Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  A few weeks after my visit with Human Terrain Team IZ3, I embedded with an Army infantry company at Joint Security Station Comanche, a small outpost manned by an Army infantry company inside Sadr City proper. First Sergeant Ethan Mizell, the company’s senior NCO, told me the generators inside their patrol zone had been installed in August; the Iraqi government provided some test fuel, around a thousand liters. That supply ran out in less than three weeks, although the company donated some extra fuel to get people through the Eid festival after Ramadan. “They ran out of fuel in twenty days,” Mizell said. “I gave it to them for the rest of the month because it was their holiday.” After that, there was no more money from the Army to keep topping up the generator supply.

  Captain Andrew Slack, the company commander, told me the Commander’s Emergency Response Program funds had dried up on October 1, at the beginning of the new fiscal year. The Iraqis would be on their own. “You can sort of play Sim City: Come in and build some roads, repair buildings, spruce up a park or a school,” he said. “That can be nice visually, but because we weren’t so hooked up with the local leadership, we weren’t as effective as we could have been.”

  In many respects Pete Pierce was the ideal person to lead Human Terrain IZ3. As a district attorney he was steeped in the intricacies of municipal politics; he also understood the organized crime–style networks underpinning the insurgency in Sadr City. But that was by accident, not by design. Pierce was recruited to run IZ3 because of his background in Military Intelligence and Civil Affairs; he was recruited by another reserve officer who was in his Civil Affairs unit, who had done a tour in Iraq with one of the senior managers of the Human Terrain System program. He was not a Middle East expert, and both he and the social scientists on Human Terrain Team IZ3 relied heavily on Arabic interpreters to do their jobs.

  For cultural insights, Pierce depended on his senior cultural adviser, Abu Bassam. An Iraqi Christian and Baghdad native, Abu Bassam had emigrated to the United States three decades ago and had returned to Iraq to work as an interpreter for U.S. military commanders. (Abu Bassam, or “father of Bassam” was the nickname he used when dealing with Iraqis.) A compactly built man with a neatly trimmed mustache, Abu Bassam had a gentle, low-key demeanor. Back in the United States, he was a retired engineer. Here, he was the key interpreter of the local scene, and a powerful broker between cultures.

  “I am very much a fair broker to both sides,” he told me while we waited for the meeting with Hassan Shama. “I don’t want anybody to lose. A lot of money was wasted [on reconstruction projects] and we all know that.”

  The collaboration with Shama was a case in point. “Everyone hated him, the commander, the Americans,” Abu Bassam said. “I convinced everyone we should work with him.”

  Abu Bassam may have emigrated to the States decades ago, but that didn’t mean he had shed all of his Iraqi habits of thought. He had a low opinion of the Shia population of Sadr City. “The Shia mentality is different,” he told me. “They are ghetto. They can sleep with their cousins, screw donkeys. I don’t want to put them down—some of them are doctors, engineers, teachers. Now the Shia took over the government—what do they know how to do? Nothing. Administratively, they have nothing, no experience in governing.”

  During the years he had spent working for the U.S. military in Iraq, Abu Bassam had noticed a subtle shift under way. The U.S. military was getting smarter. “There was an attitude: Don’t fight them with bullets. We need to be not more offensive, not more defensive. We need to listen.” If the Human Terrain System had been in place in 2003, he concluded, “this all would have been different. We [the United States] don’t know how to spend on projects. We need to run the military more as a business. The military never follows through on anything—so much money wasted, gone into bank accounts in Syria and Lebanon. We give a project a million dollars, and half a million dollars goes to militias.”

  This was the problem with spending money to pacify Iraq: The whole approach of paying large segments of the Iraqi population not to fight was extraordinarily susceptible to waste, fraud, and abuse. In Anbar Province and elsewhere, in a program called “Sons of Iraq,” the U.S. military bankrolled tribal militias to stop fighting American forces and keep order in their neighborhoods. Many of the “Sons” were former insurgents. Eventually, the Iraqi government was supposed to absorb some of the “Sons” into regular security forces. In Baghdad, the U.S. government sponsored a host of make-work schemes and public works projects designed to keep fighting-age males on the U.S. payroll—and out of criminal gangs or insurgent groups.

  Fraud and waste were not limited to the military. USAID also lost track of millions of dollars. Take the Community Stabilization Program, a massive program started in May 2006 by USAID to complement counterinsurgency efforts in selected Iraqi cities. In a March 2008 audit, the agency’s inspector general concluded that the program was extremely vulnerable to fraud. The report cited a letter from a USAID representative on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Baghdad that indicated that “millions of dollars” from trash pickup campaigns were being redirected to insurgents, as well as to corrupt community leaders. This source reckoned that as much as half of the cash directed to cleanup campaigns in one area had been siphoned off by insurgents or corrupt officials. “If the source’s estimates are correct—that 40 to 50 percent of payments for such projects were used for improper pay-offs—USAID may have already been defrauded of $6.7 to $8.4 million, with another $3.4 to $4.3 million at risk absent any corrective action,” the inspector general concluded—and this was in just one neighborhood of Baghdad, where $16.7 million in Community Stabilization Program funds had been disbursed.28

  That was where the Human Terrain System entered the picture. It was not, as its academic critics liked to hint, a devilishly complex scheme to target Iraqis and Afghans for assassination, a sort of latter-day Phoenix Program, nor was it a version of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s discredited domestic surveillance program that targeted antiwar groups and civil rights activists in the 1960s. Human Terrain IZ3’s mission was an outgrowth of the military’s employment of cash as a weapon. The military needed better intelligence about how to spend the motherlode of reconstruction funds it was overseeing as part of the nation-building effort, and the Human Terrain System was tasked with obtaining it.

  Human Terrain was, in short, an intelligence program. Not intelligence in the traditional sense, perhaps; instead, information with a practical military application. “Intelligence” was a taboo word for the Human Terrain System, and senior officials, like McFate, insisted that the teams were walled off from military intelligence. Yet the word cropped up in the field.

  In a discussion with members of Human Terrain Team IZ3 around a picnic table at Forward Operating Base War Eagle, Pete Pierce, IZ3’s leader, described the Human Terrain Team as having a clear role in collecting intelligence for the brigade’s Civil Affairs operations.

  “Well, we work with them on a constant basis,” Pierce said. “So you could almost argue that we are”—Pierce paused, thinking—“the intelligence arm of Civil Affairs and the e-PRT, because they are the ones who control the budget. They are the ones who have the program to do reconstruction.”

  Robert Kerr, one of the social scientists on Pierce’s team, swiftly moved to correct his boss. “The information arm,” he clarified.

  But in that conversation, Pierce repeatedly used the word “intelligence” to describe the kind of work they did. Asked what kinds of product they provided the commander after a key meeting with a local leader, he said, “We provide him with an intelligence …” He paused to clarify his language. “With an EXSUM, a summary of the meeting.” In describing what kind of support he received from the “Reachback Center” analysts at Fort Leavenworth, he said, “If we go to these meetings and there’s something we don’t understand, about a tribe or about the political leadership or about the formation of the government of Iraq, then we request, you know, a report, a summary, or an intel produ
ct—I shouldn’t say intel product—information product—from the Reachback Center.”

  So all the talk of the Human Terrain System being simple “open source” research was a polite fiction. The members of a Human Terrain Team worked for a military commander, they were located within a brigade headquarters, and information they shared, even if in the most general way, could help the commander sort out who was and was not the enemy. Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile, who commanded an armored reconnaissance squadron in Baghdad in 2006 and who described himself as “greatly in favor” of the program, pointed out that Human Terrain analysis would on some level allow commanders to understand who the enemy was in the area his unit operated in. “Don’t fool yourself,” he wrote Marcus Griffin, a Human Terrain Team member working in Iraq. “These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq … So stop sugarcoating what these teams do and end up being a part of; to deny this fact is to deny a reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”29

  Nicole Suveges, who was killed in the Sadr City advisory council bombing, would not be the last Human Terrain Team casualty. On November 4, 2008, two Human Terrain Team members, Don Ayala and Paula Loyd, were on a foot patrol in the village of Chehel Gazi, Afghanistan. Loyd, a social scientist, approached Abdul Salam, a local man carrying a fuel jug, and struck up a conversation about the price of gasoline. Without warning, the man doused Loyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire. Soldiers rolled Loyd in a ditch to put out the flames; Abdul Salam was captured and restrained in plastic flexcuffs. When Ayala learned about the extent of Loyd’s injuries, he walked over to the Afghan man, still bound at the wrists, and executed him with a pistol shot to the head.

  Loyd died of her injuries after two agonizing months in an Army hospital.30 Ayala pled guilty to the revenge killing; a U.S. District Court judge sentenced him to five years probation and a $12,500 fine.31 The incident further tarnished the reputation of the program. In February 2009, morale further plummeted after the program’s managers suddenly announced a major change. Team members would have to convert from well-compensated contractor status to a less well compensated government employee status, or they would have to resign. The move was supposed to be in response to the agreement struck between the Iraqi and U.S. governments to lift legal immunity for contractors, but it did not sit well with team members. Around one third of the program’s deployed workforce quit.

  That same spring, Major Ben Connable, a Marine Corps officer, authored a devastating critique of the Human Terrain System in Military Review, the same publication that had introduced the concept to a military audience two and a half years earlier. As a foreign area officer, or FAO, Connable understood the military’s need to learn about foreign cultures. FAOs were supposed to be the military’s resident experts on local cultures; they had language training and advanced degrees in area studies or international relations. But the Human Terrain approach of hiring civilian social scientists on contract had been a disaster, he contended. In the article, “All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System Is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence,” he argued that the military needed to develop its own culturally literate officers in-house. That would further a commonsense aim of remedying the military’s devastating lack of cultural knowledge without all the blowback from recruiting anthropologists and other social scientists. Connable asked:

  Why is it necessary to create a separate program, costing (at a minimum) tens of millions of dollars, to assign these personnel to the very staffs at which they were trained to serve? What do the Human Terrain Team FAO and CA [Civil Affairs] officers bring to the table that organic FAO and CA officers do not? If HTS can find these qualified officers, why can’t the U.S. military services?32

  But boosting the military’s cultural I.Q. would have been too logical, and by now the Human Terrain System had taken on a life of its own in the Pentagon bureaucracy. U.S. Africa Command had quietly begun recruiting to staff a new “sociocultural cell” that would be attached to the new regional military headquarters. A “research and risk management firm” called Archimedes Global, Inc., was selected to recruit contractor teams. As the military ramped up its involvement in Afghanistan, the Army quietly moved to expand the program. In June 2009, a $40 million expansion of the program appeared in a story posted by the Thirty-fourth Infantry Division at its Web site—buried in a photo caption.33

  Despite setbacks and failures, and the general inability to find the right people for the job, the U.S. military’s embrace of social science showed no sign of diminishing. The approach was seen as the key to fighting a smarter war. But the Human Terrain System ignored a larger problem. The U.S. military was fighting an away game, operating in cultures it didn’t understand, in places undergoing violent social change. They were the outsiders. All the anthropological expertise in the world couldn’t fix that.

  CHAPTER 12

  Obama’s War

  On July 15, 2009, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, boarded a Chinook helicopter bound for Pushghar, a village in Afghanistan’s remote Panjshir Valley. Mullen was in Afghanistan as part of a morale-boosting United Service Organizations tour of U.S. bases in the Middle East and Central Asia. Accompanied by Don Shula, an NFL Hall of Famer, and other celebrities, Mullen and his entourage visited Kirkuk, Iraq; Bagram, Afghanistan; and the USS Ronald Reagan, deployed in the Persian Gulf. His detour to the Panjshir, however, was not for a meet-and-greet with the troops. The admiral was on a different mission: He was on his way to attend a ribbon-cutting at a girls’ school.

  The Panjshir girls’ school had been opened by Greg Mortenson, author of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea and founder of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, which promoted girls’ education in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Members of the Panjshir Provincial Reconstruction Team, which was funding a dozen education projects throughout the province, also attended the opening ceremony.1 The admiral had brought the New York Times columnist and globalization theorist Thomas Friedman along for the ride.2 A visit by the top uniformed officer in the U.S. military to this rural schoolhouse would show how fully the U.S. military had embraced the concept of armed humanitarianism.

  The morning of the ceremony, I hitched a ride to the Panjshir with an Army security detail that was providing backup for Mullen’s visit. The Panjshir Valley was considered “permissive,” meaning the risk of attack was low. The high-walled valley had been a famous redoubt against both the Soviets and the Taliban, and the tough, warlike Panjshiris took pride in protecting their guests. Nevertheless, the Army dispatched a small security force to the Panjshir to provide backup security for Mullen’s visit. The security force, led by Staff Sergeant Gabriel Castillo, would be the “quick reaction force” on hand in case anything went wrong.

  The security force rolled out from Bagram Air Base in a convoy of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the behemoth, blast-proof trucks the military had procured in massive numbers to shield troops from roadside bombs.* Castillo, a muscular close-protection specialist from El Paso, Texas, gave the security team a short predeparture briefing. At the time, all roads to the Panjshir were considered “green” (relatively safe) but the soldiers were to be on the lookout for possible attackers, particularly when crossing through Kapisa Province, between Bagram and the gateway to the Panjshir. In late May, a Humvee carrying members of the Panjshir Provincial Reconstruction Team had been hit by a suicide car bomber while passing through Kapisa. Four members of the team were killed. It was a reminder that although the mission in the Panjshir Valley was primarily humanitarian, there were still serious risks.

  The supersized armored trucks may have been well suited for Iraq’s extensive highway network, but they definitely were not designed with Afghanistan’s primitive roads in mind. The two-lane highway through the Panj
shir was reasonably well paved, but the convoy also had to navigate village streets that were at some points barely wider than the trucks themselves. As the convoy weaved along narrow switchback roads, the MRAP driver leaned on the horn, scattering the occasional flock of fat-tailed sheep or gaggle of children playing in the road. A miscalculation on one of the turns, and the trucks could easily tumble to the bottom of a ravine.

  After passing through the main gateway to the valley, the crews removed the barrels of their heavy .50-caliber machine guns. More than anything it was a gesture of trust. Traveling guns-up in the Panjshir would definitely have sent the wrong signal. Nonetheless, the Army lieutenant who was hitching a ride with the team in the back of one of the MRAPs wasn’t particularly happy. “I don’t like that,” he said. “I just came from Kapisa.”

  After a bumpy hour-and-a-half ride, the crew reached their destination. They parked in the motor pool of Forward Operating Base Lion, the small base for the Panjshir PRT, and waited. FOB Lion looked quite different from most military outposts I had seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was not surrounded by intimidating concrete walls or a perimeter of sand-filled HESCO barricades but was quite open and accessible, with just a simple gate and some concertina wire across the entrance. Pickup trucks, not massive armored vehicles, were parked in the motor pool. It was intriguing to see a U.S. base in Afghanistan that didn’t look like Fortress America.

  The convoy had arrived early; I wandered around the small camp and talked with some of the team members. Matthew Burns, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers representative on the PRT, had come to the valley after stints working in Jalalabad and Kabul. When he first heard about how the PRT operated—driving around in pickups, not living behind walls, he was skeptical, to say the least. “When I first heard about it, no HESCOS, soft-skin vehicles, I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said.