Armed Humanitarians (45 page)

The extended discussion was part of the frustrating but very necessary process of winning local commitment to the project; it required patience from the engineers, who had seen the results of poorly conceived or badly executed aid work. After debating for an hour and a half, Daoud relented. “We believe you and trust in your experience,” he said, shaking the hands of the engineers. “But the people are not happy with this.”

Doherty and Mead seemed to care deeply about their job, and they had to work hard to convince the security teams, usually composed of younger, ready-for-action infantrymen, that these protracted negotiations were the primary mission. On a visit to a district subgovernor's office under construction in the provincial center of Sayghan, Doherty had to argue with the patrol commander, who wanted him to hurry up and wrap up a meeting with a local building contractor.

One of the soldiers called over the radio, “The boss wants to know when we're done. We've got other patrols to do.”

Mike snapped back, “Tell him I haven't been here for a month. This trip is for me.”

“But we've got patrols to do.”

“I know, but if he's got a problem, we can talk it through later.”

For the engineers, it was a constant battle: Trying to win the trust of Afghans, and trying to persuade the other soldiers that this was a mission that deserved their time. They also had to remind the security teams about winning hearts and minds. Despite the generally lower level of violence here, the security teams often drove at high speeds through villages or refused to take off their intimidating wraparound shades when interacting with ordinary Afghans.

During their long-range patrol in the northeast, the engineers overnighted at a small patrol base shared with a contingent of U.S. Military Police from Fort Hood, Texas. The MPs were there to train the local contingent of Afghan National Police. When not on a training mission, they played Ping-Pong or worked out in a weight room. At night they watched DVDs on a projector. There were few other distractions. This small base had no Internet or morale phones for calls home, so the troopers devised other entertainment. One diversion was the “man-jammy challenge”: When someone lost at Ping-Pong with a score of zero, they had to run around the perimeter of the small camp in a
shalwar kameez
, the long tunic and baggy pants worn by Afghan men. The soldiers claimed their adopted camp dogs were trained to attack anyone in man-jammies, which would double the entertainment value. It didn't quite work that way in practice. When a soldier who lost at Ping-Pong emerged from behind the HESCO barrier in his
shalwar kameez
, the dog lunged after him, then stopped to sniff his hand and lick it. “She recognized him,” said one MP with disappointment. Despite the NATO command's pronouncements, cultural sensitivity was not their strong suit.

That night, as we set out our cots under the stars at the remote patrol base, a weary Doherty finally unburdened himself. He was frustrated not by the interminable negotiations with the Afghans, but by his work with the military. Even though this was primarily a reconstruction mission, he worried that testosterone-filled infantrymen were not suited for the job. “The Kiwis are supposed to be the low-key ones!” he said, shaking his head. “And they are so coarse and heavy-handed. Their language is so crude. Even if Afghans don't understand English, they can tell. The muscles and the tattoos, the wraparound shades, the body language. They have this contempt for the locals.”

It wasn't just the New Zealanders who had that attitude, Doherty said. “Remember the movie
The Beast
?” he asked, referring to a Hollywood film about a Soviet tank crew in Afghanistan. “I watched that at the base in Qalat. And you know the opening scene, where the helicopters come in and destroy the village? The U.S. soldiers all cheered. And the Afghan staff watched.”

We discussed the day's patrol. While driving back to base, the soldiers sped through the village nearest to the patrol base, kicking up an enormous cloud of dust. I saw more than a few sidelong glances at the convoy. “It's so inconsiderate,” Doherty said. “And one inconsiderate gesture can erase all the months of good work.”

Doherty's biggest concern, though, was the road to Madar, where the ribbon-cutting ceremony was to take place in two days. Local contractors had bulldozed over part of the local bazaar and paved over some of the fields without compensating anyone. The road looked great on paper. It was a deliverable result, and would be a public relations boost for the coalition, but the local residents were still simmering. Worse still, the local government had no budget or equipment to maintain and repair the roads. Unless they received continued subsidy, the roads would quickly fall into disrepair. “You have colonels in Bagram making decisions about the inches of asphalt, and they have no clue,” Doherty said with a sigh.

Two days later, top officers were helicoptered in from Bagram for the road-opening ceremony, which also marked the launch of the western portion of the Parwan-to-Bamyan road. The event was presided over by Habiba Surabi, the governor of Bamyan Province. Surabi appeared at the ribbon-cutting with Colonel Scott Spellmon, the commander of Task Force Warrior, and Group Captain Elliot, the PRT commander, who was photographed at the ribbon cutting wearing a traditional lambskin cap and a woolen cloak.

It was a marvelous photo opportunity, but the goodwill did not last. A few days after the ceremony, Abdullah Abdullah, an Afghan presidential candidate, paid a visit to the province for a campaign event. When Surabi's car arrived at the checkpoint outside the event, her guards emerged from the vehicle, only to have the U.S. MPs draw their weapons on them. Surabi was infuriated; I later learned that she called all government officials in Kabul demanding that the Americans leave Bamyan. Colonel Spellmon, the commander of Task Force Warrior, flew up to Bamyan to smooth things over, but also warned the locals that if the Americans left, they would take all their money with them.

The school visit in the Panjshir was not a mere photo opportunity intended to win over the Beltway elites with images of progress; the valley was not a Potemkin village. The Bagram outreach was a genuine effort to win friends and influence people in the communities around a vital base. Road projects were some measure of progress, even if they weren't sustainable. But to replicate this success throughout Afghanistan would require a generation-long military commitment and a generation-long investment by the U.S. taxpayer. It would require a military and diplomatic apparatus that was completely reorganized around a new mission of building the rudiments of a functioning Afghan state. It would be armed development work on a massive scale, involving combat troops, military advisors, cultural and development experts, and local administrators, in a reprise of the “successful” Iraq strategy. It meant more troops would live out among the population, away from the fortified sanctuary of the forward operating base, and commanders would turn on a stream of development money through the Commander's Emergency Response Program. And this time, civilian agencies would have to chip in on a much larger scale and step up to the task of administering a state down to the district level. Could this be done? Or was the ribbon-cutting scene in the Panjshir girls' school just a symbol of an elusive dream?

Since 2001, Congress has appropriated more than $50 billion for humanitarian and reconstruction aid to Afghanistan, yet all the money spent in Afghanistan has not guaranteed success. Violence was on the rise in the summer of 2009; August 2009 was the deadliest month on record for U.S. troops, but by June 2010 the security situation had deteriorated further. In fact, the infusion of aid was to some extent enabling the corruption that was undermining support for the Afghan government. It was fairly common knowledge that the increase in aid had created more opportunities for kickbacks and bribery. For example, the owner of an Afghan logistics firm casually disclosed to me in 2008 that he was spending $5,000 to pay off militia commanders every time he sent a fuel convoy to Kandahar. But the U.S. government was slow to act. In September 2009, prompted in part by an investigation in the online newspaper
GlobalPost
, USAID launched a belated investigation into allegations that money for highway and bridge projects was ending up in the hands of Taliban commanders, who extracted protection money from roadbuilders.
13
But increased oversight could never be enough, given the sheer volume of dollars arriving in Afghanistan. Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged this reality in a press conference with President Hamid Karzai, saying: “I do have concerns that with the billions and billions of dollars coming into Afghanistan from the international community, that that assistance itself has become one of those sources of corruption.”

In a damning report published in March 2008, Matt Waldman, a policy and advocacy advisor with Oxfam, a British charity, reckoned that international assistance accounted for 90 percent of public expenditures in Afghanistan. Yet the Afghan government didn't know how one third of all aid to the country, around $5 billion, had been allocated since 2001. What's more, much of the aid being pledged to Afghanistan was being repatriated in the form of aid contractor salaries and corporate overhead costs. The cost of a single expatriate consultant working for one of the myriad private consulting companies was between $250,000 and $500,000 per year, and Waldman estimated that 40 percent of aid went back to donor countries in one form or another.
14
The U.S. military was spending close to a hundred million dollars a day in Afghanistan, yet the average volume of aid spent by all donors since 2001 was just seven million dollars a day.
15

The reconstruction business in Afghanistan has opened extraordinary opportunities for international consulting firms and well-connected Afghan contractors. According to Waldman, companies have enjoyed profit margins of 20 percent and sometimes take home as much as 50 percent of the contract amount. The reconstruction projects run out of Bagram were just one glimpse of the marvelous opportunities for greed that the Afghanistan surge has created.

The reconstruction racket seems to be enriching a small and select group of well-connected Afghan officials, many of whom are former warlords. General Baba Jan, the Northern Alliance commander who once escorted reporters to the frontlines of the fighting at Bagram, has been said to enjoy a postwar retirement as a Bagram contractor.
16
Coalition officers told me that the governor of one province was suspected of skimming reconstruction funds. Other officials have been implicated in bulldozing the houses of refugees in Kabul's Sherpur district to make way for the expensive new homes of government ministers and former warlords.
17
Seen through the eyes of ordinary people, nation-building in Afghanistan seemed to benefit everyone—foreign aid workers, well-connected local officials, Afghan construction firms—except them.

Afghanistan offered a new laboratory for a “whole-of-government” approach to nation building, but it seemed doubtful that the civilian bureaucracy could rise to that challenge. The Civilian Response Corps, created in response to the nation-building fiascos in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was still in its infancy, and the military ended up shouldering the burden once again in Afghanistan. As 2009 drew to a close, the administration had still fallen short of its target to have nearly a thousand government experts in Afghanistan by year's end to support Obama's civilian “surge.” By October 2009, only 575 civilians were in Afghanistan, and most of these were still in Kabul and rarely left their secure compounds.
18

*
MRAP procurement began in earnest in November 2006, more than three years after the invasion of Iraq. With some prodding from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, buying the vehicles soon became the Pentagon's top spending priority. By mid-2009, the military had taken delivery of more than 16,000 of the million-dollar-plus vehicles, and the military had ordered a more nimble, offroad version for Afghanistan service, called the MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle. Though smaller, the M-ATV was still a beast, weighing in at twelve tons.

*
A
New England Journal of Medicine
study published in mid-2009 concluded that murder after abduction was the leading cause of civilian deaths in Iraq between 2003 and 2008. Of the nearly twenty thousand murder victims accounted for in the study, nearly one third showed signs of torture.
3

*
Kilcullen also landed briefly at CNAS: He worked on his book
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
at CNAS in 2008 before moving on to a private consulting firm.
5

*
By the summer of 2009, fewer of the red lanyards worn by KBR workers were seen. That July, the Army awarded two giant task orders to the service firms Fluor and DynCorp to build and run bases in Afghanistan. The work was divided along geographic lines: Fluor got the northern part of Afghanistan, and DynCorp, the southern half. All told the work was worth a potential $15 billion over five years, depending on how many troops would eventually be sent to Afghanistan. The new task orders reflected the Army's shift away from the controversial Logistics Civil Augmentation Program III contract, which had given KBR a lock on base operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and had helped give battlefield contracting a bad name.

*
An unfortunate use of the word “target.” In military-speak, “targeting” can mean building relationships (“targeting a local leader” means arranging a meeting) or taking lethal action.

CONCLUSION

Foreign Policy Out of Balance

Over the past decade, the United States has become more deeply involved in nation building than at any point since the Marshall Plan. Iraq was the turning point. Confronted with the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the early occupation, the military rediscovered the principles of population-centric counterinsurgency, an approach that translated in practice to armed social work. But the military establishment overcompensated. As the Pentagon took on a greater share of diplomatic and development work, foreign policy became dangerously out of balance.