Armed Humanitarians (3 page)

This is the world of muddy-boots diplomacy, practiced on a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Civil servants who once trained for peacetime development work now find themselves mediating tribal disputes in remote mountain provinces of Afghanistan. The State Department's Foreign Service officers find themselves evading roadside bombs—and sometimes returning fire in firefights. Army platoon leaders hand out microgrants to small-business owners in the restless Shia slums of Baghdad. And a new class of expatriate has taken up residence in an archipelago of miniature Green Zones. They live behind concrete blast walls and concertina wire, commute to work in armored trucks, and reside in the ultimate gated communities.

But the shift in many ways has been incomplete. As this book will show, there has been a horrific failure to equip ourselves for success in this mission. The military quickly learned that it was poorly equipped for nation building—lacking cultural knowledge, language skills, and local understanding to do the job right in places like Iraq. Civilian agencies of the U.S. government such as the U.S. State Department and USAID were poorly prepared for the mission as well. In military terms, they had no “expeditionary capability”: They had no deployable reserve, no way to sustain people in the field, and few professional incentives for serving in combat zones. Their budgets were a fraction of the Defense Department's, and their personnel were stretched thin: The State Department has around sixty-five hundred Foreign Service officers and another five thousand Foreign Service specialists who work overseas; another fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers work for USAID, the Foreign Commercial Service, the Foreign Agricultural Service, and the International Broadcasting Bureau.
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The U.S. Army, including active, reserve, and National Guard components, has an “end strength”—manpower authorized by Congress—of over one million.

The shortage of manpower was a chronic problem for this new enterprise. Sending thousands of civil servants to remote and often dangerous outposts had profound consequences. It was to create the world of the armed humanitarian: a landscape seen through bulletproof glass. An army of private security companies built a lucrative new business ferrying diplomats, civilian aid workers, and contractors around war zones. These hired guns provided bodyguard details, convoy escorts, and camp guards; they provided what the military calls “force protection”; they also created extraordinary distance between the representatives of the U.S. government and the populations they were supposed to help. And the military's belated attempt to understand the “human terrain” it was operating in inadvertently sharpened the divide between the practitioners of this new foreign policy and the academic specialists whose expertise they sought to tap. This was one way the manpower gap was closed.

Equally problematic, this new mission blurred the lines between military force and humanitarian assistance. Over the course of the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Pentagon took on a greater share of overseas development assistance, work traditionally performed by civilians. In 2006, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international organization that tracks development trends, published a study of U.S. foreign aid. It found that over one fifth of official U.S. development assistance—22 percent, to be exact—flowed through the Defense Department. In 2002, that figure had been less than 6 percent.
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And the 22 percent did not include the “security assistance” dollars the Pentagon committed annually to training and equipping foreign militaries and police forces.
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The U.S. military had become a major player in the development world. And in many places, U.S. military money spent on development far outstripped the budget of traditional aid organizations. The aid workers there didn't wear Birkenstocks—they wore combat boots.

Despite working diligently to solve the bureaucratic problems of nation building, the new practitioners often came to a late realization: Building an effective state and a functioning civil society is a process that takes decades, often generations. Imposing it from the outside often feeds the perception that the intervening power is an occupier, not a nation builder. And they also faced an unhappy reality: Sometimes, the more you throw money, resources, and talent at a problem, the worse the problem becomes. The massive infusion of resources creates extraordinary opportunities for corruption in states that have weak rule of law and poor traditions of governance. Equally important, they had to confront the fact that the American public has little patience, particularly given the current economic state, for this kind of costly enterprise.

Many books have probed the military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan: memoirs of combat by platoon leaders, brigade commanders, and embedded reporters; searing critiques of military decisionmaking by investigative journalists; self-serving accounts by civilian decisionmakers. But literature on the nation-building experience is almost nonexistent. Reporters who cover war often gravitate to the “bang-bang,” but rarely hang around for the complex development work that follows military action. This book is about the rise of this new class of nation builder, and the experiences, frustrations, and lessons of nation building. It is a tale of courage, idealism, and commitment; it is also one of profligacy, waste, and disillusion. This is the defining experience for a generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners.

Our decade-long affair with nation building was more than a break with the traditional world of diplomacy. For the military, it marked a shift away from fighting and winning conventional wars, as troops were reassigned to a constabulary mission. The military that had won a rapid victory over Saddam Hussein's army in 1991 and 2003 was now stretched too thin to handle major new emergencies. The military was grasping for a new way to describe this mission: It was something other than war—more a hybrid of police work and development. They settled on the term “stability operations” to describe this kind of approach.

The Pentagon's embrace of this new strategy can be charted out in a series of official documents. One week before the STAR-TIDES demonstration at the Pentagon, in October 2008, the U.S. Army released Field Manual 3-07,
Stability Operations
. The manual provided the military with a blueprint for rebuilding failed states. And it stated the obvious: Nation building requires a lot of “soft power” and the full participation of the civilian agencies of government if it is to succeed. According to the manual, the United States faced a new era in which “the greatest threats to national security will not come from emerging ambitious states, but from nations unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs and aspirations of their people.”

The manual's foreword states:

America's future abroad is unlikely to resemble Afghanistan or Iraq, where we grapple with the burden of nation-building under fire. Instead, we will work through and with the community of nations to defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering. Achieving victory will assume new dimensions as we strengthen our ability to generate “soft power” to promote participation in government, spur economic development, and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world.

The week the new Army manual was made public, I sat down with Clinton Ancker, the director of the Combined Arms Center Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During his Army career, Ancker had served with an armored cavalry unit in Vietnam and had spent nine years stationed on the border between East and West Germany in the late years of the Cold War. Ancker was also a historian, and he went on to be an intellectual mentor to many of the military officers who were leading battalions and brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had helped lead the drafting of the manual, and he wanted to emphasize an important point. “There's a very clear message in the manual: that the Army should not be the lead on most of this, but a recognition that in many cases we will be when the operation kicks off,” he told me.

Ancker, like many of his contemporaries, wanted a government that was better organized to carry out this mission, that would require a new kind of approach—neither purely civilian nor wholly military—to handle nation building. “In theory, in the best of all possible worlds, the military would never have to do stability operations because they are fundamentally functions of a government,” he said. “If there is somebody else who is competent and capable of doing these things we would just as soon transition those tasks to them, because every soldier devoted to this is one who is not training for other missions or available for other missions. [But if] no one else can do it, we have to acknowledge that it's a task and we have to have thought about it ahead of time.”

That manual was just one product of a period of introspection about the failure of the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most famous document of this was Field Manual 3-24, the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps's counterinsurgency manual, published in December 2006. That book became a surprise bestseller (and one of its authors, General David Petraeus, became a celebrity), but the manual represented only one aspect of the military's embrace of armed humanitarianism. In November 2005, the Defense Department issued Directive 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction.” It placed stability operations for the first time on a par with offensive or defensive combat. It stated: “Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.”
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This dull bureaucratic language obscured a stunning admission: The United States had failed to plan for the postwar occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The counterinsurgency manual followed one year later, signaling a cultural shift within the land services, the Army and Marine Corps. In October 2007, the U.S. Navy released its “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” a document that, in essence, said that avoiding wars was as important as winning them. In June 2008, an entire section of the 2008 National Defense Strategy, a sort of “statement of purpose” for the Defense Department, was devoted to outlining the importance of working with civilian agencies. “Our forces have stepped up to the task of long-term reconstruction, development and governance,” it read. “The U.S. Armed Forces will need to institutionalize and retain these capabilities, but this is no replacement for civilian involvement and expertise.”

These documents, along with classified documents on development and deployment of forces, all provided guidance for a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy toward nation building. By October 2008, the same month of the STAR-TIDES demonstration, work was nearing completion on a “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency guide that would instruct policymakers on how to plan and respond to future interventions overseas. In parallel, the State Department was taking the first steps toward creating a new Civilian Response Corps, a sort of civilian equivalent to the military reserve that could be called up in an emergency for nation-building missions.

Nation building has also changed Washington. In parallel with the push to refashion government, a new class of theorists, consultants, and advisors set up shop among the think tanks and lobbying offices of downtown Washington and staked their reputations and careers on the nation-building enterprise. This paradigm shift has also created rich new opportunities for the government contracting firms, not only for traditional aid contractors but for defense firms looking to branch out into the stability operations business. Providing manpower, consulting services, and logistics for nation-building projects became a more promising growth business than building warships, helicopters, and tanks.
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Aid contracting first became a big business with the Clinton administration's push to “reinvent government” in the 1990s. That same privatization dynamic was at work in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but on a much larger scale. The profit motive would often be at odds with the mission.

Wars of choice, such as the Iraq War, may prove the exception in American foreign policy, but the experience of administering Iraq, Afghanistan, and other frontier states will mold a new generation of soldiers, diplomats, and bureaucrats. This new doctrine—still a work in progress—will shape future interventions. Armed nation building fits neatly with new ideas taking hold in international relations. Concepts such as the “responsibility to protect” trump state sovereignty and can pave the way for humanitarian intervention in failing states, or states deemed to be failing. This is a new idea of a just war, a place where liberal interventionists and conservative hawks find common ground.

This embrace of nation building, however, carries serious risks. The more the military focuses on armed social work, the less it will focus on its main mission of fighting and winning wars. The United States may be less ready to respond to new crises because of the enormous drain on our resources posed by the nation-building mission. Sustaining these missions on borrowed money increases our national debt, diverts money from domestic priorities, and hands an enormous burden to the next generation of taxpayers. It threatens to diminish the standing of the United States, because the huge footprint that it requires feeds perceptions that we are an imperial power. It creates more, not less, temptation for the United States to intervene in putative failed states. It sends mixed messages about who we are as a nation, because we interact with the world through our most authoritarian institutions. More worryingly, armed nation building may begin to look like an attractive way to solve domestic problems. This is a noble but flawed undertaking. The tools are important to have, but they must be used judiciously.