The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan. The program did many things there, but intelligence gathering was certainly one of them. Not just, on occasion, the old-school, find-the-enemy kind of intelligence, but—in what were perhaps the program’s finest moments—the cultural, demographic, and political context that could transform inscrutable Afghanistan into a place with an intact social structure and clear mechanisms for conveying power, much like anywhere else. There were bright spots, but in the end, the Human Terrain System would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence. Within a few months of my visit to Helmand, a Human Terrain Team member was fired after refusing to turn off her reading light during a night mission, attempting to reprimand a marine for what she viewed as inappropriate treatment of a troublesome Afghan, and spending three hours getting her hair braided in an Afghan compound while marines stood guard outside. One of her teammates, a Vietnam veteran, was sent home after he pulled a knife on a British soldier in a tent the men were sharing. By February 2010, the Marine colonel who supervised the Human Terrain Team at Leatherneck wrote in an email to a program official that the program’s effort in Helmand “is a mess and I think the guys in Kabul are full of crap. If I were king for the day, then I would start firing people at the top. . . . I am still an advocate for HTT but my patience is wearing thin. If HTT fails in Helmand, then I am not sure the program should continue to exist at all.”

  * * *

  War is a form of hysteria to which no industry is more susceptible than defense contracting. Suddenly there is money for everything, but political will is fickle, Congress mercurial, and manufacturers and program developers must move fast before the funding dries up. The moment calls for speed, and speed calls for cutting corners.

  The Human Terrain System had grown too fast. In early 2007, Steve Fondacaro had accompanied the first team to Afghanistan. Soon after, the military wanted twenty-six teams instead of the original five. “We thought we had five teams and two years to build them, and it turned out we had to build twenty-six teams immediately,” McFate told me. “It was kind of catastrophic.” Recruitment was shoddy, and there were no systems in place to handle training and deploying so many teams. She and Fondacaro argued over how to proceed. ‘Look, this is expanding too fast,’ McFate says she told him. ‘We need to slow it down.’ They had been asked to provide Human Terrain Teams “that are going to be functional,” she told me, yet too many basic questions about how the teams should be trained and how they would operate in the field remained unanswered. But the massive, heavy gears of the Pentagon had already begun to turn. Soldiers were dying, and the Army wanted what it wanted, and wanted it now.

  In 2006, before the first Human Terrain Team shipped out for Afghanistan, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office had described the proposed teams in detail. Years later, two things about that debut article in Military Review stand out. The first is its frankness about the close connection between the Human Terrain System and military intelligence, a connection that program officials repeatedly denied. The second is its precision about the area-specific qualifications that Human Terrain Team members would purportedly possess. As the people who ultimately ran the Human Terrain System would find out, only a handful of people with detailed sociocultural knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan existed in the United States. Many had already taken other, better-paying jobs in the defense industry, and a significant number of social scientists, particularly anthropologists, refused to work in an active war zone for the U.S. military. Jacob Kipp, the former director of the Foreign Military Studies Office, had been one of the article’s authors. At the time, he told me, he had been thinking primarily about the Army’s needs in Iraq. He knew several qualified reservists who spoke Arabic; he knew hardly any who spoke Pashto. And therein lay a revelation. The article was not shy about the need for intelligence skills on Human Terrain Teams because, at the time, its authors intended to staff the Human Terrain Teams not with civilian social scientists but with military reservists, for whom involvement in the intelligence cycle would be no big deal. But using reservists ultimately proved impossible. Once the Human Terrain idea gained currency, the ranks of qualified reservists couldn’t keep pace with the Army’s demand for teams. “Once we began to sell it, it got very popular,” Kipp told me, “and we had to look at another way of finding people to do it.”

  I met colonels and generals who talked about the Human Terrain System as if it were the best thing that had ever happened to the Army. They included Colonel Martin Schweitzer, who had been so thrilled with the accomplishments of the first Human Terrain Team, and Colonel Mike Howard, one of the most experienced American officers I met in Afghanistan. Howard had served three previous tours there, and he had gotten to know the eastern part of the country well. During his fourth rotation in late 2009, the Human Terrain Team attached to his brigade in Khost had mutinied, refusing to work for a team leader they considered incompetent. Howard had to personally phone Fondacaro back in the States to get the team leader fired and bring in a replacement. Nevertheless, Howard was a big supporter of the teams. “My only criticism is there’s not enough of them,” he told me. Mike Flynn, a sharp, contrarian general who served as the chief of NATO intelligence under McChrystal and Petraeus, shared Howard’s view. In January 2010, Flynn published a paper calling for “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself—from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan.” Because the U.S. military had directed most of its intelligence efforts at insurgents, the intelligence community “still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade,” Flynn and his coauthors wrote. “This problem or its consequences exist at every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not making it to those who need it.” More than eight years into the war, the intelligence community remained “[i]gnorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers—whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers.”

  Human Terrain Teams could help solve these problems, Flynn believed. He called them an “extraordinary capability.” “Whoever had that idea was a genius,” he told me. What made the teams so valuable was precisely the fact that many of their members weren’t “intel people,” by which Flynn meant collectors or analysts who had spent their whole lives narrowly focusing on the enemy. “They’re different and they’re willing to take the risk,” Flynn told me. “And these are people that absolutely have much better things to do, but they decided that they want to serve.”

  Did the people staffing Human Terrain Teams have much better things to do? Some did and some didn’t. Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights, but an equal or larger number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. If McFate knew that the pace of the Human Terrain System’s growth was catastrophic, why didn’t she and Fondacaro tell the Defense Department it couldn’t be done at that speed? McFate and Fondacaro had told me that their recruitment process was crippled by an overly generous contract with BAE Systems, which got paid to find and hire potential Human Terrain Team members—a contract that was already in place when they started building the program. BAE kept sending the Human Terrain System unqualified candidates, including an eighty-two-year-old man and a woman who had been charged with vehicular manslaughter, but there were no accountability mechanisms in the contract when such problems arose. Convinced that the project’s failures stemmed from weak hiring practices, McFate and Fondacaro had tried unsuccessfully to detach the Human Terrain System from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, which had signed the contract with BAE. Yet all the while,
they kept promoting the program as if nothing were wrong. Why had they kept insisting that they could produce the capability they had promised, when they knew they couldn’t?

  “Steve has the attitude that ‘I can take this idea and make it real, and nothing will stop me,’ ” McFate told me in the summer of 2010, after Fondacaro had been fired from his job as the Human Terrain System’s program manager. “You have to think about his personality. It was fill or kill—thirteen months to do it or it dies. We had some arguments at the time,” she said, but in the end, “there was a war on. We felt a moral obligation to do it.” And yet McFate wasn’t innocent, either. I remembered something her old friend Cintra Wilson had said about her. “When she decides something, it’s hard to undo her,” Wilson had told me. “Even if she’s wrong, it’s really hard to explain why she’s wrong. Actually, no, it’s impossible.”

  Program development within the Pentagon is an exercise in circularity. An idea needs money to develop into a program, but it can’t get money without stating in the strongest possible terms what it hopes to accomplish. Overselling is pretty much required. The ultimate product may not be all that its creators envisioned, but by that time the government has already invested in its development, and everyone has an incentive to keep the money flowing. The Human Terrain System had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms, but it was a human capability, a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. “The problem with the Human Terrain System,” Steve Fondacaro told me, “is that we have too many humans.”

  But the problem with the Human Terrain System was bigger than that. It had everything to do with the contradiction between the United States’ self-image as a benevolent superpower and the realities of war and the economy that drives it. “American lives have become intertwined with the fate of government contracts,” Irving Louis Horowitz wrote in his 1967 book on the fall of Project Camelot. How much truer those words ring today. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had grown interested in the problems and possibilities of nation building. Generals had stepped into the gap left by a weakened civilian diplomatic and development corps that was poorer by far than the Defense Department. The military was America’s all-purpose tool: war was America’s foreign aid, war was America’s international diplomacy. Contractor-run programs to help the armed forces understand their new sphere of influence grew faster than summer weeds.

  By 2012, the Human Terrain System had cost U.S. taxpayers more than $600 million. Fondacaro was no longer in charge by then, but in more optimistic times, he had spoken of it as a kind of mini State Department within the Defense Department. In fact, the program was a giant cultural metaphor. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post–Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by a ravenous hunger for profit. The Human Terrain System was a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist, neatly encapsulating both a justification for war and the intoxicating belief that war could be less lethal, more anthropological. We claimed to want to understand the Afghans. What we wanted was to understand ourselves.

  9. THE DEVIL YOU DON’T KNOW

  It seemed obvious to everyone back home that the Taliban had killed Paula Loyd. Who else could have done it? It was generally believed, moreover, that she had been singled out for this excruciating punishment because she had offended the insurgents’ misogynistic sensibilities, because she was a Western woman working openly in a conservative part of the Afghan south. For those who knew and loved her, the complex array of forces that drove her killer might have been unwelcome or impossible to contemplate. Perhaps, too, his motivations would simply have proved uninteresting. The important thing was that she was gone.

  But the Human Terrain System had no such excuse. “Paula Loyd, in our estimation based on the facts that we have, because of her success and because of the way she stood out—because she was an unveiled Western woman, blond, pretty, the antithesis of what the Taliban would think is the proper role of women, and she was having such success, she was so well loved, she was getting so much traction in that particular community—was, in our view, what made her specifically targeted,” Steve Fondacaro, the Human Terrain System’s then–program manager, told me shortly after her death. “They sought to make an example of her. The technique they used to get close to her was very well thought out, very well rehearsed. Carefully rehearsed.”

  “Who was the guy?” I asked. “Do you know?”

  Fondacaro said he didn’t. What he knew was that Loyd’s killer was not from Maiwand. The insurgency had chosen an outsider to commit the attack on purpose, he told me. That way, if he were killed, locals wouldn’t be able to identify him. The leaders of the Human Terrain System knew the killer wasn’t from Maiwand because of something that Loyd’s teammate Clint Cooper had overheard that day near the bazaar.

  “You know there are a lot of kids in Afghanistan,” Montgomery McFate told me. “And they were coming up and they were saying, ‘Who are you? Who are you? You’re not from here, who are you?’ And he was kind of trying to move them out and he was saying, ‘Go away, go away,’ and they would say—”

  “ ‘You’re not our father. You’re not from here,’ ” Fondacaro put in.

  “Yeah,” McFate said. “ ‘You can’t tell us what to do. You’re not our father, you can’t tell us what to do.’ So we know he wasn’t local.”

  They were not the first or only ones to tell the story this way, but they were wrong. A boy who had been playing in the lane that morning had recognized Loyd’s killer. When it was over, the boy told the soldiers he had seen the man around, and that his name was Abdul Salam.

  * * *

  Shortly after Loyd’s death, I went to Kandahar to learn what I could about her killer. I worked with a tenacious Pashtun journalist named Muhib Habibi, who came to collect me outside the gates of Kandahar Airfield. Before I arrived, Muhib had asked how tall I was. Now, as I climbed into the Toyota Corolla, he handed me a burqa he had bought in the market. I had never worn a burqa before for any length of time, but I hadn’t been to Kandahar in several years, and things had changed. The synthetic blue sack with its woven eye-screen was hot and constricting, but I pulled it on without argument.

  Muhib is physically fearless and will go just about anywhere for a story, but he didn’t like the idea of taking me to Maiwand. “Getting there is one hundred percent,” he told me. “Getting back is fifty-fifty.”

  Driving to Maiwand without a powerful Afghan escort seemed unwise. But by early 2009, political alliances in and around Kandahar had become so fragmented that only a few prominent Afghans could have guaranteed our protection over two and a half hours of highway that covered the outskirts of the city and the province’s western districts. Since those people’s allegiances might have endangered the people we would be talking to, we ruled them out. In an earlier era, we might have traveled under the protection of a Taliban commander, but that fall, a few months before I climbed into Muhib’s car in Kandahar, a New York Times reporter had been kidnapped on his way to interview just such a commander.

  The biggest threat on the road to Maiwand was buried bombs, which we might encounter no matter whether we traveled with an Afghan official or in an unmarked taxi. But the drive wouldn’t have been the hardest part. Lingering there and talking to people would have been dangerous for Muhib and me, and possibly even more so for the Afghans we were visiting. Even if the insurgents didn’t catch up with us, they would certainly notice that we had been to see people and want to know why. Our visit might have consequences we couldn’t foresee.

  We decided to start in Kandahar, meeting with elders from Maiwand who came to the city regularly on business. At the same time, we would try to make contact with Abdul Salam’s family through interm
ediaries. I would offer to pay their taxi fare to come to the city and meet us.

  The neutral place we chose for our meetings with people who might or might not be insurgents was the Kandahar office of the Afghan government reconciliation commission, a modest building behind high walls on a quiet street. Rosebushes grew in the garden and pale, wintry sunlight illuminated the room where we sat on cushions drinking tea. The commission had been set up several years earlier to bring in Taliban who wanted to stop fighting and join the government. In 2007, as many as twenty or thirty insurgents had come to Kandahar seeking amnesty every month, the director, Hajji Agha Lalai Dastagiri, told us. The government had promised to help support former fighters and protect them, but this had proved impossible. By the time we showed up in January 2009, Hajji Lalai, a provincial council member and former mujaheddin commander, was finding it almost impossible to lure anyone away from the insurgency.