The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  For my part, I could not have wished for a higher-value target, short of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself. I said, by all means, send the letter to General McNeill.

  A few days passed and I got another call from Bill. “General McNeill wants to see you.” I later found out how it had gone, McNeill’s response to my letter, a rant: “What does she think, we believe Shirzai? We trust the guy? A guy who’s got a used-car salesman with a bad toupee for a sidekick? Does she think we trust any of them? But what’s the alternative? And what about her, in with the Karzais? I can think of one of them who’s making a whole pile of money out of our presence in Kandahar…” And on and on in this vein till the very end, when he suddenly asked: “When can I see her?”

  I took the next plane to Kabul.

  We met at the embassy, attended by a note taker named Tim. On his lapel, General McNeill wore a stickpin from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. That was his silent handshake across the divide, his signal that we belong to the same species after all.

  I have never been especially adept at the unspoken; I always insist on spelling things ponderously out. So I reached for the much more unwieldy tool of words. “General,” I ventured, “before I say anything else, I want you to understand that I am with you. I consider myself to be on your team. I’m not allergic to men in uniform. If I sound harsh, it’s a harshness that comes from disappointment, not knee-jerk opposition. Almost the way I’d be harsh with my own family.”

  McNeill seemed to take this in.

  I was burning to know if what the Special Forces officer told me out at Kandahar Airfield represented the position of the U.S. Army. McNeill, with a hint of a grimace, remarked that he had been having “some trouble” with that Special Forces team, and would be glad to see the back of them. From his response, it seemed clear that the SF soldier was speaking substantially for himself regarding the myriad virutes of Gul Agha Shirzai.

  A bit reassured, I pounced on what seemed to be the most immediate fire to put out: Helmand.

  “Governor Shir Mahmad did not order the assassination of those two troopers,” I told McNeill, “there’s just no way.” General McNeill confirmed that he had aborted the Special Forces plan. He had ordered SF not to move on the governor, he told me, a spark of self-satisfaction in his voice.

  Picking up on the tone, I suddenly glimpsed another divide between Americans, this one within the U.S. military itself. General McNeill was supreme commander of Coalition troops in Afghanistan. And yet Special Forces, the outfit that was conducting the greatest proportion of combat operations, did not answer directly to him. Special Forces, cohabiting with regular army troops on the U.S. bases at Baghram and Kandahar, roaming about bearded and grubby in the Afghan countryside, had its own separate chain of command, and answered to its own chief in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  So. Here’s another factor thwarting the coordination of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. I sighed. Though General McNeill did not say so explicitly, he made it plain that he shared my frustration.

  The subject of Gul Agha Shirzai was, of course, the elephant splashing water on its back in the middle of our conversation. McNeill was clear. “We are here to support President Karzai. Shirzai is President Karzai’s governor, and so long as he is President Karzai’s governor, we will support him.” I launched into my argument that intermediate steps existed between removing Shirzai and writing him a blank check.

  I pointed out, for example, that Kandahar has legitimate security forces: the army and the police. These forces had legal status under the 1964 constitution, which was supposed to be governing Afghanistan until a new one was written. In Kandahar, President Karzai deliberately took these legitimate security forces out of Shirzai’s hands and placed them under someone else’s command. Shirzai, by setting up his own private militias that now compete with these forces, was actually engaged in an act of rebellion. Collaborating so closely with his illegal militias, the U.S. military was not working for the central government, but against it. “Those militias should be disarmed,” I said.

  I had had this conversation with military intelligence officers in Kandahar, and they had vehemently agreed. They had even worked up an operational plan for doing the job, which fell under the disarmament and demobilization mandate of the international community. But I could tell from General McNeill’s expression that no such vigorous action was in the cards.

  On the other hand, past the party line, he did display undisguised distaste for the caliber of most Afghan government officials. An opinion he let slip late in our discussion indicated—so starkly as to give me a jolt—that he included the Karzais with the rest.

  The conversation went on, for a long time. I offered McNeill several openings to wrap it up politely, but he did not, circling instead from policy to personal antecedents and back around to policy. Finally he told me he wanted me to see his commander in Kandahar, a Colonel John Camp-bell. “A very competent youngster,” McNeill styled him, a man he said he himself would be proud to serve under, very smart. “Don’t get me wrong,” he hastened to add, “he’s a warrior. But he is intelligent. A good conversationalist.”

  Army style, McNeill made it happen. Within days of my return to Kandahar, I had an appointment to see the base commander. I was bringing my Ghiljai elders out for a meet-and-greet with a Civil Affairs captain, so we decided to make a day of it.

  Colonel Campbell proved to be every bit of what McNeill had promised. At first, our conversation was a little more awkward than the channel that had miraculously opened with the general. Maybe the fact that I had been forced on Campbell from on high put his back up. Maybe he was embarrassed that the Letter to Washington snafu had happened on his watch. He had read it, of course, so he knew where I was coming from.

  We quickly abandoned territory-marking preliminaries, however, in favor of a remarkable frankness. Campbell, his hair shaved to the length and consistency of peach fuzz, his arched eyebrows expressing most of his reactions, was listening. His questions were direct. In reply, I was more detailed about the ways in which the exclusive U.S. relationship with Shirzai and his gang undermined the central government and undermined what the colonel was trying to accomplish in southern Afghanistan.

  Campbell absorbed my points. And he turned and quietly asked the Civil Affairs captain sitting in on the meeting: “How did we let this happen?”

  He turned back to me. “Tell me three things I can do, right now, to make things better.” I found five on the tip of my tongue. The first was to open up a direct channel with Akrem.

  “Provide training for the Kandahar police force,” I said. Akrem had been begging for this kind of help for months. I had spent time with him, drawing up an organization chart of his department, listing the most-needed skills. “My men are fighters,” he would say; “they don’t know how to conduct criminal investigations—they don’t know how to direct traffic, for that matter. They need to be trained in the ways of a civilian institution of law and order.”

  Here was an irony. Long before I had met Akrem, back in the first months of 2002, before I had even returned to Afghanistan to live, I had entertained a fantasy. I wanted to get U.S. cops to train their Kandahari counterparts. I wanted to make a symbol out of it. I thought: what if we get the New York City Police Department, the NYPD, to adopt the Kandahar police department. What if those heroic New York City cops came to the very place where the 9/11 attack was planned, and waded in and helped forge their counterparts into the police force of a new, democratic Afghanistan. What a phenomenal way to build a bridge out of the rubble of September 11. But the enormity of it daunted me. I did not know anyone in New York municipal government. I did not know whom to approach. Besides, in the postwar division of labor, the United States had been assigned the Afghan National Army to nurture, and Germany was put in charge of the police. A full year later, nothing had happened. Desperate, Akrem had set up a training facility himself, till he ran out of money. By now, with still no Germans in sight, there seemed to
be no reason why the U.S. Army should not step into the void.

  Idea number two for Colonel Campbell was for him to break his exclusive bonds with Governor Shirzai’s private militia. Diversify, I told him. Work with other Afghan units. Even if, as seemed to be the case, constructive, reliable commanders were scarce in the regular forces, the United States would be less vulnerable to manipulation.

  I told him to stop systematically turning low-level suspected insurgents over to Gul Agha’s forces, since that gave them an incentive to point the Americans toward their personal opponents, calling them Taliban. I told the colonel to start meeting with tribal elders, for they were the leaders respected by the community. Finally, I advised him to work to target reconstruction contracts so as to benefit a cross section of the population.

  When I was done, Colonel Campbell leaned back and looked at me, levelly. “We make mistakes,” he said. “But I think you will see that we also have a procedure for trying to catch and correct them.”

  It was a fair point. What civilian NGO has postoperation assessment built into its mode of functioning? Of course, the military did not always get it right. Defensiveness in the glare of the media’s occasionally harsh light, or impunity in its absence, left grave faults to grow, fester, and metastasize. The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq is an egregious case in point. Still, the procedure does exist and compared not so badly to the ways of self-righteous humanitarians, myself included, who use the angelic nature of their self-sacrifice to cover everything from excessive salaries to an utter lack of accountability, as they mount the steps, measured off in one-year assignments, of their careers in the burgeoning aid industry.

  Colonel Campbell was as good as his word. He told the Civil Affairs captain, a Niagara Falls police officer in civilian life, to get together with Akrem and see about designing a training program. The captain did so, though nothing ever came of it; he was more interested in the intelligence-gathering opportunities the relationship offered. Campbell asked me to draw up a chart depicting the main tribes in the region. To my dumbfounded amazement, there was no such information available to the U.S. army in Kandahar—almost a year and a half after its arrival there.

  Hearing that I had arranged for a group of elders to come onto the base that very day, Colonel Campbell suggested that maybe he should stop by. He did so, at perhaps the most surreally awkward moment of a meeting that had kicked off a bit awkwardly anyway. The Civil Affairs captain had arrayed Formica tables with foldout metal legs in a U around a makeshift conference room—partitioned off in plywood from the main terminal building, which, despite some blackened spots left over from the anti–Al-Qaeda bombing, housed most of the army’s offices. It was lunchtime, and in deference to the notion that Afghans might eat at lunchtime, the captain had placed cardboard trays of raisins and blueberry muffins and stacks of packaged PowerBars at intervals around the tables. Fifteen venerable Ghiljai elders considered this unhabitual arrangement, and gamely found places upon folding metal chairs arranged around the tables.

  The captain had made the effort to avoid Shirzai’s interpreters, bringing a middle-aged Afghan American instead, who proved to be both not too bright and a native of eastern Afghanistan, so the elders’ broad Kandahar accent was a trial for him.

  The captain’s attempt at a fulsome greeting completed, and the response of the group’s president underway, an odd noise began emanating from one of my favorite elders, Tukhi, with his wide, solemn eyes and enormous beard. It was a kind of moaning sound, punctuated by ragged breaths. Then he collapsed.

  We had just gotten him laid out on the ground when Colonel Campbell arrived, for once absolutely ignored upon his appearance in a room. He quickly sized up the situation and brought order to the frightened pandemonium, commanding the two soldiers who had arrived with a stretcher to stop gawking and get a move on, and reassuring the elders that he had some “pretty good docs here” who would get their friend “back in shape.”

  Then he took over the meeting, running it with dignity, patience, and natural grace. “What you’re telling me,” he said after carefully hearing the elders out, “is that because the U.S. troops are working so closely with one tribe, the rest of the Afghans are losing faith in them. Is that it?” He said he wished he had held this meeting earlier.

  It proved to be the first of several that Colonel Campbell would convene with Kandahar-area elders.

  The episode helped me reach another realization about the role of the U.S. military in places like Afghanistan. Two issues regarding the U.S. military presence are being confounded in the minds of many Westerners, I suddenly perceived, and they need to be disentangled. One is a theoretical question, a subject that requires serious deliberation and debate inside the United States. That question is, do we, as American citizens, wish to have the bulk of our foreign policy conducted by the Department of Defense? It is a crucial question for us as a nation, and it ought to be explicitly addressed and pronounced upon in the United States.2

  But how to interact with U.S. troops in theater was, at least for me as an American, a separate issue. For on the ground in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense was conducting the bulk of our foreign policy. Concretely, the sheer numbers made this truth incontrovertible. Upward of 5,000 U.S. soldiers were stationed in Kandahar. And one State Department representative. Even the newly constituted U.S. embassy, graced by the likes of Bill Taylor, could hardly make an impression next to the massive footprint of the U.S. military. For all intents and purposes, U.S. foreign policy was in the army’s hands. And no amount of hostility directed by civilians at soldiers on the ground was going to change that.

  There was just one problem. Whoever it was in Washington who had decided upon this state of affairs or allowed it to evolve, had neglected to inform the U.S. Army. Men like Colonel Campbell were trained in the skills of enemy engagement, battlefield tactics, military planning—not in politics and diplomacy. And they were being expected to do a job that had not even been properly defined for them. This was why so many of their decisions, like the empowerment of men like Gul Agha Shirzai, were ill adapted to the peacetime nation-building dimension of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

  Arguably, a Colonel Campbell should have caught on a little more quickly, but now that he had, now that he was grasping the true dimensions and potential import of his mission, he was struggling to catch up.

  When, about six months later, in December 2003, I found myself sitting opposite another colonel, Richard Pedersen, in his office at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, I made this point explicitly. “I’m not sure this is what you signed up for, Colonel, but you’re the one who’s going to be running U.S. foreign policy out there. And you had better prepare yourself for it.”

  “I don’t like it,” he answered, “but I think you’re right.”

  Pedersen’s unit, Bronco Brigade, Twenty-fifth Light Infantry Division, was on its way to Kandahar, and I had been flown out to brief its officers. I was at Schofield Barracks for three days, and could not have asked for a more attentive reception. I must have spent fully eight hours closeted with the colonel, who liked to learn orally, interacting with someone. His penetrating, rapid-fire questions led us all over the map that we had dug up and spread out on his desk. He introduced my talks to two successive groups of officers, seated at dozens of round tables after lunch at the base club, throwing a mantle of benediction over me with his generous words. I was a soldier too, he told his troops, working out there in Kandahar “without benefit of five thousand of her closest friends for protection.” I spent a lot of time with the division Civil Affairs team. And I drew up a longer and more complete version of the chart of the local tribes I had drafted for Colonel Campbell back in Kandahar.

  The only thing that bothered me about this whole experience was that it had come about entirely by accident. A friend from my days in the Balkans was enrolled at the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and had suggested me as a guest speaker. I
was suddenly battling my worst stage fright since that original talk at First Parish Church in Concord, standing in front of a roomful of men in uniform. Concord citizens were my people, but I had no idea how what I had to say would go over with army majors.

  Past a cold, slightly halting start, the talk went great. It appeared that previous guest speakers, general officers as a rule, had rarely given it to them so straight.

  One member of the audience was from the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, and made the contact with battalion HQ out in Hawaii—ending his e-mail to Schofield Barracks with terms of praise I would never have imagined reaping: “She’s like no journalist you’ve ever seen,” he enthused. “She’s a hawk!”

  My point is this: I wound up briefing the Twenty-fifth by way of a coincidence. No concerted effort was being made to educate the army about the radically new duties that had been thrust upon it. With $178 billion in defense authorizations for 2004, almost nothing was earmarked for the acquisition of knowledge about the place where the troops would be investing the next year of their lives—about its languages, its history or culture, about what was currently at stake there. None of the GIs I talked to out at the base in Kandahar had received such training.

  It is not that I, personally, knew so much. But, given the hybrid nature of the mission the army was now being asked to perform, the type of information and experience possessed by maybe a dozen people who had recently spent real time on the ground in Afghanistan had a new value. It seemed to me that such learning should be actively sought out, not just encountered by accident. It should be paid for, just as the latest in weapons technology is paid for. It seemed to me that as long as the Defense Department is conducting U.S. foreign policy, officers should be taught about the foreign land upon which their actions will have such a lasting impact.