Armed Humanitarians (16 page)

Parker's first day on the job was not easy. Before the drive to Torkham, the security team held a predeparture briefing, which was routine before a military convoy. The PRT had never had a civilian female team member, and they were unsure how the conservative, male-dominated Pashtun community of Torkham would respond to her presence. “Michelle, if you feel at all uncomfortable, let us know and we'll sweep you into the car,” said one of the members of the security team.

And Parker had to adjust to military culture as well. As she climbed inside the truck, she found her boots on the top of some odd black box in the passenger compartment. “What's that?” she asked. One of her colleagues silenced her: their interpreter was in the car. He was a local hire and had no security clearance. You had to be careful not to talk about the equipment in front of them. It was her first encounter with what the military calls OPSEC (operational security): keeping a lid on classified information, keeping operational plans closely held, not revealing sensitive information about equipment or intelligence collection capabilities. OPSEC was not a phrase that was usually employed in aid and development circles.

They arrived at Torkham. Sure enough, Parker found herself the lone woman at the meeting with local leaders on the electrification project. Everyone seemed to be staring. She was uncomfortable, and her headscarf kept slipping off, but she didn't want to show any fear. She kept her composure, and the meetings, about an electrification project and a government proposal to move the border post, went without a hitch. On the ride back to Jalalabad, she reviewed her first day on the job: the insane helicopter ride from Kabul, the gorgeous ride down to the Khyber Pass. Not a bad first day of work. She was hooked.

Parker was a natural for the role: As a woman she felt no peer pressure, no need to fit in with the “band of brothers” culture of the military. She would never be part of the boys' club. For her, as a strong, independent woman, living alone on a military base, it was liberating to be outside the group. There was no need to pander. She could do her job without feeling as though she had to toe the military's line.

More important, she could be a player. For a relatively junior civil servant, she wielded a significant amount of power. In addition to the “quick impact” funds at her disposal, she ended up working behind the scenes to start a road project that would link the homelands of the remote Shinwari tribe, in the Shinwar District of Nangarhar Province, with Highway 1, the main road that linked the region with the capital. Constructing the road was an important political move that helped placate the tribal leadership and improved the aid workers' relations with the provincial government. Parker had a fair degree of autonomy, serious resources, and a heavily armed contingent of soldiers to help her get the job done. In many respects it was a powerful, almost intoxicating, experience. She ended up staying in Afghanistan for the next twenty-nine months and eventually was promoted to the civilian equivalent of a brigadier general before she was thirty-two.

Launching the PRTs in Afghanistan also hinged on recruiting diplomats to fill State Department positions on the teams. But within the Foreign Service, details were still scant about what, exactly, the job entailed. All they knew was that it meant an assignment to a combat zone, far outside the confines of the capital and the embassy. It was a potentially dangerous job, one for which few Foreign Service officers were trained.

John Mongan, a junior diplomat, first heard about the PRTs during the 2003 “bid cycle,” the time of the year when Foreign Service officers apply for their next rotational assignment. Mongan was intrigued by the idea of joining a PRT: As a student he had considered joining the military and was enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. And he was fascinated by America's experiments in counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War. “Everybody else in my ROTC and poli-sci classes were studying wars we had won,” he later recalled. “And it made sense to study a war you had lost, because we pretty much know how to fight a major tank battle in Europe.”

Mongan also had some experience in conflict zones; he had joined the Foreign Service after a stint in Kosovo with the international charity Mercy Corps, where he had worked setting up food distribution networks. The idea of being a diplomat had initially sounded very stuffy and boring to someone like him, but full-time jobs with nongovernmental organizations were hard to come by, and his parents wanted him to get a job and get on with his professional life. He took the Foreign Service exam and passed. While waiting for his security clearance to come through, a time-consuming process of background checks that usually took several months, he took the job in Kosovo.

NATO's bombing campaign over Kosovo began three weeks after he joined the Foreign Service. Since he spent some time there, he was eager to continue with his Foreign Service career and put his Kosovo experience to work. First, however, he had to complete his A-100 class, the orientation and training course for new Foreign Service officers. After he completed the course, in 1999, the State Department informed him it was sending him to Angola.

Mongan was unhappy with the Angola assignment. Eventually he heard through the bureaucratic grapevine (“I met a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy”) that James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who had been President Clinton's special envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, was looking for a staff assistant. Mongan was able to get an introduction, and was offered a one-year assignment as Dobbin's aide.

It was an educational year. Dobbins had one of the longest diplomatic résumés in Washington; he had also served as the Bush administration's special envoy on Afghanistan. But after his assignment with Dobbins, Mongan found that there were few really hands-on nation-building jobs in the Foreign Service. Then, in mid-2003, he read an internal cable saying the State Department was looking for volunteers for something called a PRT in Afghanistan. He was intrigued. He contacted the officers running the program to volunteer for it. Initially he was told that he was “under grade”—too junior—and that he was ineligible because he had never held a job providing relevant experience in political affairs. But few Foreign Service officers were clamoring for the chance to live on a remote Army outpost in the middle of a combat zone, and Mongan eventually got the call to work at a PRT in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul.

He arrived later that summer in Kabul on an Air Azerbaijan flight—Afghanistan's national carrier, Ariana, was considered too risky for U.S. government personnel—after about two weeks of rudimentary training in Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan.

He had a week of orientation at the embassy, and then they tried to figure out how to get him down to Ghazni. Much like USAID, the embassy had not completely figured out how to support its personnel in isolated parts of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Mongan went to the embassy's political section to try to get information on Ghazni. The people there could not really help him, saying, “None of us have been down there in a while.” The deputy chief of mission's sole advice to Mongan was, “Don't try to be a player out there.”

Like their USAID counterparts, State Department PRT team members were orphans within the bureaucracy. James Hunter, another Foreign Service officer who served on the Asadabad PRT at roughly the same time as Mongan, described the experience thus: “When you walked out of the Kabul embassy, you dropped off the face of the earth.” At the time, the embassy's PRT section had only two officers who supported the field staff, and both had to juggle that responsibility with other embassy jobs.

Eventually, Mongan managed to get a lift to Ghazni, a two-hour drive from Kabul, with the deputy chief of mission. The DCM was new to Afghanistan; he had never traveled outside the capital, and wanted to see a PRT. By hitching a ride with the senior diplomat, Mongan felt a little bit like a kid being dropped off at college. But it had its advantages. “It probably gave the PRT and the battalion head a completely mistaken sense of the influence and heft I happened to have back in Kabul,” he later recalled. “I guess in the first few weeks that helped.”

Over the next few weeks, Mongan settled into his new situation. The base at PRT Ghazni was manned by soldiers of the Virginia National Guard. The Provincial Reconstruction Team had only a small civilian contingent: a USAID representative who had been there since earlier in the spring and a U.S. Department of Agriculture officer. The State Department had sent a retired Foreign Service officer to Ghazni, but he had lasted only two months.

The DCM's advice to Mongan was repeated by others who worked on the PRTs. In essence, it meant “Keep your head down.” The primary function of the diplomats on the PRT was to observe and report back to the embassy, nothing more. They would keep an eye on the local situation, as well as on what the other U.S. agencies were up to. They were not there to influence local decisionmaking or contribute to the larger effort being led by the military.

Diplomats did not fit neatly into the military organization. They were not on the same rotational schedule, and they reported through a different chain of command. And there was a serious communications problem. The military maintains its own classified networks, but the State Department had not provided for secure communications outside the embassy. The entire time Mongan was posted to Ghazni, he had to use a Hotmail account to communicate with his superiors in Kabul. That meant he had to send an unclassified version of his reports, with sensitive information stripped out. If he needed to relay something classified, he would add it to a summary report that the Provincial Reconstruction Team's military staff typed up and sent nightly to their brigade headquarters. A State Department officer assigned to the brigade was supposed to pass on any relevant information on the situation in Ghazni to the embassy in Kabul.

Or so went the theory. Mongan assumed that his State Department counterpart would pass the reports on to the embassy in Kabul and that someone in the embassy would bother to read them. Neither, it turned out, actually happened, even though one of Mongan's main responsibilities was keeping tabs on the political situation in Ghazni. Eventually, Mongan had to send e-mail from the PRT commander's account and call his superiors in Kabul to make sure some of his reports got through to the embassy. Other Foreign Service officers serving on PRTs encountered the same problem.

And then there was the issue of whether the civilians should be armed. Both the military and the State Department were ambivalent. This was, after all, a relatively small and isolated military outpost, and everyone needed to pitch in to provide security. But no one was clear on whether the civilians on the PRT should also carry weapons. Mongan and the other civilian members of the PRT traveled with the military on patrols, sometimes going into the city of Ghazni to meet up with some of the local government officials, sometimes driving out to rural districts. About once a month the PRT members would load up their vehicles and form a convoy for a five-day patrol to some of the more remote areas of the province. Most of the districts were pretty secure, but about four districts were marked red on the map. The PRT commander wanted everyone carrying a weapon whenever they went there.

The embassy did not want Foreign Service officers openly carrying weapons, but maintained something of a “Don't ask, don't tell” policy. And if having Foreign Service personnel carrying pistols and carbines made State Department officials uneasy, it didn't please some military commanders either. Mongan once attended a brigade commanders' conference where a State Department employee arrived with a pistol strapped to his hip, raising a few eyebrows among the military men in the room. Another Foreign Service officer on a PRT showed a bit more chutzpah. Whenever he showed up at the embassy he would leave his pistol in his truck, but he would come walking into the embassy with the empty holster still strapped to his thigh.

Despite the bureaucratic ambiguities, Mongan loved working on the PRT. It was “the best job of my life,” he later told me. He was living at a combat outpost, free of the dull certainties of embassy life; he enjoyed a good working relationship with the other civilians on the team; and his commander had a clear grasp of the mission. He discarded the DCM's cautious advice, and became closely involved in overseeing local projects. Like Michelle Parker, he discovered that a relatively junior officer had real power on a PRT. As he later recalled, “The embassy tends to have a very conventional outlook. And when they said ‘Don't try to be a player,' what they meant is ‘Keep us informed on what's going on, and don't try to get involved in it.' The problem is, of course, most diplomats being diplomats, and not physicists, don't know what Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is. You can't passively report on something—if you're in the room, you're influencing it! And you may as well influence the shit out if it instead of influencing it passively. And there were a couple of times … where I probably got in front of myself. But at a certain point the embassy was willing to trust me to go ahead with what I thought was a good idea.”

Like Parker, he was hooked. But at that point the PRTs were still an obscure experiment in militarizing aid and development.

Despite those first hesitant steps toward creating a cadre of muddy-boots diplomats, there was a sense within the Bush administration that the State Department was still not pulling its weight in nation building. In early 2004, Michael Coulter, a Republican political appointee within the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, had a conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the apparent lack of State Department commitment to the civilian reconstruction mission. The PRTs seemed like a worthwhile experiment, but there were no standard guidelines for how, exactly, they were supposed to do their job, whom they were supposed to report to, and how they fit in with the overall mission.