Armed Humanitarians (27 page)

Rumsfeld's skepticism came in part from the apparent lack of commitment from civilian agencies to the Iraq mission. Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld associate, told me that Rumsfeld's objections to the PRTs “were not with the concept itself,” but with the lack of nonmilitary personnel committed to the task:

The goal of the PRTs was exactly what senior military commanders had been asking, even pleading for, since 2003: more interagency support and competence in reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan which were nonsecurity and non-DoD related. The problem with the PRT concept was the commitment (or lack thereof) to staff them with non DoD personnel—State, Agriculture, etc.… Rumsfeld and other senior DoD officials recognized that absent commitments beyond comforting words of assurance, DoD would be carrying the burden for PRTs. And sure enough, that's what happened, especially in Iraq, when many PRTs had dozens of uniformed personnel and no more than a few civilians.

By February 2006, plans were finally in the works to roll out the rest of the teams, including an Italian-led team and a British-led team. But many issues were still unresolved. In June of 2006, James Jeffrey, a senior advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, conceded that there was friction between the military and the diplomatic corps over coordinating aid and reconstruction efforts at the regional level. Each PRT had up to one hundred personnel, so establishing more contingents would involve major security demands and put additional strain on military resources.

“The military would like to see thousands of civilians throughout the country and that would require tens of thousands of folks securing them,” Jeffrey told reporters at a breakfast in Washington. “That's a very big issue. It would be either billions of dollars and huge numbers of PSDs [personal security details] running around the country, and that's already a political and security problem, or it would require a lot of troops.”

Planners faced another problem: Civilian agencies had a hard time finding people willing to serve in Iraq. Once again, the military would plug the gap, providing much of the manpower.

Iraq's deadly downward spiral continued through 2006. That spring, Congress appointed the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel of ten Beltway worthies charged with assessing the situation in Iraq. The panel, chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, reached a depressingly obvious conclusion: U.S. troops were overstretched and Iraq was engulfed in civil war. With one hundred Americans dying every month and the war reaching a “burn rate” of $2 billion a week, there seemed to be no clear exit. That November, the American public, wearying of violent headlines from Iraq, handed a defeat to the Republican Party in the midterm elections, and the Democratic Party gained control of both the House and Senate. After the crushing electoral loss, President George W. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Robert Gates, a national security veteran who had served as director of Central Intelligence under Bush's father, was announced as Rumsfeld's replacement.

Rumsfeld's dismissal was the first real acknowledgment by the administration of the severity of the Iraq situation. Early in the war, officials had been relentlessly upbeat, even as postinvasion casualties climbed. Even the word “insurgent” was verboten. In Rumsfeld's lexicon, the insurgents were “dead-enders,” isolated Ba'athist regime holdouts, and assorted criminals. “The reason I don't use the phrase ‘guerrilla war' is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world,” he had said in late June 2003. Iraq had “looters, criminals, remnants of the Ba'athist regime, foreign terrorists who came in to assist and try to harm the coalition forces, and those influenced by Iran,” but “that … doesn't make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance.”
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He was still saying this two and a half years later.

Even after General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, broke with the party line the following month to describe the situation in Iraq as a “classical guerrilla-type campaign,” the secretary of defense clung to his “freedom is untidy” interpretation of events in Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice even floated an absurd comparison between postwar Germany and present-day Iraq, suggesting early on that the attacks in Iraq were reminiscent of the few isolated cases of postwar violence by Nazi saboteurs. That mendacious retelling of history was quietly dropped as casualties mounted.

The United States needed a radically different approach. The Iraq Study Group recommended a traditional “diplomatic offensive” that would force Iraq's neighbors to broker reconciliation within Iraq. U.S. forces should scale back to a supporting role; combat forces should begin a withdrawal from Iraq. The report concluded that it was time for a “responsible transition,” but President Bush opted for a different course. On January 10, 2007, he announced a “new way forward” for Iraq, a “surge” of five additional brigade combat teams to Iraq—a total of more than twenty thousand additional troops, with the main effort focused on securing the Iraqi capital. It was a break with a strategy of gradual disengagement. General George Casey, who had assumed the top command in Iraq in June 2004, had concentrated his efforts on handing off provinces to Iraqi control and confining U.S. troops to megabases away from population centers. That would all change. As part of the surge, U.S. forces would move to small combat outposts in residential neighborhoods, where they would work to expand security, block by block. To seal the deal, Bush selected a new top commander, General David Petraeus, the godfather of the counterinsurgency movement. Ryan Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer and fluent Arabic speaker, was named as Petraeus's civilian counterpart; he replaced Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

The surge plan was influenced in part by “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” a paper authored by Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and retired General Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff. The paper had been put forward by AEI in part as a response to the Iraq Study Group's report. It was rolled out at a December 2006 event at AEI's headquarters and then at a January event attended by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. The AEI report foreshadowed some aspects of the plan that Bush adopted, and the new Iraq strategy was also shaped by the newly adopted counterinsurgency manual. The new doctrine was not presented as Iraq-specific—it was supposed to be a generic guide for U.S. forces supporting a “host nation” government involved in battling an insurgency—but it was very much written with Iraq in mind. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who was heavily involved in crafting the document, called it “a manual on how to win in Iraq.”

The counterinsurgency manual was meant in part to force a rethink of the military's fixation on “force protection,” the fortress mentality that kept U.S. troops hunkered behind the walls of large, fortified bases. It featured a series of thought-provoking “paradoxes” that would encourage commanders to think more carefully about the application of lethal force and about preventing civilian harm:

Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be

Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is

Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction

Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot

These sounded like politically correct talking points, or a clever way of selling counterinsurgency to the public, but they had a very real aim: collecting intelligence. If U.S. forces relied on blunt tools such as airstrikes or artillery, killed civilians at checkpoints, and generally kept everyone back one hundred meters from their convoys, as signs on their vehicles warned, they would never collect any meaningful information about the insurgency. A key appendix on using social network analysis and other intelligence tools drove the point home: In many respects the campaign would resemble policing a beat, as the military patrolled an area and mapped out and identified the insurgent networks and how they operated.

The field manual devoted an entire chapter to “unity of effort,” the bureaucratic term for tightly integrating development work, diplomacy, and military operations. The Departments of State, Justice, and Treasury would all have to send representatives to work and live with the military and provide advice on governance, law enforcement, and finance. USAID would also have to subordinate its development programs to counterinsurgency strategy. The focal point of the development agency's efforts in Iraq was the Community Stabilization Program, a massive jobs and public-works program for Iraq. The program was supposed to keep young (fighting-age) Iraqi men away from the insurgency by putting them to work or enrolling them in vocational programs. The tab for the Community Stabilization Program was a whopping $644 million, more than the agency allocated to the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund and the Development Assistance account for all of Asia and the Near East in fiscal year 2005. The contract was controversial. Many established nongovernmental organizations were skeptical that such an ambitious program could be managed effectively (Mercy Corps, a major U.S. nonprofit, declined to bid on the project for that reason). There was also concern that the program was too overtly tied to counterinsurgency aims, rather than development goals, and was a textbook example of how military operations and development work had become intermingled. International Relief and Development, a large, well-established USAID implementing partner, won the contract.

The surge also required a parallel diplomatic effort, a doubling of the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and civilians serving outside the Green Zone. Those new teams, called “embedded” or e-PRTs because they would be attached directly to brigade combat teams or regimental combat teams, were to be a key piece of the new Iraq strategy. They were supposed to streamline military operations and civilian reconstruction efforts, which in the past had often been badly coordinated. They were civilian-led by design (in Afghanistan, PRTs were led by military officers).

Unfortunately this civilian surge got off to a rough start, and the State Department was slow to fill billets on the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Further complicating matters, the Pentagon and the State Department could not agree on lines of responsibility, staffing plans, and objectives for PRTs. According to a House Armed Services Committee report, the State Department did not plan on “backfilling” these positions until the end of September 2008, when the military surge would already be winding down.
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On October 25, 2007, Harry Thomas, director-general of the Foreign Service, sent out an announcement to staffers informing them that the State Department had decided to begin “directed assignments” to fill an anticipated shortfall of 48 diplomats in Iraq. Around 250 Foreign Service officers received an e-mail informing them that they had been selected as qualified for the posts. If enough of them did not step forward, some of them would be ordered to Iraq. In theory, Foreign Service officers were supposed to be available for worldwide deployment. Refuse an assignment, and you had to resign your commission. But this was the first time since the Vietnam War that the State Department had contemplated ordering diplomats to serve in war zones.
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The following week, State Department management held a “town hall” forum at its Foggy Bottom headquarters whose purpose was to explain the decision to order Foreign Service officers to Iraq to make up for the lack of volunteers. The meeting turned into a bitter confrontation between diplomats and their senior management. One diplomat, Jack Croddy, seemed barely able to contain his rage as he took his turn at the microphone. Standing before the hundreds of diplomats assembled in the State Department's main auditorium, the gray-haired senior Foreign Service officer's face flushed and his voice quavered: “Incoming is coming in every day, rockets are hitting the Green Zone. So if you forced-assign people, that is really shifting the terms of what we are all about. It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence and you know it.”
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A wave of sustained applause swept through the auditorium. News accounts of the acrimonious town hall forum further bolstered a perception within the military that Foreign Service officers were elitists who refused to perform their duty while those in uniform made all the sacrifices. Many diplomats had served in harm's way since September 11, 2001, and the State Department did eventually find volunteers to fill the positions. Still, the damage to the reputation of the Foreign Service was lasting. In an open letter to colleagues posted on the State Department's Web site, John Matel, a career Foreign Service officer serving as the head of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq's Anbar Province, fretted that the Marines he served alongside would think of the government civilians as “wimps and weenies” because of the furor. “I personally dislike the whole idea of forced assignments, but we do have to do our jobs,” he wrote.

We signed up to be worldwide available. All of us volunteered for this kind of work and we have enjoyed a pretty sweet lifestyle most of our careers. I will not repeat what the Marines say when I bring up this subject. I tell them that most FSOs are not wimps and weenies. I will not share this article [about the town hall meeting] with them and I hope they do not see it. How could I explain this wailing and gnashing of teeth? I just tried to explain it to one of my PRT members, a reserve [lieutenant colonel] called up to serve in Iraq. She asked me if all FSOs would get the R&R, extra pay etc. and if it was our job to do things like this. When I answered in the affirmative, she just rolled her eyes.
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