CHAPTER  1

Absolute Beginners

The rear ramp of the C-17 airlifter groaned open, bathing the cargo hold in a hot, stupefying glare. Two rows of Army infantrymen in coyote-brown camouflage filed out, dazed and blinking, into Afghanistan’s noonday sun. A junior airman waved the soldiers away from the flight line, toward a row of sagging canvas field tents. The troops, soldiers of the Tenth Mountain Division, fresh from Fort Drum, New York, hauled their gear over to an assembly area. A few reporters who had hitched a ride on the same flight would hang back and wait for an escort. I dropped my bags in the dust and took in the scene. A pair of young airmen, a young man and a woman in T-shirts and fatigues, lounged on an empty pallet, swigging bottled water.

I had a panoramic view of Bagram Air Base, ringed on three sides by the jagged, white-capped walls of the Hindu Kush. Just a few months earlier, in the fall of 2001, this former Soviet base on the high desert plain of Parwan Province had been the frontline of battle between the Taliban and Northern Alliance fighters. And the scene here still looked like an outtake from Apocalypse Now, a wide-screen view of wartime devastation. A pair of Chinooks—the hulking, tandem-rotor helicopters familiar from the old photos of the Vietnam War—lifted off from the airstrip, kicking up a ferocious swirl of dust. The carcasses of wrecked Soviet aircraft littered the revetments off the main taxiway. Out beyond the runway, ordnance disposal teams were combing the desert floor, probing for mines and unexploded shells.

In the prelude to the offensive that routed the Taliban in December of 2001, General Baba Jan, a swaggering Northern Alliance commander, had escorted reporters to the top floor of the Bagram control tower, a squat, three-story building with the windowpanes blown out, to point the way to Kabul, and to victory.1 The tower had been a favorite target for Taliban mortar teams. The corroding skeleton of the main aircraft hangar was visible, improbably supporting the roof; an Army soldier, Specialist Jason Disney, had been crushed to death by a piece of falling scrap metal while clearing the building of debris the month before. The few buildings left standing were still perforated with bullet holes and shell fragments.

Before the Soviet-Afghan war, this had been the garden of central Afghanistan. Farmers tended orchards and vineyards on the lushly irrigated Shomali Plain, which doubled as a favorite picnic spot in the summer. In the winter, expatriates living in Kabul would drive the two-lane highway that skirted Bagram’s western edge to go skiing near the Salang Pass. The slopes had no lift, and enterprising local truckers would drop skiers at the trailhead, drive the switchback road to the bottom, and then drive them back to the top of the mountain.2 The idea of Ariana Afghan Airlines, the country’s national carrier, offering package holidays to “Ski Afghanistan,” did not seem too remote a prospect.3

A generation later, this bleak landscape was nearly uninhabitable. Bagram changed hands several times during fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. When the Taliban finally pushed their opponents from the Shomali Plain, their reprisals against the local villages for supporting the Northern Alliance were swift: demolition teams dynamited their mud-brick houses, burned the orchards, and destroyed the irrigation canals. By March of 2002 it was little more than a military staging area. In the Shah-e-Kot mountain range of eastern Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda was in full swing: Soldiers of the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, along with a contingent of Canadian soldiers, special operations teams, and Afghan irregulars, were engaged in a protracted fight against al-Qaeda footsoldiers entrenched in a series of bunkers and cave complexes in Paktia Province. Bagram was the logistics hub and headquarters for the battle; from the urgent pace with which the helicopters were shuttling off the airfield, it was clear that the fighting was still intense.

We had made a dramatic landing, with the C-17 hurtling down at a steep angle. A bulldozer and a dump truck were tethered to the floor of the aircraft. Buckled into my seat against the wall, I kept a nervous eye on the straps and chains that kept the bulldozer anchored to the deck of the cargo hold as the aircraft banked sharply. Before landing at Bagram, the C-17 had made a brief pit stop at Karshi Khanabad, a remote former Soviet air base in southern Uzbekistan. Several pallets of Pringles and Mountain Dew, destined for a makeshift commissary, had been bumped from the cargo hold to make way for the crucial heavy equipment. Karshi Khanabad was one of the staging areas of the new war; in the weeks after September 11, 2001, U.S. Defense Department officials and diplomats had negotiated overflight rights, access to airstrips, and refueling stops in remote locations along the southern rim of the former Soviet empire.

I had boarded the Afghanistan-bound C-17 at Incirlik Air Force Base, an American base in southeastern Turkey that was the home to aircraft enforcing Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Incirlik was a well-established base. The Air Force had occupied the place since the Cold War, and the base was laid out in a neat suburban grid. It looked like Abilene, Texas. I arrived at Incirlik on a Civil Reserve flight, a commercial airliner chartered by the military. As the plane taxied in at Incirlik, the arriving U.S. troops puzzled over their travel orders, trying to get a fix on their final destination. A young woman in an Air Force uniform read her travel orders—her boarding pass listed her destination as Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.

She wondered aloud: “Is that Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan?”

“Tajikistan,” someone replied.

Once the plane departed Incirlik, however, we were entering a new geography: These new strategic outposts were in strange, unpronounceable places such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Even for a military used to cycling through deployments to Bosnia and Kuwait, the Pentagon’s new map was still something of a mystery.

It was all supposed to be very, very temporary. That, at least, was the explanation Army Lieutenant Colonel Scott Donahue gave when he was asked why no American flag flew over the control tower at Bagram.

“You have to remember, if you study the history of this country, that’s what caused the demise of some of these other nations that tried to come in here and help,” he said matter-of-factly. “You come in here like a big brother to take over everything, there’s a natural resentment.”

It was a perceptive observation. During the 1960s and 1970s, politically non-aligned Afghanistan had been the scene of an international development contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the south, the United States Agency for International Development spent lavishly on infrastructure projects, building hydroelectric dams and irrigation canals in rural Helmand Province (Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, was nicknamed “Little America”) and building a sleek, modernist airport in Kandahar. In the north, the Soviets built a network of roads and the Salang Tunnel, which opened a year-round connection between the north of the country and Kabul. Despite these showpiece projects, the country remained at the bottom of the development scale. “Afghanistan’s roads and highways, Russian-built in the north, American-made in the south, originally seemed like a decoration rather than a utility, neatly tied around the country like some superfluous and extravagant ribbon,” an observer wrote in the early 1970s.

Kandahar airport still remains only a splendid showpiece, an architectural masterpiece of concentric curves, a propagandist’s pipedream costing 15 million American dollars. Equipped to welcome the biggest jets with runways designed as major staging arteries for flights to the East, the airport is a forlorn white elephant, virtually unused by the world’s air routes.4

The disastrous Soviet intervention in the 1980s did little for the country. The Soviets tried a few hearts-and-minds projects, and built some grim socialist-style housing blocks in Kabul, but the indiscriminate use of force and the displacement of millions of Afghans left few positive memories of the Russians.

Donahue, a sunburned officer wearing square-framed engineer glasses, was in charge of Task Force Bagram, a team of Army engineers that had arrived the previous November to survey the place and see if it could be turned into a functioning base. In parallel, a team from the 744th Ordnance Company from Fort Meade, Maryland, set to work methodically clearing the place of mines and unexploded munitions. Their task was not to clear the surrounding Shomali Plain—that would take years—but to make it safe to work inside the base perimeter. Several times a day, the bomb squad held “controlled detonations” to destroy their deadly finds: artillery shells, mortar rounds, rocket engines, cans of machine-gun ammunition, even five-hundred-pound bombs. By that March, they had destroyed seventy-two hundred munitions at Bagram, the equivalent of thirty thousand pounds of high explosive.

More reinforcements were arriving from the United States, along with fresh contingents of NATO troops, including Polish sappers and British paratroopers. A squadron of tank-busting A-10 Thunderbolt II fighters from the Twenty-third Fighter Group was scheduled to arrive soon to provide air support for the ongoing campaign. But as the perimeter grew, Donahue said, the Army wanted to discourage the impression that it was here to stay. And one way to keep a small footprint was to enlist local help. Major Kevin Johnson, one of Donahue’s subordinates, hired Afghan laborers to start clearing debris from the aircraft hangar. Local men got cash for hauling out trash and scrap metal. Unskilled laborers received 70 cents an hour; skilled workers got $1.70 an hour. The task force took the same labor-intensive approach to cleaning debris from the runway. The soldiers recruited two hundred day laborers, who lined up at one end of the runway, scouring the length of the fifty-six-hundred-foot airstrip, sweeping litter up with simple straw brooms. Donahue and Johnson struck a deal with local carpenters to start fixing up some of the battered buildings.

The whole point of the exercise was to give the local economy a lift. The Americans, after all, were the newcomers here, and paying for local labor and buying local tools was a quick and easy way to win hearts and minds. The Army was not here to do long-term development work; it needed to repair the buildings on base and make sure that the place was habitable during the winter. The repairs were part of a deal struck with Afghan commanders in return for the rights to use the base. “The agreement in theater is this: Every fixed building that we occupy, we will repair that building, and one more,” said Donahue. “So it’s a two-for-one.”

The operation at Bagram was low-key and unobtrusive. Outside the razor-wire perimeter at the main gate, Afghan laborers in sandals and baggy shalwar kameez lined up patiently for a pat-down before being let on base; drivers in garishly decorated jingle trucks idled outside a sand-filled HESCO barricade; local entrepreneurs operated a small carpet shop and souvenir stands to cater to the new visitors. Commander Baba Jan’s men wandered inside the perimeter, Kalashnikovs slung casually on their shoulders. One goal of these modest construction projects was what the military called “force protection.” By spreading some dollars around the neighboring community and keeping local men employed, the military could build rapport with leaders. And befriending one’s neighbors made it easier to collect intelligence and reduced the chances that the enemy would return to the area.

That equation, however, was about to change. A team of civilian contractors had recently arrived from the United States. They were here to scout the location for Brown & Root, then a subsidiary of the oil-services firm Halliburton. Brown & Root, renamed KBR later that year, was familiar to anyone who had visited the massive U.S. bases in the Balkans such as Camp Bondsteel, a sprawling camp in eastern Kosovo. The company had managed Camp Bondsteel as part of the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP: it had a contract for the management of military installations overseas. Under LOGCAP, the Army could order individual “task orders” on an as-needed basis: The contractor built housing, provided clean water, and operated commissaries; it provided fuel and spare parts; and it maintained vehicles and equipment. In theory, outsourcing through LOGCAP freed up the downsized post–Cold War Army to do purely military tasks. The military could train and prepare for war, and leave the potato peeling and latrine cleaning to the contractors. And instead of training Army personnel, and paying for their training and long-term benefits, the Army could simply pay a one-time fee to a contractor.

Or so went the theory. In practice, it was expensive. LOGCAP was structured as a “cost-plus-award-fee” contract, meaning that the contractor would be reimbursed for the cost of work performed, plus a fixed percentage that would be considered profit. That meant there were few incentives to control costs. In a survey of outsourced work in the Balkans, government auditors found that Brown & Root charged the government for cleaning offices four times a day; servicing latrines three times a day; and conducting routine base maintenance around the clock. Commanders complained that the company padded payrolls by hiring oversized construction teams and cleaning crews that were often idle.5

Brown & Root won the original LOGCAP contract in 1992, for work in Somalia.6 In 1997 and 2001, a rival company, DynCorp, outbid Brown & Root for the second LOGCAP contract, but Brown & Root got a consolation prize: lucrative task orders in the Balkans. In December 2001, weeks after Bagram was captured by the Northern Alliance, the Army awarded a ten-year contract to Brown & Root for LOGCAP III. The contract had an initial ceiling of $300 million, an amount that would turn out to be a modest first installment. Brown & Root won the contract despite the fact that government auditors faulted the Army for failing to manage proper oversight of its work in the Balkans. Contracts to support the administration’s war on terror followed in quick succession. In February 2002, the company won a sixteen-million-dollar award from the Navy for construction of an expanded detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By late April 2002, the Army’s Operations Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois, which managed the LOGCAP program, had issued five task orders to the company and was preparing another; three of those jobs were in Central Asia. The U.S. military was preparing for a long stay in Afghanistan.

The military machine could not function without contractors, who maintained their equipment, provided translation services, and kept the camps running. Bringing in the big contractors, however, meant that fewer dollars would trickle down to the local economy. In the Balkans, Brown & Root hired an army of local people to do the cooking, cleaning, and construction, but in the new megabases such as Bagram, the company flew in third-country nationals—contract laborers from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal—to dig ditches or ladle out food. By design or by accident, it mirrored the division of labor in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, where imported workers did all the physical labor. Winning hearts and minds and boosting the local economy was not the point.

On the Shomali Plain, then, reconstruction got off to a modest start. During Afghanistan’s civil war, villagers had fled the devastated agricultural region surrounding Bagram, and in the spring of 2002, the region was still in a shambles. The humble mud-brick compounds had been dynamited or destroyed; the fields were seeded with mines; and the main highway to Kabul was still pitted with the ugly, blossoming scars created by the impact of mortar rounds. The detritus of war still littered the road. On a drive outside the base, I spotted rusting hulks of armored personnel carriers, the occasional tank with its turret blown off, and a shipping container that had taken a direct hit, its shredded metal sides ballooned out. Green flags, symbolizing martyrdom, fluttered above roadside graves.

Around Bagram, the job of rebuilding fell to a relatively small contingent of Army Civil Affairs soldiers. When Dana Priest, a Washington Post military affairs reporter, visited the base that spring, she found a small group of reservists led by Major Bryan Cole, a Civil Affairs officer, leading a limited, ad hoc reconstruction effort. Cole’s reservists were part of the 489th Civil Affairs Battalion, a unit based in Knoxville, Tennessee, that had around 120 soldiers in Afghanistan. They had two million dollars in seed money from the Army to jump-start the reconstruction process around Bagram.7

Priest, a perceptive reporter, had noticed an interesting shift in the 1990s, as U.S. policymakers turned increasingly to the military to solve political and economic problems. Priest had shadowed several of the “CINCs,” the four-star commanders-in-chief of the military’s geographic commands, and had seen how they had emerged as powerful regional proconsuls. General Wesley Clark, the head of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and General Anthony Zinni, the chief of U.S. Central Command, held more power than any ambassador. They had aircraft and special operations teams at their disposal, they commanded the respect and attention of presidents and prime ministers, and they wielded more clout than the four-star service chiefs who were nominally their superiors. With little discussion or debate, America’s military had been taking on a wider role in foreign policy. And nation building had by default been taken on by the combatant commands and the Civil Affairs and special operations units tasked to them.

That shift would begin to accelerate in Afghanistan, at first almost imperceptibly. In June 2002, a New York Times reporter visited a Civil Affairs team in Kunduz, a city that had been the final Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan. A small team there was working on a few small-scale projects, sprucing up a small schoolhouse with a fresh coat of paint and fixing windows. But the team had none of the resources to take on the more ambitious types of projects that Afghans were hoping for, like roadbuilding or bridge repair. In 2002, Civil Affairs teams in Afghanistan had an eight-million-dollar budget for the entire country, a relatively modest sum compared to the funds pledged at the December 2001 Afghanistan peace conference in Bonn. The soldiers avoided using the phrase “nation building” to describe their work.8

Civil Affairs troopers had one advantage over traditional aid workers, however: They were armed, and they could go to insecure areas that were off limits to many aid groups. That fact, combined with the military’s “can-do” attitude and massive logistics capability, meant that the eight million dollars was just a start.

Civil Affairs is an unorthodox kind of soldiering. Unlike that of combat units—infantry, armor, artillery, and so on—the primary role of Civil Affairs is not “kinetic,” because Civil Affairs troopers are not on the battlefield to seize territory and destroy things. Quite the opposite: Civil Affairs teams are supposed to step in after the fighting is over and restore essential services such as sewage, water, electricity, and roads. They dig wells, repair schools, and run small clinics. They forge relationships with local communities and nongovernmental organizations. Essentially, they are relief workers with guns.

The Civil Affairs community was unique in other ways. More than 90 percent of Civil Affairs troops are Army reservists, part-time soldiers with ordinary jobs in civilian life.9 Civil Affairs shares a traditional affiliation with the Army Special Forces: Army Civil Affairs units were once subordinate to Army Special Operations Command, and for many years the Army had only one active-duty Civil Affairs unit, the Ninety-sixth Civil Affairs Battalion, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the Army’s Special Warfare Center and School.10 And like Special Forces, the Civil Affairs units were, at least in the pre–September 11 world, something of a stepchild. Civil Affairs was not considered a path to meteoric professional advancement; the Army classes Civil Affairs as a “functional area,” essentially meaning that it is a secondary career for an officer.*

Civil Affairs had not, however, been conceived of as the primary development arm of the U.S. government. Its units were there to serve the immediate needs of the military commander on the scene; they were not equipped for any kind of long-term development effort. The idea was to step in, stabilize the situation, and get out. Patching up a road that was torn up by tank treads was one thing; helping create sustainable livelihoods in agricultural communities was quite another.

That was a job for another set of newcomers to the Shomali Plain: contractors from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. In July 2002, USAID awarded Chemonics International, a for-profit development firm, a $2.9 million contract for the Quick Impact Project, a short-term effort to repair the roads and the irrigation canals that once were the economic lifeline of the Shomali. The Quick Impact project was supposed to provide a quick infusion of jobs for returning families, and Chemonics hired three thousand local men to work as unskilled laborers rebuilding roads. The project would inject cash into the local economy, and help create the basic infrastructure that would connect communities to the capital.11 The Quick Impact Project was also an important win for Chemonics: In 2000, its USAID contracts totaled $6.7 million.12

Development work and humanitarian aid may once have been the traditional domain of not-for-profit groups, charities, and international aid organizations such as CARE, Save the Children, and Médecins sans Frontières. Some nonprofits worked as “implementation partners” for government-funded aid schemes; others maintained their independence, refusing government funds. But foreign aid was also a tool of foreign policy. And it had increasingly become a for-profit business.

Chemonics was a good example. Founded in 1975 by Thurston Teele, a former Foreign Service officer, Chemonics was one of a number of private companies that had built a formidable business in the 1990s bidding for contracts from the U.S. government’s aid agency. As part of an experiment in “reinventing government” led by the Clinton administration, USAID had become the government’s primary laboratory for outsourcing.13 USAID, which had deployed two thousand civilian development experts to South Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War, had been gutted by a series of staff cutbacks; by 2002 it was basically a glorified contracting organization.14 By the end of the 1990s, around half of USAID’s funds for overseas development assistance were being channeled through private firms; the primary beneficiaries of U.S. development assistance were contractors. Ruben Berrios, a scholar who studied the emergence of for-profit companies in U.S. development assistance in the 1990s, reckoned that only a few cents of every foreign aid dollar actually ever reached the developing world. Hiring for-profit development companies often meant that much foreign aid was repatriated to the United States in the form of consultant salaries and other goods and services provided by contractors.15

This was the dirty little secret of U.S. foreign development assistance. While summoning visions of altruistic, self-sacrificing aid workers wearing sandals and digging wells, aid was really quite the racket. I had first encountered the world of the high-priced development consultant in the mid- to late 1990s, while living in Ukraine. To my eyes, at least, the life of a USAID contractor in Kyiv seemed to be one of enormous privilege, particularly in the down-at-heel world of post-Soviet Ukraine. Their employers paid astronomical sums to rent out smartly refurbished flats in the center of town; they were ferried around by drivers; they frequented a clutch of per diem–busting restaurants. This cosseted class also had its own unique vocabulary. Much discussion revolved around their “pay differential”—many of them, to my surprise, drew hardship pay—and they tended to ask other Americans how long they had been “in country,” as if they were in the middle of a one-year combat tour. Ukrainians were referred to as “locals” (the word “native,” evidently, had fallen out of fashion), and the USAID consultants had a uniformly low opinion of them. To my astonishment, few of the USAID contractors I met could speak passable Russian or Ukrainian. This, for them, was another stop on the USAID contracting circuit. Next year they would be in Bolivia, Bangladesh, or Albania.

Ukraine was a dysfunctional state run by retrograde former Communist officials. It had creaky infrastructure and poor rule of law; nevertheless, in most respects it belonged to the developed world. Still, like the rest of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Ukraine was a boom market for private-sector foreign aid contractors such as Chemonics and Booz Allen Hamilton as well as for large, not-for-profit entities like Counterpart International and International Relief and Development. They won USAID contracts to advise the Ukrainians on everything from agricultural-sector reform to media development.16

In the mid-1990s, Matt Bivens, a young freelance journalist, received a lucrative offer from Burson-Marsteller, a U.S. public relations firm, to work on a USAID contract promoting privatization in Kazakhstan. Burson-Marsteller, he later wrote, “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: $53,518 a year after taxes, insurance benefits, free housing, a driver, a maid, a $2,000 moving allowance, and an additional $25 per diem ($9,000 a year) in spending money. All told, a $70,000-a-year package; after only a few months, it would grow to $90,000.”17

Bivens was twenty-six years old. In a scathing 1997 article in Harper’s, he described the daily routine of a “cost-plus” USAID contractor in Kazakhstan. “The main event of every day was lunch,” he wrote.

Lunch was always at a fancy restaurant, with your driver waiting out front. More than thirty-five U.S. companies or organizations were on the AID payroll in Kazakhstan, offering advice on everything from drafting laws to wearing condoms, and every single one of them seemed to be as high on lunch as Burson-Marsteller was … Fridays I would retrieve a crumpled ball of business cards from my suit-coat pocket and incorporate them into a memo summarizing my work week: Monday met with so-and-so, discussed such-and-such. Tuesday met with such-and-such of the this-and-that group. Mostly I was describing lunch.18

Foreign aid budgets were often singled out by conservatives as a waste of taxpayer money—and aid programs to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s set new standards for corruption and mismanagement. In Russia, USAID hired the Harvard Institute for International Development to advise the government on privatization. The project was directed by Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and tenured professor of economics at Harvard; another consultant to the project was Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes Scholar and former World Bank consultant. Both men, it turned out, had a massive conflict of interest: While helping the Russian government design the rules for a market economy, they were simultaneously making personal investments in Russia.19 The U.S. government later implicated both men in a conspiracy to defraud the government, and Harvard University eventually paid $26.5 million to the U.S. government to settle a lawsuit after a U.S. District Court judge found Shleifer and Hay liable for breaching conflict-of-interest rules. Neither Shleifer nor Hay acknowledged any wrongdoing.20

Afghanistan would be the next big market for the USAID contractors. Much as KBR had arrived to scout Bagram Air Base for business opportunities with the Army, companies such as Chemonics, Bearing Point, and Louis Berger Group were positioning themselves to snag more contracts in Afghanistan. After all, USAID was as dependent upon companies like Chemonics to do its work as the Army was dependent on LOGCAP contracts to maintain its bases overseas. In government contracting parlance, Chemonics had a “track record”—it could be counted on to present a bid that would meet the Byzantine requirements of government contracting practice. As Joel Hafvenstein, a young Chemonics consultant, would note in his memoir of the aid business in Afghanistan, “Chemonics was nothing if not a proposal-writing machine. The company prided itself on being able to whip up a plan and a team to carry out pretty much anything USAID might want to do: clean up air pollution in Cairo, train Russian judges, help Ugandans export cut flowers.”21

By the time Hafvenstein arrived to help close out the Chemonics Quick Impact Project on the Shomali Plain, a micro-economy had already sprung up in Kabul that served a small community of international relief workers and aid contractors, conspicuous in their white SUVs. Their drivers would park their vehicles outside the discreet restaurants that catered to Kabul’s expatriate community, small oases behind compound walls where the development set could chill out, drink a few cans of imported Heineken, and live some facsimile of the high life.

At that point it was not clear what USAID’s long-term plan for rebuilding Afghanistan was, or what the end-state was supposed to be. But the reconstruction of Afghanistan meant there would be a new destination for the lavishly paid class of aid consultants who would see Afghans through the windshields of their air-conditioned Land Cruisers. Watching the arrival of Development Inc. in Kabul, I wondered if this would be a new chance to get foreign aid right—or another opportunity for waste, fraud, and abuse.

For the time being, Afghanistan remained primarily a military mission. And Operation Enduring Freedom, the military’s name for the post–September 11 campaign in Afghanistan, was first and foremost a punitive expedition. Major Bryan Hilferty, the spokesman for the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division at Bagram, would conclude all of his press briefings with the same sound bite: “The hunt continues. The war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is not over.”

After Operation Anaconda was wrapped up, in late March 2002, the press corps at Bagram rapidly dwindled: The dramatic battle in the mountains was over, and few reporters were attracted to the less alluring subject of rebuilding Afghanistan’s shattered infrastructure. For the news media as much as the military, Afghanistan’s long-term economic development was an afterthought.

Afghanistan had a transitional administration headed by Hamid Karzai, but little else that resembled a functioning national government or bureaucracy. The State Department needed the rudiments of a functioning embassy, both to conduct diplomatic business with the new government and to help get it on its feet. In March 2002, Ambassador Robert Finn, a career diplomat with some experience in the region, was dispatched to Kabul to set up an embassy. Finn had helped open the first U.S. diplomatic mission in the oil-rich former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, and had previously served as ambassador to Tajikistan, the dysfunctional Central Asian state that bordered northern Afghanistan. At the time, the State Department had yet to begin normal rotational staffing for diplomats to Afghanistan. Kabul was considered a “hardship” rotation; most officers would stay for only weeks at a time. The high turnover meant there was constant waste and duplication of effort. There was no institutional memory to guide aid effectively.

Keith Mines was one of the Foreign Service officers who volunteered to “go TDY” (on temporary duty) to help get the embassy up and running. He arrived in Kabul in June 2002. The U.S. embassy in Kabul occupied a sandbagged compound near a traffic circle recently renamed for the martyred Northern Alliance commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. After the city fell to the Northern Alliance in late 2001, a team of CIA and U.S. Special Operations commandos made their way through downtown Kabul to reclaim the embassy, which had been shuttered during Afghanistan’s civil war and the years of Taliban rule. Gary Berntsen, a counterterrorism officer, was one of the first Americans to set foot in the embassy since 1989; he found rotary-dial telephones and official photographs of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush on the wall. On the floor of the ambassador’s office Berntsen found a more somber memento: a photograph from the funeral of Adolph Dubs, the last U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who was killed in an exchange of fire during a botched hostage rescue attempt at a Kabul hotel in 1979.22

Among the many bureaucratic tribes in Washington, the Foreign Service had always conceived of itself as something of an elite. Foreign Service officers had to pass competitive entry exams, a written test and a more subjectively graded oral exam; obtain Top Secret security clearances; and pass a “suitability review.” Foreign Service officers segregated themselves from the other civil servants within the State Department. FSOs, as they are called, are diplomats, not ordinary bureaucrats; everyone else is mere support staff, regardless of their pay grade or their expertise. Even the analysts at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the State Department’s respected intelligence arm, were second-class citizens within the department. Until Colin Powell became secretary of state under George W. Bush, Foreign Service officers even had their own dedicated lounge inside “main State,” the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

Some Foreign Service officers were attracted to the job’s prestige, and to the postings in European capitals. Mines was not one of them. He was the kind of Foreign Service officer instinctively drawn to what he called the “failed-state circuit.” As a diplomat, he had served tours in Somalia and Haiti; he had made friends with Palestinians during a posting to Israel; and he had spent time overseas outside the protective embrace of the embassy. In the late 1970s, he had spent two years as a young Mormon missionary in Colombia, which was emerging from two decades of mayhem known as la violencia. His first experience was working in Barranquilla with a Colombian companion who spoke no English. He would go for weeks on end without any contact with other Americans.

Colombia taught him some valuable lessons. “That was the closest I have ever been to a foreign culture, living as we did directly among the people without any of the organizational protection from things foreign that is provided in military or Embassy service, business or even the Peace Corps,” he later recalled.* That familiarity with life outside the embassy walls set Mines apart, as did his previous career: Before joining the Foreign Service, Mines was an Army infantry officer.

Mines, then, was unusually well prepared to work in the postconflict environment of Afghanistan. He was not drawn to the cocktail-party circuit, and he preferred hardship posts to plush assignments. Before he joined the mission in Kabul, Mines had been serving a relatively quiet posting in the political-military section at the U.S. embassy in Budapest. The evening of the 9/11 attacks, he collected all his old military gear and put it in a rucksack that he parked in the middle of the upstairs hall; the next day, he sent a letter to a reserve commander to offer his services. It was a symbolic gesture: The Army did not need an aging paratrooper. Mines eventually put his rucksack back in the closet, but he was on a war footing.

Like the other new arrivals at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Mines was assigned space in cramped offices. But the job had an upside. Security in Kabul was reasonably good, and the capital was enjoying its first spring free of the Taliban. After a few days of orientation, embassy staffers were given a fair degree of freedom to move outside the fortified embassy perimeter. But there was no master plan for rebuilding Afghanistan; they would have to improvise.

In theory, the U.S. ambassador is the head of the “country team”; he or she is the top U.S. representative in a country, and all agencies of the U.S. government report to the ambassador. In practice, however, the military was running the show in Afghanistan. It owned a fleet of airlifters, fighter aircraft, and helicopters; it ran a massive logistics operation and a network of bases; and by late 2002, it had about seven thousand troops on the ground. It also had a clear mandate: Hunt for Osama bin Laden, destroy his network, and finish off the remnants of the Taliban. For the small embassy staff, the mission in Afghanistan was less than clear. Afghanistan barely had a functioning bureaucracy, and its economy seemed stuck in the Middle Ages. The traditional job of the diplomat, reporting on the political goings-on in a foreign capital, was hard to do when the institutions of government were still being rebuilt. For instance, Mines was instructed to prepare Afghanistan’s new minister of commerce to brief some officials from Washington who would be paying a call on him. He walked through the minister’s résumé with the minister’s assistant. The biography went something like this: born, 1957; secondary schooling, Kabul Elementary and West Kabul High School, graduated 1975; graduate in engineering, University of Kabul, 1979; minister of commerce, 2001.

Mines inquired about the twenty-year gap in the minister’s résumé.

“Oh, that,” his assistant said. “Well, there was the jihad against the Soviets; then there was the civil war; and then, of course, we had the war against the Taliban.”

At that moment, Mines realized he was dealing with a lost generation; Afghanistan’s governing institutions had missed the past twenty years of economic development and contact with the outside world.

Part of the diplomats’ job was scouting local businesses to better understand the local economy, and figuring out how to get Afghanistan’s economy back on its feet. Congress had inserted an extra $49.7 million in overseas humanitarian aid into a $20 billion emergency war spending bill in early 2002; $5 million was earmarked specifically for landmine victims. At an international conference in Bonn in December 2001, the international community pledged to back the creation of the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, a peacekeeping contingent that would initially provide security for Kabul. At a donors’ conference in Tokyo the following month, donor countries promised $5 billion in reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan over a six-year period.

But the country could not move forward without some kind of collective political settlement, and that was where the diplomats could make a difference. The international community helped sponsor a loya jirga, a grand assembly, in June 2002. The loya jirga was the founding moment of the new Afghanistan, a council of national unity, attended by prominent community delegates and tribal leaders. In practice, it was Afghan tradition merged with twenty-first-century political theater: The event was broadcast on national television and radio, and the country watched the process of national reconciliation unfold. The United Nations had the lead for the event; Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran UN peace negotiator, was the special representative overseeing the event. Behind the scenes, U.S. embassy staff helped stage-manage everything. The Germans brought in a huge Oktoberfest tent to house the delegates. Mines went around to NATO allies to beg donations of uniforms and equipment for the first kandak (battalion) of the Afghan National Army, which would provide security for the proceedings.

For Mines, watching the loya jirga was a heady experience. “It was national group therapy,” he later recalled. “And it was precisely what the new nation needed. In the hall there was focus on each of the speakers, and throughout Kabul—in the cafes, homes, and parks—people were riveted. It was the cathartic experience that the Afghan nation had to have if it was to succeed in putting itself back together.”

It was also a hopeful moment for the international community. ISAF, a small NATO force operating under a UN mandate, arrived to police the capital in late 2001. At the final session of the loya jirga, Mines noticed, the most enthusiastic applause was reserved for the commander of ISAF. After years of factional fighting and the near-destruction of Kabul, Afghans were grateful to see a force that was neutral and impartial. ISAF’s mandate, however, extended only to the capital and its environs; outside Kabul, local warlords still held sway.

The triumph of the loya jirga was marred by a tragic event shortly afterward: the bombing of a wedding party at a village in Oruzgan by U.S. aircraft. The guests had been firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, a celebratory gesture the pilots mistook as an attack. Dozens of guests were killed.23 It was not the first time civilians had been targeted by mistake: In December, U.S. forces acting on a tip from a local informant attacked a convoy in Paktia Province. But it was not a Taliban convoy; the trucks were actually ferrying a group of elders to Kabul to celebrate the inauguration of Karzai. It was a classic case of score settling: An informant had set U.S. troops up to kill off a rival.24

Not long after the loya jirga, the embassy hosted a visit from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. When an officer briefed the deputy secretary on the Oruzgan bombing, Wolfowitz quickly grew irritated. Why, he asked, had the briefers accepted the reports of civilian casualties at face value? Couldn’t the Taliban have faked the incident? Perhaps it was staged to make the coalition look bad, he suggested. Did anyone actually see the bodies? Wolfowitz would hear none of it, and he chastised the group for falling for what, in his view, might easily have been Taliban propaganda. The people in the room were “stunned,” Mines recalled.*

In public, at least, senior officials paid lip service to the importance of preventing civilian casualties. In a public town hall meeting during his visit to Afghanistan, Wolfowitz told a reporter, “We are always concerned when we believe that we may have killed innocent people. And we think that probably happened in that incident and we deeply regret that. But we have no regrets whatsoever about going after terrorists, or people who harbor terrorists. And we have really very little doubt that there were such people in that area. It was a combat zone. Bad things happen in combat zones.”25

Wolfowitz’s attitude to Afghanistan’s political end-state was even more revealing. The briefers cued up a slide for the high-level visitor that posed the crucial question: Would Afghanistan be a partner or a platform in the war on terror? Thus far, Afghanistan had been a launching pad, a base for a military campaign against al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies. Mines and his colleagues wanted to argue for a more robust state-building effort in Afghanistan: helping build state institutions and backing a capable national army under the control of the central government. At this point Karzai was the mayor of Kabul; most of Afghanistan was still ruled by strongmen who controlled private militias. And this task would require a commitment to extend the influence of the national government into the provinces, Special Forces soldiers to train and advise the new Afghan security forces, and civilian experts who could advise the new government on everything from education to agriculture.

But as the briefers quickly realized, the Pentagon leadership had already moved on from Afghanistan, and the focus had shifted to planning the campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Special Forces teams were needed elsewhere, and Afghanistan’s military would have to do with secondhand equipment and an “economy of force” contingent. A vigorous state-building effort would have to wait. A question lingered for the next several years: What would have happened in Afghanistan if the United States had committed more resources early on, and not become distracted by Iraq? Would it have successfully kept the Taliban at bay—and kept Afghanistan from sliding back into war?

* In the weeks and months after the toppling of the Taliban regime, an operation in which Special Forces teams played an outsize role, it was easy to forget that for much of the 1990s, Special Operations had been something of a professional backwater. The world of Special Forces was also obscured by Hollywood mythmaking and its soldiers’ depiction in the media as super-soldiers. One of the main missions, at least before Afghanistan, was the rather unglamorous work of “foreign internal defense”: weeks and months spent patiently schooling ragtag third world armies in basic infantry tactics. As much as this task required good soldiering skills—and the Special Forces were very good at it—it also required some cultural sophistication and foreign-language skills. Along with the Civil Affairs teams and a small corps of Foreign Area Officers (military officers with advanced degrees in regional studies who worked as military attachés inside U.S. embassies) they were the Pentagon’s informal diplomats, and its most experienced nation builders.

* This section draws in part on Wingtips on the Ground, an unpublished memoir by Mines, who kindly gave permission to quote from his manuscript.

* Asked about his recollection of the briefing, Wolfowitz told me through an intermediary that Mines’s story “doesn’t square with his recollection of this event from eight years ago,” without offering any further account of what happened at the meeting.