by Nathan Hodge
Not long after his trip to Iraq, Hillen began planning a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan. He wanted to examine the civilian-military experiment under way in Afghanistan’s provinces, and outlined his plans in an e-mail to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The embassy staff, however, initially opposed Hillen’s plans to travel outside of Kabul, and a chain of e-mail correspondence followed. The argument from Kabul was that Hillen, as the assistant secretary of state, should be spending his time in Kabul with the Afghan ministers of defense or interior, not mucking around in the countryside visiting military units or Provincial Reconstruction Teams. What was there for him to do in Khowst, or in Ghazni, or some other combat outpost in the provinces? Shouldn’t he be spending time meeting his counterparts in the capital?
As Hillen’s correspondence with the embassy made it clear, a Red Zone–Green Zone mentality still prevailed in the diplomatic corps. When Hillen scrolled down to the bottom of the e-mail chain, he noticed a note appended from Ambassador Ronald Neumann, a tough, salty-tongued Vietnam veteran who had succeeded Zalmay Khalilzad in the ambassador’s post. He had written a note to one of his officers, perhaps not thinking it would find its way back to Hillen. As Hillen recalled, it said: “Tell Assistant Secretary Hillen we’re not his fucking travel agency.”*
Still, after a few months of persuading, Hillen received the National Security Council’s blessing to begin working on whole-of-government counterinsurgency guidelines. “Which is probably why Dave [Petraeus] cannily pushed it off on me,” Hillen told me. “I mean, why should he get the crap beat out of him in Washington for three months, when I was willing to do it?”
The governmentwide counterinsurgency conference was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington that September. The agenda read like a roster of luminaries from the counterinsurgency world: An opening panel on counterinsurgency best practices featured David Kilcullen, the Australian military officer who had won a cult following with his “Twenty-Eight Articles,” and Colonel H. R. McMaster, the former commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar. Day 2 featured a keynote address by Petraeus, who was introduced by Sarah Sewall of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
If the concept of armed nation building was already taking hold within the military, the conference brought the concept to a wider audience: the civilian agencies of the federal government. A briefing paper distributed to participants made the aim of the conference clear: The U.S. government should “reframe the GWOT [global war on terror] as global COIN [counterinsurgency].” That new acronym marked a clear break with the concept that had provided the intellectual framework and justification for five years of war under President George W. Bush. And it heralded a more sweeping, long-term campaign that would see the United States intervening to support governments that were combatting locally organized, globally networked extremists, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but around the globe. At the heart of counterinsurgency was political, social, and developmental work, meaning that civilian agencies needed to work more closely with the military and absorb counterinsurgency principles in their planning. The conference packet featured a logo that presented the idea visually: a circle in which the blue silhouette of a soldier is flanked by two bureaucrats, a man in a suit and tie and a woman in a pant suit; they face off against a cartoon insurgent, a shadowy figure holding a Kalashnikov rifle. The circle was bounded by the phrase “United States Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative”; a crest, top and bottom, read “whole of government” and “whole of society.”
This was more than the usual series of lectures and workshops. It was designed to set the agenda for something quite radical: refashioning the U.S. government around stability operations and nation building. This would be a generation-long effort, something that would require reorganizing the agencies of government around the mission of advising, rebuilding, and sometimes directly administering vulnerable states. Hillen’s co-host, Jeb Nadaner, the deputy secretary of defense for stability operations, ticked off a list of new “capabilities” the U.S. government would require. At the top of the list was a deployable “civilian reserve,” analogous to the military’s reserve system, that could send civilian experts to crisis regions on short notice.
It was, in short, a call to reform the U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid establishment and place it on a war footing. Nadaner said that this new force, like soldiers, would need to take part in military exercises, and they would need protection in the field. This dedicated cadre of nation builders might even extend outside the federal government: It might include members of state and local government, private-sector experts, even representatives of nongovernmental organizations. “We’re going to need a national movement, if we want to see the civilian reserve develop into the institution it needs to become,” Nadaner said.
In essence, the counterinsurgents were mobilizing around a vision of a reinvented federal government, a sort of Colonial Office for the twenty-first century. It would have a cadre of skilled development experts and administrators who could work in collapsed states and war zones; a corps of social scientists who could help the military navigate this complex ethnic terrain; a military advisory force that would help build the key security institutions of developing countries. In theory, it would unite the practice of development, defense, and diplomacy. The foundation was now being laid for all three. The next several years would be a test: of whether the United States was equipped for nation building, and if nation building could succeed.
At that stage, Iraq was still in the throes of a civil war. U.S. assistance had yielded some tenuous successes, including a series of national elections in 2005. Afghanistan had receded from the headlines, but it, too, was beginning to face growing instability as the Taliban regrouped and as guerrillas built a recruiting and organizational base across the border in Pakistan. Even as the United States looked for a smarter approach, the internal dynamics in both countries meant that the nation-building mission would still have to be done under fire.
* Neumann said he didn’t recall that remark, or any such exchange with Hillen. “He may have clashed with someone in Kabul and it may not have come up to me,” he said. But ferrying officials from Washington around the hinterlands, Neumann added, was definitely a problem. “We didn’t control much aviation, so when people wanted to get around it wasn’t so easily done,” he told me.
PART III
Theory into Practice
CHAPTER 8
Wingtips on the Ground
Sending diplomats and aid experts to Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other war-zone assignments was a good idea, in theory. Civilians had the kind of expertise in governance, state building, and development that few soldiers had. But the State Department and other civilian agencies were even less prepared than the U.S. military for the violent, chaotic situation they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nation building required more manpower than those organizations had on hand, and the larger the mission grew, the more it exposed the shortcomings of the civilian bureaucracy.
It was tough, unglamorous work, and diplomats were being asked to tackle a completely unfamiliar set of problems. Instead of their traditional responsibilities of reporting back to Washington on the high-level goings-on in foreign capitals, they were becoming involved in the complexities of local and provincial administration. They were overseeing water and sewage repair, trash collection, and rural electrification, all while occasionally being shot at.
Diplomatic and government agencies had been involved in administering and rebuilding Iraq since the invasion in 2003, but there was still no comprehensive way to organize and mobilize them. Unlike the military, which had realistic predeployment training and predictable rotation cycles, the civilian bureaucracy had a more haphazard approach to sending employees “downrange.” Military units typically trained together before deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan; by contrast, civilians usually arrived as individual replacements on Provincial Reconstruction Teams or in regional embassy offices. This lack
of esprit de corps often created unnecessary friction. It was also a question of training. The State Department offered a rigorous area-studies and language training to diplomats going to traditional embassy assignments, but that kind of specialized preparation was nonexistent for nation-building assignments.
In the summer of 2005, the State Department began planning Provincial Reconstruction Teams for Iraq. The idea was to deploy a Provincial Reconstruction Team in each of Iraq’s eighteen governorates (provinces) as part of a push to extend the central government’s control to Iraq’s regions, something the military desperately wanted. Greg Bates, a retired Marine Corps officer who had worked in Iraq since the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was part of the team recruited by the State Department to help jump-start the effort. Bates had wide civilian and military experience in the Middle East. He had worked in naval intelligence, had served a tour with the CPA as a Foreign Service officer, and had worked as a USAID contractor for a local governance program in Iraq. By his third tour in Iraq, as director of operations for the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, a shortfall in civilian personnel had become glaringly obvious. Multi-National Force Iraq, the U.S.-dominated military command, was “screaming to get civilians back in the provinces,” Bates said.
The aim in Iraq was not to reproduce the Afghanistan experiment. Iraq was much more developed: It had infrastructure, a centralized administration, and a literate population. What it needed most was effective provincial- and national-level government institutions. Planners started work on a new template for civil-military teams in Iraq. Whereas PRT commanders in Afghanistan were almost exclusively military, the Iraq teams would be civilian-led, and they would focus more on governance than on rural development projects. Mentoring Iraqi officials, not building infrastructure, would be the main focus. The catchwords for the program, “capacity building” and “sustainability,” were borrowed from the world of development. The planning team presented their proposal to Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had moved on from Afghanistan to become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in September. The team feared that “reconstruction” in the name might suggest to Iraqis that they would have a giant pot of construction funds at their disposal, but they stuck with PRT, which was by that time familiar to the members of Congress who controlled the purse strings.
Training would be a problem for diplomats and other civilians assigned to this new mission. At that point, diplomats headed to Iraq could expect to go on a three- or five-day security course where they would learn the fundamentals of working in a hostile environment—basic first aid, evasive driving, and weapons handling—but there was no PRT-specific training. No system was in place to ensure proper coordination with the military or to pass on lessons that had been learned in the field. (There would be no formal predeployment training program for PRTs until February 2007, when the Iraq “surge” began.)
Then there was the question of who would provide security. Foreign Service officers, USAID employees, and other civilians assigned to PRTs would require protection while out in the field. The first three teams would be working out of regional embassy offices, so they could rely on private security details provided by Triple Canopy, DynCorp, or Blackwater, the three U.S. security firms that had security contracts with the State Department. But in other provinces, the PRTs would have to be located on forward operating bases, where security and transportation would have to be provided by the military. That would require intricate negotiations between the different bureaucratic tribes in Iraq: the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Multi-National Force Iraq headquarters.
The national coordination center for Iraq PRTs was established at the beginning of October 2005. Around the same time, the U.S. Embassy Baghdad released Baghdad Cable 4045, a coordinated memorandum between the embassy and Multi-National Force Iraq to the State Department headquarters that outlined the PRT program, what it was supposed to accomplish, and how diplomats and the military were directed to do it. By late November, two teams were up and running. The first was in Mosul, the city where Petraeus had made his mark as a military administrator, and the second in Hillah, where Marine Lance Corporal John Guardiano had learned hard lessons about municipal politics in Iraq. A third team was established in Kirkuk by mid-December. But the PRTs were slow to build momentum. Under the original timetable, around fifteen PRTs were supposed to be established by mid-2006. By June 2006 there were only five. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—not a huge fan of the concept, according to those involved in the project—demanded a sixty-day “proof of concept” before allowing the program to move forward.
Rumsfeld’s skepticism came in part from the apparent lack of commitment from civilian agencies to the Iraq mission. Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld associate, told me that Rumsfeld’s objections to the PRTs “were not with the concept itself,” but with the lack of nonmilitary personnel committed to the task:
The goal of the PRTs was exactly what senior military commanders had been asking, even pleading for, since 2003: more interagency support and competence in reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan which were nonsecurity and non-DoD related. The problem with the PRT concept was the commitment (or lack thereof) to staff them with non DoD personnel—State, Agriculture, etc.… Rumsfeld and other senior DoD officials recognized that absent commitments beyond comforting words of assurance, DoD would be carrying the burden for PRTs. And sure enough, that’s what happened, especially in Iraq, when many PRTs had dozens of uniformed personnel and no more than a few civilians.
By February 2006, plans were finally in the works to roll out the rest of the teams, including an Italian-led team and a British-led team. But many issues were still unresolved. In June of 2006, James Jeffrey, a senior advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, conceded that there was friction between the military and the diplomatic corps over coordinating aid and reconstruction efforts at the regional level. Each PRT had up to one hundred personnel, so establishing more contingents would involve major security demands and put additional strain on military resources.
“The military would like to see thousands of civilians throughout the country and that would require tens of thousands of folks securing them,” Jeffrey told reporters at a breakfast in Washington. “That’s a very big issue. It would be either billions of dollars and huge numbers of PSDs [personal security details] running around the country, and that’s already a political and security problem, or it would require a lot of troops.”
Planners faced another problem: Civilian agencies had a hard time finding people willing to serve in Iraq. Once again, the military would plug the gap, providing much of the manpower.
Iraq’s deadly downward spiral continued through 2006. That spring, Congress appointed the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel of ten Beltway worthies charged with assessing the situation in Iraq. The panel, chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, reached a depressingly obvious conclusion: U.S. troops were overstretched and Iraq was engulfed in civil war. With one hundred Americans dying every month and the war reaching a “burn rate” of $2 billion a week, there seemed to be no clear exit. That November, the American public, wearying of violent headlines from Iraq, handed a defeat to the Republican Party in the midterm elections, and the Democratic Party gained control of both the House and Senate. After the crushing electoral loss, President George W. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Robert Gates, a national security veteran who had served as director of Central Intelligence under Bush’s father, was announced as Rumsfeld’s replacement.
Rumsfeld’s dismissal was the first real acknowledgment by the administration of the severity of the Iraq situation. Early in the war, officials had been relentlessly upbeat, even as postinvasion casualties climbed. Even the word “insurgent” was verboten. In Rumsfeld’s lexicon, the insurgents were “dead-enders,” isolated Ba’athist regime holdouts, and
assorted criminals. “The reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war’ is because there isn’t one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world,” he had said in late June 2003. Iraq had “looters, criminals, remnants of the Ba’athist regime, foreign terrorists who came in to assist and try to harm the coalition forces, and those influenced by Iran,” but “that … doesn’t make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance.”1 He was still saying this two and a half years later.
Even after General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, broke with the party line the following month to describe the situation in Iraq as a “classical guerrilla-type campaign,” the secretary of defense clung to his “freedom is untidy” interpretation of events in Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice even floated an absurd comparison between postwar Germany and present-day Iraq, suggesting early on that the attacks in Iraq were reminiscent of the few isolated cases of postwar violence by Nazi saboteurs. That mendacious retelling of history was quietly dropped as casualties mounted.