Armed Humanitarians (14 page)

In a modest way I was one of the people aiding the reconstruction of Afghanistan. I had returned to the country in September 2004 to cover the upcoming presidential elections and had stayed on to take a job with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a U.K.-based charity that was teaching basic journalism skills to a new generation of Afghan reporters. Accepting the post was in part a move dictated by necessity: Very few U.S. news organizations were willing to keep a full-time correspondent in Kabul, and living and working in Afghanistan on $150 or $200 per article, the going rate paid by many newspapers, was a losing proposition. So this job allowed me to remain in Afghanistan.

I may have been a reluctant member of Development Inc., but autumn 2004 was a unique time to be in Afghanistan. Unlike Baghdad, which was in the grip of a violent insurgency, Kabul was a relatively peaceful place. I could live in a residential neighborhood without having to retreat inside a guarded compound. It was easy to move around the countryside. To report a story outside the capital, I could simply hire a truck and go. That freedom had its limits: Parts of the south and the east were still home to the remnants of the Taliban, but violent crime actually seemed as big a worry as political unrest. The U.S. military maintained an almost invisible presence in much of the country. Part of the reason for this invisibility was the size of the contingent, which hovered at around fifteen thousand troops. It was also a “force protection” mind-set that kept U.S. forces sequestered behind blast walls. On a reporting visit to Bagram Air Base, the public affairs major who arranged my interview asked me how I'd gotten to the base. When I told him that I'd taken a taxi, he looked at me as though I was deranged.

It was generally an optimistic time. On October 9, 2004, Afghanistan held its first direct presidential elections. Millions of Afghans went to the polls, and U.S. and NATO troops stepped up security around the country to make sure the elections took place. Out on the Shomali Plain, which was still devastated after the war two and a half years earlier, I saw the first signs of economic optimism: brick factories, which were providing the materials to help rebuild the capital.

But the Taliban and its allies, who had been driven from power in 2001 by the United States and the Northern Alliance, were readying a comeback. In villages on the Shomali Plain, agitators from Pakistan were rumored to be meeting with village elders to encourage them to fight the Americans. At the time, the U.S. military was focused on rescuing Iraq from its downward spiral, not on the possibility of a resurgent Taliban. And the attack on Chicken Street was a sign that the mayhem on the distant Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier could also reach the capital. After taking in the scene of the bombing, I hurried back to my guest house to type an e-mail to an editor in the United States: “Any interest in a story on the bombing?” “Thanks,” he wrote, “but we'll pass.” He was expecting a heavy run of domestic news. The 2004 U.S. election campaign was in full swing; another big story of the day was that Delta Airlines was experiencing financial turbulence. In other words, Afghanistan was a forgotten war. And that was a shame, because Afghanistan was the scene of an important new experiment in the way that aid was being delivered.

A few months before the invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon official, Joseph Collins, traveled to Afghanistan on a fact-finding trip. Collins, a retired Army colonel, was known as something of an Afghanistan watcher: He had begun studying the country in the late 1970s, and his Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia focused on Soviet policy in Afghanistan. After a career in the Army, he worked as a public policy researcher in Washington. But his research career was put on hold in 2001, when he was asked to join the incoming administration of George W. Bush. Collins first served as special assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and was promoted shortly thereafter to a new job within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Collins was deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, an obscure directorate inside “OSD Policy,” the policymaking shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Stability operations was something of an orphan inside the DoD bureaucracy. Collins described his office as the “junk drawer of OSD policy” because of the mixed bag of missions under his purview: evacuating U.S. citizens from combat zones, humanitarian mine clearance, civil-military operations, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid.
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In theory, the Pentagon was not supposed to be the lead U.S. agency for aid to Afghanistan: That was supposed to be the job of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the year following the defeat of the Taliban, USAID had initiated its first quick impact projects: rebuilding schools, delivering new textbooks, and providing food to returning Afghan refugees. And Afghans were voting with their feet: By official estimates, around two million Afghans had returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan and the cities of Iran. At the same time, the military was getting more deeply involved in the business of humanitarian aid. By late 2002, around two hundred Army Civil Affairs specialists were on the ground in Afghanistan, repairing schools, boring wells, and opening medical clinics. They had refurbished the National Veterinary Center and the National Teachers' College in Kabul.
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Collins's office oversaw that portfolio of humanitarian projects.

During his fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, Collins received a briefing from a British army officer, Colonel Nick Carter. Carter showed Collins a PowerPoint slide that sketched out a novel military organization that would be tailored to Afghanistan, something called Joint Regional Teams. The idea was to jump-start development projects in rural Afghanistan by organizing eight or ten of these units—essentially, super-sized Civil Affairs teams—and stationing them out in the provinces. Each JRT would field a force of fifty to one hundred uniformed personnel. A larger “force protection” component of the team would guard the small outpost, run patrols, and provide overwatch (where one small unit supports or covers the activities of another). They would expand the presence of the military in Afghanistan, and by extension, serve as a counterweight to the militia commanders who still held sway in the countryside. Afghanistan at that point still had an extremely fragile central government, and the
jang salaran
(warlords) who had been put on the U.S. payroll during the campaign to oust the Taliban now stood in the way of creating a functioning Afghan state.

Carter, a former battalion commander with the British army's Royal Green Jackets regiment, would later be credited with the idea of the JRTs, but the plan was also being presented by other British officers assigned to Coalition Joint Task Force-180, the military headquarters that ran the war from Bagram.
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The approach drew inspiration in part from the British army's experience in policing low-intensity conflicts in Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Carter was a recent veteran of Kosovo, where he had been charged with policing Kosovo's divided city of Mitrovica as part of KFOR, NATO's Kosovo force. Patrolling Mitrovica was equal parts police work and military operation: keeping the ethnic Serb and Albanian communities at bay, preventing ethnic reprisals, and searching for illegal weapons.
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Military planners believed the Joint Regional Teams would create a more visible coalition presence in Afghanistan outside the capital. By the summer of 2002, Kabul and its environs were reasonably secure, a development that was credited to the presence of the International Security Assistance Force, a small UN-mandated peacekeeping contingent that had arrived in December 2001. But ISAF did not patrol outside the capital, and policymakers in Kabul and Washington wanted to find a way to spread the “ISAF effect” into the regions.

Collins brought up the topic of Joint Regional Teams in a meeting with President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan president liked the idea, but he didn't like the name. “It doesn't work,” Karzai said. “The word ‘joint' doesn't exist in Dari or Pashto.”

Officials in Kabul would have to come up with a new name. They settled on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs. It was in part a political calculation: Warlords had their regions, the reasoning went, but the new Afghan state had provinces.

The PRTs were a more muscular version of the Civil Affairs teams already on the ground. With a security contingent to both guard their base and provide transport, they could go into harm's way to do development work. Collins, who came from the world of special operations and low-intensity conflict, liked the idea. On his return to Washington, he presented the idea to Doug Feith, the head of the Pentagon's policy office.

Collins would not take credit for inventing the PRTs, but he was key to propagating the concept within the Pentagon. The experiment had previously been tried on a small scale by the Coalition Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force (CJCMOTF, pronounced “chick motif”), an ad hoc organization that originally oversaw the U.S. military's humanitarian operations in Afghanistan. CJCMOTF formed something called Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells (“chick licks” or “Chiclets”), six-man Civil Affairs teams augmented by a few civilian experts who accompanied Special Forces troops working out in the field.
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But for the concept to work on a larger scale, it would need funding, and some more personnel. Traditional Civil Affairs teams did not have the right skills for long-term development projects. They could drill a well here or repair a school there but could not necessarily do anything about the underlying problems of poverty and development that afflicted Afghanistan. In the new PRT model, the civilian experts—diplomats, agricultural experts, and development specialists—could focus on the tasks of long-term economic development. It was agreed that the PRTs would include civilian members drawn from development organizations such as USAID or the U.K.'s Department for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. State Department. The diplomats were supposed to act as local political advisors and report back to their embassies on the situation in the provinces. Real development experts could help plan more ambitious development projects such as building highways or repairing hydroelectric dams.

That fall, work got under way on planning, and military officials laid out a timeline for staffing the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The first was a U.S.-led team in eastern Afghanistan that opened in January 2003 at Gardez. Shortly thereafter, teams were established at Bamyan, home of the giant Buddha statues dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, and in Kunduz, the last city in northern Afghanistan held by the Taliban. The British opened the first non-U.S. team in Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in northern Balkh province that was the scene of an ongoing feud between two warlords, the Tajik leader Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor and his rival, an Uzbek general named Abdul Rashid Dostum. Plans were in the works for additional teams to be deployed around the country by the late summer of 2003.
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Collins presented the idea to the press in a December 2002 briefing and relayed an important message to the public as well: Major combat in Afghanistan was essentially over, and the emphasis would now shift. Beginning on January 1, 2003, the military would “be transitioning to focus on stability operations.”
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In theory, the creation of these new teams—they had yet to be officially renamed PRTs—would bring the military and the civilian agencies closer together. The military headquarters at Bagram and the embassy in Kabul were physically and psychologically separated. Up until that point, each had basically done its own thing, meaning there was little “unity of effort” by the various U.S. agencies tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan. It was a bureaucratic problem with real implications. Without some elementary coordination, aid would be wasted: the same school might be repaired twice, unnecessary wells would be drilled. Savvier local leaders could persuade multiple donors to fund the same project, essentially double- or triple-dipping in reconstruction funds while depriving needier and less well connected communities of essential funds.

But the creation of the PRTs inadvertently expanded the military's remit. Collins noted that Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180, and General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, “will be the people who are running these operations out in the field.”
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The creation of the PRTs was, in effect, the first step toward what the Pentagon strategist Thomas Barnett had called the “SysAdmin” force: a new kind of organization, part military, part civilian, that was uniquely suited for the task of nation building. Afghanistan would serve as the first laboratory for this experiment. But it was easier said than done. When I met with Collins shortly before my departure for Afghanistan in September 2004, he made a blunt appraisal of NATO's efforts to contribute to this new mission. “The performance of our European brethren is pretty pathetic,” he said. “Pretty pathetic.” The problem was that “everybody wants to help, but nobody wants to put out. NATO is incredibly badly organized, the NATO nations are incredibly badly organized. The Germans complain all the time about their overstretch, and they've got less than three percent of their force abroad.”

By early 2003, although the headlines about Iraq were eclipsing all news from Afghanistan, U.S.-funded reconstruction work in Afghanistan had slowly begun to pick up its pace. The first wave of quick-impact projects had been wrapped up, and work was beginning in earnest on more ambitious projects such as repairing Afghanistan's “ring road,” the highway network that would connect the country's major cities. Plans were also in the works to repair the country's hydroelectric dams, which could generate inexpensive power and speed rural electrification. In its fiscal year 2003 budget request, the State Department also recognized a new development priority: weaning Afghan farmers from their dependence on growing opium poppy. Opium had emerged as Afghanistan's main cash crop: It was easy to grow, transport, and store, making it the perfect hedge for a lawless and uncertain time. A portion of the department's International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement budget would go toward poppy eradication, police training, and employment schemes in opium-growing areas.