Armed Humanitarians (2 page)

The project was the brainchild of Wells. The former commander of a naval destroyer squadron, Wells looked every inch the retired Navy officer: He wore a regimental tie and round, steel-framed glasses; his gray hair was neatly cut and pomaded, with a side part. But Wells did not speak in the clipped tones of Pentagonese. Rather, he had a loose, professorial style, borrowing lots of buzzwords from the aid and development world. STAR-TIDES, Wells explained, was not some new agency of the Pentagon; their job was not to respond to the next Hurricane Katrina or deliver emergency rations to refugees in Darfur. Rather, the project would be more about “collaboration,” “trust building,” and “social networking” than leading the Army to build yurts during a humanitarian crisis. “We're not going to be planting a flag in the field and delivering MREs,” he said, referring to Meals-Ready-to-Eat, the military's packaged rations. “Our job is to connect people who may have solutions.”

At first glance, STAR-TIDES looked like little more than a public relations exercise—an interesting experiment in open-source technology, perhaps, or an advertisement for a kinder, gentler military. For manufacturers of solar power generators and water purification systems, it was a nice promotional boost, a way to reach potential government customers. But this was a radical departure from the standards of a decade earlier. Under the rubric of STAR-TIDES, Wells and his colleagues were trying to get the military to build new alliances and coalitions, not with other militaries, but with nongovernmental organizations, aid workers, diplomats, citizen activists, even the press. The idea was to overcome the uniformed military's traditional distrust of what they called the “unicorns-and-rainbows” crowd: aid workers, development experts, human-rights advocates. Wells gave a brief example to the reporters. One of his acolytes, Dave Warner, was able to persuade U.S. Central Command, the powerful military headquarters that oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to release a large amount of unclassified satellite imagery of Afghanistan, without restrictions, to nongovernmental organizations that were working on aid and reconstruction projects on the ground. In Wells's telling, this kind of data could be used for “nonkinetic” (i.e., nonviolent) ends: to win the support of the local population for road building projects.

“One of the roads went through a cemetery,” Wells said. “And so the [Afghan] government proposal was, ‘Well, we'll just kick the people out and build the road anyway.' But Dr. Warner's point with the NGOs was, ‘Let's not do that, let's work from the bottom up.' And so by working with the people in the village, showing them what the value of the road was, eventually the villagers moved their own graves to allow the road to be built. Rather than having the United States being blamed for some sort of sacrilege or violation of some ancient creed, it's turned out to have been an absolute win-win, because we've been willing to drink the three cups of tea, spend the time, and you had something worthwhile to offer.”

This was a parable of sorts: Instead of using force—dropping a bomb, say, on a Taliban safe house or kicking down doors in the middle of the night—the military could collaborate with an NGO to win the support of the local population. It would, in development parlance, be a solution with local buy-in. And the happy villagers, presumably, would not be planting bombs on the new road or ambushing U.S. forces. Wells was also making a deliberate pop-culture reference:
Three Cups of Tea
is the title of a book by Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who founded a charity to build children's schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It turns out that the inspirational bestseller also had a cult following within the military: Mortenson had been invited that fall to the Pentagon for a private meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; later that year, he traveled to MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to address senior officials from U.S. Special Operations Command.
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Three Cups of Tea
offered a tantalizing vision of the uses of soft power.

Wells's experiment was getting high-level attention. Among the visitors to the STAR-TIDES demonstration was General William “Kip” Ward, the head of AFRICOM, the U.S. military's newly created geographic command for Africa. AFRICOM itself was branded as an experiment in reorganizing the U.S. military for humanitarian emergencies and conflict prevention; it would be a “hybrid” organization with civilian and military experts on the payroll. A visit by the military's newest four-star combatant commander was a big deal for the STAR-TIDES organizers.
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More important, the STAR-TIDES scenarios—disaster relief in Central America or the Western Pacific, stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, refugee support in sub-Saharan Africa, disaster response in the United States (euphemistically referred to as “defense support to civil authorities”)—were not plucked out of thin air. They were devised at the request of the combatant commands, the powerful regional headquarters the U.S. military uses to divide the globe into geographic “areas of responsibility.”

STAR-TIDES, then, was not a mere curiosity. Wells and his fellow evangelizers may have been at the further edges of the movement, but they were part of a larger cultural shift within the defense and national security establishment: a consensus that the U.S. military needed to master the arts of diplomacy, learn the language of aid and development, and develop new cultural skills. It was an approach that would fundamentally alter the way that the U.S. government carried out diplomacy and delivered foreign aid. It would also transform the way the United States waged war.

After Wells delivered sound bites to a radio reporter and escorted some more VIPs around the courtyard displays, I asked him what motivated him to launch STAR-TIDES. “I spent sixteen years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” he said. “And frankly, I saw too many young American men and women die, because our government doesn't do this ‘Wrap up the conflict' very well, or in some cases avoid them.”

What Wells was saying was the same thing I had been told dozens of times before, in some shape or form, by top officers, ordinary soldiers, and civilian officials:
We can get it right
. That phrase, variously put, distilled the bitter experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan: winning the war—and losing the peace.
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Just two weeks before the October 2008 STAR-TIDES demonstration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at National Defense University in Washington. In his speech, he outlined his vision of the new American way of war. “What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign—a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and moderation,” he said. “In the long-term effort against terrorist networks and other extremists, we know that direct military force will continue to have a role. But we also understand that over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory.”
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Military operations, Gates continued, should be subordinate to programs to promote economic development and good governance in places at risk from extremism. And that strategy, he added, would require an effort to “tap the full strength of America and its people”—not just the uniformed military, but civilian agencies, volunteer organizations, and the private sector.

The United States fields the most well-trained, well-funded, and technologically sophisticated fighting force the world has ever seen. But that military was confounded by the complexity of fighting low-tech insurgents in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For Gates and his allies within the Pentagon, victory over militant extremism depended on mastering the “three cups of tea” approach: digging wells, building schools, and repairing roads. What began in late 2001 as a global war on terror was quietly recast as a campaign of armed social work. And in the process, American foreign policy underwent a tectonic shift.

That shift had its modest beginnings in the post-9/11 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. It accelerated in Iraq, as the United States became mired down in the vicious internal war that followed the decapitation of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. A series of dramatic, innovative nation-building experiments rescued the Iraq mission from complete failure, but in the process, the military overcompensated. The Pentagon became fixated on soft power as the answer for security problems such as terrorism and insurgency. Military commanders threw billions of dollars at quasi-development schemes in the hopes that a combination of aid money and armed social work would get at the root causes of violence in failing states. And top policymakers launched an initiative to refashion government around the tasks of state building. The short-term lessons drawn from Iraq took on a life of their own, as policymakers and practitioners looked to repeat the experiment on an equally grand scale in Afghanistan.

In a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000, the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, outlined his vision of the U.S. military policy: “I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building,” he said. “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

In the decade before Bush took office, the United States had been involved in armed humanitarianism, albeit in relatively modest contingencies. In Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, U.S. troops were committed to peacekeeping operations with limited goals and indeterminate ends, and military theorists and foreign policy thinkers worried that the United States was frittering away military power by playing global beat cop. The conservative argument against nation building was summed up in one neat phrase: Superpowers don't do windows.
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By the time Bush left office, the United States had committed itself to nation building on an epic scale.

This shift toward nation building can be documented in many different ways. One of the starkest ways is cost. Since 2003, Congress has appropriated over $50 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction, at one time considered the largest amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars ever committed to aid and reconstruction in a single country.
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As of summer 2010 the war in Afghanistan has become a nation-building project as ambitious and costly as the reconstruction of Iraq. By mid-2010, the United States had spent approximately $51.5 billion on building the rudiments of a modern state in Afghanistan.
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Those figures were only a fraction of the larger cost of staying on a wartime footing. In the decade that followed September 11, 2001, the Pentagon's base budget effectively doubled, not including additional funding to cover the cost of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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For fiscal year 2011, President Barack Obama requested $733.3 billion in new budget authority for national defense: $548.9 billion for the regular operations of the Defense Department; $159.3 billion for ongoing military operations, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq; and $25.1 billion for defense-related activities by other agencies, including money to support the nuclear weapons complex. The total national defense budget in fiscal year 2001, adjusted for 2010 dollars, was around $375 million. Foreign aid budgets grew dramatically as well. For instance, between 2002 and 2009 the U.S. Agency for International Development spent around $7 billion in Afghanistan.
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That amount roughly equaled USAID's global operating budget for fiscal year 2001.
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The manpower committed to this mission has also been extraordinary. By the end of his second term, Bush had embarked on a mission to reorganize government for this role, taking the first steps toward creating a standing nation-building corps. The State Department launched an effort to create a cadre of diplomatic first responders who would be on call to respond to humanitarian crises and take on nation-building assignments in war zones. And military planners began thinking in terms of the “long war,” an era of persistent conflict that would require an unceasing cycle of deployments to places deemed vulnerable to violent extremism. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the practice of nation building was manpower-intensive, demanding a heavy U.S. troop presence to police some of the world's toughest neighborhoods. By mid-2010, troops in Afghanistan outnumbered those in Iraq, and casualties in Afghanistan reached record highs. Nation building is a hard, often risky business. As of this writing, forty-four hundred U.S. troops have died in Iraq. More than eleven hundred have died in Afghanistan. Those numbers do not include contractors and civilians, whose names rarely figure in official casualty tallies.

Weeks after the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, conservative writer Max Boot made a provocative argument in favor of a new kind of American imperialism. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he wrote.
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Implicit in that clever shorthand was a critique: The United States lacked a talented class of colonial administrators capable of refashioning failed states and preparing the local inhabitants for eventual self-rule.

At first glance, it looks as if Boot's post-9/11 wish has been fulfilled—and that the United States is finally creating the twenty-first-century equivalent of the British Empire's Colonial Service. Over the 2000–2010 decade, a new class of nation builders has emerged: staffing Provincial Reconstruction Teams in cities in Iraq; constructing roads in rural Afghanistan; or training Kalashnikov-toting soldiers in Timbuktu. From West Africa to Central Asia, the old diplomatic cocktail-party circuit has given way to a new world of fortified outposts, where a new generation of diplomats, soldiers, and private contractors is working at the sharp end of U.S. foreign policy.