by Nathan Hodge
What Wells was saying was the same thing I had been told dozens of times before, in some shape or form, by top officers, ordinary soldiers, and civilian officials: We can get it right. That phrase, variously put, distilled the bitter experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan: winning the war—and losing the peace.*
Just two weeks before the October 2008 STAR-TIDES demonstration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at National Defense University in Washington. In his speech, he outlined his vision of the new American way of war. “What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign—a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and moderation,” he said. “In the long-term effort against terrorist networks and other extremists, we know that direct military force will continue to have a role. But we also understand that over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory.”6
Military operations, Gates continued, should be subordinate to programs to promote economic development and good governance in places at risk from extremism. And that strategy, he added, would require an effort to “tap the full strength of America and its people”—not just the uniformed military, but civilian agencies, volunteer organizations, and the private sector.
The United States fields the most well-trained, well-funded, and technologically sophisticated fighting force the world has ever seen. But that military was confounded by the complexity of fighting low-tech insurgents in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For Gates and his allies within the Pentagon, victory over militant extremism depended on mastering the “three cups of tea” approach: digging wells, building schools, and repairing roads. What began in late 2001 as a global war on terror was quietly recast as a campaign of armed social work. And in the process, American foreign policy underwent a tectonic shift.
That shift had its modest beginnings in the post-9/11 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. It accelerated in Iraq, as the United States became mired down in the vicious internal war that followed the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. A series of dramatic, innovative nation-building experiments rescued the Iraq mission from complete failure, but in the process, the military overcompensated. The Pentagon became fixated on soft power as the answer for security problems such as terrorism and insurgency. Military commanders threw billions of dollars at quasi-development schemes in the hopes that a combination of aid money and armed social work would get at the root causes of violence in failing states. And top policymakers launched an initiative to refashion government around the tasks of state building. The short-term lessons drawn from Iraq took on a life of their own, as policymakers and practitioners looked to repeat the experiment on an equally grand scale in Afghanistan.
In a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000, the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, outlined his vision of the U.S. military policy: “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building,” he said. “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”
In the decade before Bush took office, the United States had been involved in armed humanitarianism, albeit in relatively modest contingencies. In Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, U.S. troops were committed to peacekeeping operations with limited goals and indeterminate ends, and military theorists and foreign policy thinkers worried that the United States was frittering away military power by playing global beat cop. The conservative argument against nation building was summed up in one neat phrase: Superpowers don’t do windows.* By the time Bush left office, the United States had committed itself to nation building on an epic scale.
This shift toward nation building can be documented in many different ways. One of the starkest ways is cost. Since 2003, Congress has appropriated over $50 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction, at one time considered the largest amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars ever committed to aid and reconstruction in a single country.8 As of summer 2010 the war in Afghanistan has become a nation-building project as ambitious and costly as the reconstruction of Iraq. By mid-2010, the United States had spent approximately $51.5 billion on building the rudiments of a modern state in Afghanistan.9 Those figures were only a fraction of the larger cost of staying on a wartime footing. In the decade that followed September 11, 2001, the Pentagon’s base budget effectively doubled, not including additional funding to cover the cost of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.10 For fiscal year 2011, President Barack Obama requested $733.3 billion in new budget authority for national defense: $548.9 billion for the regular operations of the Defense Department; $159.3 billion for ongoing military operations, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq; and $25.1 billion for defense-related activities by other agencies, including money to support the nuclear weapons complex. The total national defense budget in fiscal year 2001, adjusted for 2010 dollars, was around $375 million. Foreign aid budgets grew dramatically as well. For instance, between 2002 and 2009 the U.S. Agency for International Development spent around $7 billion in Afghanistan.11 That amount roughly equaled USAID’s global operating budget for fiscal year 2001.12
The manpower committed to this mission has also been extraordinary. By the end of his second term, Bush had embarked on a mission to reorganize government for this role, taking the first steps toward creating a standing nation-building corps. The State Department launched an effort to create a cadre of diplomatic first responders who would be on call to respond to humanitarian crises and take on nation-building assignments in war zones. And military planners began thinking in terms of the “long war,” an era of persistent conflict that would require an unceasing cycle of deployments to places deemed vulnerable to violent extremism. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the practice of nation building was manpower-intensive, demanding a heavy U.S. troop presence to police some of the world’s toughest neighborhoods. By mid-2010, troops in Afghanistan outnumbered those in Iraq, and casualties in Afghanistan reached record highs. Nation building is a hard, often risky business. As of this writing, forty-four hundred U.S. troops have died in Iraq. More than eleven hundred have died in Afghanistan. Those numbers do not include contractors and civilians, whose names rarely figure in official casualty tallies.
Weeks after the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, conservative writer Max Boot made a provocative argument in favor of a new kind of American imperialism. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he wrote.13 Implicit in that clever shorthand was a critique: The United States lacked a talented class of colonial administrators capable of refashioning failed states and preparing the local inhabitants for eventual self-rule.
At first glance, it looks as if Boot’s post-9/11 wish has been fulfilled—and that the United States is finally creating the twenty-first-century equivalent of the British Empire’s Colonial Service. Over the 2000–2010 decade, a new class of nation builders has emerged: staffing Provincial Reconstruction Teams in cities in Iraq; constructing roads in rural Afghanistan; or training Kalashnikov-toting soldiers in Timbuktu. From West Africa to Central Asia, the old diplomatic cocktail-party circuit has given way to a new world of fortified outposts, where a new generation of diplomats, soldiers, and private contractors is working at the sharp end of U.S. foreign policy.
This is the world of muddy-boots diplomacy, practiced on a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Civil servants who once trained for peacetime development work now find themselves mediating tribal disputes in remote mountain provinces of Afghanistan. The State Department’s Foreign Service officers find themselves evading roadside bombs—and sometimes returning fire in firefights. Army platoon leaders hand out microgrants to small-business owners in the restless Shia slums of Baghdad. And a new class of expatriate has taken up residence in an archi
pelago of miniature Green Zones. They live behind concrete blast walls and concertina wire, commute to work in armored trucks, and reside in the ultimate gated communities.
But the shift in many ways has been incomplete. As this book will show, there has been a horrific failure to equip ourselves for success in this mission. The military quickly learned that it was poorly equipped for nation building—lacking cultural knowledge, language skills, and local understanding to do the job right in places like Iraq. Civilian agencies of the U.S. government such as the U.S. State Department and USAID were poorly prepared for the mission as well. In military terms, they had no “expeditionary capability”: They had no deployable reserve, no way to sustain people in the field, and few professional incentives for serving in combat zones. Their budgets were a fraction of the Defense Department’s, and their personnel were stretched thin: The State Department has around sixty-five hundred Foreign Service officers and another five thousand Foreign Service specialists who work overseas; another fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers work for USAID, the Foreign Commercial Service, the Foreign Agricultural Service, and the International Broadcasting Bureau.14 The U.S. Army, including active, reserve, and National Guard components, has an “end strength”—manpower authorized by Congress—of over one million.
The shortage of manpower was a chronic problem for this new enterprise. Sending thousands of civil servants to remote and often dangerous outposts had profound consequences. It was to create the world of the armed humanitarian: a landscape seen through bulletproof glass. An army of private security companies built a lucrative new business ferrying diplomats, civilian aid workers, and contractors around war zones. These hired guns provided bodyguard details, convoy escorts, and camp guards; they provided what the military calls “force protection”; they also created extraordinary distance between the representatives of the U.S. government and the populations they were supposed to help. And the military’s belated attempt to understand the “human terrain” it was operating in inadvertently sharpened the divide between the practitioners of this new foreign policy and the academic specialists whose expertise they sought to tap. This was one way the manpower gap was closed.
Equally problematic, this new mission blurred the lines between military force and humanitarian assistance. Over the course of the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Pentagon took on a greater share of overseas development assistance, work traditionally performed by civilians. In 2006, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international organization that tracks development trends, published a study of U.S. foreign aid. It found that over one fifth of official U.S. development assistance—22 percent, to be exact—flowed through the Defense Department. In 2002, that figure had been less than 6 percent.15 And the 22 percent did not include the “security assistance” dollars the Pentagon committed annually to training and equipping foreign militaries and police forces.16 The U.S. military had become a major player in the development world. And in many places, U.S. military money spent on development far outstripped the budget of traditional aid organizations. The aid workers there didn’t wear Birkenstocks—they wore combat boots.
Despite working diligently to solve the bureaucratic problems of nation building, the new practitioners often came to a late realization: Building an effective state and a functioning civil society is a process that takes decades, often generations. Imposing it from the outside often feeds the perception that the intervening power is an occupier, not a nation builder. And they also faced an unhappy reality: Sometimes, the more you throw money, resources, and talent at a problem, the worse the problem becomes. The massive infusion of resources creates extraordinary opportunities for corruption in states that have weak rule of law and poor traditions of governance. Equally important, they had to confront the fact that the American public has little patience, particularly given the current economic state, for this kind of costly enterprise.
Many books have probed the military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan: memoirs of combat by platoon leaders, brigade commanders, and embedded reporters; searing critiques of military decisionmaking by investigative journalists; self-serving accounts by civilian decisionmakers. But literature on the nation-building experience is almost nonexistent. Reporters who cover war often gravitate to the “bang-bang,” but rarely hang around for the complex development work that follows military action. This book is about the rise of this new class of nation builder, and the experiences, frustrations, and lessons of nation building. It is a tale of courage, idealism, and commitment; it is also one of profligacy, waste, and disillusion. This is the defining experience for a generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners.
Our decade-long affair with nation building was more than a break with the traditional world of diplomacy. For the military, it marked a shift away from fighting and winning conventional wars, as troops were reassigned to a constabulary mission. The military that had won a rapid victory over Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991 and 2003 was now stretched too thin to handle major new emergencies. The military was grasping for a new way to describe this mission: It was something other than war—more a hybrid of police work and development. They settled on the term “stability operations” to describe this kind of approach.
The Pentagon’s embrace of this new strategy can be charted out in a series of official documents. One week before the STAR-TIDES demonstration at the Pentagon, in October 2008, the U.S. Army released Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations. The manual provided the military with a blueprint for rebuilding failed states. And it stated the obvious: Nation building requires a lot of “soft power” and the full participation of the civilian agencies of government if it is to succeed. According to the manual, the United States faced a new era in which “the greatest threats to national security will not come from emerging ambitious states, but from nations unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs and aspirations of their people.”
The manual’s foreword states:
America’s future abroad is unlikely to resemble Afghanistan or Iraq, where we grapple with the burden of nation-building under fire. Instead, we will work through and with the community of nations to defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering. Achieving victory will assume new dimensions as we strengthen our ability to generate “soft power” to promote participation in government, spur economic development, and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world.
The week the new Army manual was made public, I sat down with Clinton Ancker, the director of the Combined Arms Center Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During his Army career, Ancker had served with an armored cavalry unit in Vietnam and had spent nine years stationed on the border between East and West Germany in the late years of the Cold War. Ancker was also a historian, and he went on to be an intellectual mentor to many of the military officers who were leading battalions and brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had helped lead the drafting of the manual, and he wanted to emphasize an important point. “There’s a very clear message in the manual: that the Army should not be the lead on most of this, but a recognition that in many cases we will be when the operation kicks off,” he told me.
Ancker, like many of his contemporaries, wanted a government that was better organized to carry out this mission, that would require a new kind of approach—neither purely civilian nor wholly military—to handle nation building. “In theory, in the best of all possible worlds, the military would never have to do stability operations because they are fundamentally functions of a government,” he said. “If there is somebody else who is competent and capable of doing these things we would just as soon transition those tasks to them, because every soldier devoted to this is one who is not training for other missions or available for other missions. [But if] no one else can do it, we have to acknowledge that it’s a task and we have to have thought about it ahead of time.”
That manual was just one product of a perio
d of introspection about the failure of the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most famous document of this was Field Manual 3-24, the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps’s counterinsurgency manual, published in December 2006. That book became a surprise bestseller (and one of its authors, General David Petraeus, became a celebrity), but the manual represented only one aspect of the military’s embrace of armed humanitarianism. In November 2005, the Defense Department issued Directive 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction.” It placed stability operations for the first time on a par with offensive or defensive combat. It stated: “Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.”17
This dull bureaucratic language obscured a stunning admission: The United States had failed to plan for the postwar occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The counterinsurgency manual followed one year later, signaling a cultural shift within the land services, the Army and Marine Corps. In October 2007, the U.S. Navy released its “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” a document that, in essence, said that avoiding wars was as important as winning them. In June 2008, an entire section of the 2008 National Defense Strategy, a sort of “statement of purpose” for the Defense Department, was devoted to outlining the importance of working with civilian agencies. “Our forces have stepped up to the task of long-term reconstruction, development and governance,” it read. “The U.S. Armed Forces will need to institutionalize and retain these capabilities, but this is no replacement for civilian involvement and expertise.”