breath, heading back to his mud-splattered Toyota.

America's man in Juba has made a few missteps himself. One evening he jumped out of his Land Cruiser on a main street in Juba to chase down a U.N. official, only to find that he had locked his keys in the car, which then bottled up traffic for an hour. More recently he forgot that he had invited an African diplomat for dinner and went off to a party that required sprinting through mud puddles and quaffing rounds of beer. He returned home to find the diplomat pacing in elegant coat and tie.

The day after the legal-affairs minister stood him up, Mr. Whitehead spent more than an hour baking on the tarmac at the Juba airport before a U.N. relief flight took him south to Kajo Keji, tucked in the lush mountains near the Ugandan border. Hundreds of children scattered at the end of the dirt runway as the prop plane swooped in.

The visit was quick, and the rain-carved roads further jarred Mr. Whitehead's bad back -- the product, he had decided, of a sagging mattress. The U.S. had earmarked $900,000 for a range of development projects in the remote region. But the American program manager had left a month earlier; many of the projects were far behind schedule.

Asked later if he saw his work as transformational, Mr. Whitehead paused and lit another cigarette. "I suppose the point is to transform this place into a country with which we can really cooperate," he said. "It's slow, but we're getting there."