Armed Humanitarians (13 page)

These temporary assignments meant, in essence, that service with the Coalition Provisional Authority would be a “ticket-punching” exercise: Volunteers would go on a brief assignment to a war zone, add another line to their résumés, but not hang around long enough to accomplish anything. In short, the diplomatic corps was not on a war footing.

The high turnover rate among civilians assigned to the CPA made a poor impression on the military, particularly those working staff positions in Baghdad. Most Army units were expected to serve one-year rotations in Iraq, at a minimum; as the situation worsened, units often found their tours were extended by several months.

Colonel Peter Mansoor, commander of the “Ready First” First Brigade, First Armored Division, arrived in Iraq in late May 2003; his unit effectively administered several districts in central and northeast Baghdad, an area of seventy-five square miles that was home to 2.1 million Iraqis. By late 2003, Mansoor's brigade was already deeply involved in the stability operations across the Tigris River from the CPA headquarters in the Green Zone. They had helped to form neighborhood and district advisory councils to create some facsimile of local government, had begun training Iraqi security forces, and had undertaken Civil Affairs projects. But their encounters with the civilian-led occupation authorities were rare—and immensely frustrating. In his memoir of his tour in Iraq,
Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq
(2008) Mansoor recalled a dispiriting trip into the Green Zone, Saddam Hussein's former palace complex on the west bank of the Tigris river, where the CPA had set up shop. Insulated behind the blast walls, HESCO barriers, and razor wire, CPA staff rarely seemed to venture outside the fortified perimeter.

“What we really needed was an embedded team of interagency advisors configured to help the brigade combat team deal with issues of governance, economics, and rule of law,” he wrote. “But the Ready First Combat Team was based on the east side of the Tigris River and rarely saw CPA personnel in our area. Furthermore, Ambassador Bremer had centralized decisionmaking in his palace headquarters in the Green Zone, which made support for brigade combat teams difficult if not impossible.”
22

Not only did the CPA's Humanitarian Action Coordination Center and representatives of the U.S. Agency for International Development ensconced in the Green Zone seem detached from what was happening on the ground, but the staff at CPA seemed young and underqualified. Mansoor recalled meeting a twenty-something employee of the State Department, who, despite her youth and inexperience, had been assigned as the coordinator for local governments throughout central and northeastern Baghdad. “I took her to a meeting of the Adhamiya District Advisory Council a few days later, gave her a personal briefing on our operations at my brigade headquarters, and invited her to return to coordinate complementary efforts,” he wrote. “I never saw her again.”
23

Within the Green Zone, the CPA had its own internal conflicts. Faced with unfilled billets in the CPA, the Defense Department made the decision to hire “3161 appointees” to supplement members of the military and the diplomatic corps staffing the CPA. These were direct hires who would typically serve in Iraq on one-year contracts (3161 refers to the section of the U.S. Code that regulates the hiring of civilian experts). Many 3161 appointees were drawn from the private sector. They were experts in the oil sector, municipal services, and transportation; in order to recruit them temporarily from the private sector, 3161s were paid at the top of the government pay scale. At one memorable DoD-to-State transition meeting for 3161s in Baghdad, a visiting State Department personnel specialist announced, with some bewilderment, “Some people here make more money than the ambassador.” The 3161s also clashed with the Foreign Service culture: Many of them had never worked in an embassy or learned how to clear a diplomatic cable, but they also felt that diplomats had few real-world skills to offer when it came to repairing Iraq's creaking infrastructure, and spent little time meeting their Iraqi counterparts.

An advisor to the Transportation Ministry recalled that a Foreign Service officer visited the ministry he was supposed to be advising only once. “It was a forty-five-minute, senior-level event and everyone came away talking about ‘the relationship,' ” the advisor said. “Unfortunately, the minister never gave it another thought.” The 3161 advisor, on the other hand, visited the ministry several times a week. “We spoke to our Iraqi counterparts every day,” the advisor told me. “I sometimes went to the ministry (escorted by ten heavily armed friends) with no fixed agenda, but invariably something arose once I started talking to my Iraqi counterparts. And besides, the Iraqis made it to work. Why should we cower in the Green Zone?”

The greatest media scorn, however, was reserved for the political hacks who seemed to dominate the CPA. Although the CPA staff had been drawn from various government agencies, and included a smattering of officials from other coalition states, it also had a fair share of ideologically motivated operatives who seemed to view their jobs primarily in terms of securing President Bush's reelection in 2004. The CPA press office was a particularly egregious case: It was led by Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who was then secretary of energy. Senor headed an office that included a healthy number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees, and former Capitol Hill staffers. The Associated Press found that more than one third of the CPA's press office staff had Republican ties.
24

And then there was the “brat pack,” a group of politically connected youngsters inside the CPA. Ariana Eunjung Cha, a
Washington Post
reporter, profiled one group of twenty-something volunteers who served short tours with the CPA in Iraq. They included a twenty-eight-year-old legislative aide to Republican Senator Rick Santorum, a twenty-four-year-old Web site editor, and the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of the neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen. They were all in their twenties or early thirties; few had any overseas experience; and they had been hired for low-level jobs. But because of high staff turnover and a lack of volunteers, they very quickly found themselves occupying positions of serious responsibility and drawing six-figure salaries. How did they manage to land these important jobs? “For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank,” Cha wrote.
25

Less well connected but equally inexperienced were Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann, a pair of enterprising misfits on a Valium- and liquor-fueled buddy trip to Iraq who also managed to land jobs in the CPA. LeMoine and Neumann, who previously had run a business selling
YANKEES SUCK
T-shirts at Boston's Fenway Park, ended up running the CPA's NGO Assistance Office after taking a bus trip to Baghdad on a lark in January 2004. As outsiders to government, they were perceptive observers. And they quickly found the CPA's appearance of purposeful administration was little more than illusion. Their description of the “Bremer Look” (the CPA chief favored a navy-blue blazer, khaki trousers, and regimental tie, plus a pair of desert tan combat boots) was particularly withering. “By the time we arrived in Iraq, the Bremer Look had fully penetrated the CPA,” they noted. “Like a news anchor wearing a suit jacket and tie but naked below the desk, the Bremer Look suggested both serious work and slightly reckless adventure. Considering that most Iraqis wore plastic sandals, and didn't live in palaces or travel by helicopter, they associated the Bremer Look with American arrogance … Fact is, most CPA combat boots never left the Green Zone. The Look, like the CPA itself, was all image.”
26

Bremer would later write a self-serving memoir,
My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope
. LeMoine and Neumann provided more insights about their own failures. In a heartbreaking summary of their time in Iraq,
Babylon by Bus
, they wrote: “In the end, it was our work that would come to define our time in Iraq. There is no point in romanticizing what we did. We thought we were helping Iraqis. We were wrong. Because of our failure, we'd leave the Middle East in a state of regret.”
27

The biggest U.S. experiment in foreign assistance since the Marshall Plan was being run by amateurs. In an October 2004 U.S. Institute of Peace interview, Colonel Lloyd Sammons, a reserve Special Forces officer and a lawyer who served as a military assistant in the governance section of the CPA, described the atmosphere of deep disillusion that set in within the CPA under Bremer. The political appointees seemed more preoccupied with making the administration look good than actually improving the lot of ordinary Iraqis. Frustrated by the remoteness of the CPA and his isolation in the Green Zone, Sammons staged a minor act of rebellion. In the small shared office space, he started posting the names of soldiers whose deaths had been announced in Defense Department news releases and put up a sign on his desk that said, “Why I am here?” in boldface type.

Sammons departed Iraq in frustration. “I'm a big boy and I recognize things aren't perfect in this world, but to me it was sad,” he later said. “Frankly, I left early. Nobody threw me out, but I knew that I was probably reaching an untenable level of anger and sadness. I would rant and rave right outside of Ambassador [Richard Henry] Jones's office while visiting his MA [military assistant]. Jones had to hear me. When Bremer would walk in every once in a while (he had to pass my desk on the way to the john) I'd just look at him like he was a piece of shit, and that's how I felt about him … I don't know every inside deal and everything, but I'm not an idiot. You can sort of smell when you're losing.”
28

*
Akbar would later be convicted of murder and sentenced to death by a court-martial. Incidents of fragging, murder of fellow soldiers or superior officers, were extremely rare in the Iraq War. A 2009 shooting spree by a soldier at a stress treatment clinic at Camp Victory, Baghdad, however, put the spotlight on the psychological toll of combat.

*
The Army also had a similar facility in Germany, the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels. The Marine Corps did similar training at Twenty-nine Palms in the Mojave Desert.

*
Details of that plan are still not public. On April 1, 2010, U.S. Central Command released a redacted version of the document in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Nearly all of its twenty-seven pages were blacked out.
13

*
The Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit was commanded by Colonel James Jones, who would later go on to be NATO's supreme allied commander–Europe and the head of U.S. European Command. In 2009 he was named National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama.

*
At the Iraq-Kuwait border was a ten-kilometer-deep linear obstacle complex comprising massive tank ditches, concertina wire, electrified fencing, and of course berms of dirt.

CHAPTER  4

The Other War

The string of grenades went off in quick succession:
pop-pop-pop
. I was down the block at the Mustafa Hotel, a four-story hotel on a traffic circle in Kabul's Shahr-e-Naw district. The Mustafa was a sketchy place—it had been the favorite haunt of an American bounty hunter who was later arrested for running a private jail in Kabul—and I was convinced that someone, someday, would try to blow the place up. But it served decent kebabs and kept beer in stock, and I liked the manager, Wais Faizi, a fast-talking guy with a New Jersey accent and a vintage Camaro. I excused myself from my lunch on the terrace and went out onto the street to see what the matter was.

At the intersection of Chicken Street and Interior Ministry Road, an agitated Afghan National Police officer was waving his Kalashnikov rifle to keep curious onlookers away from the scene of the attack. A few photographers were hanging out around the traffic barrier. They wanted to get closer to the scene, so I followed them as they ducked down a side alley and wound their way down to the middle of Chicken Street, a dusty lane filled with carpet shops and souvenir stores selling antique daggers, Martini-Henry rifles, and pirated DVDs. The body of a man in a scorched
shalwar kameez
was lying on the pavement, his arms blown off and his torso squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.

This was the body of the bomber, who had detonated a series of hand grenades concealed beneath his shirt. Dressed like a beggar, the man had approached a group of soldiers from the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. The bomber had been trying to follow them into a carpet shop when he detonated his improvised suicide vest. The soldiers escaped, but others were not so lucky. The blast killed Jamie Michalsky, a young American woman who had recently served with the Army in Afghanistan and was on a visit from Uzbekistan, where she worked as a contract linguist.
1
It also killed Feriba, a third-grader who attended a nearby school, and who hawked English-language papers on the street to foreigners. She was the main breadwinner for her family.
2

It was a relatively primitive attack. Afghan reporters from a local news agency later discovered the identity of the suicide bomber, a mentally ill man named Matiullah who had been recruited at a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, by a splinter faction of the militant group Hezb-e-Islami.
3
But the attack had a strategic effect: It deliberately targeted a place frequented by foreigners, and it sent a message that the people who were in Afghanistan to help rebuild the country were also targets of the insurgency.