Armed Humanitarians (17 page)

Coulter later recalled that the discussion got Armitage fired up. He had served three combat tours in Vietnam as a patrol boat officer and advisor to the South Vietnamese navy. Within a week, he instructed Coulter to pack his bags for Afghanistan, where he would be the eyes and ears for Armitage. Armitage's advice: “Don't spend a single night in Kabul; hitchhike around the country with our staff.” Coulter's initial title was “roving PRT person.”

The problem was, getting around Afghanistan was not easy. At that point the State Department still had few people stationed outside Kabul, and the embassy usually depended on the military to ferry its personnel to remote outposts. Even though Coulter was relatively senior, he had a difficult time following Armitage's directive. Eventually he found a solution. In spring 2004, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division's commander, Major General Eric Olson, took over as the head of Combined Joint Task Force-76. Coulter was essentially seconded to Olson as a political advisor, and in return, he had authority to hop around the country on military aircraft. It was, to use State Department slang, a classic bureaucratic “drug deal.”

By autumn 2004 the U.S. military wanted to expand the number of PRTs around the country. The plan was to gradually hand over control of PRTs to NATO, starting with the teams in the relatively stable and secure northeastern portions of Afghanistan and then moving around the map counterclockwise. It was part of the exit strategy: As NATO took control, this would presumably free up more U.S. forces that were desperately needed in Iraq. But Coulter discovered that the NATO allies were not always enthusiastic about the PRT mission. In northern Kunduz Province, he found, the Germans were extremely risk-averse. They allowed the Provincial Reconstruction team members to leave the camp only if they could be accompanied by armored ambulances; night patrols were rare; and the Germans were bound by restrictive rules (called “caveats”) that prevented them from taking part in combat unless they were under direct attack. That approach created a security void that insurgents would soon fill.

In early October 2004, I paid a visit to Kunduz, where about 280 German soldiers were stationed along with a handful of U.S. government civilians and about a dozen U.S. soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Scheibe, spokesman for PRT Kunduz, made it eminently clear to me that the Germans were not eager to work outside the wire, emphasizing that basic security was the job of local police. “We are part of ISAF,” Scheibe told me. “Security
assistance
force.”

But that attitude was problematic. A month earlier, in September 2004, the city of Faizabad, in the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan, had been the scene of a riot. Fired by rumors that local women had been sexually assaulted by foreigners, local men had burned down the offices of two foreign aid agencies in the town, where fifty-five members of the PRT Kunduz had recently established a security contingent. Around a dozen German soldiers were working at the airport when the riots began. Hoping to consolidate his forces, the German commander ordered the team members back to base but they couldn't get away. When the German troops reached the town, they ran straight into the rioters. “They stopped immediately and saw about a thousand people. The street was full,” Scheibe told me. “And they were not friendly-looking … so [the German soldiers] decided to go back another way.”

After beating an initial retreat, the German commander led a team out to do some reconnoitering. By then the riot was over; it all ended when a local Afghan commander threatened to shoot rioters. Several aid workers were beaten, and they had to be spirited away by UN workers and Global Risk, a private security firm. The Germans were supposed to be responsible for the four northeastern provinces of Afghanistan, generally considered the most secure part of the country. Although they took their own protection very seriously, caveats meant that security in the north would start to unravel. In June 2004, eleven Chinese laborers who were working on a road construction project south of Kunduz were gunned down in their tents. Not long after that, the convoy of Afghanistan's vice president, Nematullah Shahrani, was hit by a roadside bomb. The night after I left Kunduz, two rockets hit the Kunduz PRT; four soldiers were injured, one seriously.

This new model of militarized aid to Afghanistan, then, was a completely hit-or-miss affair. In early 2003 and 2004, the PRTs were still very much a work in progress, and policymakers were still wrestling with basic questions of how to support this experiment. State Department personnel still had few career incentives for working in isolated military outposts; they were not trained to work in an active combat zone; and once in the field, they were all but forgotten by their parent organizations.

And there was another reason why the reconstruction of Afghanistan would have to wait: The machinery of government was still focused on the war in Iraq. As employees of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Kabul had realized in their 2002 briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, senior leaders in Washington had shifted resources and bureaucratic attention to the Iraq campaign, which was starting to unravel in the face of an accelerating civil war.

The military's focus in Afghanistan, then, moved away from stability operations. Emphasis shifted to “Find, fix, and finish”: killing the remnants of the Taliban instead of focusing on securing the needs of the population. Troops and resources would be needed for Iraq, and rebuilding Afghanistan was a manpower-intensive business. A civilian official recalled realizing how far the pendulum had swung away from development work during a briefing with Major General Jason Kamiya, who was the chief operational commander in Afghanistan as of March 2005. Kamiya and his staff had paid a visit to central Afghanistan after a severe spring flood, and PRT members had prepared a briefing on relief distribution. Kamiya told the team leader: “I don't give a fuck about this flood! What are you doing to kill the enemy?”

Kamiya remembered it differently. That remark, he said, was “one hundred eighty degrees from my philosophy.” But he acknowledged that there was sometimes friction among the military command, the PRTs, and the development agencies that led to constant misunderstandings. In PRT briefings, people sometimes misinterpreted his questions about how development projects fit into the larger security picture. “This is Ph.D.-level work,” he said. “You're just trying to mentor both the military side as well as showing your development partner, who is looking skeptically at someone in uniform, it's not ‘my way or the highway.' ”

Afghanistan had started to slip away. Even though the reconstruction effort there was relatively modest in scale, many of the tensions between military and humanitarian missions were already apparent. The entire enterprise seemed chronically short of money, manpower, and time. Equally important, the traditional humanitarian aid community was alarmed by what it saw as a dangerous blurring of the lines, with uniformed soldiers taking on a greater share of development work. Soon, those tensions would become even more pronounced in Iraq, where the U.S. military was beginning to spend much more heavily on infrastructure and governance projects than ever before. In a bid to stop Iraq's deadly spiral, a key new instrument—cash—would become as important as any weapon system in the arsenal.

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In fact, it would take another two years before USAID's human resources department would add Afghanistan PRT jobs to the “bid list,” so it was next-to-impossible for a tenured USAID Foreign Service officer to get an assignment to a team. Complicating matters, career USAID Foreign Service officers couldn't legally report to a personal services contractor, and until 2006, the head of the USAID PRT office in Kabul was a personal services contractor.

CHAPTER  5

Cash as a Weapon

In October 2003, I attended the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army, the service's professional association, in Washington. Amid the displays of high-tech weaponry mounted by military contractors such as Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems was the charred hulk of a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, a truck better known as a Humvee, that had struck a command-detonated mine in Afghanistan. The engine block was destroyed, leaving tendrils of blackened steel where the front axle had once been, but the passenger compartment was intact—the windshield wasn't even cracked.
*

This was an M1114, an armored version of the truck. The detonation of a roadside bomb—say, an artillery shell detonated by remote control—would throw out a lethal blast wave and a shower of hot, sharp fragments. An “up-armored” Humvee had a hardened passenger compartment that cocooned its occupants behind ballistic glass and heavy steel doors, diminishing the risk of injury from an explosion.

Many military units had arrived in Iraq in “soft-skin” Humvees, four-wheel-drive utility trucks with flimsy canvas doors, or no doors at all. The vehicles were not designed for combat: They were supposed to be an all-purpose pickup for troops operating safely in the rear. It reflected the U.S. military's conventional view of war. Either the environment was considered “permissive,” and troops could drive around in Humvees, or it was frontline combat, and they would be in tanks. For this new type of combat arena the military needed a different mode of transport: one that was light enough for ferrying soldiers around narrow urban streets but robust enough to withstand gunfire or a mine detonation. The U.S. military had a few vehicles that fit the bill, but only in very limited numbers.

In October 2003 Congress was weighing the Bush administration's $87 billion emergency spending request for fiscal year 2004 to pay for the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Armor Holdings, a company that made Humvee armor, expected that the bill would pay for more of the vehicles. Anticipating rapid demand for vehicle protection, the company had also developed something called the HArD-Kit (HMMWV Armored Demountable Kit), a bolt-on armor system that could be installed on Humvees in the field. Bob Mecredy, president of Armor Holdings' aerospace and defense group, told me that the damaged chassis on display at the conference “couldn't be a better advertisement” for the effectiveness of the M1114.

Congress passed the bill, and tacked on extra funds for up-armored Humvees. When the Bush administration submitted its supplemental-funding request to Congress, it asked for $177.2 million to buy approximately 747 up-armored Humvees. House and Senate conferees, however, recommended a total of $239 million, enough to buy 1,065 of the vehicles. Congress also inserted funds to pay for radio frequency jammers capable of blocking the signal from cell phones or pagers, which were often used to set off roadside bombs remotely. Still, the new armored vehicles could not get to Iraq quickly enough. In a town hall meeting with Iraq-bound troops at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, in December 2004, a Tennessee National Guardsman, with some prompting from a reporter, asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?” Rumsfeld's answer: “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
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The statement spoke volumes about the military's preparedness for this new mission. In the months after the invasion, the military ramped up delivery of up-armored Humvees to Iraq, and they did save lives. But they would also create the phenomenon of the “urban submarine”: U.S. troops and reconstruction specialists driving around in these boxy, bullet-resistant vehicles seemed all the more remote from the population they were supposed to be aiding. The business of nation building in Iraq was extremely dangerous and deadly, but the military needed more than lethal weaponry to get the job done.

On May 7, 2003, the U.S. military command in Iraq issued a fragmentary order (in military parlance, a “FRAGO,” used to inform units of a refinement to the operations plans) titled the “Brigade Commander's Discretionary Recovery Program to Directly Benefit the Iraqi People.” The FRAGO gave unit commanders the authority to spend cash that had been confiscated from the Ba'athist regime and direct the money toward humanitarian assistance and development.
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The money included around $900 million that had been seized by U.S. forces during the invasion, much of it discovered in Saddam Hussein's palaces. The following month, the Coalition Provisional Authority formalized the program, authorizing commanders “to take all actions necessary to operate a Commander's Emergency Response Program.”
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This Robin Hood scheme would quickly evolve into something more ambitious. Left essentially to their own devices, military units on the ground in Iraq would devise their own approach to repairing and stabilizing Iraq. Unlike the civilian-led administration, which had relatively little manpower at its disposal, the military had 150,000 pairs of boots on the ground. And it had a new tool for promoting Iraq's self-government, security, and reconstruction: cash, and lots of it.

The Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP, pronounced “surp”) quickly became a preferred tool for U.S. military commanders trying to solve problems on the ground. The program allowed military purchasing officers to authorize large cash expenditures using standardized forms, so it was a quick way to spread cash around in the communities where they operated. Used to pay for local development projects, CERP became the most important nonlethal instrument in the U.S. military's tool kit. Within the first six months in Iraq, commanders burned through around $78.6 million, buying neighborhood generators, paying Iraqis to pick up trash, repairing schools, and procuring computers or air-conditioning units for municipal and provincial offices.
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