Armed Humanitarians (5 page)

She wondered aloud: “Is that Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan?”

“Tajikistan,” someone replied.

Once the plane departed Incirlik, however, we were entering a new geography: These new strategic outposts were in strange, unpronounceable places such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Even for a military used to cycling through deployments to Bosnia and Kuwait, the Pentagon's new map was still something of a mystery.

It was all supposed to be very, very temporary. That, at least, was the explanation Army Lieutenant Colonel Scott Donahue gave when he was asked why no American flag flew over the control tower at Bagram.

“You have to remember, if you study the history of this country, that's what caused the demise of some of these other nations that tried to come in here and help,” he said matter-of-factly. “You come in here like a big brother to take over everything, there's a natural resentment.”

It was a perceptive observation. During the 1960s and 1970s, politically non-aligned Afghanistan had been the scene of an international development contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the south, the United States Agency for International Development spent lavishly on infrastructure projects, building hydroelectric dams and irrigation canals in rural Helmand Province (Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, was nicknamed “Little America”) and building a sleek, modernist airport in Kandahar. In the north, the Soviets built a network of roads and the Salang Tunnel, which opened a year-round connection between the north of the country and Kabul. Despite these showpiece projects, the country remained at the bottom of the development scale. “Afghanistan's roads and highways, Russian-built in the north, American-made in the south, originally seemed like a decoration rather than a utility, neatly tied around the country like some superfluous and extravagant ribbon,” an observer wrote in the early 1970s.

Kandahar airport still remains only a splendid showpiece, an architectural masterpiece of concentric curves, a propagandist's pipedream costing 15 million American dollars. Equipped to welcome the biggest jets with runways designed as major staging arteries for flights to the East, the airport is a forlorn white elephant, virtually unused by the world's air routes.
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The disastrous Soviet intervention in the 1980s did little for the country. The Soviets tried a few hearts-and-minds projects, and built some grim socialist-style housing blocks in Kabul, but the indiscriminate use of force and the displacement of millions of Afghans left few positive memories of the Russians.

Donahue, a sunburned officer wearing square-framed engineer glasses, was in charge of Task Force Bagram, a team of Army engineers that had arrived the previous November to survey the place and see if it could be turned into a functioning base. In parallel, a team from the 744th Ordnance Company from Fort Meade, Maryland, set to work methodically clearing the place of mines and unexploded munitions. Their task was not to clear the surrounding Shomali Plain—that would take years—but to make it safe to work inside the base perimeter. Several times a day, the bomb squad held “controlled detonations” to destroy their deadly finds: artillery shells, mortar rounds, rocket engines, cans of machine-gun ammunition, even five-hundred-pound bombs. By that March, they had destroyed seventy-two hundred munitions at Bagram, the equivalent of thirty thousand pounds of high explosive.

More reinforcements were arriving from the United States, along with fresh contingents of NATO troops, including Polish sappers and British paratroopers. A squadron of tank-busting A-10 Thunderbolt II fighters from the Twenty-third Fighter Group was scheduled to arrive soon to provide air support for the ongoing campaign. But as the perimeter grew, Donahue said, the Army wanted to discourage the impression that it was here to stay. And one way to keep a small footprint was to enlist local help. Major Kevin Johnson, one of Donahue's subordinates, hired Afghan laborers to start clearing debris from the aircraft hangar. Local men got cash for hauling out trash and scrap metal. Unskilled laborers received 70 cents an hour; skilled workers got $1.70 an hour. The task force took the same labor-intensive approach to cleaning debris from the runway. The soldiers recruited two hundred day laborers, who lined up at one end of the runway, scouring the length of the fifty-six-hundred-foot airstrip, sweeping litter up with simple straw brooms. Donahue and Johnson struck a deal with local carpenters to start fixing up some of the battered buildings.

The whole point of the exercise was to give the local economy a lift. The Americans, after all, were the newcomers here, and paying for local labor and buying local tools was a quick and easy way to win hearts and minds. The Army was not here to do long-term development work; it needed to repair the buildings on base and make sure that the place was habitable during the winter. The repairs were part of a deal struck with Afghan commanders in return for the rights to use the base. “The agreement in theater is this: Every fixed building that we occupy, we will repair that building, and one more,” said Donahue. “So it's a two-for-one.”

The operation at Bagram was low-key and unobtrusive. Outside the razor-wire perimeter at the main gate, Afghan laborers in sandals and baggy
shalwar kameez
lined up patiently for a pat-down before being let on base; drivers in garishly decorated jingle trucks idled outside a sand-filled HESCO barricade; local entrepreneurs operated a small carpet shop and souvenir stands to cater to the new visitors. Commander Baba Jan's men wandered inside the perimeter, Kalashnikovs slung casually on their shoulders. One goal of these modest construction projects was what the military called “force protection.” By spreading some dollars around the neighboring community and keeping local men employed, the military could build rapport with leaders. And befriending one's neighbors made it easier to collect intelligence and reduced the chances that the enemy would return to the area.

That equation, however, was about to change. A team of civilian contractors had recently arrived from the United States. They were here to scout the location for Brown & Root, then a subsidiary of the oil-services firm Halliburton. Brown & Root, renamed KBR later that year, was familiar to anyone who had visited the massive U.S. bases in the Balkans such as Camp Bondsteel, a sprawling camp in eastern Kosovo. The company had managed Camp Bondsteel as part of the Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP: it had a contract for the management of military installations overseas. Under LOGCAP, the Army could order individual “task orders” on an as-needed basis: The contractor built housing, provided clean water, and operated commissaries; it provided fuel and spare parts; and it maintained vehicles and equipment. In theory, outsourcing through LOGCAP freed up the downsized post–Cold War Army to do purely military tasks. The military could train and prepare for war, and leave the potato peeling and latrine cleaning to the contractors. And instead of training Army personnel, and paying for their training and long-term benefits, the Army could simply pay a one-time fee to a contractor.

Or so went the theory. In practice, it was expensive. LOGCAP was structured as a “cost-plus-award-fee” contract, meaning that the contractor would be reimbursed for the cost of work performed, plus a fixed percentage that would be considered profit. That meant there were few incentives to control costs. In a survey of outsourced work in the Balkans, government auditors found that Brown & Root charged the government for cleaning offices four times a day; servicing latrines three times a day; and conducting routine base maintenance around the clock. Commanders complained that the company padded payrolls by hiring oversized construction teams and cleaning crews that were often idle.
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Brown & Root won the original LOGCAP contract in 1992, for work in Somalia.
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In 1997 and 2001, a rival company, DynCorp, outbid Brown & Root for the second LOGCAP contract, but Brown & Root got a consolation prize: lucrative task orders in the Balkans. In December 2001, weeks after Bagram was captured by the Northern Alliance, the Army awarded a ten-year contract to Brown & Root for LOGCAP III. The contract had an initial ceiling of $300 million, an amount that would turn out to be a modest first installment. Brown & Root won the contract despite the fact that government auditors faulted the Army for failing to manage proper oversight of its work in the Balkans. Contracts to support the administration's war on terror followed in quick succession. In February 2002, the company won a sixteen-million-dollar award from the Navy for construction of an expanded detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By late April 2002, the Army's Operations Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois, which managed the LOGCAP program, had issued five task orders to the company and was preparing another; three of those jobs were in Central Asia. The U.S. military was preparing for a long stay in Afghanistan.

The military machine could not function without contractors, who maintained their equipment, provided translation services, and kept the camps running. Bringing in the big contractors, however, meant that fewer dollars would trickle down to the local economy. In the Balkans, Brown & Root hired an army of local people to do the cooking, cleaning, and construction, but in the new megabases such as Bagram, the company flew in third-country nationals—contract laborers from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal—to dig ditches or ladle out food. By design or by accident, it mirrored the division of labor in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, where imported workers did all the physical labor. Winning hearts and minds and boosting the local economy was not the point.

On the Shomali Plain, then, reconstruction got off to a modest start. During Afghanistan's civil war, villagers had fled the devastated agricultural region surrounding Bagram, and in the spring of 2002, the region was still in a shambles. The humble mud-brick compounds had been dynamited or destroyed; the fields were seeded with mines; and the main highway to Kabul was still pitted with the ugly, blossoming scars created by the impact of mortar rounds. The detritus of war still littered the road. On a drive outside the base, I spotted rusting hulks of armored personnel carriers, the occasional tank with its turret blown off, and a shipping container that had taken a direct hit, its shredded metal sides ballooned out. Green flags, symbolizing martyrdom, fluttered above roadside graves.

Around Bagram, the job of rebuilding fell to a relatively small contingent of Army Civil Affairs soldiers. When Dana Priest, a
Washington Post
military affairs reporter, visited the base that spring, she found a small group of reservists led by Major Bryan Cole, a Civil Affairs officer, leading a limited, ad hoc reconstruction effort. Cole's reservists were part of the 489th Civil Affairs Battalion, a unit based in Knoxville, Tennessee, that had around 120 soldiers in Afghanistan. They had two million dollars in seed money from the Army to jump-start the reconstruction process around Bagram.
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Priest, a perceptive reporter, had noticed an interesting shift in the 1990s, as U.S. policymakers turned increasingly to the military to solve political and economic problems. Priest had shadowed several of the “CINCs,” the four-star commanders-in-chief of the military's geographic commands, and had seen how they had emerged as powerful regional proconsuls. General Wesley Clark, the head of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and General Anthony Zinni, the chief of U.S. Central Command, held more power than any ambassador. They had aircraft and special operations teams at their disposal, they commanded the respect and attention of presidents and prime ministers, and they wielded more clout than the four-star service chiefs who were nominally their superiors. With little discussion or debate, America's military had been taking on a wider role in foreign policy. And nation building had by default been taken on by the combatant commands and the Civil Affairs and special operations units tasked to them.

That shift would begin to accelerate in Afghanistan, at first almost imperceptibly. In June 2002, a
New York Times
reporter visited a Civil Affairs team in Kunduz, a city that had been the final Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan. A small team there was working on a few small-scale projects, sprucing up a small schoolhouse with a fresh coat of paint and fixing windows. But the team had none of the resources to take on the more ambitious types of projects that Afghans were hoping for, like roadbuilding or bridge repair. In 2002, Civil Affairs teams in Afghanistan had an eight-million-dollar budget for the entire country, a relatively modest sum compared to the funds pledged at the December 2001 Afghanistan peace conference in Bonn. The soldiers avoided using the phrase “nation building” to describe their work.
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Civil Affairs troopers had one advantage over traditional aid workers, however: They were armed, and they could go to insecure areas that were off limits to many aid groups. That fact, combined with the military's “can-do” attitude and massive logistics capability, meant that the eight million dollars was just a start.

Civil Affairs is an unorthodox kind of soldiering. Unlike that of combat units—infantry, armor, artillery, and so on—the primary role of Civil Affairs is not “kinetic,” because Civil Affairs troopers are not on the battlefield to seize territory and destroy things. Quite the opposite: Civil Affairs teams are supposed to step in after the fighting is over and restore essential services such as sewage, water, electricity, and roads. They dig wells, repair schools, and run small clinics. They forge relationships with local communities and nongovernmental organizations. Essentially, they are relief workers with guns.

The Civil Affairs community was unique in other ways. More than 90 percent of Civil Affairs troops are Army reservists, part-time soldiers with ordinary jobs in civilian life.
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Civil Affairs shares a traditional affiliation with the Army Special Forces: Army Civil Affairs units were once subordinate to Army Special Operations Command, and for many years the Army had only one active-duty Civil Affairs unit, the Ninety-sixth Civil Affairs Battalion, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the Army's Special Warfare Center and School.
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And like Special Forces, the Civil Affairs units were, at least in the pre–September 11 world, something of a stepchild. Civil Affairs was not considered a path to meteoric professional advancement; the Army classes Civil Affairs as a “functional area,” essentially meaning that it is a secondary career for an officer.
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