Armed Humanitarians (4 page)

This newest generation of nation builders had to learn the hard way, groping for solutions in often difficult circumstances. For guidance, the architects of this new approach looked to the lessons of the Vietnam War, and to the literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial administration. During Vietnam, the U.S. military and civilian agencies of government became heavily involved in what at the time was called the “other war”: a massive civilian-led development campaign. Even though the Vietnam War ended in failure, some of the nation builders offered a new interpretation of the conflict: Many of the unique civil-military experiments in armed social work and reorganizing government had produced successes that, despite the fall of the Saigon government in 1975, could be repeated.

This book revisits some of that history, but it also describes what makes the experience of the past decade distinct from other foreign adventures. This new doctrine was an effort to get past the simplistic “shock and awe” view of American military might, and impose a more nuanced, and culturally sophisticated, way of doing business. Strenuously avoiding civilian casualties would become the prime directive for U.S. troops. And serious thinkers within government would look for ways to make U.S. intervention smarter, smaller, and less intrusive.

Despite this smarter approach, the outcome is not guaranteed. Iraq, as of this writing, is in the grip of a fresh wave of sectarian violence. Despite having stabilized to some extent, the country still could not manage to form a national government half a year after elections in March 2010. Overall violence is down, but the threat of renewed civil war is very real. In Afghanistan, the massive ramping up of U.S. military involvement and a parallel development effort had the perverse effect of enabling rampant corruption that undermined the trust of the Afghan people. U.S. troops, once greeted as liberators by Afghans weary of the Taliban's medieval rule and a quarter century of civil war, found that their welcome was wearing thin. Local resentment has grown over civilian casualties, and in many parts of the country the Taliban is managing to outgovern the coalition and the Afghan government. The practitioners of foreign policy were rediscovering the fundamental paradox of nation building: The more you help, the less you empower the host government.

This book, then, is an accounting. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru, described this kind of mission as “armed social work.” Poverty alleviation, job creation, and infrastructure development can be noble and altruistic enterprises; these projects are often taken on by self-sacrificing, service-minded people. But good intentions are not enough. As any student of aid and development should know, efforts to aid the developing world have often done more harm than good. To borrow a construct from the economist William Easterly, the U.S. government belongs to the world of the “planners,” the topdown institutions that have consistently failed over five decades and trillions of dollars to find adequate remedies for poverty in the developing world. As they get further into the development business, the U.S. military faces the same dilemma. Underlying the whole enterprise is an assumption, questionable at best, that aid and development money can automatically bring down violence and promote stability in war-torn states.

Ultimately, there needs to be an acknowledgment of the limits to what we can accomplish. Without a reliable partner, the whole thing is doomed to fail. If the government we are helping is hopelessly corrupt, ineffective, and illegitimate, no amount of money or manpower will solve the problem. Building effective states can take decades, and requires a class of people who are committed to it. As experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, this is not a soldier's job, yet civilian agencies simply lack the personnel and the expeditionary capability to handle nation building in the world's most violent neighborhoods. We are still a long way from developing a real cadre of people who can handle this mission, and do it affordably. Furthermore, it's not primarily a task that can be accomplished by outsiders, be they in or out of uniform. Developing a functioning state and a thriving civil society is a process that has its own internal dynamic. We cannot remake entire societies no matter how much time we give ourselves. We cannot do it, and we can't afford it.

A few notes on terminology: This book traces the theory and practice of nation building, even in an era when official policy insisted that the term did not apply. The reluctant acceptance of the need to use that term—and the belated acknowledgment of its importance—is part of the story.

I have made a deliberate effort to avoid national-security jargon. In the U.S. military, the term “peacekeeping” has fallen out of fashion. “Stability operations,” sometimes referred to as “Phase IV” or “post-conflict” operations, can apply to missions such as peacekeeping (the preferred phrase is now “peace operations”), disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and counterinsurgency.
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An argument persists about whether counterinsurgency falls under the rubric of stability operations or vice versa—the Army–Marine Corps manual describes counterinsurgency as a combination of offensive, defensive, and stability operations—but those definitions are of greatest concern to a professional military audience.
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While it may offend the purists, I have chosen to use the terms “nation building” and “stability operations” interchangeably.

“Nation building” and “state building” are terms that have very specific meaning for academics and members of the development community. “Nation building” means building a collective political identity around the concept of a culturally unique “nation”; it is quite distinct from the task of designing and building institutions of state. The United States has been deeply involved in both: In Iraq, it tried to nurture and promote a sense of Iraqi national unity that superseded ethnic allegiance, even though certain state institutions were dominated by one group (the Interior Ministry was Shia-dominated, for instance) and parts of the country were pushing for the greatest possible degree of autonomy (Kurdistan wanted a regional government). In Afghanistan, the efforts to build a national army drawn from all of the country's ethnic groups was at its heart an attempt to promote national unity.

A note on sources: I have tried to depict as accurately as possible the world of the nation builder as I have encountered it. I have watched Army Human Terrain Teams negotiate with neighborhood leaders in Baghdad's Sadr City; accompanied military doctors to a rural clinic in Mali; observed Special Forces soldiers training the sneaker-clad troops of the Georgian army; and watched State Department diplomats negotiate with provincial leaders in Afghanistan. The ranks are those they held at the time they were interviewed. In addition to my firsthand reporting, I spoke to dozens of veterans of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, regional embassy offices, and Civil Affairs teams; tracked down retired Vietnam-era civilian and military advisors; and interviewed many generals and top civilian officials. Information not drawn from my own interviews, reporting, or observation is cited in the notes.

Many sources agreed to speak to me on the record; others, because of the nature of their work and their respective bureaucratic cultures, have asked to remain unnamed. The State Department, in particular, has a “don't-rock-the-boat” culture that discourages unscripted interaction with an independent writer and researcher. Nevertheless, many Foreign Service officers and many civil servants, contractors, USAID officers, and serving military personnel agreed to speak candidly to me. They felt the story was too important to remain untold.

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Shortly after taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama employed that phrase himself when he addressed the U.S. military. In an interview with the Pentagon Channel, he said his biggest responsibility to the troops was to ensure he “gets it right,” and that military power alone would not ensure victory in places like Afghanistan. “We are not going to win in Afghanistan or get an acceptable outcome in Afghanistan if we are only depending on our military,” he said.
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That phrase, originally attributed to the former head of the CIA's Afghan Task Force, was the title of an influential article by John Hillen, a former Army officer who went on to serve as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs under George W. Bush. The article was cited more often than read: Hillen was making a more nuanced argument about the management of alliances against the backdrop of the conflict in the Balkans. But because of its provocative title, it was often held up as an anti-nation-building screed.
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PART  I

Winning the War, Losing the Peace

CHAPTER  1

Absolute Beginners

The rear ramp of the C-17 airlifter groaned open, bathing the cargo hold in a hot, stupefying glare. Two rows of Army infantrymen in coyote-brown camouflage filed out, dazed and blinking, into Afghanistan's noonday sun. A junior airman waved the soldiers away from the flight line, toward a row of sagging canvas field tents. The troops, soldiers of the Tenth Mountain Division, fresh from Fort Drum, New York, hauled their gear over to an assembly area. A few reporters who had hitched a ride on the same flight would hang back and wait for an escort. I dropped my bags in the dust and took in the scene. A pair of young airmen, a young man and a woman in T-shirts and fatigues, lounged on an empty pallet, swigging bottled water.

I had a panoramic view of Bagram Air Base, ringed on three sides by the jagged, white-capped walls of the Hindu Kush. Just a few months earlier, in the fall of 2001, this former Soviet base on the high desert plain of Parwan Province had been the frontline of battle between the Taliban and Northern Alliance fighters. And the scene here still looked like an outtake from
Apocalypse Now
, a wide-screen view of wartime devastation. A pair of Chinooks—the hulking, tandem-rotor helicopters familiar from the old photos of the Vietnam War—lifted off from the airstrip, kicking up a ferocious swirl of dust. The carcasses of wrecked Soviet aircraft littered the revetments off the main taxiway. Out beyond the runway, ordnance disposal teams were combing the desert floor, probing for mines and unexploded shells.

In the prelude to the offensive that routed the Taliban in December of 2001, General Baba Jan, a swaggering Northern Alliance commander, had escorted reporters to the top floor of the Bagram control tower, a squat, three-story building with the windowpanes blown out, to point the way to Kabul, and to victory.
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The tower had been a favorite target for Taliban mortar teams. The corroding skeleton of the main aircraft hangar was visible, improbably supporting the roof; an Army soldier, Specialist Jason Disney, had been crushed to death by a piece of falling scrap metal while clearing the building of debris the month before. The few buildings left standing were still perforated with bullet holes and shell fragments.

Before the Soviet-Afghan war, this had been the garden of central Afghanistan. Farmers tended orchards and vineyards on the lushly irrigated Shomali Plain, which doubled as a favorite picnic spot in the summer. In the winter, expatriates living in Kabul would drive the two-lane highway that skirted Bagram's western edge to go skiing near the Salang Pass. The slopes had no lift, and enterprising local truckers would drop skiers at the trailhead, drive the switchback road to the bottom, and then drive them back to the top of the mountain.
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The idea of Ariana Afghan Airlines, the country's national carrier, offering package holidays to “Ski Afghanistan,” did not seem too remote a prospect.
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A generation later, this bleak landscape was nearly uninhabitable. Bagram changed hands several times during fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. When the Taliban finally pushed their opponents from the Shomali Plain, their reprisals against the local villages for supporting the Northern Alliance were swift: demolition teams dynamited their mud-brick houses, burned the orchards, and destroyed the irrigation canals. By March of 2002 it was little more than a military staging area. In the Shah-e-Kot mountain range of eastern Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda was in full swing: Soldiers of the Army's Tenth Mountain Division, along with a contingent of Canadian soldiers, special operations teams, and Afghan irregulars, were engaged in a protracted fight against al-Qaeda footsoldiers entrenched in a series of bunkers and cave complexes in Paktia Province. Bagram was the logistics hub and headquarters for the battle; from the urgent pace with which the helicopters were shuttling off the airfield, it was clear that the fighting was still intense.

We had made a dramatic landing, with the C-17 hurtling down at a steep angle. A bulldozer and a dump truck were tethered to the floor of the aircraft. Buckled into my seat against the wall, I kept a nervous eye on the straps and chains that kept the bulldozer anchored to the deck of the cargo hold as the aircraft banked sharply. Before landing at Bagram, the C-17 had made a brief pit stop at Karshi Khanabad, a remote former Soviet air base in southern Uzbekistan. Several pallets of Pringles and Mountain Dew, destined for a makeshift commissary, had been bumped from the cargo hold to make way for the crucial heavy equipment. Karshi Khanabad was one of the staging areas of the new war; in the weeks after September 11, 2001, U.S. Defense Department officials and diplomats had negotiated overflight rights, access to airstrips, and refueling stops in remote locations along the southern rim of the former Soviet empire.

I had boarded the Afghanistan-bound C-17 at Incirlik Air Force Base, an American base in southeastern Turkey that was the home to aircraft enforcing Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Incirlik was a well-established base. The Air Force had occupied the place since the Cold War, and the base was laid out in a neat suburban grid. It looked like Abilene, Texas. I arrived at Incirlik on a Civil Reserve flight, a commercial airliner chartered by the military. As the plane taxied in at Incirlik, the arriving U.S. troops puzzled over their travel orders, trying to get a fix on their final destination. A young woman in an Air Force uniform read her travel orders—her boarding pass listed her destination as Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.