Armed Humanitarians (15 page)

Simultaneously, the Bush administration's philosophical opposition to this mission was quietly set aside. George W. Bush had declared his aversion to nation building during the 2000 presidential campaign. A few months after he declared “Mission accomplished” on the deck of the carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
, however, he recast the occupation of Iraq in clear nation-building terms. In a speech before the United Nations on September 23, 2003, half a year after the Iraq invasion, Bush used the success of the Marshall Plan, Europe's postwar recovery, as a selling point for a massive assistance package for Iraq. The reconstruction of Iraq, he said, would be “the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan.” Bush glossed over a key distinction: The United States did not rebuild postwar Europe in the midst of a shooting war. More important, the Marshall Plan hinged on facilitating trade, not handing out aid, and a great deal of American money went directly into backing the European Payments Union, which served as a clearinghouse for transactions between European nations.
12
It was, according to the historian Nicolaus Mills, a “blood transfusion” that encouraged the European states to make their own investments in infrastructure and social welfare programs to improve the lives of their citizens.
13

While less ambitious in scale than Iraq's reconstruction, efforts to rebuild Afghanistan were also ramping up. “That opposition to nation-building is a fig leaf that dropped a while ago,” a spokesman of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Alberto Fernandez, told the
Washington Post
. “We're up to our ears in nation-building.”
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Between 2002 and 2003, the United States poured around $900 million into humanitarian aid and assistance to Afghanistan, eclipsing the $296 million the United States initially pledged at the first donor conference in Tokyo.
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Not everyone was pleased with the U.S. government's new enthusiasm for this approach, however. Traditional nonprofit aid groups such as CARE and Save the Children greeted the creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams with skepticism. In the 1990s, armed intervention in Kosovo and East Timor had troubled many traditional aid and relief groups, who felt they were being crowded out of the traditional “humanitarian space” by the military. The PRTs, they argued, “blurred the line” between humanitarian workers and the military, making it difficult for locals to distinguish between the coalition forces and the “true” humanitarians.

Militaries, they argued, served the interests of policymakers in their respective capitals; they were not guided by principles of neutrality and impartiality that humanitarian agencies traditionally aspired to. And they tended to deliver aid in a way that was likely to suit the short-term aims of military commanders on the ground, rather than considering broader development imperatives or the needs of the local community. Most important, associating with the military violated a deep taboo among traditional humanitarians at a fundamental level: In their view, it created a perception that humanitarian actors are not neutral players in a conflict, and this makes it harder for them to act impartially and effectively. Two researchers for Save the Children U.K. outlined their worries in a paper published in late 2002:

If humanitarian actors are not perceived as neutral by the parties to the conflict, their impartiality and trustworthiness will be in doubt, and their access to all people in need, as well as their own security, will be in jeopardy … Any integration of humanitarian aid into wider political and military strategy compromises humanitarian principles, making it harder for humanitarian actors on the ground to assert their independence and impartiality, and to negotiate access to people in need. Associating with a military force in a conflict zone implies that the agency in question is in some way identifying with that group, against others.
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In fact, the traditional humanitarians felt that the PRTs and the military's embrace of the humanitarian mission put them directly in harm's way. In the past, humanitarian aid groups had relied on their neutrality for protection. Even in strife-torn regions such as Afghanistan, they would avoid hiring armed guards for fear that it would compromise their impartiality. If members of the uniformed military dug wells or rebuilt schools, they feared, it would become impossible for the local population to distinguish between combatants and humanitarians.

In Afghanistan, however, arguments about preserving the traditional humanitarian space seemed increasingly quaint. In late March 2003, a Red Cross water engineer from El Salvador named Ricardo Munguia was driving along a road in southern Uruzgan province when he was pulled over by gunmen at a roadblock. He was pulled from his car and shot dead, in plain sight of other Afghan aid workers. Munguia's killers apparently knew he was an aid worker: One of the gunmen reportedly pulled his trouser leg up to show Munguia an artificial limb he had received from the Red Cross in Pakistan.
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The death of Munguia sent a tremor through Afghanistan's small community of expatriate aid workers.
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The insurgents were beginning to deliberately target humanitarian aid workers and their local employees, who presented a much easier target than foreign military forces. Killing aid workers served a dual purpose. It telegraphed a message of intimidation to Afghans: collaboration with foreigners might cost you your life. And it was what the military called an “information operation,” a dramatic attack that would guarantee headlines, magnifying insurgents' power and omnipresence.

Sarah Chayes, a former radio correspondent who had settled in Kandahar to work for an Afghan charity, saw how the death of Munguia further soured relations between the U.S. military and the nongovernmental organizations. “For international aid workers in Afghanistan, the only available target upon which to vent their frustration was the U.S. presence there,” she later wrote. “And so humanitarian workers, Europeans as well as many Americans, opposed the presence far more vocally than Afghans did. They said it was the U.S. troops who endangered their lives, since the U.S. troops were doing reconstruction, and ‘insurgents' could not distinguish between soldiers and aid workers.”
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Chayes worked on development projects in Kandahar as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society, an independent charity founded by Qayum Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's older brother. In
The Punishment of Virtue
, an account of her first few years in Afghanistan, she described how poorly the international aid system had delivered on promises to rebuild Afghanistan. But she disagreed with the humanitarian aid purists. She felt that the presence of U.S. troops had in fact brought security to Afghanistan. In fact, the military's deepening involvement in the humanitarian enterprise seemed to threaten the image of lofty neutrality that was carefully cultivated by the international aid community. “Aid workers have trouble accepting that they are now in the crosshairs themselves,” she wrote. “When one of them is killed deliberately, the loss sparks shocked hurt feelings as well as grief. For the unconscious belief persists: If humanitarian workers are being targeted, there must be some mistake.”
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Michelle Parker tightened the straps in the passenger seat of the old Huey helicopter as it prepared to lift off from Kabul Airport. It was a painfully early hour, and Parker had never flown on a helicopter before. As she anxiously waited for liftoff, she noticed a slight Afghan man tethered to a harness in the front of the passenger hold. He was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle.
Can he stop an RPG with that thing?
she wondered.
Really, what is he going to do—annoy some farmer?

Just a few weeks earlier, a helicopter carrying workers for the Louis Berger Group, a U.S. construction firm that had a major contract from USAID to rebuild Afghanistan's main highways, had crashed after coming under fire in southern Afghanistan. The pilot was killed, and a civilian worker was injured.
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The diminutive Afghan was supposed to provide some modicum of security for the flight down to Jalalabad, where Parker, a young USAID employee, would be taking up her new assignment with the Jalalabad PRT.

It was July 2004. Parker had been in the country for about two weeks, and she was being accompanied down to Jalalabad by her predecessor, a former Marine who had been promoted to USAID regional development advisor at Camp Salerno, a large U.S. firebase in southeastern Afghanistan (a firebase is a base supplying fire support to coalition forces). At the time, USAID still faced a logistical nightmare getting its employees and contractors out to the field: The agency had no aircraft of its own, Afghanistan had only a couple of unreliable commercial carriers, and the military owned most of the helicopters. On military flights, civilians were the lowest priority for seats: They flew “space available,” meaning they could be bumped from their seat on the aircraft by the lowest-ranking private or a pallet of bottled water. And to further complicate matters, USAID usually had to rely on “implementing partners,” its contractors and their subcontractors, for transportation. They had few options.

Parker's predecessor, however, had figured out how to work the system. He had been scouting an electrification project at Torkham, the border town that is the crossing point from Pakistan's Khyber Agency to Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province. He convinced some of the USAID senior engineers to make a fact-finding trip to Torkham, the main customs station on the highway between Peshawar and Jalalabad. Having senior officials on board helped him line up the helicopter flight, and they could drop Parker off in Jalalabad. After rising at the crack of dawn, going down to the airport, and waiting for liftoff, Parker weighed the situation: It was her first job after graduate school; it was her first trip on a helicopter. As the helicopter lifted off, Parker breathed in:
Okay, welcome to your new job
.

The flight was stunning. The chopper wound through the jutting canyons of the Kabul Gorge, passed over the sparkling reservoir behind the Surobi Dam, and then dropped low, hugging the plains of Nangarhar Province, until it arrived at the Jalalabad PRT's camp. The USAID team touched down at a primitive landing zone, by a swampy area behind the PRT site.

At the landing zone, Parker and the USAID team were met by an Army Civil Affairs major.
Here's a strapping young lad
, she thought to herself with a laugh. And then it started to sink in: She would be living alone on a military base with all of these young men, many of whom were barely old enough to buy beer. The soldiers unloaded Parker's gear, and then, after grabbing a quick breakfast, the entire team walked over to a convoy of pickup trucks and SUVs for the two-hour ride to the border.

Another major was standing by the trucks with an enormous plug of chew in his mouth. He sized up Parker, a Georgia native with the looks of a hometown sweetheart, strapped into body armor and ready for the journey.

“So,” he drawled with an exaggerated southern accent, “You a Republican or Democrat?”

“How about undecided?” Parker shot back.

“I'll take it, you're hired!” the officer said approvingly. “I think we just got an upgrade in AID people.”

When Parker arrived in Nangarhar Province, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams were still a novelty. Parker had first heard of them just a few months before, when she was finishing a graduate degree at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. An instructor had suggested that she research a paper on this new experiment; aside from a critique written by Barbara Stapleton, then of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an alliance of charity organizations, there almost was no literature on the subject. So Parker went straight to the source: She began lining up interviews with people in the Pentagon who were involved with setting up the PRTs. She couldn't get an appointment with Joseph Collins, so she arranged an interview with Dave des Roches, a gregarious West Point graduate who worked on Collins's staff and had worked behind the scenes to set up the first PRTs. Parker interviewed des Roches at a bar.

She also paid a call on the Afghanistan desk at USAID. After she concluded her interview, the official she was interviewing made her a recruitment pitch. Parker had already worked on a USAID project in Nepal; she was finishing graduate school; and she probably knew more about PRTs than anyone else right now. Did she want to apply for a job?

At the time, tenured USAID officers had few incentives to work and live on a military outpost on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Culturally speaking, the USAID bureaucracy primarily viewed itself as an altruistic organization, not an arm of the U.S. national security establishment. Volunteering for this quasi-military duty was not a career-enhancing move. What's more, USAID tenure and promotion boards weren't quite sure how to review or evaluate someone who had served on a PRT: It didn't fit the traditional job description for a USAID worker, and very few volunteers came forward within the bureaucracy in the early days of the PRTs.
*

Consequently the agency had to turn to contractors such as Parker. USAID had a mechanism, called a personal services contract, which basically allowed USAID to beef up its foreign service by hiring individual contractors. The PSCs, as they were called, worked directly for USAID. They held temporary positions within the civil service, but they had none of the long-term benefits that USAID personnel enjoyed. Within the caste system of USAID, they were temporary hires, bureaucratic second-class citizens.

These shake-and-bake USAID officers were not an easy fit with the military culture, either. Parker's predecessor had clashed with the military members of the Jalalabad team. As a former Marine officer, he was unimpressed by what he saw as sloppy soldiering by the Army reservists and National Guard soldiers on the outpost. He reprimanded them for discipline infractions such as failing to arm their weapons when they went “outside the wire.” For their part the troops resented being dressed down by an aid worker. When Parker arrived at the Jalalabad base, she was unsure how she would fit in, both as a civilian and as a woman.