Armed Humanitarians (20 page)

But the point was academic because the military was the only organization that could operate with relative freedom inside an increasingly violent country. What's more, the U.S. military had the cash. By the end of his tour, Major Tim Vidra, the Civil Affairs officer in Mosul, was contracting about a million dollars' worth of projects per month—a staggering amount of money for a junior officer to be overseeing, and an enormous “burn rate” (spending rate) for development work.

Back in Tal Afar, after Vidra's short-term job in the town ended, Major Brian Grady stayed on as a Civil Affairs team leader. He inherited some of the same local relationships for a new battalion that was stationed there. About half of Grady's time was spent on project development and project management, parceling out the unit's CERP funds on a wide range of projects. One of his major efforts was a clean-up campaign for Tal Afar streets that was supposed to deter insurgents from laying IEDs. Like Vidra, he tried to use cash as an incentive to discourage insurgents from laying ambushes or roadside bombs. Grady did it through the mayor of Tal Afar at the time and paid biweekly. “I wrote into the contract or the proposal that if we got an IED … on a portion of that route during that two weeks, they didn't get paid. It didn't work so well, but we tried.” So spending money was not a panacea. Grady reckoned his Civil Affairs team distributed about fourteen or fifteen million dollars throughout Nineveh Province during its ten-month rotation there.

The other half of Grady's time he spent as a sort of political advisor to the battalion commander when he went on missions to meet with either tribal leaders or local government representatives. The violence in Nineveh continued, and much of the military's work concentrated on feel-good projects. A
Stars & Stripes
reporter described Grady's delivering school supplies and toothbrushes to children at a remote school near the Syrian border. “The visit was a spur-of-the-moment stop for the Stryker Brigade Combat Team,” the reporter wrote. “Soldiers piled up backpacks filled with school supplies and warnings about unexploded ordnance on the ramps of two Strykers while soldiers and translators asked the school principal to let the children out of class to have at them.”
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The positive atmospherics were of little consequence. In retrospect one can see that CERP projects and Civil Affairs work were well intentioned but misguided, and officers were spreading around funds without much thought to the longer-term implications.

More important, there was no systematic way of tracking the funds, how effectively they were spent, and whether or not the cash got into the wrong hands. The aims, Grady concluded, were good, but projects were implemented with little oversight: “It was mostly a waste of money that [would have] needed a robust support structure to see it spent at all responsibly.” It was a quick fix, not a strategic development effort, and it could fuel corruption. But strict oversight and fiscal responsibility were not the primary criteria: Officers were under pressure to spend CERP money, and quickly. It was considered an important item on the commander's “to do” list.

Iraq continued its downward spiral into violence, and U.S. military commanders groped for a new approach that required more than just military manpower and know-how. Money may have been an important new tool in the military's arsenal, but it needed more serious planning and oversight if it was to bring political results. All the good intentions in the world plus a heap of cash could not fundamentally change the problem: The United States was trying to stabilize a country that did not have stable civil and political institutions. The invasion had demolished the old order, and its military architects had neglected to plan for a new one. And American solutions were never going to be as effective as Iraqi ones.

*
The Humvee was never designed to be an armored vehicle. While the ballistic windshield of an “up-armored” Humvee could stop armor-piercing 7.62mm rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle, and its front axle could withstand a 12-pound contact-mine detonation, its drive train and suspension were not originally built to handle the extra weight of heavy steel armor. More important, the vehicle's flat-bottomed design would not dissipate the energy of a blast when the vehicle was hit from below.

PART  II

History Lessons

CHAPTER  6

The Phoenix Rises

In early February 2005, a group of government and defense industry officials crowded the exhibit hall of the Marriott Wardman Hotel in Washington, D.C., for a symposium on the newly fashionable subject of special operations and low-intensity conflict. The war in Iraq was less than two years old, and many members of the audience were fresh from their first tours there. The defense industry–sponsored forum was an opportunity to reflect on the frustrating first year and a half in Iraq, which had seen lackluster performance by the Coalition Provisional Authority and rising casualty count. At that point, the war had claimed the lives of over fourteen hundred U.S. troops, but the complex and deadly insurgency showed no sign of abating. A panel on “capabilities and gaps” featured a briefing by Brigadier General Joseph Votel, who was then head of a new Army task force for battling roadside bombs. What had begun as a ten-man cell at the military headquarters in Baghdad by July 2004 had morphed into a full-fledged task force for fighting roadside bombs, which were growing in their sophistication and lethality. The Pentagon eventually poured billions into fielding radio-frequency jammers to counter these devices, but insurgent technology—often shared through the Internet—was often one step ahead of the defense countermeasures.

While defense contractors and government officials swigged coffee and picked at cheap pastries, Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and warfighting support, took the podium. He opened his remarks with a disclaimer. “Let me say that I did clear this speech with public affairs,” he said. “Nothing that I will say today represents the official position of the Department of Defense. Let's get that out of the way in case the inspector general happens to be in the audience.”

The mostly male, middle-aged audience erupted in hearty laughs. It was a defense insider's joke: Boykin had become the focus of a media firestorm in late 2003, when a defense writer, William Arkin, broke the story in the
Los Angeles Times
of how Boykin, a born-again Christian, had been delivering speeches to evangelical groups that cast the Bush administration's war on terror in terms of a Christian crusade. One Boykin gem: He told an Oregon congregation that George W. Bush “was appointed by God.” And in a speech at a church in Daytona, Florida, Boykin described his encounter with a Somali warlord. “I knew that my God was bigger than his,” he said. “I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” Boykin typically appeared in uniform at these events.
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Arkin's report had put an uncomfortable spotlight on Boykin, who had spent most of his career in the secretive world of Special Operations. Boykin was a public relations liability for the Bush administration, which was trying to persuade the world it was not at war with Islam. An investigation by the Pentagon inspector general concluded that Boykin failed to properly vet his speeches and make clear that his religious pronouncements were not official policy.
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It was, in essence, a slap on the wrist. Boykin stayed on in the job.

Despite the disclaimer, Boykin's remarks that morning were provocative. In Iraq and Afghanistan, he told the audience, the military was undergoing a fundamental shift in the way that it fought. The military would no longer be preoccupied with traditional military tasks. It was no longer focused on enemy formations—tracking Saddam Hussein's armor brigades or looking for Soviet strategic nuclear forces. It was about identifying and targeting specific individuals. Information collected by a soldier on patrol or captured by a surveillance aircraft loitering overhead could be used to capture or kill members of the insurgent underground in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Boykin's jargon, “operationalizing intelligence,” once the domain of the elite and secretive counterterrorism world, was now a task for the conventional military.

“What we're trying to do is get the rest of the military to recognize today that our real battle in Iraq and Afghanistan is a battle for knowledge, it's a battle for information, it's an intel battle,” he said.

Waging the offensive in Iraq and Afghanistan was about mapping out and recognizing networks: identifying insurgent cells, mapping out how they were organized, and connecting the dots. It was closer to detective work than fighting a conventional enemy. For this new mission, it was important to reorganize, at some fundamental level, the way the national security bureaucracy was structured, and how military and civilian organizations shared information, Boykin said: “Intelligence today that never would have been of importance to the soldier on the street, collected from the national foreign intelligence program, is now important to the ordinary soldier out on the street. And the intelligence that guy is collecting—that guy running around in a Humvee—he's getting information that is now important all the way to the top, all the way to the national foreign intelligence program.”

Now, intelligence was driving military operations. “Every high-value target that we capture today has intelligence value in the interrogation and debriefing of those targets,” Boykin said. “We need to recognize that now.”

It was an approach that would have sounded familiar to a British officer in Northern Ireland, or an Israeli officer policing the Palestinian territories. But Boykin reached for a different analogy. Pressed to provide further clarification on the issue by a member of an audience, Boykin made a direct comparison to the 1980s campaign against Communist guerrillas in El Salvador and to the Phoenix program, a CIA-orchestrated program put in place during the Vietnam War. “I think the basic principle [of Phoenix and El Salvador] was to kill or capture,” he said.

I will tell you, I wouldn't call it the Phoenix program, but I think we're doing a pretty good job of it right now. It's not just SOF [special operations forces], it's conventional forces that are out there capturing. I think we're running that kind of program right now. I think this secretary and this administration understand this is a war, we're going after these people, killing or capturing these people is a legitimate mission for the department and for the interagency. I think we're doing a pretty good job … We're doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do, without all of the secrecy.

Boykin was reaching back to one of the more controversial lessons of the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War the U.S. government—after initial frustration and setbacks—embarked on a sweeping reorganization of its mission in Southeast Asia. Phoenix was just one piece of this, although it was perhaps one of the more infamous. At its core, Phoenix was an intelligence program: an attempt to map out and identify what was called “Viet Cong infrastructure,” the underground political organization of the Viet Cong. That meant collecting human intelligence at the local level: maintaining dossiers on individual members of the Viet Cong infrastructure who had infiltrated villages in Vietnam, and targeting them. “Targeting” could mean capture or arrest, or persuading Viet Cong cadres to defect through an offer of amnesty. Yet critics of the Phoenix program maintained that in practice, it led to a program of targeted killing: Thousands who were identified as Viet Cong sympathizers were also killed.

Apologists for Phoenix maintained it was not a deliberate assassination program. In 1971 testimony on U.S. assistance to Vietnam, William Colby of the CIA offered some interesting statistics: Since the program began in 1968, Phoenix had accounted for the capture of 28,978 members of the Viet Cong infrastructure, 17,717 members of the Viet Cong had defected, and 20,587 had been killed. Colby claimed that most of those deaths were incidental—most of those killed had been involved in firefights with the regular military or South Vietnamese paramilitaries and identified after the fact. He insisted that Phoenix was not designed primarily as an assassination campaign, while not ruling out that Viet Cong sympathizers or innocent civilians had been the victims of premeditated killings.
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Colby may have missed a larger point. But Colby, who was CIA director from 1973 to 1976, and others saw Phoenix as a success, part of a larger set of bureaucratic tools that had proved themselves in Vietnam. In his introduction to
Lost Victory
, his intimate but rather self-justifying postmortem on the Vietnam War, Colby alluded to “right” lessons that could be drawn from Vietnam:

We must distinguish the strategy, or lack thereof, from the tactics and judge them separately to find which are worthy of adding to our national arsenal and which clearly were mistaken and should be rejected. We must sort out the optional from the inevitable aspects of our effort there, the choice of strategy and arms from the certain side effects of the presence of a large military force in an ethnically and culturally foreign community.
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With the military groping for the “right” approach to Iraq, that reading of the Vietnam War was deeply appealing. In 2005, General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, wrote a foreword to the paperback edition of
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
, a book first published in 2002 by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, an Army officer who had recently served in Iraq as the operations officer of the First Battalion of the Thirty-fourth Armor Regiment. Coming from the highest-ranking general in the Army, the foreword was a top-level endorsement. “The organizational culture of the U.S. Army, predisposed to fight a conventional enemy that fought using conventional tactics, overpowered innovative ideas from within the Army and from outside it,” Schoomaker wrote of the experience in Vietnam. “As a result, the U.S. Army was not as effective at learning as it should have been, and its failures in Vietnam had grave implications for both the Army and the nation.”
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