Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  The United States needed a radically different approach. The Iraq Study Group recommended a traditional “diplomatic offensive” that would force Iraq’s neighbors to broker reconciliation within Iraq. U.S. forces should scale back to a supporting role; combat forces should begin a withdrawal from Iraq. The report concluded that it was time for a “responsible transition,” but President Bush opted for a different course. On January 10, 2007, he announced a “new way forward” for Iraq, a “surge” of five additional brigade combat teams to Iraq—a total of more than twenty thousand additional troops, with the main effort focused on securing the Iraqi capital. It was a break with a strategy of gradual disengagement. General George Casey, who had assumed the top command in Iraq in June 2004, had concentrated his efforts on handing off provinces to Iraqi control and confining U.S. troops to megabases away from population centers. That would all change. As part of the surge, U.S. forces would move to small combat outposts in residential neighborhoods, where they would work to expand security, block by block. To seal the deal, Bush selected a new top commander, General David Petraeus, the godfather of the counterinsurgency movement. Ryan Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer and fluent Arabic speaker, was named as Petraeus’s civilian counterpart; he replaced Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

  The surge plan was influenced in part by “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” a paper authored by Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and retired General Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff. The paper had been put forward by AEI in part as a response to the Iraq Study Group’s report. It was rolled out at a December 2006 event at AEI’s headquarters and then at a January event attended by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. The AEI report foreshadowed some aspects of the plan that Bush adopted, and the new Iraq strategy was also shaped by the newly adopted counterinsurgency manual. The new doctrine was not presented as Iraq-specific—it was supposed to be a generic guide for U.S. forces supporting a “host nation” government involved in battling an insurgency—but it was very much written with Iraq in mind. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who was heavily involved in crafting the document, called it “a manual on how to win in Iraq.”

  The counterinsurgency manual was meant in part to force a rethink of the military’s fixation on “force protection,” the fortress mentality that kept U.S. troops hunkered behind the walls of large, fortified bases. It featured a series of thought-provoking “paradoxes” that would encourage commanders to think more carefully about the application of lethal force and about preventing civilian harm:

  Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be

  Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is

  Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction

  Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot

  These sounded like politically correct talking points, or a clever way of selling counterinsurgency to the public, but they had a very real aim: collecting intelligence. If U.S. forces relied on blunt tools such as airstrikes or artillery, killed civilians at checkpoints, and generally kept everyone back one hundred meters from their convoys, as signs on their vehicles warned, they would never collect any meaningful information about the insurgency. A key appendix on using social network analysis and other intelligence tools drove the point home: In many respects the campaign would resemble policing a beat, as the military patrolled an area and mapped out and identified the insurgent networks and how they operated.

  The field manual devoted an entire chapter to “unity of effort,” the bureaucratic term for tightly integrating development work, diplomacy, and military operations. The Departments of State, Justice, and Treasury would all have to send representatives to work and live with the military and provide advice on governance, law enforcement, and finance. USAID would also have to subordinate its development programs to counterinsurgency strategy. The focal point of the development agency’s efforts in Iraq was the Community Stabilization Program, a massive jobs and public-works program for Iraq. The program was supposed to keep young (fighting-age) Iraqi men away from the insurgency by putting them to work or enrolling them in vocational programs. The tab for the Community Stabilization Program was a whopping $644 million, more than the agency allocated to the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund and the Development Assistance account for all of Asia and the Near East in fiscal year 2005. The contract was controversial. Many established nongovernmental organizations were skeptical that such an ambitious program could be managed effectively (Mercy Corps, a major U.S. nonprofit, declined to bid on the project for that reason). There was also concern that the program was too overtly tied to counterinsurgency aims, rather than development goals, and was a textbook example of how military operations and development work had become intermingled. International Relief and Development, a large, well-established USAID implementing partner, won the contract.

  The surge also required a parallel diplomatic effort, a doubling of the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and civilians serving outside the Green Zone. Those new teams, called “embedded” or e-PRTs because they would be attached directly to brigade combat teams or regimental combat teams, were to be a key piece of the new Iraq strategy. They were supposed to streamline military operations and civilian reconstruction efforts, which in the past had often been badly coordinated. They were civilian-led by design (in Afghanistan, PRTs were led by military officers).

  Unfortunately this civilian surge got off to a rough start, and the State Department was slow to fill billets on the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Further complicating matters, the Pentagon and the State Department could not agree on lines of responsibility, staffing plans, and objectives for PRTs. According to a House Armed Services Committee report, the State Department did not plan on “backfilling” these positions until the end of September 2008, when the military surge would already be winding down.2

  On October 25, 2007, Harry Thomas, director-general of the Foreign Service, sent out an announcement to staffers informing them that the State Department had decided to begin “directed assignments” to fill an anticipated shortfall of 48 diplomats in Iraq. Around 250 Foreign Service officers received an e-mail informing them that they had been selected as qualified for the posts. If enough of them did not step forward, some of them would be ordered to Iraq. In theory, Foreign Service officers were supposed to be available for worldwide deployment. Refuse an assignment, and you had to resign your commission. But this was the first time since the Vietnam War that the State Department had contemplated ordering diplomats to serve in war zones.3

  The following week, State Department management held a “town hall” forum at its Foggy Bottom headquarters whose purpose was to explain the decision to order Foreign Service officers to Iraq to make up for the lack of volunteers. The meeting turned into a bitter confrontation between diplomats and their senior management. One diplomat, Jack Croddy, seemed barely able to contain his rage as he took his turn at the microphone. Standing before the hundreds of diplomats assembled in the State Department’s main auditorium, the gray-haired senior Foreign Service officer’s face flushed and his voice quavered: “Incoming is coming in every day, rockets are hitting the Green Zone. So if you forced-assign people, that is really shifting the terms of what we are all about. It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it.”4

  A wave of sustained applause swept through the auditorium. News accounts of the acrimonious town hall forum further bolstered a perception within the military that Foreign Service officers were elitists who refused to perform their duty while those in uniform made all the sacrifices. Many diplomats had served in harm’s way since September 11, 2001, and the State Department did eventually find volunteers to f
ill the positions. Still, the damage to the reputation of the Foreign Service was lasting. In an open letter to colleagues posted on the State Department’s Web site, John Matel, a career Foreign Service officer serving as the head of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq’s Anbar Province, fretted that the Marines he served alongside would think of the government civilians as “wimps and weenies” because of the furor. “I personally dislike the whole idea of forced assignments, but we do have to do our jobs,” he wrote.

  We signed up to be worldwide available. All of us volunteered for this kind of work and we have enjoyed a pretty sweet lifestyle most of our careers. I will not repeat what the Marines say when I bring up this subject. I tell them that most FSOs are not wimps and weenies. I will not share this article [about the town hall meeting] with them and I hope they do not see it. How could I explain this wailing and gnashing of teeth? I just tried to explain it to one of my PRT members, a reserve [lieutenant colonel] called up to serve in Iraq. She asked me if all FSOs would get the R&R, extra pay etc. and if it was our job to do things like this. When I answered in the affirmative, she just rolled her eyes.5

  Ted Andrews, a veteran Foreign Service officer, was on vacation in Florence with his wife in October 2007 when he picked up a copy of the International Herald-Tribune and spotted an article about the contentious town hall meeting at the State Department. He turned to his wife and drily remarked, “I wonder where I’m going.”

  Andrews didn’t consider himself much of an adrenaline junkie. He was enjoying a peaceful diplomatic assignment in Brussels with his family, and he had no plans to volunteer to go into a war zone. Reading about the town hall tirade by Foreign Service officers, however, helped change his mind. A few weeks later, he signed up for a State Department billet on an embedded PRT in Iraq. “I don’t want to sound like a great patriot,” he told me the following December, as he neared the end of his tour in Baghdad, “but I didn’t like the press. It made the State Department look pretty ridiculous—the people who were so vocally and openly complaining. And also the head of our personnel department is someone I really admire, and he was going out there and beating the drum for this. He’s not a fool, so I said, ‘All right, we’ll go, because we’ve got one boy next year going to college.’ ” Pausing briefly, Andrews added, “I don’t want to sound flippant. I thought it would be—it wouldn’t be appropriate to say fun—I thought it would be really interesting sort of work.” (Andrews’s understatement was deliberate. Several of his colleagues, including a member of the PRT, were killed in the bombing of the Sadr City District Advisory Council in June of that year.)

  Andrews was not a stranger to conflict; he had previously worked in Somalia, and he was posted to Kenya at the time of the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi. But until the “town hall” fiasco, he hadn’t been particularly eager to volunteer to go to Iraq. The Foreign Service did offer sweeteners for serving on a PRT: They allowed families to stay at whatever post the diplomat was already assigned to, sparing them a disruptive move back to the United States. That meant children could stay in school, and they wouldn’t have to move for just one year or thirteen months. The State Department also offered generous leave packages. During their year-long deployment, diplomats serving on PRTs could take three long R&R breaks or two long R&Rs and three shorter breaks. It added up to a total of about two months of leave. By contrast, a typical Army tour in Iraq during the surge was fifteen months.

  But Andrews’s training for Iraq was abbreviated at best. The position he put in for was scheduled to begin in April; then the start date was moved up to March. Prior to deployment, he went through a five-day security course refresher, a version of the “crash and bang” course taught in West Virginia to teach basic survival skills for assignments to dangerous places. The first three days included intensive first aid; the training also featured a familiarization course on improvised explosive devices, the main threat in Iraq. The trainers showed gruesome videos of roadside bombs going off to remind trainees of how serious the dangers were. It was like a wartime version of the classroom scare movies they show in driver’s education: If diplomats were riding along in a military vehicle, it was as much their job as it was a soldier’s to stay alert and look out for a possible attack.

  The diplomats also received a brief overview of weapons handling. It wasn’t particularly intensive training. They took turns firing pistols, and learned the difference between the 9mm weapons carried by diplomatic security and the ones used by the military. Trainers also familiarized them with the ubiquitous AK-47, so they could recognize its distinctive sound, and the M4 carbine, the Army’s standard carbine. Then they drove through a course where they saw simulated ambushes and roadside bomb attacks. The whole thing was sobering, but brief. Many people finished the course at noon on a Friday and flew out of Dulles International Airport to the Middle East at nine that night.

  Diplomats assigned to PRTs were also supposed to get specific training in the United States on how the teams operated. Andrews never got around to that, because of the rush to get diplomats to the field during the surge. Likewise, he never had the chance to attend a mandatory orientation for e-PRT team members that was supposed to be held in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces inside Baghdad’s International Zone (also called the Green Zone). Andrews was originally scheduled to arrive on Easter Sunday, 2008, the day that insurgents unleashed a barrage of rocket and mortar fire on the IZ. The indirect-fire attacks continued for several more weeks. Andrews was sent instead to Camp Taji, a large base north of Baghdad, where he began his assignment with the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, which was responsible for the volatile Baghdad neighborhoods of Sadr City and Adhamiya.

  “I’ve never taken the orientation class,” Andrews said with a laugh. “They have an orientation for us, three days in the IZ at the palace, at the head office for the PRTs. I never took it, because there were all the rockets, and they said, don’t come here.” He continued with a chuckle. “I came straight to … Taji, and started working around. I learned everything on the job!”

  Part of the job was to provide a civilian face for the brigade’s “engagements” with local politicians and local business leaders in discussions about Civil Affairs projects. They were also there to provide some guidance and advice to local district councils. Living on a base, wearing body armor, and riding in military convoys was physically taxing: The middle-aged diplomat shed around twenty pounds during his deployment. And he had learned that progress in Iraq would be slow. “They’re not going to have a ‘victory-over-terrorism day,’ ” he said. “Just one day you’re going to realize, we’ve gone six months without a big incident. And that’s what normalcy will be.”

  The military took the lead in almost everything related to reconstruction. The e-PRT didn’t have transport of its own, so Andrews and his colleagues had to hitch rides around the brigade’s area of operations on military convoys. In briefings for the press or meetings with local dignitaries, the brigade commander was clearly in charge, although Andrews or another civilian was often at his elbow to provide some quiet advice. Andrews’s case was somewhat extreme, but it reflected the general lack of training and preparation the State Department gave to diplomats, more than five years into the Iraq War. A picture Andrews kept on the wall of his office slyly underscored the absurdity of the situation. It showed a wrecked vehicle in the tank graveyard at Taji. On the rusting hulk someone had spray-painted DAD— STUCK IN IRAQ—SEND MONEY.

  When Petraeus took command in Iraq, he selected a team of experts, called the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, that was tasked with creating a unified civil-military plan for the country. It was to combine all the elements of nation building: economic development, intelligence gathering, and security measures. Petraeus also invited David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert, to serve as his personal counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq. Kilcullen arrived in early 2007, and over the next year he traveled throughout the theater, serving as a sort of rovin
g emissary for Petraeus. His role was to be an evangelizer for counterinsurgency “best practices,” hammering home the basic principles of protecting the population, promoting development, and breaking the cycle of violence. It was an unusual choice to bring in a foreigner to tell the U.S. military how to do its job. In some respects, Kilcullen was reprising the role of Sir Robert Thompson, the Malaya counterinsurgency expert who had provided expert advice (and prescient warnings) to the U.S. military during the Vietnam war: a smart, articulate outsider who could tell the military what they did not want to hear.

  In the small clique of counterinsurgency theorists, Kilcullen was a star. A reserve lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, he had been seconded to State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism as an expert on guerrilla warfare.6 His exotic résumé read like a document from another era. He had made use of the Australian Army’s generous leave to conduct field work in West Java for a doctoral dissertation on Indonesian insurgent groups. As a soldier he had taught tactics at the British School of Infantry; served on peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and Bougainville; and worked as a military advisor to the Indonesian Special Forces.7 He had also worked in several countries of the Middle East. Perhaps most famously, he negotiated a ceasefire after a border clash between Australian troops and the Indonesian army, police, and militia in October 1999, during the UN-mandated intervention in East Timor.8 The incident occurred in the town of Motaain, close to the border with Indonesian West Timor. The Indonesian army was using an old Dutch map that showed Motaain west of the border; the UN’s map, printed in Indonesia, showed Motaain in the east.9 Television footage shot at the time showed Kilcullen crossing Motaain Bridge in the open, with his hands up, to meet with his Indonesian counterparts, compare maps, and broker a ceasefire.10