Armed Humanitarians (7 page)

Mines, then, was unusually well prepared to work in the postconflict environment of Afghanistan. He was not drawn to the cocktail-party circuit, and he preferred hardship posts to plush assignments. Before he joined the mission in Kabul, Mines had been serving a relatively quiet posting in the political-military section at the U.S. embassy in Budapest. The evening of the 9/11 attacks, he collected all his old military gear and put it in a rucksack that he parked in the middle of the upstairs hall; the next day, he sent a letter to a reserve commander to offer his services. It was a symbolic gesture: The Army did not need an aging paratrooper. Mines eventually put his rucksack back in the closet, but he was on a war footing.

Like the other new arrivals at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Mines was assigned space in cramped offices. But the job had an upside. Security in Kabul was reasonably good, and the capital was enjoying its first spring free of the Taliban. After a few days of orientation, embassy staffers were given a fair degree of freedom to move outside the fortified embassy perimeter. But there was no master plan for rebuilding Afghanistan; they would have to improvise.

In theory, the U.S. ambassador is the head of the “country team”; he or she is the top U.S. representative in a country, and all agencies of the U.S. government report to the ambassador. In practice, however, the military was running the show in Afghanistan. It owned a fleet of airlifters, fighter aircraft, and helicopters; it ran a massive logistics operation and a network of bases; and by late 2002, it had about seven thousand troops on the ground. It also had a clear mandate: Hunt for Osama bin Laden, destroy his network, and finish off the remnants of the Taliban. For the small embassy staff, the mission in Afghanistan was less than clear. Afghanistan barely had a functioning bureaucracy, and its economy seemed stuck in the Middle Ages. The traditional job of the diplomat, reporting on the political goings-on in a foreign capital, was hard to do when the institutions of government were still being rebuilt. For instance, Mines was instructed to prepare Afghanistan's new minister of commerce to brief some officials from Washington who would be paying a call on him. He walked through the minister's résumé with the minister's assistant. The biography went something like this: born, 1957; secondary schooling, Kabul Elementary and West Kabul High School, graduated 1975; graduate in engineering, University of Kabul, 1979; minister of commerce, 2001.

Mines inquired about the twenty-year gap in the minister's résumé.

“Oh, that,” his assistant said. “Well, there was the
jihad
against the Soviets; then there was the civil war; and then, of course, we had the war against the Taliban.”

At that moment, Mines realized he was dealing with a lost generation; Afghanistan's governing institutions had missed the past twenty years of economic development and contact with the outside world.

Part of the diplomats' job was scouting local businesses to better understand the local economy, and figuring out how to get Afghanistan's economy back on its feet. Congress had inserted an extra $49.7 million in overseas humanitarian aid into a $20 billion emergency war spending bill in early 2002; $5 million was earmarked specifically for landmine victims. At an international conference in Bonn in December 2001, the international community pledged to back the creation of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, a peacekeeping contingent that would initially provide security for Kabul. At a donors' conference in Tokyo the following month, donor countries promised $5 billion in reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan over a six-year period.

But the country could not move forward without some kind of collective political settlement, and that was where the diplomats could make a difference. The international community helped sponsor a
loya jirga
, a grand assembly, in June 2002. The
loya jirga
was the founding moment of the new Afghanistan, a council of national unity, attended by prominent community delegates and tribal leaders. In practice, it was Afghan tradition merged with twenty-first-century political theater: The event was broadcast on national television and radio, and the country watched the process of national reconciliation unfold. The United Nations had the lead for the event; Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran UN peace negotiator, was the special representative overseeing the event. Behind the scenes, U.S. embassy staff helped stage-manage everything. The Germans brought in a huge Oktoberfest tent to house the delegates. Mines went around to NATO allies to beg donations of uniforms and equipment for the first
kandak
(battalion) of the Afghan National Army, which would provide security for the proceedings.

For Mines, watching the
loya jirga
was a heady experience. “It was national group therapy,” he later recalled. “And it was precisely what the new nation needed. In the hall there was focus on each of the speakers, and throughout Kabul—in the cafes, homes, and parks—people were riveted. It was the cathartic experience that the Afghan nation had to have if it was to succeed in putting itself back together.”

It was also a hopeful moment for the international community. ISAF, a small NATO force operating under a UN mandate, arrived to police the capital in late 2001. At the final session of the
loya jirga
, Mines noticed, the most enthusiastic applause was reserved for the commander of ISAF. After years of factional fighting and the near-destruction of Kabul, Afghans were grateful to see a force that was neutral and impartial. ISAF's mandate, however, extended only to the capital and its environs; outside Kabul, local warlords still held sway.

The triumph of the
loya jirga
was marred by a tragic event shortly afterward: the bombing of a wedding party at a village in Oruzgan by U.S. aircraft. The guests had been firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, a celebratory gesture the pilots mistook as an attack. Dozens of guests were killed.
23
It was not the first time civilians had been targeted by mistake: In December, U.S. forces acting on a tip from a local informant attacked a convoy in Paktia Province. But it was not a Taliban convoy; the trucks were actually ferrying a group of elders to Kabul to celebrate the inauguration of Karzai. It was a classic case of score settling: An informant had set U.S. troops up to kill off a rival.
24

Not long after the
loya jirga
, the embassy hosted a visit from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. When an officer briefed the deputy secretary on the Oruzgan bombing, Wolfowitz quickly grew irritated. Why, he asked, had the briefers accepted the reports of civilian casualties at face value? Couldn't the Taliban have faked the incident? Perhaps it was staged to make the coalition look bad, he suggested. Did anyone actually
see
the bodies? Wolfowitz would hear none of it, and he chastised the group for falling for what, in his view, might easily have been Taliban propaganda. The people in the room were “stunned,” Mines recalled.
*

In public, at least, senior officials paid lip service to the importance of preventing civilian casualties. In a public town hall meeting during his visit to Afghanistan, Wolfowitz told a reporter, “We are always concerned when we believe that we may have killed innocent people. And we think that probably happened in that incident and we deeply regret that. But we have no regrets whatsoever about going after terrorists, or people who harbor terrorists. And we have really very little doubt that there were such people in that area. It was a combat zone. Bad things happen in combat zones.”
25

Wolfowitz's attitude to Afghanistan's political end-state was even more revealing. The briefers cued up a slide for the high-level visitor that posed the crucial question: Would Afghanistan be a partner or a platform in the war on terror? Thus far, Afghanistan had been a launching pad, a base for a military campaign against al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies. Mines and his colleagues wanted to argue for a more robust state-building effort in Afghanistan: helping build state institutions and backing a capable national army under the control of the central government. At this point Karzai was the mayor of Kabul; most of Afghanistan was still ruled by strongmen who controlled private militias. And this task would require a commitment to extend the influence of the national government into the provinces, Special Forces soldiers to train and advise the new Afghan security forces, and civilian experts who could advise the new government on everything from education to agriculture.

But as the briefers quickly realized, the Pentagon leadership had already moved on from Afghanistan, and the focus had shifted to planning the campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Special Forces teams were needed elsewhere, and Afghanistan's military would have to do with secondhand equipment and an “economy of force” contingent. A vigorous state-building effort would have to wait. A question lingered for the next several years: What would have happened in Afghanistan if the United States had committed more resources early on, and not become distracted by Iraq? Would it have successfully kept the Taliban at bay—and kept Afghanistan from sliding back into war?

*
In the weeks and months after the toppling of the Taliban regime, an operation in which Special Forces teams played an outsize role, it was easy to forget that for much of the 1990s, Special Operations had been something of a professional backwater. The world of Special Forces was also obscured by Hollywood mythmaking and its soldiers' depiction in the media as super-soldiers. One of the main missions, at least before Afghanistan, was the rather unglamorous work of “foreign internal defense”: weeks and months spent patiently schooling ragtag third world armies in basic infantry tactics. As much as this task required good soldiering skills—and the Special Forces were very good at it—it also required some cultural sophistication and foreign-language skills. Along with the Civil Affairs teams and a small corps of Foreign Area Officers (military officers with advanced degrees in regional studies who worked as military attachés inside U.S. embassies) they were the Pentagon's informal diplomats, and its most experienced nation builders.

*
This section draws in part on
Wingtips on the Ground
, an unpublished memoir by Mines, who kindly gave permission to quote from his manuscript.

*
Asked about his recollection of the briefing, Wolfowitz told me through an intermediary that Mines's story “doesn't square with his recollection of this event from eight years ago,” without offering any further account of what happened at the meeting.

CHAPTER  2

The PowerPoint Warrior

The cavernous, air-conditioned auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington was packed to capacity with Pentagon bureaucrats, defense contractors, and men and women in dress uniform. Covering a naval research and development conference was not the most exciting reporting assignment, but Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, was scheduled to deliver the keynote address that day. After fortifying myself with cheap coffee and a stale bagel, I made my way into the hall and sank into a plush chair. I was prepared to doze quietly through another dull PowerPoint briefing.

Then the man in the mock turtleneck took the stage. Thomas Barnett, an obscure strategist with the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, strolled in front of the massive screen and cued up a slide. I was jolted in my seat by a jarring sound effect:
ching-ching!
the ominous prison-door clang from the crime procedural
Law & Order
.

For an audience used to monochromatic PowerPoint presentations from Pentagon officials, Barnett's approach was something completely different: He prowled the stage restlessly with a wireless microphone, punching out his talking points with the patter of a Silicon Valley tech guru. He liked to use catchphrases (“disconnectedness defines danger”) and Thomas Friedman-isms (Osama bin Laden and his ilk, he said, were “super-empowered individuals”). Key points were punctuated by an audio sample (“Yeah, baby!”) from an Austin Powers movie. Barnett's style was over-the-top, but he was delivering an important message to the military and the defense industry: “We're a military that's built to fight other nation-states, other militaries,” he said. “The security market has fractured dramatically over time.”

It had already become a cliché to say that the world changed on September 11, 2001. But the Pentagon had not really changed as an institution. While U.S. troops were engaged in an unconventional war in Afghanistan, the Defense Department was still groping for an adversary worthy of an annual budget of roughly four hundred billion dollars. A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military was geared primarily toward conventional, state-on-state conflict. Air wings, Army divisions, and carrier battle groups were all trained and equipped for high-end warfare, and the Pentagon's guiding strategy document, the
2001 Quadrennial Defense Review
, still viewed China as a potential “peer competitor” that might someday challenge the United States.

Barnett had little patience with talk of a looming great-power struggle with China or a resurgent Russia that would provide an organizing principle for the Pentagon. “China and the United States going at it, out of the blue, is a load of crap in my mind,” he said. The United States, he argued, was already deeply involved in a very new kind of war that would refashion the way the United States would be engaged in the world. And things would be that way for a long time.

Take, for instance, the new military outposts established on the periphery of the former Soviet Union to support Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Although administration officials insisted they had no plans to maintain a permanent presence in Central Asia—in part out of deference to local political sensitivities—Barnett was blunt about the new U.S. military presence in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. He predicted that the United States would be in these new outposts for decades to come. “I believe fifty years from now, [those bases] will be as familiar to us as Ramstein Air Force Base,” he said, referring to one of the giant U.S. installations in Germany. It was an arresting prediction, particularly considering the Bush administration's efforts to portray those bases as a temporary expediency for the war on terror. And it was particularly startling to hear it from a Pentagon strategist.