WASHINGTON, Jan 19: The Bush administration is planning a “dramatic increase” in the US diplomatic presence in the Middle East and Asia by redeploying hundreds of diplomats from Europe and Washington to developing countries. The new plan, unveiled by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on Wednesday, envisages a major increase in US diplomatic missions in countries like China, India, Lebanon, and Nigeria over the next five years.

Ms Rice also echoed the call for more diplomats who speak Farsi, Chinese, and Arabic. The Bush administration recently launched a major foreign language initiative aimed at training more military, intelligence and diplomatic officials to be fluent in “critical languages”.

This year, Ms Rice said, the State Department intends to move 100 diplomats to Africa, Asia and the Middle East as a first step toward achieving her larger vision of a State Department that is able to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Her plan is part of a US strategy for “transformational diplomacy,” creating a new kind of diplomatic corps that can do hands-on work with citizens abroad - as US diplomats are doing now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The intent is to help transform developing countries into democracies and to fight terrorism, she said.

Ms Rice portrayed the changes as a move away from the outdated vestiges of the Cold War.

The State Department currently employs about 6,400 “generalist” foreign officers, a third of whom serve in Washington.

“We have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of one billion people,” Ms Rice told an audience of students and professors at Georgetown University in Washington. “We must begin to lay the diplomatic foundations to secure a future of freedom for all people.”

One senior State Department official who briefed reporters after the announcement likened the strategy to the Pentagon’s plan to shift up to 70,000 troops in the coming years out of Cold War-era bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea to smaller bases around the world where they can better respond to new threats.

In addition to the staff redeployment, Ms Rice said she would authorize more one-person posts in important cities where the United States had no diplomatic presence. These cities currently include Alexandria (Egypt) and Medan (Indonesia).

“These are challenging jobs in critical countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan and Angola; countries where we’re working with foreign citizens in difficult conditions to maintain security and fight poverty and make democratic reforms,” Ms Rice said.

“To succeed in these kinds of posts, we will train our diplomats not only as expert analysts of policy, but as first-rate administrators of programmes, capable of helping foreign citizens to strengthen the rule of law, to start businesses, to improve health, and to reform education.”

In a shake-up of the foreign aid bureaucracy, Ms Rice plans to set up an office under her direct supervision to oversee agencies and bureaus that dispense $19 billion each year, State Department officials said.