During his presidential campaign, President Barack Obama promised to "stop shuttering consulates and start opening them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world." In our last update, we defined a consulate as a foreign office, somewhat similar to an embassy, "responsible for fostering economic, commercial, scientific and cultural relations" between the country it represents and the area in which it is located.
To get an idea what consulates have been opened since Obama was inaugurated, we spoke with the Department of State, which was able to provide us with a list of consular offices opened from the beginning of 2009 to the end of February, 2012. The department told us that since 2009, the administration has opened consulates in Wuhan, China; Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan; Herat, Afghanistan; Almaty, Kazakhstan and in the cities of Erbil, Basrah and Kirkuk in Iraq.
It is difficult to objectively define what makes areas "tough and hopeless," but we looked at statistics on life expectancy, literacy rates and mortality rates to get a rough approximation of the quality of life in these countries. We charted those statistics in a table and included the world ranking for each nation out of 221 countries:
Country
|
Life expectancy at birth (World Rank)
|
Literacy rate (World Rank)
|
Mortality rate for children under 5 (World Rank)
|
China
|
75 years (95th)
|
92.2 percent (101st)
|
16 per 1,000 births (111th)
|
Kazakhstan
|
69 years (148th)
|
99.5 percent (15th)
|
24 per 1,000 births (82nd)
|
Iraq
|
71 years (144th)
|
74.1 percent (151st)
|
41.7 per 1,000 births (61st)
|
Afghanistan
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45 years (217th)
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28.1 percent (202nd)
|
149.2 per 1,000 births (2nd)
|
While the statistics for China, Kazakhstan and Iraq aren"t near the top of the world rankings, each country still ranks above over 60 other nations in terms of literacy rate, mortality rate and life expectancy at birth. So while the citizens of these countries certainly may be struggling, it might be an overstatement to describe their situations as "tough and hopeless."
The statistics for Afghanistan, though, tell a significantly different story. The average Afghan citizen lives over 30 years less than than the average American; Afghanistan"s literacy rate is lower than that of 200 other countries; and over 15 percent of Afghan infants die before the age of five. Those numbers suggest that Afghanistan qualifies as a "tough and hopeless" part of the world.
Of the seven consulates that the administration has opened or since beginning of 2009, two have opened in Afghanistan, a nation with enough challenges to be described as "tough and hopeless." And, according to the State Department, none have been closed. We rate this as a Promise Kept.