by Nathan Hodge
Bivens was twenty-six years old. In a scathing 1997 article in Harper’s, he described the daily routine of a “cost-plus” USAID contractor in Kazakhstan. “The main event of every day was lunch,” he wrote.
Lunch was always at a fancy restaurant, with your driver waiting out front. More than thirty-five U.S. companies or organizations were on the AID payroll in Kazakhstan, offering advice on everything from drafting laws to wearing condoms, and every single one of them seemed to be as high on lunch as Burson-Marsteller was … Fridays I would retrieve a crumpled ball of business cards from my suit-coat pocket and incorporate them into a memo summarizing my work week: Monday met with so-and-so, discussed such-and-such. Tuesday met with such-and-such of the this-and-that group. Mostly I was describing lunch.18
Foreign aid budgets were often singled out by conservatives as a waste of taxpayer money—and aid programs to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s set new standards for corruption and mismanagement. In Russia, USAID hired the Harvard Institute for International Development to advise the government on privatization. The project was directed by Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and tenured professor of economics at Harvard; another consultant to the project was Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes Scholar and former World Bank consultant. Both men, it turned out, had a massive conflict of interest: While helping the Russian government design the rules for a market economy, they were simultaneously making personal investments in Russia.19 The U.S. government later implicated both men in a conspiracy to defraud the government, and Harvard University eventually paid $26.5 million to the U.S. government to settle a lawsuit after a U.S. District Court judge found Shleifer and Hay liable for breaching conflict-of-interest rules. Neither Shleifer nor Hay acknowledged any wrongdoing.20
Afghanistan would be the next big market for the USAID contractors. Much as KBR had arrived to scout Bagram Air Base for business opportunities with the Army, companies such as Chemonics, Bearing Point, and Louis Berger Group were positioning themselves to snag more contracts in Afghanistan. After all, USAID was as dependent upon companies like Chemonics to do its work as the Army was dependent on LOGCAP contracts to maintain its bases overseas. In government contracting parlance, Chemonics had a “track record”—it could be counted on to present a bid that would meet the Byzantine requirements of government contracting practice. As Joel Hafvenstein, a young Chemonics consultant, would note in his memoir of the aid business in Afghanistan, “Chemonics was nothing if not a proposal-writing machine. The company prided itself on being able to whip up a plan and a team to carry out pretty much anything USAID might want to do: clean up air pollution in Cairo, train Russian judges, help Ugandans export cut flowers.”21
By the time Hafvenstein arrived to help close out the Chemonics Quick Impact Project on the Shomali Plain, a micro-economy had already sprung up in Kabul that served a small community of international relief workers and aid contractors, conspicuous in their white SUVs. Their drivers would park their vehicles outside the discreet restaurants that catered to Kabul’s expatriate community, small oases behind compound walls where the development set could chill out, drink a few cans of imported Heineken, and live some facsimile of the high life.
At that point it was not clear what USAID’s long-term plan for rebuilding Afghanistan was, or what the end-state was supposed to be. But the reconstruction of Afghanistan meant there would be a new destination for the lavishly paid class of aid consultants who would see Afghans through the windshields of their air-conditioned Land Cruisers. Watching the arrival of Development Inc. in Kabul, I wondered if this would be a new chance to get foreign aid right—or another opportunity for waste, fraud, and abuse.
For the time being, Afghanistan remained primarily a military mission. And Operation Enduring Freedom, the military’s name for the post–September 11 campaign in Afghanistan, was first and foremost a punitive expedition. Major Bryan Hilferty, the spokesman for the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division at Bagram, would conclude all of his press briefings with the same sound bite: “The hunt continues. The war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is not over.”
After Operation Anaconda was wrapped up, in late March 2002, the press corps at Bagram rapidly dwindled: The dramatic battle in the mountains was over, and few reporters were attracted to the less alluring subject of rebuilding Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure. For the news media as much as the military, Afghanistan’s long-term economic development was an afterthought.
Afghanistan had a transitional administration headed by Hamid Karzai, but little else that resembled a functioning national government or bureaucracy. The State Department needed the rudiments of a functioning embassy, both to conduct diplomatic business with the new government and to help get it on its feet. In March 2002, Ambassador Robert Finn, a career diplomat with some experience in the region, was dispatched to Kabul to set up an embassy. Finn had helped open the first U.S. diplomatic mission in the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, and had previously served as ambassador to Tajikistan, the dysfunctional Central Asian state that bordered northern Afghanistan. At the time, the State Department had yet to begin normal rotational staffing for diplomats to Afghanistan. Kabul was considered a “hardship” rotation; most officers would stay for only weeks at a time. The high turnover meant there was constant waste and duplication of effort. There was no institutional memory to guide aid effectively.
Keith Mines was one of the Foreign Service officers who volunteered to “go TDY” (on temporary duty) to help get the embassy up and running. He arrived in Kabul in June 2002. The U.S. embassy in Kabul occupied a sandbagged compound near a traffic circle recently renamed for the martyred Northern Alliance commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. After the city fell to the Northern Alliance in late 2001, a team of CIA and U.S. Special Operations commandos made their way through downtown Kabul to reclaim the embassy, which had been shuttered during Afghanistan’s civil war and the years of Taliban rule. Gary Berntsen, a counterterrorism officer, was one of the first Americans to set foot in the embassy since 1989; he found rotary-dial telephones and official photographs of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush on the wall. On the floor of the ambassador’s office Berntsen found a more somber memento: a photograph from the funeral of Adolph Dubs, the last U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who was killed in an exchange of fire during a botched hostage rescue attempt at a Kabul hotel in 1979.22
Among the many bureaucratic tribes in Washington, the Foreign Service had always conceived of itself as something of an elite. Foreign Service officers had to pass competitive entry exams, a written test and a more subjectively graded oral exam; obtain Top Secret security clearances; and pass a “suitability review.” Foreign Service officers segregated themselves from the other civil servants within the State Department. FSOs, as they are called, are diplomats, not ordinary bureaucrats; everyone else is mere support staff, regardless of their pay grade or their expertise. Even the analysts at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the State Department’s respected intelligence arm, were second-class citizens within the department. Until Colin Powell became secretary of state under George W. Bush, Foreign Service officers even had their own dedicated lounge inside “main State,” the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom.
Some Foreign Service officers were attracted to the job’s prestige, and to the postings in European capitals. Mines was not one of them. He was the kind of Foreign Service officer instinctively drawn to what he called the “failed-state circuit.” As a diplomat, he had served tours in Somalia and Haiti; he had made friends with Palestinians during a posting to Israel; and he had spent time overseas outside the protective embrace of the embassy. In the late 1970s, he had spent two years as a young Mormon missionary in Colombia, which was emerging from two decades of mayhem known as la violencia. His first experience was working in Barranquilla with a Colombian companion who spoke no English. He would go for weeks on end without any contact with other Americans.
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bsp; Colombia taught him some valuable lessons. “That was the closest I have ever been to a foreign culture, living as we did directly among the people without any of the organizational protection from things foreign that is provided in military or Embassy service, business or even the Peace Corps,” he later recalled.* That familiarity with life outside the embassy walls set Mines apart, as did his previous career: Before joining the Foreign Service, Mines was an Army infantry officer.
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-bui
lding 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.