Armed Humanitarians (40 page)

To complicate matters further, the clock was ticking. Under a security framework that was negotiated between the United States and Iraq in late 2008, U.S. troops were to begin a gradual withdrawal from Iraq's cities by mid-2009. Within six months, the U.S. military would be moving to the periphery, and local communities would have to rely more and more on the provincial government and the national government and less and less on assistance from the United States. The costly U.S. investments in projects such as micro-power generation would be squandered if there was no Iraqi plan to sustain them. Things were moving swiftly, and the U.S. military needed to show progress.

Over the summer, Hort's Third Brigade had paid for nine new neighborhood generators for that part of Sadr City. So the news that Hassan Shama, now Sadr City DAC chairman, brought Pierce and his Human Terrain IZ3 team was not good: “We had a promise to deliver some generators, you may have delivered those generators and you may have left them, but I'm not aware of it—the council's not aware of it,” Shama said.

Ali Ghatte, who headed the DAC's electricity committee and had accompanied Shama to the meeting, had counted only five generators. Another twist: they had no registration documents. In Iraq, a generator, like an automobile, came with registration papers. Without the papers, the DAC couldn't get subsidized fuel from the Ministry of Oil. Shama, a beefy, forty-something man in jeans and green and yellow polo shirt with closely cropped mustache and goatee, explained this complicated situation to Pierce and Ted Andrews, the Foreign Service officer who headed the e-PRT.

As the Americans listened through the interpreters, Shama shifted restlessly in his seat, and steadily began to raise his voice.

“Let me say this,” Pierce said, trying to convey a sense of urgency. “Maybe we don't look like we are concerned. We're concerned with what you just told us, believe me.”

Andrews, rising above the crosstalk, added, “We will have the Army confirm with you … and if there is some big mistake, we have a gentleman from the press here who can write all this down!”

Switching to English, Shama said, “I'm sorry, mister, this is the problem.” Leaning energetically forward on his elbows, he resumed in Arabic. “This is how this thing's supposed to be done,” he said. “If you have a quantity of generators, you should go to me and say you have those nine or ten generators. You tell us where the areas are that are most in need for them. Even if the Army is trying to put those generators up, they know who's the [council] member for the section they are working in. They should have grabbed him and told him [Ali Ghatte]. The Army may have placed the generator there, but nobody's aware of it. And nobody's watching the generators. So someone may have just come and taken it.”

That worried Pierce. He called down to the brigade staff to sort out whether or not the generators had in fact been delivered or if they had in fact disappeared. A major from the brigade staff arrived shortly thereafter, looking confused.

“Let me do this as a district attorney here,” Pierce told the major. “Here is the deal that we have discovered. First of all, Ali Ghatte is concerned about the actual location—and, frankly, security of the microgenerators. He's concerned, because we've given him in Arabic their location, and he says some of those are not in those
mahallas
[blocks] … Frankly, we're concerned that some of them have been taken. So that's a very significant issue.”

Solving that first issue was fairly straightforward. The major would arrange to pick up Ghatte and Shama in an armored vehicle and show them where all the generators were. The second point, getting subsidized fuel, was a bit more complicated. They needed to get registration paperwork from Doctor Moayad Hamed, a Baghdad doctor who had built a lucrative postwar business as a contractor to the U.S. military. Doctor Moayad had won the contract to oversee the repair of Route Irish, the crucial Baghdad airport road. He had contracts for trash pickup, for street repair, even for painting bright murals to spruce up the concrete barriers that surrounded many residential neighborhoods. He had the contract for generators as well. The problem was, he was not turning over the paperwork.

Pierce said, “Ali Ghatte told us that he tried to talk to Doctor Moayad, and that for some reason Doctor Moayad is extremely reluctant to turn over the registration paperwork. Is that right?”

“That's true, we contacted them more than one time,” Ghatte said.

Pierce, to the major, said sotto voce, “What I'm afraid is that he is turning around and using this registration paperwork to secure fuel and then selling it on the black market.”

“Sure,” the major whispered. “I'm tracking that.”

Pierce then cleared his throat. “I do have a couple questions for the group. Will copies of the registrations suffice to get the fuel flowing?”

Shama and Ghatte agreed that, yes, a copy of the paperwork would suffice. After two hours of debate, a temporary solution had been reached—or so it seemed. Later that month, the generators still were not operating.

A few weeks after my visit with Human Terrain Team IZ3, I embedded with an Army infantry company at Joint Security Station Comanche, a small outpost manned by an Army infantry company inside Sadr City proper. First Sergeant Ethan Mizell, the company's senior NCO, told me the generators inside their patrol zone had been installed in August; the Iraqi government provided some test fuel, around a thousand liters. That supply ran out in less than three weeks, although the company donated some extra fuel to get people through the Eid festival after Ramadan. “They ran out of fuel in twenty days,” Mizell said. “I gave it to them for the rest of the month because it was their holiday.” After that, there was no more money from the Army to keep topping up the generator supply.

Captain Andrew Slack, the company commander, told me the Commander's Emergency Response Program funds had dried up on October 1, at the beginning of the new fiscal year. The Iraqis would be on their own. “You can sort of play Sim City: Come in and build some roads, repair buildings, spruce up a park or a school,” he said. “That can be nice visually, but because we weren't so hooked up with the local leadership, we weren't as effective as we could have been.”

In many respects Pete Pierce was the ideal person to lead Human Terrain IZ3. As a district attorney he was steeped in the intricacies of municipal politics; he also understood the organized crime–style networks underpinning the insurgency in Sadr City. But that was by accident, not by design. Pierce was recruited to run IZ3 because of his background in Military Intelligence and Civil Affairs; he was recruited by another reserve officer who was in his Civil Affairs unit, who had done a tour in Iraq with one of the senior managers of the Human Terrain System program. He was not a Middle East expert, and both he and the social scientists on Human Terrain Team IZ3 relied heavily on Arabic interpreters to do their jobs.

For cultural insights, Pierce depended on his senior cultural adviser, Abu Bassam. An Iraqi Christian and Baghdad native, Abu Bassam had emigrated to the United States three decades ago and had returned to Iraq to work as an interpreter for U.S. military commanders. (Abu Bassam, or “father of Bassam” was the nickname he used when dealing with Iraqis.) A compactly built man with a neatly trimmed mustache, Abu Bassam had a gentle, low-key demeanor. Back in the United States, he was a retired engineer. Here, he was the key interpreter of the local scene, and a powerful broker between cultures.

“I am very much a fair broker to both sides,” he told me while we waited for the meeting with Hassan Shama. “I don't want anybody to lose. A lot of money was wasted [on reconstruction projects] and we all know that.”

The collaboration with Shama was a case in point. “Everyone hated him, the commander, the Americans,” Abu Bassam said. “I convinced everyone we should work with him.”

Abu Bassam may have emigrated to the States decades ago, but that didn't mean he had shed all of his Iraqi habits of thought. He had a low opinion of the Shia population of Sadr City. “The Shia mentality is different,” he told me. “They are ghetto. They can sleep with their cousins, screw donkeys. I don't want to put them down—some of them are doctors, engineers, teachers. Now the Shia took over the government—what do they know how to do? Nothing. Administratively, they have nothing, no experience in governing.”

During the years he had spent working for the U.S. military in Iraq, Abu Bassam had noticed a subtle shift under way. The U.S. military was getting smarter. “There was an attitude: Don't fight them with bullets. We need to be not more offensive, not more defensive. We need to listen.” If the Human Terrain System had been in place in 2003, he concluded, “this all would have been different. We [the United States] don't know how to spend on projects. We need to run the military more as a business. The military never follows through on anything—so much money wasted, gone into bank accounts in Syria and Lebanon. We give a project a million dollars, and half a million dollars goes to militias.”

This was the problem with spending money to pacify Iraq: The whole approach of paying large segments of the Iraqi population not to fight was extraordinarily susceptible to waste, fraud, and abuse. In Anbar Province and elsewhere, in a program called “Sons of Iraq,” the U.S. military bankrolled tribal militias to stop fighting American forces and keep order in their neighborhoods. Many of the “Sons” were former insurgents. Eventually, the Iraqi government was supposed to absorb some of the “Sons” into regular security forces. In Baghdad, the U.S. government sponsored a host of make-work schemes and public works projects designed to keep fighting-age males on the U.S. payroll—and out of criminal gangs or insurgent groups.

Fraud and waste were not limited to the military. USAID also lost track of millions of dollars. Take the Community Stabilization Program, a massive program started in May 2006 by USAID to complement counterinsurgency efforts in selected Iraqi cities. In a March 2008 audit, the agency's inspector general concluded that the program was extremely vulnerable to fraud. The report cited a letter from a USAID representative on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Baghdad that indicated that “millions of dollars” from trash pickup campaigns were being redirected to insurgents, as well as to corrupt community leaders. This source reckoned that as much as half of the cash directed to cleanup campaigns in one area had been siphoned off by insurgents or corrupt officials. “If the source's estimates are correct—that 40 to 50 percent of payments for such projects were used for improper pay-offs—USAID may have already been defrauded of $6.7 to $8.4 million, with another $3.4 to $4.3 million at risk absent any corrective action,” the inspector general concluded—and this was in just one neighborhood of Baghdad, where $16.7 million in Community Stabilization Program funds had been disbursed.
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That was where the Human Terrain System entered the picture. It was not, as its academic critics liked to hint, a devilishly complex scheme to target Iraqis and Afghans for assassination, a sort of latter-day Phoenix Program, nor was it a version of COINTELPRO, the FBI's discredited domestic surveillance program that targeted antiwar groups and civil rights activists in the 1960s. Human Terrain IZ3's mission was an outgrowth of the military's employment of cash as a weapon. The military needed better intelligence about how to spend the motherlode of reconstruction funds it was overseeing as part of the nation-building effort, and the Human Terrain System was tasked with obtaining it.

Human Terrain was, in short, an intelligence program. Not intelligence in the traditional sense, perhaps; instead, information with a practical military application. “Intelligence” was a taboo word for the Human Terrain System, and senior officials, like McFate, insisted that the teams were walled off from military intelligence. Yet the word cropped up in the field.

In a discussion with members of Human Terrain Team IZ3 around a picnic table at Forward Operating Base War Eagle, Pete Pierce, IZ3's leader, described the Human Terrain Team as having a clear role in collecting intelligence for the brigade's Civil Affairs operations.

“Well, we work with them on a constant basis,” Pierce said. “So you could almost argue that we are”—Pierce paused, thinking—“the intelligence arm of Civil Affairs and the e-PRT, because they are the ones who control the budget. They are the ones who have the program to do reconstruction.”

Robert Kerr, one of the social scientists on Pierce's team, swiftly moved to correct his boss. “The
information
arm,” he clarified.

But in that conversation, Pierce repeatedly used the word “intelligence” to describe the kind of work they did. Asked what kinds of product they provided the commander after a key meeting with a local leader, he said, “We provide him with an intelligence …” He paused to clarify his language. “With an EXSUM, a summary of the meeting.” In describing what kind of support he received from the “Reachback Center” analysts at Fort Leavenworth, he said, “If we go to these meetings and there's something we don't understand, about a tribe or about the political leadership or about the formation of the government of Iraq, then we request, you know, a report, a summary, or an intel product—I shouldn't say intel product—
information
product—from the Reachback Center.”

So all the talk of the Human Terrain System being simple “open source” research was a polite fiction. The members of a Human Terrain Team worked for a military commander, they were located within a brigade headquarters, and information they shared, even if in the most general way, could help the commander sort out who was and was not the enemy. Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, who commanded an armored reconnaissance squadron in Baghdad in 2006 and who described himself as “greatly in favor” of the program, pointed out that Human Terrain analysis would on some level allow commanders to understand who the enemy was in the area his unit operated in. “Don't fool yourself,” he wrote Marcus Griffin, a Human Terrain Team member working in Iraq. “These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq … So stop sugarcoating what these teams do and end up being a part of; to deny this fact is to deny a reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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