US Diplomacy in the wake of Wikileaks?

Ambassador Ray Charles recently remarked that he had a writing quota of 1000 words a day. It seems US diplomats have an addiction to pens (err keyboards) and will write anything to fulfil their quotas.

They will write reports about anything and everything. The unpleasant side effect of this excessive report writing is that people who thought they were in informal meetings with US officials, have been surprised to find their names popping up in the formal US reports released by Wikileaks.

A Thai diplomat complained that an informal lunch meeting with a US official several years ago meant that his name appeared in a formal US report.

One wonders whether US diplomats should now be treated like lepers. Avoid them in case your name ends popping up where you don't want it to pop up.

Secondly I don't understand the logic of meeting people informally when they are not prepared to meet some of them formally. Take for example Zimbabwe's case. Over the years US diplomats have been meeting Zanu-PF officials informally and ended up being told a range of opinions and predictions none of which had anything to do with Zanu-PF's official positions.

Instead of ending up with valuable insider intelligence it looks like the US ended up mostly with dud information. As a result US policy in Zimbabwe can hardly be said to have been a success. They ended up backing a lame Prime Minister while Zanu-PF 'hard-liners' continued to exercise the real power.

Could this have been avoided if they had taken official positions more seriously? Could it be that the US diplomats were being deliberately misled, by the informal contacts they sought? I don't know the answers, and I doubt that anyone in the US diplomatic corps does either.

People who know Zimbabweans society inside out would have told you that the influence of the highly respected liberation war cadre was not about to wane and could definitely now be switched off overnight. Back when I was still writing blogs for the now defunct The Zimbabwe Times, I was among the first to predict that the MDC could not rule without the backing of the military.

Look at the size of Mujuru's funeral. That alone tells you that there are millions of ordinary people out there who care about what General Mujuru did for the country. That is helping get rid of the yoke of cruel racist colonialism.

Then the MDC almost totally ignored the existence of the military. Now they are trying to fashion a relationship of sorts with the military but I believe it is now too late for it to make much of a difference. If fact rather than build alliances and mutual respect, they are calling for 'security sector reform' which suggests they still don't have meaningful influence on or from the military.

The MDC strategy in Zimbabwe was not well thought out from the beginning. It was and largely still is a hodge-podge collection of opportunistic interests only united by their common abhorrence of Mugabe.