Armed Humanitarians (19 page)

Despite the Stryker brigade's digital equipment, the Civil Affairs soldiers went blind into Tal Afar. The day before he was sent from Mosul to Tal Afar, Vidra had sat in on a half-hour briefing on current operations in the area in which the briefers made scant mention of Civil Affairs. As it turned out, the Civil Affairs unit that Vidra's team was replacing was somewhat dysfunctional. They hadn't gone “outside the wire” (off their base) in two months because of the heavy fighting. The team that preceded his had been pretty intent on finding chores they could do within the confines of the base, and there were no ongoing reconstruction projects in the city. Vidra's team would have to start from scratch.

Much as Civil Affairs means working outside the wire, it also requires finding key local leaders who can help identify the needs of the local community. And with Iraq's administrative and governance institutions still in tatters, that was a challenge. U.S. forces had detained the mayor and the police chief, who were allegedly colluding with the insurgents. With little formal civilian leadership in the city, it would be hard to begin any meaningful reconstruction work. The U.S. military handpicked a new mayor for Tal Afar (a former Ba'athist general) and a new police chief (the leader of a local Shiite militia, as it later emerged).

The biggest chore for Vidra's Civil Affairs team members, however, was dealing with a huge population of displaced people outside the city. Before insurgents moved in, Tal Afar had been a city of around 200,000 people, but around 190,000 people had fled into the neighboring desert because of the heavy fighting. The Civil Affairs team had to help the Iraqi Red Crescent Society deal with 190,000 internally displaced people in the deserts outside Tal Afar. Actually, Vidra said, the insurgents had made a tactical error. “They really paid a price by allowing civilians to flee, because it let us use our weapons systems more effectively against them. They didn't make that mistake again. In later fights, the insurgents would threaten the population and tell them they had to stay in the city to give them more cover.”

For a spell the fighting died down in Tal Afar. U.S. security forces tried to screen the civilians flooding back into the city, but their efforts were only marginally effective in culling out insurgents. The soldiers set up checkpoints on the main roads into the city, but insurgents would just take the small back roads. Vidra's Civil Affairs team had to help get some very basic services back online. U.S. forces had turned off electricity to the city during the fighting to try and disrupt the insurgents. After the major fighting was over, the Civil Affairs team had to figure out how to turn it back on.

After that first attempt to pacify Tal Afar, top generals and experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flew in to assess the situation and find out what was going on. The planners in Baghdad had ambitious designs to rebuild the town, but they had some unrealistic expectations. For instance, they devised U.S.-style contracting schemes, and one of the selection criteria was that the winning bidder had to have a bank account so the Corps of Engineers could wire money to them. Iraq's banking system was in shambles at that point, and Vidra had to explain to the planners that the only place Iraqis could open an account was in Baghdad. “They [were] trying to use a selection criteria for Tal Afar that was meaningless, they couldn't do it,” Vidra later recalled. “Tal Afar had a total cash economy.”

By the end of September 2004, Tal Afar saw a brief period of calm, and Vidra had begun to initiate a series of small-scale construction projects. But the Fifth Battalion 20th Infantry Regiment was redeploying, and their leadership didn't seem particularly interested in supporting the hearts-and-minds mission. The only way the battalion's commander would allow Vidra to go into town was if he was accompanied by a full infantry company, and that meant he couldn't do his job. The 5-20 was a very good infantry unit, but they really hadn't caught on to what Civil Affairs teams could do.

About six weeks after its arrival in Tal Afar, Vidra's Civil Affairs team was transferred out of Tal Afar, and he was sent back to Mosul, where his team was attached to First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment. This unit's operational area had recently shifted to cover the southern portions of Mosul, including a particularly rough neighborhood known locally as Palestine, which had historically been a center of insurgent activity. Few local leaders were willing to step forward to assist the Americans in reconstruction projects. Collaborating with coalition forces could be a death sentence for Iraqis. The Palestine neighborhood had a bad reputation: A number of former generals in Saddam's army lived there, and they may have been helping organize attacks on coalition forces.

Vidra learned firsthand how dangerous it could be. On a trip to the neighborhood on February 22, 2005, Vidra went out to take a look at neighborhood generators used to supplement power when the electrical grid was down, which was fairly often. He was interviewing the generator operator through an interpreter when a sniper opened fire. When the men sought cover on the other side of the building, they were caught in a burst of machine-gun fire. Vidra was hit in the abdomen with a tracer round—probably one that ricocheted, for the injury was considered relatively light—a “return to duty” injury. His wound was cleaned up and he was back at work the next day. The soldier standing next to him was shot in the neck, but miraculously the bullet missed any major veins or arteries. They were both very lucky.

The security situation in the Mosul area had been deteriorating since late 2004. In November the local police force walked off the job en masse, and the chief of police fled the city. The U.S. Marines had begun an assault on Fallujah, in Iraq's western Anbar Province, and a number of insurgent fighters fled north into Mosul. Insurgents had used Nineveh Province as a staging area in the past, but as more fighters came north, the entire region erupted. For several days, the U.S. military nearly lost control of Mosul. U.S. combat engineers were deployed to secure the bridges that went through central Mosul. The U.S. troops were reinforced by a contingent of Kurdish
peshmerga
, and another Stryker battalion that had been preparing to go into Fallujah was pulled back and sent to reinforce Mosul.

One particular town, Hammam al-Alil, the largest town outside Mosul in the battalion's operating area, was spiraling dangerously out of control. A substantial portion of the Iraqi National Guard walked away from the brand-new training center the U.S. military had just built for them, and the place was ransacked. The situation was touch-and-go, and as the battalion moved into the area, Vidra persuaded the commander to focus his CERP money on the town of Hammam al-Alil. It was the only U.S. development work going on there at the time. During the spike in violence, USAID forbade its representatives to go to Mosul.

Attacks on U.S. forces in the town had crested in the last week of 2004, when there were thirteen incidents. As Vidra started spending money in the town, he charted the dollars invested and the projects started against the number of incidents. He saw an interesting correlation. The more money he spent, the fewer attacks there seemed to be. The Civil Affairs team collected intelligence from the local population as they spent money, and it seemed to promote a virtuous cycle: The more information the military units had, the more effective they were in their targeted raids on insurgent safehouses. The more insurgents killed or captured, the fewer the number of attacks. Information also made it a lot easier to run development projects. Vidra spent $1.6 million in Hammam Al-Alil over the course of about six months—roughly the cost of a new Stryker vehicle.
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By the time Vidra handed over the mission to his successor, attacks in the town were down to zero.

This approach was not about sustainable development or meeting the long-term needs of the population; it was about using money as a weapon. The projects that Vidra focused on—keeping fighting-age Iraqis off the streets; discouraging the population from supporting insurgents; and repairing infrastructure—were all of direct benefit to U.S. forces. A good example was a roadbuilding project funded by Vidra. The Stryker unit had to traverse a twelve-mile dirt road that connected the town of Hammam Al-Alil to a major north–south highway, and U.S. troops had lost two Strykers to improvised explosive devices on the road. Vidra was able to go out and find a Kurdish contractor to come in and pave the highway with asphalt, making it much harder for insurgents to bury roadside bombs.

Vidra's team also funded short-term employment in a manner that supported U.S. troops. Roadside debris was often used to conceal IEDs. The Civil Affairs team hired Iraqis to collect trash in their neighborhoods. If teams paid residents of a neighborhood to pick up litter, and U.S. troops were attacked there, the residents did not get paid. It was a simple, almost coercive relationship, but it reduced attacks on the troops. Some Civil Affairs units focused on giving away school supplies to children or handing out soccer balls and stuffed animals. It made for nice press back at home, but to Vidra, it seemed like a waste of time. The whole point of Civil Affairs operations, he thought, was to try to dissuade an unemployed young Iraqi man from pulling a trigger or laying a land mine. He explained his philosophy this way: “The project I worked on was not necessarily, ‘Hey, let's go drill a well for people, it's the right thing to do.' Because the need was overwhelming—every town needed help, because there was no government to help support them. Every town needed roads paved, every town needed schools done, every town needed medical clinics, supplies. And so the question came down to, ‘Well, where can I be the most effective?' And so you ask your commander, ‘Where do you need results?' You need results in town A, B, and C, and then you tailor your program to achieve those results.”

It was one of the things they didn't teach in Civil Affairs school. Some in uniform were attracted to Civil Affairs because it seemed like a humanitarian mission. “A lot of Civil Affairs people came in and said, ‘That's great, I'm so happy I'm in the Civil Affairs, we're not in the part of the military that kicks down doors and conducts ambushes and things like that—we're here because we're great humanitarians and we want to hand out food biscuits to starving babies,' ” Vidra reflected. “No. The role of Civil Affairs is to support the infantry commander. And if he wants to lessen attacks on his troops, you need to go out and develop Civil Affairs strategies to support that goal. So you develop relationships with people in the community by using money and you can influence people's behavior by doing that. By starting those jobs programs, by pumping money through the mayor or other means.”

Those humanitarian projects may have had a beneficial effect, but that was not the main reason the military was doing them. In his handover memorandum to his successor in May 2005, Vidra emphasized that point:

Our ultimate goal here is to get out of the country all together. In order to do this, civil institutions need to be robust enough to serve the needs of the people. The more projects that the military does, the more the local populace will turn to the coalition to fix their problems and not the local government. Right now, one of the biggest things holding back the local governments is the lack of money. With no budget, it is hard for the local governments to do anything.

CA [Civil Affairs] projects are at best a short-term band aid-like fix to a much larger problem. The fact of the matter is that most CA projects are not sustainable in the long term (in terms of being able to totally replace the functions of a local government). Good luck.

As the military was taking on a growing share of humanitarian aid and development work in Iraq, it was becoming increasingly difficult for traditional aid and relief groups to operate. One obstacle was security. After the August 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, it was clear that international organizations and humanitarian workers were considered legitimate targets by insurgents.

Another obstacle had been the Coalition Provisional Authority itself. On October 25, 2003, the CPA issued Order 45, which compelled all nongovernmental organizations to register with the occupation authorities or be barred from operating inside Iraq. Among other things, the CPA demanded that international and local NGOs provide detailed information on their activities, including full addresses, lists of employees, sources of funding, proof of nonprofit status, and lists of ongoing projects inside Iraq.
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To the CPA, it may have seemed like a reasonable measure to ensure that insurgents did not use obscure civil society groups as front organizations for fundraising or money laundering. It also was aimed at ensuring that NGOs did not abuse their exemption from paying import duties. But to traditional aid groups such as Oxfam or Médecins Sans Frontières, it looked like a brazen effort by the U.S. occupational authorities to exercise unprecedented control over Iraqi civil society and neutral international groups. It looked like the kind of authoritarian move the rulers of Russia, Uzbekistan, or Zimbabwe might try. The NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, an umbrella organization that represented dozens of established international organizations, protested that the rules were intrusive and potentially dangerous, especially for groups that wanted to keep a low profile in Iraq.
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Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann, the authors of
Babylon by Bus
, who had lucked into jobs in the CPA's NGO Assistance Office, watched communications break down between the international aid establishment and the CPA. The humanitarians insisted on maintaining their neutrality, while CPA officials seemed unperturbed that they were relying increasingly on the military to achieve humanitarian goals. “By early February [2004], Jeff and I could already see the seeds of Iraqi dissatisfaction germinating,” LeMoine and Neumann wrote. “The U.S. government and its CPA in Iraq didn't seem to care that using an army to achieve humanitarian aims sends the wrong message to the local population. Tanks and machine guns are never associated with hospitals and schools. If the Pentagon-powered CPA insisted on using Army Civil Affairs units instead of NGOs to lead Iraq's rebuilding effort, confusion was going to be the result. Bremer's Order 45 became our introduction to the wholesale misdirection of power that was the CPA.”
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