Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  Kilcullen had also participated in the drafting of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. But his participation at the Fort Leavenworth counterinsurgency seminar in February 2006 was interrupted by an urgent phone call. There had been a bombing at the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. Kilcullen needed to get to Iraq as quickly as possible. What Kilcullen found on this trip to Iraq was dispiriting: The U.S. military had been slow to respond to the accelerating internal war. On a visit to the deputy of Muwaffak al Rubai’e, Iraq’s national security advisor, Kilcullen noted the disconnect as U.S. military briefers delivered an eye-glazing, acronym-laden PowerPoint presentation filled with “metrics” detailing the latest trends in Iraq. The American briefers were focusing mostly on their recent raids against insurgent groups and ignoring the impact that the burgeoning civil war was having on the population. “[I]t took approximately four and a half months, from the Samarra bombing until mid-July 2006, for these slides to begin reflecting what the Iraqi political staff (who worked less than 50 yards from the briefing room but were not allowed into it) had told me the very week of the bombing: that Samarra was a disaster that fundamentally and irrevocably altered the nature of the war,” Kilcullen wrote.11

  Iraq’s violent civil war continued for the rest of the year. In parallel, Kilcullen and his allies within the national security bureaucracy started working on a way to salvage the situation and get the rest of the government more fully involved in the mission. By late 2006, counterinsurgency was all the rage within military circles, even as commanders on the ground were still trying to get a grip on its practice. The same could not be said for the civilian side of government—even if, as theory held, civilian-led nation building was the most important part of a counterinsurgency campaign.

  Shortly after the September 2006 U.S. government counterinsurgency conference in Washington, Kilcullen and a few others within the State Department started working on a new interagency counterinsurgency guide, a handbook for civilian policymakers that was supposed to drive home the importance of nation building. A less-than-subtle agenda was at work: If the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual was supposed to push the uniformed military to embrace “soft power,” the new guide was supposed to get diplomats, aid officials, and other civilians to get in touch with their hard-power military side.

  But the new document needed to be more than just a Cliff’s Notes version of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine. The new guide was a manual on how to win Iraq, but it wasn’t necessarily going to help in Afghanistan or in any other future contingency. It focused heavily on twentieth-century Maoist-style insurgencies, rather than on the sophisticated, globally connected insurgencies the U.S. government was expected to face in the future. Kilcullen wanted a document that took a more contemporary view of the problem. More important, he wanted to force policymakers to think about a larger issue: when—and when not—to intervene. Kilcullen made little effort to conceal the fact that he viewed the decision to invade Iraq as a grave strategic mistake, and he wanted to make clear that aiding a government involved in counterinsurgency did not have to require deploying a large, conventional U.S. military force. The counterinsurgents once again reached for historical precedent. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, one of the models for the eponymous character in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, was sent as an expert advisor to the Philippine leader Ramon Magsaysay during the Communist-dominated Hukbalahap rebellion. The United States supported El Salvador’s counterinsurgency with a limited number of military advisors in the 1980s. This new document studied the problems of intervention, and showed when and how to intervene.

  The first draft of the document ran to around two hundred pages. That was too long for the kinds of busy senior policymakers—cabinet members, National Security Council staffers, presidential envoys—that Kilcullen and the counterinsurgents wanted to reach. It needed to be fifty pages, tops, with a crisp executive summary. Kilcullen decided to refocus the document. Just two weeks after the near revolt at the State Department over news of the directed assignments, Kilcullen hosted a workshop in a rented conference room at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Representatives of over half a dozen government agencies and from think tanks, academia, the media, and several foreign embassies participated. Kilcullen, who only recently had returned from Iraq, tried to relay the gravity of the situation to the attendees. “This doctrine that we’re looking at here actually saves lives,” he said.

  During his recent tour in Iraq, Kilcullen had traversed the violent landscape, visiting e-PRTs, brigade commanders, and Iraqi officials in a frenetic effort to reinforce the basic principles of counterinsurgency: unity of effort, civilian and military cooperation. “To fix that, we had to sit out in the field with these e-PRTs, work out their problems, and identify what’s going on,” he said.

  And it’s easy to say that, but doing that involves transiting areas. We lost aircraft trying to get out to e-PRTs … We had a Humvee crew drown in their vehicle when they were hit by an IED getting out to the e-PRT to talk about their command and control structure. Moving through ambush after ambush to deal with little problems that could have been solved in a handbook written a thousand miles away that just didn’t come in time. So we had to be out there doing it—and eventually losing people to snipers and to IEDs and so on to make this thing work.

  The effort carried a price, he grimly concluded. “I reckon conservatively we lost about a dozen people because we didn’t have a doctrine,” he said.

  As Kilcullen concluded, the manual was supposed to spell out the roles of civilian and military agencies that would be involved in these sorts of interventions for the foreseeable future: “It’s so that you don’t hunker down in some building with people shooting at you and some full colonel saying, ‘What are you supposed to be doing here?’ and we certainly don’t need to lose people trying to get out and explain stuff that people should already know.”

  This new document was just one part of the solution. The civilian agencies of government needed to be more “expeditionary”—more military, better able to deploy on short notice, practiced in cooperating with the military, ready to work in war zones. The U.S. military has a deep bench: In addition to an active-duty force, it has an extensive reserve system that it can call on in a crisis. During the Cold War, the National Guard and the reserves were standing by for “the big one” if war broke out with the Soviet Union. In the post-9/11 era, the military drew heavily on reserves, especially Army National Guard units, to support rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The system worked, despite the strain of repeated deployments. But the diplomatic corps and the civilian agencies of government had no civilian equivalent. Absent a large reserve, nation-building missions would continue to depend heavily on civilian contractors who could deploy to a crisis zone on short notice.

  With the creation of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in August 2004 the State Department took the first tentative steps toward building a more “expeditionary” diplomatic corps. The new office, known as S/CRS (S stands for State Department’s Office of the Secretary), was supposed to be the home for a new kind of diplomat, “muddy-boots” Foreign Service officers and civil servants who would work outside the walls of the traditional embassy and focus on working in conflict and postconflict environments. It was a direct response to the failures in Iraq, where the diplomatic corps had been slow to mobilize for the reconstruction. In theory, members of the new office would be the diplomatic equivalent of Special Forces teams, ready to parachute into remote, often hostile, places with minimal support to prevent a localized conflict from becoming a regional crisis.

  The creation of the new office was exciting news for adventurous young diplomats like John Mongan; Mongan learned about S/CRS as he was preparing to deploy to a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. Mongan needed a new assignment after his one-year tour, so he approached the new office, submitted a résumé, and made a point of keeping in touch with them
while he was in the field. It sounded like a perfect fit. Mongan wanted a job that would allow him to keep working in trouble spots, instead of rotating back to a routine management job in Foggy Bottom. He turned down other State Department jobs, having gotten a promise from the new head of S/CRS that he would have a place within the new organization. But when Mongan began his job, at S/CRS in August 2005, he learned that he would not be returning to the field anytime soon. His first task at S/CRS was to write up a recruiting paper so they could begin filling the first fifteen one-year positions for something called the Active Response Corps, or ARC, which would form the core of the new civilian reserve. In other words, S/CRS had not even begun staffing its first diplomatic crisis-response team.

  In its first year of existence, S/CRS invested in building a Washington office but put little money into training, which was essential if the State Department wanted to have bureaucrats standing by for deployment. To work in these war zones, they would need hostile environment training and language skills; they would have to be adept at negotiating with local warlords, nongovernmental organizations, and military officers; and they would need to take part in training exercises. Part of the problem was managerial. Secretary of State Colin Powell founded S/CRS shortly before he left the administration, so the initiative foundered without high-level backing. And in January 2006, his successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, launched “transformational diplomacy,” a broader effort to put the State Department on a war footing by shifting more assignments within the Foreign Service from coveted embassy slots in Europe to posts in the developing world. In parallel, Rice restructured USAID, folding its planning staff into the State Department and elevating the USAID administrator to a rank equivalent to that of deputy secretary of state. Although the move stopped short of merging USAID completely with State, it further marginalized an organization that should have played a key role in fixing failed states.

  The first test of the Active Response Corps was in Sudan’s Darfur region. In May 2006, the Darfur Peace Agreement, signed in Abuja, Nigeria, brought a fragile accord between the Khartoum government and one of Darfur’s rebel factions. S/CRS sent Eythan Sontag, one of the eleven officers of the Active Response Corps, and Keith Mines to help implement the peace agreement by persuading other rebel groups to join the peace process. Mines was now stationed in Ottawa as a political officer and had volunteered for duty as a standby officer. The ARC team had to scout a location for a modest, fortified headquarters on the outskirts of El Fasher; hire a small local staff of drivers, custodians, and interpreters; and set up a remote office using a Very Small Aperture Terminal, a satellite Internet connection.12 Both Sontag and Mines were former Army officers, and they gravitated to work in crisis zones. The government needed more than just a self-selected group of civil servants and diplomats standing by to be international first responders, but at that point the Active Response Corps had a full-time staff of only a dozen people.

  ARC’s deployment to Darfur, then, was a trial run of something much more ambitious. Just a few weeks after announcing the Iraq surge, in his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush proposed a dramatic initiative, the creation of a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps: “Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.”

  In theory, the CRC would be a sort of supersized Peace Corps, stacked with experts in nation building. It would be a complex, three-tiered organization, built in stages. The first stage would comprise active and standby components drawn from government ranks. The active component, around 250 strong, would be trained to deploy within forty-eight hours. The standby corps, about 2,000 individuals drawn from around eight federal agencies, would be available to respond within thirty days of a crisis. The second stage, creating the reserve component, would be a much more ambitious, long-term project. It would be drawn from a roster of citizens in all walks of life who were willing to serve as temporary U.S. government employees in support of overseas reconstruction and stabilization operations: civil engineers, agricultural experts, city managers, public health officials, police officers, corrections officials. They would provide the boots on the ground and the expertise that the government simply did not have.

  Officials within S/CRS acknowledged that this stage would be easier said than done. How would reservists be paid? What would happen if they were injured or killed on the job? Would they be considered full government employees, or would they be glorified temps? None of the details were clear, and there were thorny legal issues that would have to be resolved. When military reservists are called up, their employers are required by law to release them and rehire them when their service is complete. If a volunteer for the Civilian Response Corps were not offered similar legal protection, they would have little incentive to leave their jobs and deploy to a war zone or a postconflict environment.

  The biggest problem, however, was the budget. If the goal was to have a real “whole of government” nation-building team—a true twenty-first-century Colonial Office—it would need full funding from Congress. Without money to cover the cost of salaries, buy war-zone survival equipment, and develop a training program, the whole thing would be an exercise in paper shuffling.

  In its brief existence S/CRS managed to lure some motivated and talented people. Beverli DeWalt, a member of the Civilian Response Corps, Active component, joined the Foreign Service in November 2003 and served her first tour in Islamabad as a consular officer. She spoke Urdu, a key language, and had served at the U.S. mission to NATO in Brussels as a political officer specializing in Iraq and civil-military issues. In 2008, she worked at the U.S. embassy in Pristina to help pave the way for Kosovo’s declaration of independence. That same year, she served for about six months as a political, governance, and women’s issues advisor at the Kapisa and Parwan Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. In short, she was the kind of person who was a natural fit with the new kind of diplomacy.

  But this new breed of diplomatic first responder was not a natural fit with the culture of the State Department, in which everything revolved around the embassy hierarchy. They were still bureaucratic orphans. And the deployment cycle for active-duty members of the Civilian Response Corps was a strain; they often spent six months in the field, then six months back at home. Back-to-back rotations were difficult for the military, but at least the troops could rely on an extensive support network for their families back at home. It was an imperfect system, but the expectation of spending time in the field was built into the system, part of the normal cycle of deployment. The Civilian Response Corps did not have that infrastructure. Unlike regular diplomatic assignments, their postings to the field were “unaccompanied,” meaning that their spouses, if they had them, could not go with them. It made for a less than ideal social life, and was a major disincentive for joining the State Department’s nation-building force.

  I asked DeWalt if she had a family. “Mom and Dad,” she said quietly. “A sister.” Was anyone else in the small group at S/CRS married? Did they have children?

  “Let me go through this,” she said. “The director does, but he doesn’t really deploy much.” Ticking off the rest of the group on her fingers, she continued, “Single, single, single—sensing a theme here?—married with one kid. The majority are single.”

  S/CRS’s corps of diplomatic first responders was the exception: Most diplomats were still being posted to dangerous places without much thought or preparation. James Hunter was the first Foreign Service officer stationed to the Asadabad PRT, a remote firebase in a high-walled mountain valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, not far from the Pakistan border. Hunter was the lone PRT civilian at the outpost, where a contingent of sixty-seven American troops, a mix of regular Army and Special Forces, and later Marines
, defended the base. Fortunately, the military scrapped plans to withdraw some of the soldiers guarding the base. Otherwise, maintaining Americans in each guard position—a necessity, since the base was ten miles from the border with Pakistan—would have taken up all the time of everyone on the base, Hunter included. The small fort was under attack on average at least once a week. One night they could even observe the Taliban fighters coming down on the opposite side of the valley, setting up mortars to fire at the base. Hunter grew accustomed to the distinctive sound of incoming 107mm rockets whistling across the valley. A few even flew right over his position. It sounded just like in the movies.

  Out in Asadabad, Hunter felt as if he was at the very end of the line. As far as the embassy in Kabul was concerned, “We fell off the face of the earth.” He had to send in reporting cables, minus the sensitive information, by Hotmail account: The embassy had not yet arranged for secure communication with Kabul. Still, Hunter threw himself into his work, compiling detailed biographical files on the major tribal players and local officials in Kunar and Nuristan provinces. By the time he left his “bio files” extended to about 350 pages; the document provided the U.S. mission with key insights into the “human terrain” of this part of Afghanistan.

  Still, it was a job that required skills that were not remotely part of Foreign Service training. The PRT worked with people from the Korengal Valley, a densely forested river valley in Kunar Province that was home to a proud, insular tribal community that offered a haven for insurgents. A convoy traveling through the valley in the spring of 2005 hit an ambush. The column of vehicles was stuck on the road while gunfire cracked overhead. At one point, Hunter borrowed an M4 carbine from the driver, climbed out of the truck, and began returning fire—firing aimed shots, just as he had been trained to do in the military. “I didn’t spray and pray,” he recalled.