by Nathan Hodge
In theory, the Pentagon was not supposed to be the lead U.S. agency for aid to Afghanistan: That was supposed to be the job of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the year following the defeat of the Taliban, USAID had initiated its first quick impact projects: rebuilding schools, delivering new textbooks, and providing food to returning Afghan refugees. And Afghans were voting with their feet: By official estimates, around two million Afghans had returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan and the cities of Iran. At the same time, the military was getting more deeply involved in the business of humanitarian aid. By late 2002, around two hundred Army Civil Affairs specialists were on the ground in Afghanistan, repairing schools, boring wells, and opening medical clinics. They had refurbished the National Veterinary Center and the National Teachers’ College in Kabul.5 Collins’s office oversaw that portfolio of humanitarian projects.
During his fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, Collins received a briefing from a British army officer, Colonel Nick Carter. Carter showed Collins a PowerPoint slide that sketched out a novel military organization that would be tailored to Afghanistan, something called Joint Regional Teams. The idea was to jump-start development projects in rural Afghanistan by organizing eight or ten of these units—essentially, super-sized Civil Affairs teams—and stationing them out in the provinces. Each JRT would field a force of fifty to one hundred uniformed personnel. A larger “force protection” component of the team would guard the small outpost, run patrols, and provide overwatch (where one small unit supports or covers the activities of another). They would expand the presence of the military in Afghanistan, and by extension, serve as a counterweight to the militia commanders who still held sway in the countryside. Afghanistan at that point still had an extremely fragile central government, and the jang salaran (warlords) who had been put on the U.S. payroll during the campaign to oust the Taliban now stood in the way of creating a functioning Afghan state.
Carter, a former battalion commander with the British army’s Royal Green Jackets regiment, would later be credited with the idea of the JRTs, but the plan was also being presented by other British officers assigned to Coalition Joint Task Force-180, the military headquarters that ran the war from Bagram.6 The approach drew inspiration in part from the British army’s experience in policing low-intensity conflicts in Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Carter was a recent veteran of Kosovo, where he had been charged with policing Kosovo’s divided city of Mitrovica as part of KFOR, NATO’s Kosovo force. Patrolling Mitrovica was equal parts police work and military operation: keeping the ethnic Serb and Albanian communities at bay, preventing ethnic reprisals, and searching for illegal weapons.7
Military planners believed the Joint Regional Teams would create a more visible coalition presence in Afghanistan outside the capital. By the summer of 2002, Kabul and its environs were reasonably secure, a development that was credited to the presence of the International Security Assistance Force, a small UN-mandated peacekeeping contingent that had arrived in December 2001. But ISAF did not patrol outside the capital, and policymakers in Kabul and Washington wanted to find a way to spread the “ISAF effect” into the regions.
Collins brought up the topic of Joint Regional Teams in a meeting with President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan president liked the idea, but he didn’t like the name. “It doesn’t work,” Karzai said. “The word ‘joint’ doesn’t exist in Dari or Pashto.”
Officials in Kabul would have to come up with a new name. They settled on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs. It was in part a political calculation: Warlords had their regions, the reasoning went, but the new Afghan state had provinces.
The PRTs were a more muscular version of the Civil Affairs teams already on the ground. With a security contingent to both guard their base and provide transport, they could go into harm’s way to do development work. Collins, who came from the world of special operations and low-intensity conflict, liked the idea. On his return to Washington, he presented the idea to Doug Feith, the head of the Pentagon’s policy office.
Collins would not take credit for inventing the PRTs, but he was key to propagating the concept within the Pentagon. The experiment had previously been tried on a small scale by the Coalition Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force (CJCMOTF, pronounced “chick motif”), an ad hoc organization that originally oversaw the U.S. military’s humanitarian operations in Afghanistan. CJCMOTF formed something called Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells (“chick licks” or “Chiclets”), six-man Civil Affairs teams augmented by a few civilian experts who accompanied Special Forces troops working out in the field.8
But for the concept to work on a larger scale, it would need funding, and some more personnel. Traditional Civil Affairs teams did not have the right skills for long-term development projects. They could drill a well here or repair a school there but could not necessarily do anything about the underlying problems of poverty and development that afflicted Afghanistan. In the new PRT model, the civilian experts—diplomats, agricultural experts, and development specialists—could focus on the tasks of long-term economic development. It was agreed that the PRTs would include civilian members drawn from development organizations such as USAID or the U.K.’s Department for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. State Department. The diplomats were supposed to act as local political advisors and report back to their embassies on the situation in the provinces. Real development experts could help plan more ambitious development projects such as building highways or repairing hydroelectric dams.
That fall, work got under way on planning, and military officials laid out a timeline for staffing the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The first was a U.S.-led team in eastern Afghanistan that opened in January 2003 at Gardez. Shortly thereafter, teams were established at Bamyan, home of the giant Buddha statues dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, and in Kunduz, the last city in northern Afghanistan held by the Taliban. The British opened the first non-U.S. team in Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in northern Balkh province that was the scene of an ongoing feud between two warlords, the Tajik leader Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor and his rival, an Uzbek general named Abdul Rashid Dostum. Plans were in the works for additional teams to be deployed around the country by the late summer of 2003.9
Collins presented the idea to the press in a December 2002 briefing and relayed an important message to the public as well: Major combat in Afghanistan was essentially over, and the emphasis would now shift. Beginning on January 1, 2003, the military would “be transitioning to focus on stability operations.”10
In theory, the creation of these new teams—they had yet to be officially renamed PRTs—would bring the military and the civilian agencies closer together. The military headquarters at Bagram and the embassy in Kabul were physically and psychologically separated. Up until that point, each had basically done its own thing, meaning there was little “unity of effort” by the various U.S. agencies tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan. It was a bureaucratic problem with real implications. Without some elementary coordination, aid would be wasted: the same school might be repaired twice, unnecessary wells would be drilled. Savvier local leaders could persuade multiple donors to fund the same project, essentially double- or triple-dipping in reconstruction funds while depriving needier and less well connected communities of essential funds.
But the creation of the PRTs inadvertently expanded the military’s remit. Collins noted that Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180, and General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, “will be the people who are running these operations out in the field.”11
The creation of the PRTs was, in effect, the first step toward what the Pentagon strategist Thomas Barnett had called the “SysAdmin” force: a new kind of organization, part military, part civilian, that was uniquely suited for the task of nation building. Afghanistan would serve as the first laboratory for this experiment. But it was easier said than done. When I met with Collins sho
rtly before my departure for Afghanistan in September 2004, he made a blunt appraisal of NATO’s efforts to contribute to this new mission. “The performance of our European brethren is pretty pathetic,” he said. “Pretty pathetic.” The problem was that “everybody wants to help, but nobody wants to put out. NATO is incredibly badly organized, the NATO nations are incredibly badly organized. The Germans complain all the time about their overstretch, and they’ve got less than three percent of their force abroad.”
By early 2003, although the headlines about Iraq were eclipsing all news from Afghanistan, U.S.-funded reconstruction work in Afghanistan had slowly begun to pick up its pace. The first wave of quick-impact projects had been wrapped up, and work was beginning in earnest on more ambitious projects such as repairing Afghanistan’s “ring road,” the highway network that would connect the country’s major cities. Plans were also in the works to repair the country’s hydroelectric dams, which could generate inexpensive power and speed rural electrification. In its fiscal year 2003 budget request, the State Department also recognized a new development priority: weaning Afghan farmers from their dependence on growing opium poppy. Opium had emerged as Afghanistan’s main cash crop: It was easy to grow, transport, and store, making it the perfect hedge for a lawless and uncertain time. A portion of the department’s International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement budget would go toward poppy eradication, police training, and employment schemes in opium-growing areas.
Simultaneously, the Bush administration’s philosophical opposition to this mission was quietly set aside. George W. Bush had declared his aversion to nation building during the 2000 presidential campaign. A few months after he declared “Mission accomplished” on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, however, he recast the occupation of Iraq in clear nation-building terms. In a speech before the United Nations on September 23, 2003, half a year after the Iraq invasion, Bush used the success of the Marshall Plan, Europe’s postwar recovery, as a selling point for a massive assistance package for Iraq. The reconstruction of Iraq, he said, would be “the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan.” Bush glossed over a key distinction: The United States did not rebuild postwar Europe in the midst of a shooting war. More important, the Marshall Plan hinged on facilitating trade, not handing out aid, and a great deal of American money went directly into backing the European Payments Union, which served as a clearinghouse for transactions between European nations.12 It was, according to the historian Nicolaus Mills, a “blood transfusion” that encouraged the European states to make their own investments in infrastructure and social welfare programs to improve the lives of their citizens.13
While less ambitious in scale than Iraq’s reconstruction, efforts to rebuild Afghanistan were also ramping up. “That opposition to nation-building is a fig leaf that dropped a while ago,” a spokesman of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Alberto Fernandez, told the Washington Post. “We’re up to our ears in nation-building.”14 Between 2002 and 2003, the United States poured around $900 million into humanitarian aid and assistance to Afghanistan, eclipsing the $296 million the United States initially pledged at the first donor conference in Tokyo.15
Not everyone was pleased with the U.S. government’s new enthusiasm for this approach, however. Traditional nonprofit aid groups such as CARE and Save the Children greeted the creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams with skepticism. In the 1990s, armed intervention in Kosovo and East Timor had troubled many traditional aid and relief groups, who felt they were being crowded out of the traditional “humanitarian space” by the military. The PRTs, they argued, “blurred the line” between humanitarian workers and the military, making it difficult for locals to distinguish between the coalition forces and the “true” humanitarians.
Militaries, they argued, served the interests of policymakers in their respective capitals; they were not guided by principles of neutrality and impartiality that humanitarian agencies traditionally aspired to. And they tended to deliver aid in a way that was likely to suit the short-term aims of military commanders on the ground, rather than considering broader development imperatives or the needs of the local community. Most important, associating with the military violated a deep taboo among traditional humanitarians at a fundamental level: In their view, it created a perception that humanitarian actors are not neutral players in a conflict, and this makes it harder for them to act impartially and effectively. Two researchers for Save the Children U.K. outlined their worries in a paper published in late 2002:
If humanitarian actors are not perceived as neutral by the parties to the conflict, their impartiality and trustworthiness will be in doubt, and their access to all people in need, as well as their own security, will be in jeopardy … Any integration of humanitarian aid into wider political and military strategy compromises humanitarian principles, making it harder for humanitarian actors on the ground to assert their independence and impartiality, and to negotiate access to people in need. Associating with a military force in a conflict zone implies that the agency in question is in some way identifying with that group, against others.16
In fact, the traditional humanitarians felt that the PRTs and the military’s embrace of the humanitarian mission put them directly in harm’s way. In the past, humanitarian aid groups had relied on their neutrality for protection. Even in strife-torn regions such as Afghanistan, they would avoid hiring armed guards for fear that it would compromise their impartiality. If members of the uniformed military dug wells or rebuilt schools, they feared, it would become impossible for the local population to distinguish between combatants and humanitarians.
In Afghanistan, however, arguments about preserving the traditional humanitarian space seemed increasingly quaint. In late March 2003, a Red Cross water engineer from El Salvador named Ricardo Munguia was driving along a road in southern Uruzgan province when he was pulled over by gunmen at a roadblock. He was pulled from his car and shot dead, in plain sight of other Afghan aid workers. Munguia’s killers apparently knew he was an aid worker: One of the gunmen reportedly pulled his trouser leg up to show Munguia an artificial limb he had received from the Red Cross in Pakistan.17
The death of Munguia sent a tremor through Afghanistan’s small community of expatriate aid workers.18 The insurgents were beginning to deliberately target humanitarian aid workers and their local employees, who presented a much easier target than foreign military forces. Killing aid workers served a dual purpose. It telegraphed a message of intimidation to Afghans: collaboration with foreigners might cost you your life. And it was what the military called an “information operation,” a dramatic attack that would guarantee headlines, magnifying insurgents’ power and omnipresence.
Sarah Chayes, a former radio correspondent who had settled in Kandahar to work for an Afghan charity, saw how the death of Munguia further soured relations between the U.S. military and the nongovernmental organizations. “For international aid workers in Afghanistan, the only available target upon which to vent their frustration was the U.S. presence there,” she later wrote. “And so humanitarian workers, Europeans as well as many Americans, opposed the presence far more vocally than Afghans did. They said it was the U.S. troops who endangered their lives, since the U.S. troops were doing reconstruction, and ‘insurgents’ could not distinguish between soldiers and aid workers.”19
Chayes worked on development projects in Kandahar as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society, an independent charity founded by Qayum Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s older brother. In The Punishment of Virtue, an account of her first few years in Afghanistan, she described how poorly the international aid system had delivered on promises to rebuild Afghanistan. But she disagreed with the humanitarian aid purists. She felt that the presence of U.S. troops had in fact brought security to Afghanistan. In fact, the military’s deepening involvement in the humanitarian enterprise seemed to threaten the image of lofty neutrality that was carefully cultivated by the international aid community
. “Aid workers have trouble accepting that they are now in the crosshairs themselves,” she wrote. “When one of them is killed deliberately, the loss sparks shocked hurt feelings as well as grief. For the unconscious belief persists: If humanitarian workers are being targeted, there must be some mistake.”20
Michelle Parker tightened the straps in the passenger seat of the old Huey helicopter as it prepared to lift off from Kabul Airport. It was a painfully early hour, and Parker had never flown on a helicopter before. As she anxiously waited for liftoff, she noticed a slight Afghan man tethered to a harness in the front of the passenger hold. He was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. Can he stop an RPG with that thing? she wondered. Really, what is he going to do—annoy some farmer?
Just a few weeks earlier, a helicopter carrying workers for the Louis Berger Group, a U.S. construction firm that had a major contract from USAID to rebuild Afghanistan’s main highways, had crashed after coming under fire in southern Afghanistan. The pilot was killed, and a civilian worker was injured.21 The diminutive Afghan was supposed to provide some modicum of security for the flight down to Jalalabad, where Parker, a young USAID employee, would be taking up her new assignment with the Jalalabad PRT.
It was July 2004. Parker had been in the country for about two weeks, and she was being accompanied down to Jalalabad by her predecessor, a former Marine who had been promoted to USAID regional development advisor at Camp Salerno, a large U.S. firebase in southeastern Afghanistan (a firebase is a base supplying fire support to coalition forces). At the time, USAID still faced a logistical nightmare getting its employees and contractors out to the field: The agency had no aircraft of its own, Afghanistan had only a couple of unreliable commercial carriers, and the military owned most of the helicopters. On military flights, civilians were the lowest priority for seats: They flew “space available,” meaning they could be bumped from their seat on the aircraft by the lowest-ranking private or a pallet of bottled water. And to further complicate matters, USAID usually had to rely on “implementing partners,” its contractors and their subcontractors, for transportation. They had few options.