Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  This was a very different sort of approach to the heavily armed nation building I had seen in Iraq. After years of watching the U.S. military armoring up to do a humanitarian mission, the Panjshir PRT seemed to offer a tantalizing glimpse of a different way of doing business. For nation builders used to living behind blast walls and commuting to their jobs in the Red Zone, that took some getting used to. Burns was honest about the adjustment. “My boss used to call me phobic,” he said. “It took me a while to get used to it.”

  Burns soon found that working in the relatively peaceful Panjshir allowed for more hands-on development work. Instead of being holed up inside a camp and venturing out once or twice a week under heavy security to visit construction sites or oversee projects, members of the PRT here could get out in the valley every day. Burns and his teammates could visit a project site—a school being refurbished, a clinic under construction—as many as three times a week. For someone who was a general contractor by trade and who liked to see results, it was satisfying to watch progress every day. “It’s phenomenal,” he said with evident satisfaction. “We’ve done eighty site visits in three months. Sometimes we’ll have a dozen in a day.”

  In Kabul, by contrast, Burns considered himself lucky if he got out once a week. There he had to travel “up-armored,” with three bodyguards accompanying his team. In the Panjshir, things were much closer to traditional development work. Team members could venture out in trucks or even, in some of the more remote districts, on horseback. A Corps of Engineers manager had his kayak sent over so he could paddle the Panjshir River. Aside from the rifles and the uniforms, the Provincial Reconstruction Team looked like a civilian-run development scheme.

  In 2009 about $40 million in projects were under way in the Panjshir Valley, and about another $20 million worth were in the pipeline. The main projects were schools and health clinics; the team was also bringing electricity to the valley with micro hydro power. Renewable energy was a big theme: They installed solar panels on all major project buildings, especially the clinics. PRT members also gave practical advice and hands-on instruction while the projects were under way. Afghan bricklayers and carpenters still used rocks suspended from strings to make sure their structures were built to a true vertical. The engineers taught them to use more modern tools. “It’s a golden opportunity to train these guys on cement work and brickwork,” Burns said.

  Panjshir seemed to offer a glimpse of what the rest of Afghanistan could look like: a peaceful, relatively stable province that was a magnet for reconstruction and development work. Returning from his visit to the Panjshir, Friedman gushed about his heartstring-tugging visit to Mortenson’s school, writing in a New York Times op-ed on July 18, 2009:

  I must say, after witnessing the delight in the faces of those little Afghan girls crowded three to a desk waiting to learn, I found it very hard to write, “Let’s just get out of here.” Indeed, Mortenson’s efforts remind us what the essence of the “war on terrorism” is about. It’s about the war of ideas within Islam—a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated from other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men.

  But Panjshir was the exception in Afghanistan, not the rule. The isolated valley was populated almost exclusively by ethnic Tajiks and thus was ethnically quite homogeneous—and it was home to many of the powerful military commanders and intelligence officials who had dominated Afghanistan’s security ministries. Panjshiris were not a population at risk from Islamic extremism; their young men were not being recruited as suicide bombers. But seeing the schoolgirls of Pushghar, with their expectant smiles, it was tempting to view the massive U.S. military involvement here as a progressive enterprise, a mission to rescue the daughters of Afghanistan, save “Muslim progressives” from extremists, and project Western hopes and expectations on the country. It was an image that could be used to justify an American generation’s worth of blood and treasure.

  As the security team stood by, I spotted three helicopters soaring high, heading northeast through the valley. It was Mullen’s Chinook, escorted by two Black Hawks. For a moment I contemplated the cost of ferrying the admiral to see Mortenson’s school: fueling, flying, and maintaining three helicopters in a combat zone; sending a couple of squads of highly trained soldiers in million-dollar-trucks to the Panjshir. It seemed an awfully expensive way to lift a country out of poverty.

  On December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional thirty thousand troops, which would bring the total U.S. force there to just under one hundred thousand by mid-2010. “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended,” he said, “because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.” The following day, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made the same point, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, “This approach is not open-ended nation building.” But while the administration excised the phrase “nation building” from the talking points, that was precisely what the involvement in Afghanistan had become. Whether it was soldiers teaching better planting techniques to Afghan farmers, diplomats and aid consultants advising local leaders, or Provincial Reconstruction Teams building roads, digging wells, and repairing schools, Afghanistan had become a major nation-building effort. Moreover, the exit strategy—building capable Afghan security institutions and transferring responsibility to them—was, by definition, a state-building project.

  The escalation of the Afghanistan war underscored the continuity between the foreign policies of Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush. By the end of Bush’s term, his gamble of doubling down by sending more troops to Iraq had delivered some results. Violence in Iraq had dropped precipitously from previous levels, and the United States and Iraq negotiated a new security pact at the end of 2008 that called for the departure of U.S. troops by 2011. The surge validated the counterinsurgents theory: The U.S. military could prevail in this kind of conflict, if given the right tools. But it was an oversimplified take on events. The steep drop in violence was due to several factors, including the troop increase, a rift between al-Qaeda and Sunni tribes, and a ceasefire by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi militia. Segregation and ethnic cleansing also played a major role: The process had somewhat played itself out, and so the triggers of violence had been eliminated.* By late 2008, the sectarian lines between neighborhoods had hardened, and Baghdad was a divided city. Millions of Iraqis remained outside the country, waiting out the conflict as refugees. The country continued to suffer from major political violence, and 2009 closed with a string of deadly suicide bomb attacks.

  The Iraq surge had a curious knock-on effect. Despite the failure to turn Iraq into an oasis of stability and democracy in the Middle East, it gave the military and foreign policy establishment confidence that the United States could succeed at nation building, and transform a society.

  In Beltway foreign-policy circles, attention quickly shifted away from Iraq to another unresolved crisis: Afghanistan and its increasingly chaotic neighbor, Pakistan. After several years of being considered a “forgotten war,” Afghanistan commanded the attention of the new administration. Within weeks of taking office Obama pledged to launch a top-to-bottom review of strategy in the region. The Taliban was resurgent, threatening the central government in Afghanistan, and by the end of Bush’s term the United States had quietly stepped up a secret war in Pakistan, using armed Predator drones to strike the bases of Islamic militants who operated in Pakistan’s remote tribal territories. In addition, in late 2009 the U.S. government promised a massive aid package of $7.5 billion to Pakistan over the following five years. The money was slated for high-visibility infrastructure projects, health and education projects, and building Pakistani government institutions.

  The continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations was shaped in part by the consensus the natio
n builders had helped forge within the policymaking establishment. Just a few days before Obama’s inauguration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore signed off on the U. S. government’s new Interagency Counterinsurgency Guide, the handbook for policymakers that is supposed to reassert the primacy of “soft power.” It was the culmination of two years of effort by the counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen and his allies, and was a major victory for the nation builders. Getting two cabinet secretaries and an agency head to sign off on it was a tacit admission of failure by the Bush administration—that it had wasted years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  After the Republican defeat in November 2008, Kilcullen had toyed with the idea of getting Rice to hold off on signing the document. With her permission he had talked with the Obama transition team after the election victory, advising them on counterinsurgency issues. But he decided it was a good thing to push for high-level signatures before the close of the Bush era. An economic crisis was looming, and the new administration might not focus on the project.

  The signing of this new document was significant for a number of reasons. First, the guide was signed at the highest level, lending weight to a document that was supposed to distill the principles of counterinsurgency doctrine and the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the guide was completed in time for the new administration, which was larded with true believers in nation building. Michele Flournoy, a former Clinton official whom the administration selected as the Pentagon’s new policy chief, was a powerful advocate of the concept of global counterinsurgency. In early 2007, she had cofounded the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, a think tank that attracted some of the most prominent counterinsurgency theorists and practitioners, including the former armor officer John Nagl; the former Marine Corps infantry officer Nathaniel Fick; Tom Ricks, the author of Fiasco, the influential critique of the U.S. military’s performance in Iraq; and the counterinsurgency blogger Andrew Exum.*

  CNAS was part of a new establishment in Washington that rallied to the new counterinsurgency consensus. But the most important factor for securing a seamless transition was Obama’s decision to keep Gates on as his secretary of defense. Gates had been called in to salvage the situation in Iraq, and in the process he became a forceful advocate for mastering the tasks of what he called “nation-building under fire.”4

  During his tenure, Gates sent a message to the Pentagon’s procurement bureaucracy and to the defense industry that nation building would not be going out of fashion anytime soon. Despite nearly a decade at war, the military services had continued to push for new equipment designed for war against sophisticated, high-tech adversaries, as if they harbored a deep inner wish for a great-power war or a revived Soviet Union, not the relatively low-tech, manpower-intensive business of rebuilding failed states.

  Gates’s message was delivered to the civilian bureaucracy as well. In February 2009, the new administration kicked off a sixty-day policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. Possible options included sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan and delivering billions more in aid to Pakistan. This approach would require another “whole-of-government” effort. Addressing soldiers at Fort Drum, New York, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was time for a “commensurate surge” of diplomats and civilian experts to reinforce the military campaign to stabilize Afghanistan. The civilians were supposed to fill posts on Provincial Reconstruction Teams and new district-level advisory teams. The strategy was formally known as the “civilian uplift,” as the word “surge” was too closely associated with Iraq; it was supposed to double the number of U.S. government civilians deployed to Afghanistan to around nine hundred.6 For the nation builders, the arrival of the Obama administration offered another chance to “get it right.” The experiment in Iraq was drawing to a close, with all U.S. forces scheduled to withdraw by the end of 2011, but Afghanistan was seen as the new laboratory for applying all the lessons learned in Mesopotamia and refined in Washington.

  In the spring of 2009, General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, was unceremoniously relieved of his command. General Stanley McChrystal, an ascetic Special Forces officer, was announced as his replacement. McKiernan was generally viewed as a competent commander, but the consensus among the counterinsurgency cognoscenti was that he was not sufficiently innovative. Washington needed someone who was more schooled in the principles of armed social work. Equally important, the Obama administration wanted to put its imprimatur on the Afghanistan campaign. In late February the president signed off on an initial troop increase. An additional seventeen thousand U.S. troops started heading to Afghanistan, and within a few months, the figure rose to around twenty-one thousand.

  The administration now viewed Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single problem (now referred to with the annoying policy wonk shorthand, “Af-Pak”). The main sources of Taliban financing and recruitment were in Pakistan; al-Qaeda’s top leadership, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, were believed to have found refuge inside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and a homegrown Taliban movement was gaining momentum inside Pakistan itself. Conventional wisdom now held that fixing Afghanistan would require a parallel effort in Pakistan. For fiscal year 2009, the administration put in an emergency spending request for a $2.4 billion assistance package for Pakistan, a bigger chunk of change than either Iraq or Afghanistan received in the same budget supplemental. That amount included four hundred million dollars to build Pakistani counterinsurgency forces and nearly a billion ($921 million) to pay for diplomatic security upgrades in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including a new fortified embassy in Pakistan. The president appointed Richard Holbrooke as his special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  In June 2009, the Center for a New American Security, the new Washington think tank that had ties to the Obama administration’s national security team, published a report on Afghanistan policy titled “Triage.” It argued for a further increase in troops and a civilian surge to seize the initiative from the Taliban. The report—written by David Killcullen; Ahmed Humayun, a CNAS researcher; and Andrew Exum, the smart, plugged-in former Army captain who founded the influential counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama—caught the eye of General Stanley McChrystal, who had been tapped one month earlier as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. When McChrystal decided to launch a sweeping, top-down review of Afghanistan strategy, he invited Exum, who served in Afghanistan in 2002 as an Army Ranger, to join his assessment team. McChrystal invited other Beltway policy wonks to Afghanistan to take part in a sixty-day review of strategy and operations, including Fred Kagan of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute; two top members of the centrist foreign policy establishment, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (a former national security assistant to Republican Senator John McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee), and Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations (Biddle had served on Petraeus’s Iraq Joint Strategic Assessment Team).7 Sarah Chayes, a National Public Radio correspondent and Peace Corps veteran turned Kandahar-based humanitarian, also worked as a “special advisor” to McChrystal.

  The strategy review was a deft public relations move. After returning from their Pentagon-organized visit to Afghanistan, members of the strategic assessment group served as an advance guard for McChrystal’s upcoming request for a significant increase in troops and a commitment of more resources. The think-tankers were banging the drum for reinforcements even before McChrystal’s assessment was made public in late September by means of a leak to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Cordesman, in an op-ed in the Washington Post on August 31, wrote, “Almost every expert on the scene has talked about figures equivalent to three to eight more brigade combat teams—with nominal manning levels that could range from 2,300 to 5,000 personnel each.”8 Winning the hearts and minds of Washington’s foreign policy e
lite seemed as much the goal as revamping the strategy on the ground.

  In Washington, it looked as though a dream team was being assembled to revamp Afghanistan strategy, and most of the foreign policy establishment rallied around a consensus: The Afghanistan mission had suffered from strategic neglect; more resources were needed; and it needed a bigger push for “governance,” wonk-speak for more civilian advisors. McChrystal’s review showed that a new nation-building orthodoxy had taken hold in Washington. Afghanistan, in the view of the new administration, was the “good war,” a mission that had been neglected by the Bush administration in its rush to launch a preemptive war in Iraq. Afghanistan was primarily a nation-building mission now, not the punitive expedition launched against al-Qaeda in 2001. Building a functioning state in Afghanistan was the goal.

  Shortly after assuming command, McChrystal issued a tactical directive, a sort of mission statement that would guide operations on the ground. In its sanitized form—made available for public release with sensitive military information redacted—it echoed all the main themes of the nation-building mission. It emphasized the importance of cultural sensitivity and mastering the human terrain:

  Our strategic goal is to defeat the insurgency threatening the stability of Afghanistan. Like any insurgency, there is a struggle for the support and will of the population. Gaining and maintaining that support must be our overriding operational imperative—and the ultimate objective of every action we take.

  We must fight the insurgents, and will use the tools at our disposal to both defeat the enemy and protect our forces. But we will not win based on the number of Taliban we kill, but instead on our ability to separate insurgents from the center of gravity—the people. That means we must respect and protect the population from coercion and violence—and operate in a manner which will win their support.