Armed Humanitarians (9 page)

Georgia's first postindependence president was Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a onetime Soviet political prisoner and literature professor. Gamsakhurdia was no dissident in the Vaclav Havel mold; he was erratic and dictatorial, and he shut down opposition newspapers and jailed political opponents. Ethnic minorities in the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia particularly loathed Gamsakhurdia, who attracted some especially nationalistic followers. Georgia was soon faced with separatist movements on several fronts, including the resort region of Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast and the mountainous enclave of South Ossetia, just an hour's drive north of the capital, Tbilisi. The country was divided into armed camps.

Ousted after a round of street-fighting in 1992, Gamsakhurdia sought refuge across the border, in Russia's Chechen Republic, where a mercurial former Soviet Air Force general named Dzhokhar Dudayev was leading a campaign for independence from Moscow. Gamsakhurdia died under mysterious circumstances in 1993—perhaps a suicide, perhaps killed by his own supporters—as Georgia became engulfed in a ruinous civil war. By the early 1990s, the Mkhedrioni, a militia run by a posturing thug named Jaba Ioseliani, had emerged as Georgia's most powerful military force. Ioseliani, who had been convicted of bank robbery in Leningrad, styled himself as a playwright and an intellectual. His fighters, accessorized with Armani knockoffs and heavy weaponry, had a preference for running extortion and protection rackets. They were very good at intimidating ordinary Georgians, but were an absolute failure as a military force. Ragtag separatist armies in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, sometimes with assistance from Russia, succeeded in beating back the Georgian military and driving ethnic Georgians from their homes.

By the late 1990s, those ethnic conflicts had cooled down—or at least, the separatist boundaries were frozen in place, leaving hundreds of thousands of Georgians displaced from their homes. Georgia had stabilized somewhat under the rule of President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former secretary general of the Georgian Communist Party and onetime member of the Soviet Politburo. Shevardnadze, known as the “Silver Fox” for his political longevity, was well known in Western capitals: He served as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, and played a key role in allowing the Warsaw Pact states to go their own way during the wave of democratic transformations that swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

Shevardnadze was a canny political operator, and he had cultivated closer ties with the United States. Under his leadership, Georgia joined the Partnership for Peace, a club for NATO aspirants, and he signed off on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a new route for transporting Caspian oil from Azerbaijan that was favored by the United States. Still, despite paying lip service to democracy, Georgia under Shevardnadze was something of a gangster's paradise. The old nomenklatura was still a presence, and corruption and cronyism were a fact of life. Seen from afar, Georgia sometimes looked like Havana under Fulgencio Batista: exotic yet familiar, freewheeling and corrupt, a place to celebrate life or go on vacation, but certainly not a smart place to invest your money.
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In 1998, AES, a U.S.-based global power company founded by two veterans of the U.S. Department of Energy, won a tender to oversee the privatization of Telasi, the electricity distribution company in Georgia's capital city, Tbilisi. The whole AES Telasi exercise was a fiasco: Georgian customers, pensioners and large state enterprises alike, were used to receiving power for free; Georgia relied heavily on power imported from Russia, and its energy distribution infrastructure was a shambles. A metering scheme introduced by AES was a flop, especially when official monthly salaries were often less than a monthly electricity bill. Power outages were a routine part of life, and candlelight ceased to be romantic for the beleaguered Georgians. It was an unhappy first encounter with globalization and American know-how.
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In Barnett's terms, Georgia was a classic “gap” state: It was poorly integrated in the global economy, and its main trading partner was Russia, which hardly made it a promising model for greater global connectivity. In mid-2002, it was to become a laboratory for the U.S. government to remake this impoverished republic in its own image.

In late April of 2002, the U.S. Defense Department announced a major new initiative: the Georgia Train and Equip Program, an effort to build a new Georgian military from scratch. The program would begin in the classroom: U.S. advisors would lead a course for the Georgian military staff to ensure that Georgia's Land Forces Command, Border Guards, and other security agencies had professional staff organizations capable of communicating with NATO militaries and with each other. The advisors would then start building individual Georgian army units, one battalion at a time. Army Special Forces soldiers would do most of the hands-on training, teaching Georgian recruits battlefield first aid, radio procedures, land navigation, and marksmanship. By graduation, Georgians would be able to master small-unit infantry tactics, and a smaller, more capable group would be trained as commandos.

For a country of Georgia's size, the scope of the program was ambitious: The first phase of the program was valued at $64 million, a relative pittance by Pentagon standards, but a substantial amount of money for Georgia—several times greater than the country's regular annual defense budget. And in addition to training, the United States would provide weapons and ammunition to the Georgians, as well as around a dozen Vietnam-vintage UH-1 Huey helicopters. That fall, as the training program got under way, I traveled to Georgia to see firsthand what this experiment looked like.

Out at the Krtsanisi training range, a former Soviet tank-driving range on the southern outskirts of Tbilisi, the U.S. military trainers wore holstered sidearms. The pistols, I was told, were for self-protection against stray dogs that tended to wander around the dilapidated compound. Krtsanisi was the main venue for Georgia Train and Equip Program, a state-building exercise that was being overseen by soldiers from the Tenth Special Forces Group. When I arrived in October 2002, the trainers had been here for only a few months; the Georgia Train and Equip Program was still in its infancy, as was the new Georgian military.

Out on the firing range, the Georgian recruits were lined up in their mix-and-match uniforms. Some had old Soviet desert fatigues that looked like hand-me-downs from the 1980s war in Afghanistan; a few had U.S. Army surplus uniforms. On the range, Sergeant First Class Keith Peterson patiently helped one of the Georgians zero his rifle, a basic exercise in rifle marksmanship. Peering into his spotting scope at a paper target 100 meters downrange, Peterson ordered the trainee to squeeze off another round; a Georgian translator relayed the order to the trainee, whose scruffy Puma sneakers showed beneath his camouflage uniform.
Crack!
The trainee flinched from the recoil. “Is he jerking?” asked Peterson. The translator relayed some more instructions; Peterson then ordered another shot. After another shot downrange, Peterson looked satisfied that his student's rifle sights were correctly aligned: “That weapon is zeroed.”

The exercise at the firing range required an extra bit of patience: Special Forces soldiers had to work through a team of around two dozen Georgian interpreters who translated their instructions into the exotic Caucasus language. While working in Georgian was something new, training foreign militaries was nothing particularly novel for the Special Forces, who in peacetime had become the Pentagon's dedicated cadre of soldier-diplomats. Special Forces troops were all required to acquire at least one foreign language: Training third world militaries, a mission called “foreign internal defense,” was one of their primary jobs. It was a valuable and relatively low-cost sort of military exchange program. U.S. Special Operations Command would routinely send small teams on Joint Combined Exchange Training exercises, or JCETs (“jay-sets”) to dozens of countries around the world, usually for a few weeks at a time. Local militaries would receive invaluable training from some of the best tacticians in the business. As a quid pro quo the Special Forces would build contacts with local officers and NCOs, and familiarize themselves with a terrain they might someday find themselves operating in.

The Georgia Train and Equip Program was a JCET on steroids. Most JCETs involved small teams of around a dozen or so Special Forces troops, although some larger exercises might involve a few more soldiers. The Georgia program soon involved a total of around 150 trainers. (In terms of the number of uniformed personnel, it was closer in size to the U.S. involvement in Colombia, which had been a major recipient of U.S. military aid as part of a massive counternarcotics program, Plan Colombia. In early 2002, the Defense Department had around 250 uniformed personnel stationed in Colombia, a country with nearly ten times the population of Georgia.
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The Georgia Train and Equip Program was also a major opportunity for the Pentagon's logistics support contractors. U.S. trainers enjoyed hot meals in a shiny new mess hall built by KBR, the subsidiary of the Houston-based oil services company Halliburton that had been scouting Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan earlier that spring. Prefabricated buildings were parked around the camp, which was a hub of construction activity. A contingent of KBR contractors lived on the base, and they could also be spotted cruising around downtown Tbilisi in their SUVs. At Betsy's, a boutique hotel overlooking Tbilisi's main boulevard, the influx of Defense Department money was the talk of American expatriates who gathered to trade gossip over Saperavi wine. Well-paid jobs out at Krtsanisi were there for the asking, especially for anyone with any Georgian language skills and familiarity with Tbilisi. AES Telasi may have been a failed venture, but U.S. military involvement meant that there would be no shortage of lucrative expat jobs in Tbilisi.

Georgian troops were not the only recipients of American largesse. At the Tbilisi Marriott, a smartly refurbished hotel on Tbilisi's Rustaveli Boulevard, I met a U.S. government consultant who was working with Georgian government officials to help create the Georgian equivalent of a U.S. National Security Council. The program, he told me, had the backing of U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The idea was to create U.S.-style institutions in the post-Soviet state and to ensure a smooth succession of power when Shevardnadze left office in 2005. The United States had an eye on this region, and wanted to be sure it knew the key players in the next administration.

What, exactly, was the reason for lavishing strategic attention on this tiny country of around four and a half million people on the southern edge of the former Soviet Union? The ostensible reason was the Pankisi Gorge. This mountainous corner of northeastern Georgia was the traditional home of the Kists, ethnic cousins of the Chechens. When Russia launched a second campaign to reclaim the breakaway Chechen Republic in 1999, the Pankisi Gorge became a safe haven for Chechen refugees and a staging area for some Chechen rebels. After September 11, reports surfaced of Arab jihadis who had filtered into the region to turn it into a regional base. Whether al-Qaeda ever had a serious foothold in the Pankisi is now in doubt, but a somewhat lurid account in
Time
magazine described an al-Qaeda operation in Pankisi Gorge as belonging to

a multi-layered, interlocking, region-wide organizational structure, with decentralized planning and procurement systems. The Pankisi groups, using sophisticated satellite-based and encrypted communications, sometimes concentrated on their own operations—including refugee work and recruiting for Khattab, the Saudi-born guerrilla commander in Chechnya believed to have been close to Osama bin Laden. At other times they lent a hand to the broader “jihad” against the U.S. and its allies. For the Pankisi operatives, this meant trying to target U.S. and western interests in Russia and Central Asia using poison and bombs.
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The idea, then, was to get the Georgians to do their bit for the Bush administration's Global War on Terror. That, at least was the official line: Georgia was not supposed to use U.S. military assistance to attempt to regain control of secessionist territories like Abkhazia or South Ossetia. That kind of move might spark a full-scale war with Russia, which overtly backed the secessionists in the guise of “peacekeeping” forces stationed in the breakaway republics. U.S. trainers were adamant that they were there for training purposes, not to help the Georgians build proficiency and weapons stockpiles to retake the rebel territories by force. In an interview from Tbilisi, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Waltemeyer, the commander of the first U.S. training group, said his men would account for “every bullet” in the program. “We're not leaving war stocks here,” he promised.

The Georgia Train and Equip Mission, then, was a form of preventive state building: The United States would help Georgia better police its borders, making it a less attractive place for extremists to do business. This was exactly what Barnett's vision of the “SysAdmin” hybrid looked like: Americans quietly helping a poorly developed (or, in his parlance, a “disconnected”) country better control its territory, ensuring that it did not become a haven for transnational terrorists. During an appearance at the Pentagon with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, the Georgian minister of defense, David Tevzadze, strayed a bit from the script. Asked about al-Qaeda's phantom presence in the country, the minister said, “You know, actually, for me personally, it is very difficult to believe in that, because to come from Afghanistan to that part of Georgia, they need to [cross] at least six or seven countries, including [the] Caspian Sea. No, al-Qaeda influence can't be in the country.”

So some wishful thinking was at work here: The Georgians were eager recipients of money, training, and expertise, and they were willing to play along with the convenient fiction that the Pankisi Gorge was a hotbed of international terrorism, al-Qaeda's strategic outpost between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. And U.S. policymakers seemed to overlook the fact that the program would be training and equipping a country with an unresolved civil war on its hands. Tevzadze denied that training by U.S. forces might be used in any effort to reclaim separatist regions such as the self-proclaimed Republic of Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast. The Georgian military didn't intend to deploy U.S.-trained troops there because, Tevzadze said, “at least in the nearest future, we will not … try to come to a military resolution of the problem.”