by Nathan Hodge
Although U.S. officials were careful to emphasize the “preventative” and “nonkinetic” nature of AFRICOM, it did open the door to more direct military involvement. General William Ward, previously the deputy head of U.S. European Command, was AFRICOM’s first four-star commander. Ward had served as a brigade commander during the Somalia intervention and had made clear his views about the military’s role in Africa: It was to be driven by a sort of enlightened armed humanitarianism. In a 2007 article written for Joint Forces Quarterly, Ward described the searing experience of peacekeeping in the Horn of Africa: “Seeing the victims of the famine gave me stark reminders of why we were deployed there: to provide security to allow the international relief efforts to happen.”17
The efforts to stabilize Somalia had ended in failure. In his article Ward suggested that in the future, the U.S. military would “have to be prepared to intervene early, with clear goals, authorities, and responsibilities understood by the parties to the conflict and among the international and interagency partners involved.”18 The conviction that the judicious application of military science and a willingness to intervene could somehow inoculate Africa from full-blown conflict seemed to be AFRICOM’s guiding belief. This powerful new command could deliver aid to the continent in a way that no civilian relief agency could. It could draw upon the extraordinary logistics capabilities of the U.S. military to fly troops to a crisis in a hurry; it had a planning staff that could draw up sophisticated plans in an emergency; and it would have a sophisticated intelligence apparatus to anticipate conflict before it broke out. This vision of “smart power also pointed the way to future U.S. military intervention on the continent.
In May 2008, a few months before the full activation of AFRICOM, the Army hosted a war game at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, called Unified Quest 2008. There were around two hundred players: active-duty and retired military officers, Coast Guard personnel, NATO representatives, and a smattering of diplomats, intelligence officials, and other civilians. Unified Quest is an annual event whose purpose is to test the U.S. government’s response to potential crises in the not-so-distant future. The focus of the 2008 game was conflict prevention. Participants tested scenarios that policymakers could face in an era of “persistent conflict” arising from the combined forces of globalization, competition for energy resources, population growth, and failing states.
Two of the scenarios took place in Africa. In one, Army Colonel Mark Forman played the role of the AFRICOM commander, responding to a hypothetical crisis in Nigeria sometime between 2013 and 2015. The Nigerian government is near collapse, and various factions are competing for power. In this scenario, AFRICOM operates as an “economy of force” headquarters; it has limited manpower and is only a small presence of the continent.
The second scenario was supposed to test how a fully configured AFRICOM could respond to a crisis in the Horn of Africa. James Embrey, a retired army colonel with the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, played the head of a multinational task force that deploys to Somalia in 2025 to prop up an embattled government and fight off insurgents. The scenario was premised on the assumption that AFRICOM would command the full range of diplomatic, military, and conflict prevention tools by that time. “The supposition that we are making here is that the whole-of-government interagency planning and framework has been cured, there have been the proper structures built in terms of a special coordinator for reconstruction and stability,” Embry explained. “And … the requisite civilian expertise in terms of Civilian Response Corps—additional subject matter experts that are almost like an interagency reserve force—have come online.”
Embrey was describing the military’s vision of the future: The U.S. government will have created a functioning civilian nation-building reserve on standby. The State Department has a deployable reserve, the military is skilled at reconstruction and stability operations, and hybrid “civil-military” commands such as AFRICOM are capable of coordinating the whole effort. Despite the lip service being paid to the “interagency” and “civil-military integration,” it is clear that in this vision, the military is in charge. Brigadier General Barbara Fast, deputy director and chief of staff for the Army Capabilities Integration Center and deputy chief of staff for Army Training and Doctrine Command, told reporters quite explicitly that the Army wanted to communicate to civilian government agencies and foreign militaries to make the kind of investments and capabilities they will need in the future. “This is really a self-examination for us as an Army, and it’s an introspective look that we hope to be able to offer the insights beyond the Army, both within the department and in the international arena writ large,” she said.
Unified Quest was a forum for evangelizing another principle: humanitarian intervention. One prominent player in Unified Quest 2008 was Sarah Sewall, the Harvard professor and human rights advocate who had been instrumental in shaping the military’s emerging counterinsurgency doctrine. A few months after Unified Quest 2008, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government unveiled a new initiative led by Sewall: the Mass Atrocity Response Operations, or MARO, Project. Cosponsored by the Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, the MARO Project was supposed to be a step-by-step guide for a military response to genocide or mass killings. According to Chris Taylor, a former private security executive who helped Sewall craft the document, it was written specifically as a blueprint for action for combatant commands such as AFRICOM to use the military as a “genocide prevention tool.”
The MARO Project was inspired by “responsibility to protect,” an emerging school of thought in international relations that calls for intervention by external actors if a state is unwilling, or unable, to stop genocide or mass killings. The guide even featured a hypothetical scenario on the African continent in Country X, a landlocked state in sub-Saharan Africa. Country X resembled Rwanda before the genocide. It was run by one ethnic group, Clan A, which was distributing weapons and broadcasting propaganda for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against another group, Clan B. The international community has limited time to act—weeks, perhaps days—before the mass killings begin. The MARO Project guide is supposed to spell out the options for intervening to halt the atrocities. Using this tool, the command could weigh the implications of sending in a rapid intervention force, understand the main operational tasks, and identify the desired end-state.
More important, the guide encourages civilian government agencies as well as allied nations to reorganize and become more closely involved in planning for such contingencies. The scenarios crafted by the MARO Project are hypothetical, but it is easy enough to spot real-world applications, especially after the creation of AFRICOM. In January 2009, the U.S. military became directly involved in planning and helping pay for a military offensive against the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group in Uganda. It looked like a textbook case of “responsibility to protect”: The LRA’s messianic leader, Joseph Kony, was under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity; his cultlike army employed child soldiers and used rape as a weapon of war; and the LRA’s reign of terror extended beyond Uganda’s borders: north to Sudan, and east to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Much as in Mali, the United States had quietly been providing counterterrorism training to Ugandan troops. In addition, as the New York Times later revealed, a team of seventeen advisers and analysts from AFRICOM worked closely with Ugandan officers to plan the offensive. They also provided intelligence, satellite phones, and $1 million in fuel. Despite the U.S. assistance, the operation was botched: Ugandan troops failed to block off the LRA’s escape routes, and as the rebel fighters scattered, they embarked on a killing spree in nearby villages. An estimated nine hundred civilians were killed in a wave of massacres and reprisals.19 The quiet, behind-the-scenes intervention in Uganda was a failure.
What was missing from the planning, and the scenarios, was
some notion of balance between military and humanitarian capacity. U.S. foreign policy in Africa was quietly being militarized, but there was no parallel effort to beef up traditional aid and development efforts. There seemed to be no discussion within higher-echelon policy circles of trade, direct investment, or encouraging stronger bilateral ties within Africa. The new Africa command created its own internal logic. When the continent was viewed through the lens of preventive security, security became the sole goal.
* A notable exception was Liberia. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf offered to host AFRICOM headquarters, but as of fall 2010 the command was still based in Stuttgart.
CHAPTER 11
Windshield Ethnographers
On December 6, 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Pete Pierce was having a rough day. He had a meeting scheduled at noon with Hassan Shama, the chairman of the Sadr City District Advisory Council, but when Shama showed up at noon at the Iraqi Army checkpoint outside Forward Operating Base War Eagle, a U.S. outpost at an old police training center on the east side of the Tigris River, the soldiers would not let him to pass. Now Shama was angry: He had been waiting in his car for two hours.
Pierce marched into the office where Andre, one of his interpreters, was sprucing up a black vinyl couch with eau de cologne. “He’s been delayed at the checkpoint,” Pierce said, exasperated. “We had to call him and kiss his ass. He was stuck in traffic from ten o’clock to noon, and I promised to buy him lunch.”
It was time for Plan B. Pierce would have to send someone out to the checkpoint to escort Shama on base—and order some kebabs. Fetching Shama fell to Abu Bassam, Pierce’s Iraqi-American cultural advisor. “You go out to the checkpoint at two o’clock in your full battle rattle,” he told Abu Bassam. “I’ll get Sergeant Knox to go out with you to the checkpoint.”
In civilian life, Pierce was a senior deputy district attorney in Orange County, California; in uniform, he maintained a weary, seen-it-all-before demeanor. In Baghdad, he led Human Terrain Team IZ3, a ten-person team attached to the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division. Pierce and his team were supposed to help the brigade manage its nonlethal operations. They provided cultural advice to the commander; helped the brigade’s embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, or e-PRT, allocate reconstruction funds; and identified key local leaders with whom the brigade commander, Colonel John Hort, could meet. It was all part of the Army’s belated push for greater cultural awareness, an effort that had received official endorsement with the adoption of the Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual in late 2006. Team IZ3 had recently organized five iftar dinners, meals to break the Ramadan fast, with tribal and religious sheikhs, local government officials and security forces, and members of the district advisory councils. It had also organized today’s meeting with Shama.
The district advisory councils, referred to by the Americans as DACs, were local government bodies set up by the coalition following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They had no lawmaking power or budget authority; their brief was to provide a form of local representative government. Neighborhood advisory councils, or NACs, selected representatives for the district-level council, and the DACs sent representatives to the Baghdad City Advisory Council. The DACs and the NACs also gave the U.S. presence a form of legitimacy, and provided a valuable interface between the U.S. military and local communities.
As its deputy chairman, Shama was a key player on the Sadr City DAC. Despite military commanders’ wariness of Shama—Hort, the brigade commander, described him as initially “very anti-coalition”—Pierce and his teammates had persuaded the Army to work with him. Now things were a bit more cordial, although Shama still had a lot of complaints, particularly about the way the U.S. military was spending aid money inside Sadr City, part of the brigade’s area of operations.
Sadr City was one of the most volatile places in Iraq. The densely populated Baghdad district had long been a stronghold for Shia militants, and a dangerous place for U.S. forces. Earlier in that spring of 2008, intense fighting had flared up around Sadr City after the Iraqi government launched an offensive in the southern city of Basra. Elements of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi militia, designated “special groups” by the U.S. military, responded by using Sadr City as a launching pad for rocket attacks on the Green Zone. U.S. and Iraqi forces then launched a push into Sadr City, braving minefields and fighting street by street to retake the southern quadrant of the low-rise slum. U.S. forces then built a concrete wall along Al Quds Street that was supposed to push insurgent rocket teams beyond the reach of the Green Zone. North of the wall, tag teams of drones and attack helicopters loitered overhead, waiting to spot insurgent rocket and mortar teams. After two months of intense street fighting, the Iraqi government and the Jaish al-Mahdi concluded a truce, and Iraqi troops were able to take up positions inside the rest of Sadr City.
A few months after the ceasefire, a fragile sort of normalcy had returned to the area, and the U.S. military had begun aiming a firehose of development funds at the southern quadrant of Sadr City. In the eleven months since the arrival of the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, in Baghdad in early 2008, the unit had spent around $72 million on public works projects in and around Sadr City. It hired local contractors to pick up trash, clear backed-up sewer lines, and repair downed power lines. On patrols, infantry officers were given “walking-around money.” They were authorized to hand out $2,500 microgrants to jump-start local businesses that had lost inventory during the fighting. Seventy-two million was an astonishing amount of development money to focus on one section of one neighborhood. The United States had spent roughly the same amount on aid to all of Botswana in one year, 2008.
But the “save Sadr City fund” did not end the violence. In June 2008, a bomb was planted outside Shama’s office. A group of Americans was meeting with Shama when the bomb detonated. Shama was wounded in the leg; the Americans, who were standing closer to the bomb, unwittingly shielded him from the blast. Four Americans were killed, along with six Iraqis and an Italian interpreter of Iraqi descent.1 Two of the slain Americans were soldiers: Major Dwayne Kelley, a New Jersey state trooper and Army reservist, and Chief Warrant Officer Robert Hammett. Two were civilians: Steven Farley, a State Department contractor from Oklahoma and a member of the e-PRT, and Nicole Suveges, a member of Human Terrain Team IZ3.
When Suveges deployed to Iraq, in April 2008, Team IZ3 was part of an ambitious new experiment by the U.S. military to embed social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Suveges was nearing completion of a Ph.D. in political science at Johns Hopkins University (her dissertation was titled “Markets and Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas and the Deep Play of Political Culture”), and she had worked in Iraq for two years, first as a polling expert and then as an advisor to Multi-National Corps Iraq. According to her colleagues, Suveges had been eager to join a Human Terrain Team; these teams were seen at the time as the cutting edge of counterinsurgency warfare and as the possible salvation of the U.S. military in Iraq.
But by December 2008, the military’s program of embedding social scientists was in turmoil. Pierce had seen one member of his team killed, and he was in no mood to take any unnecessary risks. That day’s meeting was no exception. When Shama finally reached the meeting two hours later, escorted through the checkpoint by Abu Bassam, the discussion quickly turned to the main item of business, the generators the brigade was installing to bring power to the southern neighborhoods of Sadr City. A major with the brigade’s civil-military operations center was planning a trip to show members of the DAC where they were installed, and another IZ3 team member, Ben Rabitor, a young, slightly built social scientist, was enthusiastic about a chance to go out with the military team.
“I’d like to go on this mission!” he piped up.
“We’ll see,” Pierce replied drily. “I know you’re anxious to get out beyond the wire, Ben, but”—Pierce paused for effect—“I guarantee by the end of your tour, you will never want
to go out beyond the wire, okay? You will be all out-wired out!”
Ali Ghatteh, a deputy to Shama, had been listening in through an interpreter. He turned to Rabitor. “If you going to go out, grow out your beard and we are going to put you in a dishdasha,” he said, referring to the traditional robe worn by men in Iraq. “And I can show you—I’ll keep you safe in my area.”
Rabitor sat up enthusiastically. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing a civilian anthropologist attached to the Army should be doing: blending in with the local community to help oversee a development project that might, if all went to plan, help restore stability to the area. “I’ll be like Iraqeen!” he said.
Pierce, with the tone of a worried father, turned to Rabitor. “All right, Ben, you ain’t doing anything like that while I’m here,” he said.
The military that routed the Taliban in 2001 and decapitated the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a technologically superior force. It possessed overwhelming firepower, precision weaponry, and a global communications network. But this twenty-first-century force had blundered into Iraq and Afghanistan with only minimal understanding of the local cultural landscape. By the fall of 2006, with the adoption of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, the U.S. military was in theory taking the first steps toward reemphasizing the importance of cultural knowledge. In practice, these new nation builders were still struggling to understand the cultures they were dealing with in the Middle East and Central Asia. In a keynote address at the 2006 counterinsurgency conference in Washington, Eric Edelman, under secretary of defense for policy and a former ambassador, pointed to an essential new tool the U.S. government needed to deploy if it was to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in future conflicts: anthropology.