The string of grenades went off in quick succession: pop-pop-pop. I was down the block at the Mustafa Hotel, a four-story hotel on a traffic circle in Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw district. The Mustafa was a sketchy place—it had been the favorite haunt of an American bounty hunter who was later arrested for running a private jail in Kabul—and I was convinced that someone, someday, would try to blow the place up. But it served decent kebabs and kept beer in stock, and I liked the manager, Wais Faizi, a fast-talking guy with a New Jersey accent and a vintage Camaro. I excused myself from my lunch on the terrace and went out onto the street to see what the matter was.
At the intersection of Chicken Street and Interior Ministry Road, an agitated Afghan National Police officer was waving his Kalashnikov rifle to keep curious onlookers away from the scene of the attack. A few photographers were hanging out around the traffic barrier. They wanted to get closer to the scene, so I followed them as they ducked down a side alley and wound their way down to the middle of Chicken Street, a dusty lane filled with carpet shops and souvenir stores selling antique daggers, Martini-Henry rifles, and pirated DVDs. The body of a man in a scorched shalwar kameez was lying on the pavement, his arms blown off and his torso squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.
This was the body of the bomber, who had detonated a series of hand grenades concealed beneath his shirt. Dressed like a beggar, the man had approached a group of soldiers from the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. The bomber had been trying to follow them into a carpet shop when he detonated his improvised suicide vest. The soldiers escaped, but others were not so lucky. The blast killed Jamie Michalsky, a young American woman who had recently served with the Army in Afghanistan and was on a visit from Uzbekistan, where she worked as a contract linguist.1 It also killed Feriba, a third-grader who attended a nearby school, and who hawked English-language papers on the street to foreigners. She was the main breadwinner for her family.2
It was a relatively primitive attack. Afghan reporters from a local news agency later discovered the identity of the suicide bomber, a mentally ill man named Matiullah who had been recruited at a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, by a splinter faction of the militant group Hezb-e-Islami.3 But the attack had a strategic effect: It deliberately targeted a place frequented by foreigners, and it sent a message that the people who were in Afghanistan to help rebuild the country were also targets of the insurgency.
In a modest way I was one of the people aiding the reconstruction of Afghanistan. I had returned to the country in September 2004 to cover the upcoming presidential elections and had stayed on to take a job with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a U.K.-based charity that was teaching basic journalism skills to a new generation of Afghan reporters. Accepting the post was in part a move dictated by necessity: Very few U.S. news organizations were willing to keep a full-time correspondent in Kabul, and living and working in Afghanistan on $150 or $200 per article, the going rate paid by many newspapers, was a losing proposition. So this job allowed me to remain in Afghanistan.
I may have been a reluctant member of Development Inc., but autumn 2004 was a unique time to be in Afghanistan. Unlike Baghdad, which was in the grip of a violent insurgency, Kabul was a relatively peaceful place. I could live in a residential neighborhood without having to retreat inside a guarded compound. It was easy to move around the countryside. To report a story outside the capital, I could simply hire a truck and go. That freedom had its limits: Parts of the south and the east were still home to the remnants of the Taliban, but violent crime actually seemed as big a worry as political unrest. The U.S. military maintained an almost invisible presence in much of the country. Part of the reason for this invisibility was the size of the contingent, which hovered at around fifteen thousand troops. It was also a “force protection” mind-set that kept U.S. forces sequestered behind blast walls. On a reporting visit to Bagram Air Base, the public affairs major who arranged my interview asked me how I’d gotten to the base. When I told him that I’d taken a taxi, he looked at me as though I was deranged.
It was generally an optimistic time. On October 9, 2004, Afghanistan held its first direct presidential elections. Millions of Afghans went to the polls, and U.S. and NATO troops stepped up security around the country to make sure the elections took place. Out on the Shomali Plain, which was still devastated after the war two and a half years earlier, I saw the first signs of economic optimism: brick factories, which were providing the materials to help rebuild the capital.
But the Taliban and its allies, who had been driven from power in 2001 by the United States and the Northern Alliance, were readying a comeback. In villages on the Shomali Plain, agitators from Pakistan were rumored to be meeting with village elders to encourage them to fight the Americans. At the time, the U.S. military was focused on rescuing Iraq from its downward spiral, not on the possibility of a resurgent Taliban. And the attack on Chicken Street was a sign that the mayhem on the distant Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier could also reach the capital. After taking in the scene of the bombing, I hurried back to my guest house to type an e-mail to an editor in the United States: “Any interest in a story on the bombing?” “Thanks,” he wrote, “but we’ll pass.” He was expecting a heavy run of domestic news. The 2004 U.S. election campaign was in full swing; another big story of the day was that Delta Airlines was experiencing financial turbulence. In other words, Afghanistan was a forgotten war. And that was a shame, because Afghanistan was the scene of an important new experiment in the way that aid was being delivered.
A few months before the invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon official, Joseph Collins, traveled to Afghanistan on a fact-finding trip. Collins, a retired Army colonel, was known as something of an Afghanistan watcher: He had begun studying the country in the late 1970s, and his Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia focused on Soviet policy in Afghanistan. After a career in the Army, he worked as a public policy researcher in Washington. But his research career was put on hold in 2001, when he was asked to join the incoming administration of George W. Bush. Collins first served as special assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and was promoted shortly thereafter to a new job within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Collins was deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, an obscure directorate inside “OSD Policy,” the policymaking shop in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Stability operations was something of an orphan inside the DoD bureaucracy. Collins described his office as the “junk drawer of OSD policy” because of the mixed bag of missions under his purview: evacuating U.S. citizens from combat zones, humanitarian mine clearance, civil-military operations, peacekeeping, and humanitarian aid.4
In theory, the Pentagon was not supposed to be the lead U.S. agency for aid to Afghanistan: That was supposed to be the job of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In the year following the defeat of the Taliban, USAID had initiated its first quick impact projects: rebuilding schools, delivering new textbooks, and providing food to returning Afghan refugees. And Afghans were voting with their feet: By official estimates, around two million Afghans had returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan and the cities of Iran. At the same time, the military was getting more deeply involved in the business of humanitarian aid. By late 2002, around two hundred Army Civil Affairs specialists were on the ground in Afghanistan, repairing schools, boring wells, and opening medical clinics. They had refurbished the National Veterinary Center and the National Teachers’ College in Kabul.5 Collins’s office oversaw that portfolio of humanitarian projects.
During his fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, Collins received a briefing from a British army officer, Colonel Nick Carter. Carter showed Collins a PowerPoint slide that sketched out a novel military organization that would be tailored to Afghanistan, something called Joint Regional Teams. The idea was to jump-start development projects in rural Afghanistan by organizing eight or ten of these units—essentially, super-sized Civil Affairs teams—and stationing them out in the provinces. Each JRT would field a force of fifty to one hundred uniformed personnel. A larger “force protection” component of the team would guard the small outpost, run patrols, and provide overwatch (where one small unit supports or covers the activities of another). They would expand the presence of the military in Afghanistan, and by extension, serve as a counterweight to the militia commanders who still held sway in the countryside. Afghanistan at that point still had an extremely fragile central government, and the jang salaran (warlords) who had been put on the U.S. payroll during the campaign to oust the Taliban now stood in the way of creating a functioning Afghan state.
Carter, a former battalion commander with the British army’s Royal Green Jackets regiment, would later be credited with the idea of the JRTs, but the plan was also being presented by other British officers assigned to Coalition Joint Task Force-180, the military headquarters that ran the war from Bagram.6 The approach drew inspiration in part from the British army’s experience in policing low-intensity conflicts in Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Carter was a recent veteran of Kosovo, where he had been charged with policing Kosovo’s divided city of Mitrovica as part of KFOR, NATO’s Kosovo force. Patrolling Mitrovica was equal parts police work and military operation: keeping the ethnic Serb and Albanian communities at bay, preventing ethnic reprisals, and searching for illegal weapons.7
Military planners believed the Joint Regional Teams would create a more visible coalition presence in Afghanistan outside the capital. By the summer of 2002, Kabul and its environs were reasonably secure, a development that was credited to the presence of the International Security Assistance Force, a small UN-mandated peacekeeping contingent that had arrived in December 2001. But ISAF did not patrol outside the capital, and policymakers in Kabul and Washington wanted to find a way to spread the “ISAF effect” into the regions.
Collins brought up the topic of Joint Regional Teams in a meeting with President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan president liked the idea, but he didn’t like the name. “It doesn’t work,” Karzai said. “The word ‘joint’ doesn’t exist in Dari or Pashto.”
Officials in Kabul would have to come up with a new name. They settled on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs. It was in part a political calculation: Warlords had their regions, the reasoning went, but the new Afghan state had provinces.
The PRTs were a more muscular version of the Civil Affairs teams already on the ground. With a security contingent to both guard their base and provide transport, they could go into harm’s way to do development work. Collins, who came from the world of special operations and low-intensity conflict, liked the idea. On his return to Washington, he presented the idea to Doug Feith, the head of the Pentagon’s policy office.
Collins would not take credit for inventing the PRTs, but he was key to propagating the concept within the Pentagon. The experiment had previously been tried on a small scale by the Coalition Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force (CJCMOTF, pronounced “chick motif”), an ad hoc organization that originally oversaw the U.S. military’s humanitarian operations in Afghanistan. CJCMOTF formed something called Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells (“chick licks” or “Chiclets”), six-man Civil Affairs teams augmented by a few civilian experts who accompanied Special Forces troops working out in the field.8
But for the concept to work on a larger scale, it would need funding, and some more personnel. Traditional Civil Affairs teams did not have the right skills for long-term development projects. They could drill a well here or repair a school there but could not necessarily do anything about the underlying problems of poverty and development that afflicted Afghanistan. In the new PRT model, the civilian experts—diplomats, agricultural experts, and development specialists—could focus on the tasks of long-term economic development. It was agreed that the PRTs would include civilian members drawn from development organizations such as USAID or the U.K.’s Department for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. State Department. The diplomats were supposed to act as local political advisors and report back to their embassies on the situation in the provinces. Real development experts could help plan more ambitious development projects such as building highways or repairing hydroelectric dams.
That fall, work got under way on planning, and military officials laid out a timeline for staffing the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. The first was a U.S.-led team in eastern Afghanistan that opened in January 2003 at Gardez. Shortly thereafter, teams were established at Bamyan, home of the giant Buddha statues dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, and in Kunduz, the last city in northern Afghanistan held by the Taliban. The British opened the first non-U.S. team in Mazar-e-Sharif, a city in northern Balkh province that was the scene of an ongoing feud between two warlords, the Tajik leader Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor and his rival, an Uzbek general named Abdul Rashid Dostum. Plans were in the works for additional teams to be deployed around the country by the late summer of 2003.9
Collins presented the idea to the press in a December 2002 briefing and relayed an important message to the public as well: Major combat in Afghanistan was essentially over, and the emphasis would now shift. Beginning on January 1, 2003, the military would “be transitioning to focus on stability operations.”10
In theory, the creation of these new teams—they had yet to be officially renamed PRTs—would bring the military and the civilian agencies closer together. The military headquarters at Bagram and the embassy in Kabul were physically and psychologically separated. Up until that point, each had basically done its own thing, meaning there was little “unity of effort” by the various U.S. agencies tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan. It was a bureaucratic problem with real implications. Without some elementary coordination, aid would be wasted: the same school might be repaired twice, unnecessary wells would be drilled. Savvier local leaders could persuade multiple donors to fund the same project, essentially double- or triple-dipping in reconstruction funds while depriving needier and less well connected communities of essential funds.
But the creation of the PRTs inadvertently expanded the military’s remit. Collins noted that Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 180, and General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, “will be the people who are running these operations out in the field.”11
The creation of the PRTs was, in effect, the first step toward what the Pentagon strategist Thomas Barnett had called the “SysAdmin” force: a new kind of organization, part military, part civilian, that was uniquely suited for the task of nation building. Afghanistan would serve as the first laboratory for this experiment. But it was easier said than done. When I met with Collins shortly before my departure for Afghanistan in September 2004, he made a blunt appraisal of NATO’s efforts to contribute to this new mission. “The performance of our European brethren is pretty pathetic,” he said. “Pretty pathetic.” The problem was that “everybody wants to help, but nobody wants to put out. NATO is incredibly badly organized, the NATO nations are incredibly badly organized. The Germans complain all the time about their overstretch, and they’ve got less than three percent of their force abroad.”
By early 2003, although the headlines about Iraq were eclipsing all news from Afghanistan, U.S.-funded reconstruction work in Afghanistan had slowly begun to pick up its pace. The first wave of quick-impact projects had been wrapped up, and work was beginning in earnest on more ambitious projects such as repairing Afghanistan’s “ring road,” the highway network that would connect the country’s major cities. Plans were also in the works to repair the country’s hydroelectric dams, which could generate inexpensive power and speed rural electrification. In its fiscal year 2003 budget request, the State Department also recognized a new development priority: weaning Afghan farmers from their dependence on growing opium poppy. Opium had emerged as Afghanistan’s main cash crop: It was easy to grow, transport, and store, making it the perfect hedge for a lawless and uncertain time. A portion of the department’s International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement budget would go toward poppy eradication, police training, and employment schemes in opium-growing areas.
Simultaneously, the Bush administration’s philosophical opposition to this mission was quietly set aside. George W. Bush had declared his aversion to nation building during the 2000 presidential campaign. A few months after he declared “Mission accomplished” on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, however, he recast the occupation of Iraq in clear nation-building terms. In a speech before the United Nations on September 23, 2003, half a year after the Iraq invasion, Bush used the success of the Marshall Plan, Europe’s postwar recovery, as a selling point for a massive assistance package for Iraq. The reconstruction of Iraq, he said, would be “the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan.” Bush glossed over a key distinction: The United States did not rebuild postwar Europe in the midst of a shooting war. More important, the Marshall Plan hinged on facilitating trade, not handing out aid, and a great deal of American money went directly into backing the European Payments Union, which served as a clearinghouse for transactions between European nations.12 It was, according to the historian Nicolaus Mills, a “blood transfusion” that encouraged the European states to make their own investments in infrastructure and social welfare programs to improve the lives of their citizens.13
While less ambitious in scale than Iraq’s reconstruction, efforts to rebuild Afghanistan were also ramping up. “That opposition to nation-building is a fig leaf that dropped a while ago,” a spokesman of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Alberto Fernandez, told the Washington Post. “We’re up to our ears in nation-building.”14 Between 2002 and 2003, the United States poured around $900 million into humanitarian aid and assistance to Afghanistan, eclipsing the $296 million the United States initially pledged at the first donor conference in Tokyo.15
Not everyone was pleased with the U.S. government’s new enthusiasm for this approach, however. Traditional nonprofit aid groups such as CARE and Save the Children greeted the creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams with skepticism. In the 1990s, armed intervention in Kosovo and East Timor had troubled many traditional aid and relief groups, who felt they were being crowded out of the traditional “humanitarian space” by the military. The PRTs, they argued, “blurred the line” between humanitarian workers and the military, making it difficult for locals to distinguish between the coalition forces and the “true” humanitarians.
Militaries, they argued, served the interests of policymakers in their respective capitals; they were not guided by principles of neutrality and impartiality that humanitarian agencies traditionally aspired to. And they tended to deliver aid in a way that was likely to suit the short-term aims of military commanders on the ground, rather than considering broader development imperatives or the needs of the local community. Most important, associating with the military violated a deep taboo among traditional humanitarians at a fundamental level: In their view, it created a perception that humanitarian actors are not neutral players in a conflict, and this makes it harder for them to act impartially and effectively. Two researchers for Save the Children U.K. outlined their worries in a paper published in late 2002:
If humanitarian actors are not perceived as neutral by the parties to the conflict, their impartiality and trustworthiness will be in doubt, and their access to all people in need, as well as their own security, will be in jeopardy … Any integration of humanitarian aid into wider political and military strategy compromises humanitarian principles, making it harder for humanitarian actors on the ground to assert their independence and impartiality, and to negotiate access to people in need. Associating with a military force in a conflict zone implies that the agency in question is in some way identifying with that group, against others.16
In fact, the traditional humanitarians felt that the PRTs and the military’s embrace of the humanitarian mission put them directly in harm’s way. In the past, humanitarian aid groups had relied on their neutrality for protection. Even in strife-torn regions such as Afghanistan, they would avoid hiring armed guards for fear that it would compromise their impartiality. If members of the uniformed military dug wells or rebuilt schools, they feared, it would become impossible for the local population to distinguish between combatants and humanitarians.
In Afghanistan, however, arguments about preserving the traditional humanitarian space seemed increasingly quaint. In late March 2003, a Red Cross water engineer from El Salvador named Ricardo Munguia was driving along a road in southern Uruzgan province when he was pulled over by gunmen at a roadblock. He was pulled from his car and shot dead, in plain sight of other Afghan aid workers. Munguia’s killers apparently knew he was an aid worker: One of the gunmen reportedly pulled his trouser leg up to show Munguia an artificial limb he had received from the Red Cross in Pakistan.17
The death of Munguia sent a tremor through Afghanistan’s small community of expatriate aid workers.18 The insurgents were beginning to deliberately target humanitarian aid workers and their local employees, who presented a much easier target than foreign military forces. Killing aid workers served a dual purpose. It telegraphed a message of intimidation to Afghans: collaboration with foreigners might cost you your life. And it was what the military called an “information operation,” a dramatic attack that would guarantee headlines, magnifying insurgents’ power and omnipresence.
Sarah Chayes, a former radio correspondent who had settled in Kandahar to work for an Afghan charity, saw how the death of Munguia further soured relations between the U.S. military and the nongovernmental organizations. “For international aid workers in Afghanistan, the only available target upon which to vent their frustration was the U.S. presence there,” she later wrote. “And so humanitarian workers, Europeans as well as many Americans, opposed the presence far more vocally than Afghans did. They said it was the U.S. troops who endangered their lives, since the U.S. troops were doing reconstruction, and ‘insurgents’ could not distinguish between soldiers and aid workers.”19
Chayes worked on development projects in Kandahar as a field director for Afghans for Civil Society, an independent charity founded by Qayum Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s older brother. In The Punishment of Virtue, an account of her first few years in Afghanistan, she described how poorly the international aid system had delivered on promises to rebuild Afghanistan. But she disagreed with the humanitarian aid purists. She felt that the presence of U.S. troops had in fact brought security to Afghanistan. In fact, the military’s deepening involvement in the humanitarian enterprise seemed to threaten the image of lofty neutrality that was carefully cultivated by the international aid community. “Aid workers have trouble accepting that they are now in the crosshairs themselves,” she wrote. “When one of them is killed deliberately, the loss sparks shocked hurt feelings as well as grief. For the unconscious belief persists: If humanitarian workers are being targeted, there must be some mistake.”20
Michelle Parker tightened the straps in the passenger seat of the old Huey helicopter as it prepared to lift off from Kabul Airport. It was a painfully early hour, and Parker had never flown on a helicopter before. As she anxiously waited for liftoff, she noticed a slight Afghan man tethered to a harness in the front of the passenger hold. He was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. Can he stop an RPG with that thing? she wondered. Really, what is he going to do—annoy some farmer?
Just a few weeks earlier, a helicopter carrying workers for the Louis Berger Group, a U.S. construction firm that had a major contract from USAID to rebuild Afghanistan’s main highways, had crashed after coming under fire in southern Afghanistan. The pilot was killed, and a civilian worker was injured.21 The diminutive Afghan was supposed to provide some modicum of security for the flight down to Jalalabad, where Parker, a young USAID employee, would be taking up her new assignment with the Jalalabad PRT.
It was July 2004. Parker had been in the country for about two weeks, and she was being accompanied down to Jalalabad by her predecessor, a former Marine who had been promoted to USAID regional development advisor at Camp Salerno, a large U.S. firebase in southeastern Afghanistan (a firebase is a base supplying fire support to coalition forces). At the time, USAID still faced a logistical nightmare getting its employees and contractors out to the field: The agency had no aircraft of its own, Afghanistan had only a couple of unreliable commercial carriers, and the military owned most of the helicopters. On military flights, civilians were the lowest priority for seats: They flew “space available,” meaning they could be bumped from their seat on the aircraft by the lowest-ranking private or a pallet of bottled water. And to further complicate matters, USAID usually had to rely on “implementing partners,” its contractors and their subcontractors, for transportation. They had few options.
Parker’s predecessor, however, had figured out how to work the system. He had been scouting an electrification project at Torkham, the border town that is the crossing point from Pakistan’s Khyber Agency to Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province. He convinced some of the USAID senior engineers to make a fact-finding trip to Torkham, the main customs station on the highway between Peshawar and Jalalabad. Having senior officials on board helped him line up the helicopter flight, and they could drop Parker off in Jalalabad. After rising at the crack of dawn, going down to the airport, and waiting for liftoff, Parker weighed the situation: It was her first job after graduate school; it was her first trip on a helicopter. As the helicopter lifted off, Parker breathed in: Okay, welcome to your new job.
The flight was stunning. The chopper wound through the jutting canyons of the Kabul Gorge, passed over the sparkling reservoir behind the Surobi Dam, and then dropped low, hugging the plains of Nangarhar Province, until it arrived at the Jalalabad PRT’s camp. The USAID team touched down at a primitive landing zone, by a swampy area behind the PRT site.
At the landing zone, Parker and the USAID team were met by an Army Civil Affairs major. Here’s a strapping young lad, she thought to herself with a laugh. And then it started to sink in: She would be living alone on a military base with all of these young men, many of whom were barely old enough to buy beer. The soldiers unloaded Parker’s gear, and then, after grabbing a quick breakfast, the entire team walked over to a convoy of pickup trucks and SUVs for the two-hour ride to the border.
Another major was standing by the trucks with an enormous plug of chew in his mouth. He sized up Parker, a Georgia native with the looks of a hometown sweetheart, strapped into body armor and ready for the journey.
“So,” he drawled with an exaggerated southern accent, “You a Republican or Democrat?”
“How about undecided?” Parker shot back.
“I’ll take it, you’re hired!” the officer said approvingly. “I think we just got an upgrade in AID people.”
When Parker arrived in Nangarhar Province, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams were still a novelty. Parker had first heard of them just a few months before, when she was finishing a graduate degree at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. An instructor had suggested that she research a paper on this new experiment; aside from a critique written by Barbara Stapleton, then of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an alliance of charity organizations, there almost was no literature on the subject. So Parker went straight to the source: She began lining up interviews with people in the Pentagon who were involved with setting up the PRTs. She couldn’t get an appointment with Joseph Collins, so she arranged an interview with Dave des Roches, a gregarious West Point graduate who worked on Collins’s staff and had worked behind the scenes to set up the first PRTs. Parker interviewed des Roches at a bar.
She also paid a call on the Afghanistan desk at USAID. After she concluded her interview, the official she was interviewing made her a recruitment pitch. Parker had already worked on a USAID project in Nepal; she was finishing graduate school; and she probably knew more about PRTs than anyone else right now. Did she want to apply for a job?
At the time, tenured USAID officers had few incentives to work and live on a military outpost on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Culturally speaking, the USAID bureaucracy primarily viewed itself as an altruistic organization, not an arm of the U.S. national security establishment. Volunteering for this quasi-military duty was not a career-enhancing move. What’s more, USAID tenure and promotion boards weren’t quite sure how to review or evaluate someone who had served on a PRT: It didn’t fit the traditional job description for a USAID worker, and very few volunteers came forward within the bureaucracy in the early days of the PRTs.*
Consequently the agency had to turn to contractors such as Parker. USAID had a mechanism, called a personal services contract, which basically allowed USAID to beef up its foreign service by hiring individual contractors. The PSCs, as they were called, worked directly for USAID. They held temporary positions within the civil service, but they had none of the long-term benefits that USAID personnel enjoyed. Within the caste system of USAID, they were temporary hires, bureaucratic second-class citizens.
These shake-and-bake USAID officers were not an easy fit with the military culture, either. Parker’s predecessor had clashed with the military members of the Jalalabad team. As a former Marine officer, he was unimpressed by what he saw as sloppy soldiering by the Army reservists and National Guard soldiers on the outpost. He reprimanded them for discipline infractions such as failing to arm their weapons when they went “outside the wire.” For their part the troops resented being dressed down by an aid worker. When Parker arrived at the Jalalabad base, she was unsure how she would fit in, both as a civilian and as a woman.
Parker’s first day on the job was not easy. Before the drive to Torkham, the security team held a predeparture briefing, which was routine before a military convoy. The PRT had never had a civilian female team member, and they were unsure how the conservative, male-dominated Pashtun community of Torkham would respond to her presence. “Michelle, if you feel at all uncomfortable, let us know and we’ll sweep you into the car,” said one of the members of the security team.
And Parker had to adjust to military culture as well. As she climbed inside the truck, she found her boots on the top of some odd black box in the passenger compartment. “What’s that?” she asked. One of her colleagues silenced her: their interpreter was in the car. He was a local hire and had no security clearance. You had to be careful not to talk about the equipment in front of them. It was her first encounter with what the military calls OPSEC (operational security): keeping a lid on classified information, keeping operational plans closely held, not revealing sensitive information about equipment or intelligence collection capabilities. OPSEC was not a phrase that was usually employed in aid and development circles.
They arrived at Torkham. Sure enough, Parker found herself the lone woman at the meeting with local leaders on the electrification project. Everyone seemed to be staring. She was uncomfortable, and her headscarf kept slipping off, but she didn’t want to show any fear. She kept her composure, and the meetings, about an electrification project and a government proposal to move the border post, went without a hitch. On the ride back to Jalalabad, she reviewed her first day on the job: the insane helicopter ride from Kabul, the gorgeous ride down to the Khyber Pass. Not a bad first day of work. She was hooked.
Parker was a natural for the role: As a woman she felt no peer pressure, no need to fit in with the “band of brothers” culture of the military. She would never be part of the boys’ club. For her, as a strong, independent woman, living alone on a military base, it was liberating to be outside the group. There was no need to pander. She could do her job without feeling as though she had to toe the military’s line.
More important, she could be a player. For a relatively junior civil servant, she wielded a significant amount of power. In addition to the “quick impact” funds at her disposal, she ended up working behind the scenes to start a road project that would link the homelands of the remote Shinwari tribe, in the Shinwar District of Nangarhar Province, with Highway 1, the main road that linked the region with the capital. Constructing the road was an important political move that helped placate the tribal leadership and improved the aid workers’ relations with the provincial government. Parker had a fair degree of autonomy, serious resources, and a heavily armed contingent of soldiers to help her get the job done. In many respects it was a powerful, almost intoxicating, experience. She ended up staying in Afghanistan for the next twenty-nine months and eventually was promoted to the civilian equivalent of a brigadier general before she was thirty-two.
Launching the PRTs in Afghanistan also hinged on recruiting diplomats to fill State Department positions on the teams. But within the Foreign Service, details were still scant about what, exactly, the job entailed. All they knew was that it meant an assignment to a combat zone, far outside the confines of the capital and the embassy. It was a potentially dangerous job, one for which few Foreign Service officers were trained.
John Mongan, a junior diplomat, first heard about the PRTs during the 2003 “bid cycle,” the time of the year when Foreign Service officers apply for their next rotational assignment. Mongan was intrigued by the idea of joining a PRT: As a student he had considered joining the military and was enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. And he was fascinated by America’s experiments in counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War. “Everybody else in my ROTC and poli-sci classes were studying wars we had won,” he later recalled. “And it made sense to study a war you had lost, because we pretty much know how to fight a major tank battle in Europe.”
Mongan also had some experience in conflict zones; he had joined the Foreign Service after a stint in Kosovo with the international charity Mercy Corps, where he had worked setting up food distribution networks. The idea of being a diplomat had initially sounded very stuffy and boring to someone like him, but full-time jobs with nongovernmental organizations were hard to come by, and his parents wanted him to get a job and get on with his professional life. He took the Foreign Service exam and passed. While waiting for his security clearance to come through, a time-consuming process of background checks that usually took several months, he took the job in Kosovo.
NATO’s bombing campaign over Kosovo began three weeks after he joined the Foreign Service. Since he spent some time there, he was eager to continue with his Foreign Service career and put his Kosovo experience to work. First, however, he had to complete his A-100 class, the orientation and training course for new Foreign Service officers. After he completed the course, in 1999, the State Department informed him it was sending him to Angola.
Mongan was unhappy with the Angola assignment. Eventually he heard through the bureaucratic grapevine (“I met a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy”) that James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who had been President Clinton’s special envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, was looking for a staff assistant. Mongan was able to get an introduction, and was offered a one-year assignment as Dobbin’s aide.
It was an educational year. Dobbins had one of the longest diplomatic résumés in Washington; he had also served as the Bush administration’s special envoy on Afghanistan. But after his assignment with Dobbins, Mongan found that there were few really hands-on nation-building jobs in the Foreign Service. Then, in mid-2003, he read an internal cable saying the State Department was looking for volunteers for something called a PRT in Afghanistan. He was intrigued. He contacted the officers running the program to volunteer for it. Initially he was told that he was “under grade”—too junior—and that he was ineligible because he had never held a job providing relevant experience in political affairs. But few Foreign Service officers were clamoring for the chance to live on a remote Army outpost in the middle of a combat zone, and Mongan eventually got the call to work at a PRT in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul.
He arrived later that summer in Kabul on an Air Azerbaijan flight—Afghanistan’s national carrier, Ariana, was considered too risky for U.S. government personnel—after about two weeks of rudimentary training in Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan.
He had a week of orientation at the embassy, and then they tried to figure out how to get him down to Ghazni. Much like USAID, the embassy had not completely figured out how to support its personnel in isolated parts of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Mongan went to the embassy’s political section to try to get information on Ghazni. The people there could not really help him, saying, “None of us have been down there in a while.” The deputy chief of mission’s sole advice to Mongan was, “Don’t try to be a player out there.”
Like their USAID counterparts, State Department PRT team members were orphans within the bureaucracy. James Hunter, another Foreign Service officer who served on the Asadabad PRT at roughly the same time as Mongan, described the experience thus: “When you walked out of the Kabul embassy, you dropped off the face of the earth.” At the time, the embassy’s PRT section had only two officers who supported the field staff, and both had to juggle that responsibility with other embassy jobs.
Eventually, Mongan managed to get a lift to Ghazni, a two-hour drive from Kabul, with the deputy chief of mission. The DCM was new to Afghanistan; he had never traveled outside the capital, and wanted to see a PRT. By hitching a ride with the senior diplomat, Mongan felt a little bit like a kid being dropped off at college. But it had its advantages. “It probably gave the PRT and the battalion head a completely mistaken sense of the influence and heft I happened to have back in Kabul,” he later recalled. “I guess in the first few weeks that helped.”
Over the next few weeks, Mongan settled into his new situation. The base at PRT Ghazni was manned by soldiers of the Virginia National Guard. The Provincial Reconstruction Team had only a small civilian contingent: a USAID representative who had been there since earlier in the spring and a U.S. Department of Agriculture officer. The State Department had sent a retired Foreign Service officer to Ghazni, but he had lasted only two months.
The DCM’s advice to Mongan was repeated by others who worked on the PRTs. In essence, it meant “Keep your head down.” The primary function of the diplomats on the PRT was to observe and report back to the embassy, nothing more. They would keep an eye on the local situation, as well as on what the other U.S. agencies were up to. They were not there to influence local decisionmaking or contribute to the larger effort being led by the military.
Diplomats did not fit neatly into the military organization. They were not on the same rotational schedule, and they reported through a different chain of command. And there was a serious communications problem. The military maintains its own classified networks, but the State Department had not provided for secure communications outside the embassy. The entire time Mongan was posted to Ghazni, he had to use a Hotmail account to communicate with his superiors in Kabul. That meant he had to send an unclassified version of his reports, with sensitive information stripped out. If he needed to relay something classified, he would add it to a summary report that the Provincial Reconstruction Team’s military staff typed up and sent nightly to their brigade headquarters. A State Department officer assigned to the brigade was supposed to pass on any relevant information on the situation in Ghazni to the embassy in Kabul.
Or so went the theory. Mongan assumed that his State Department counterpart would pass the reports on to the embassy in Kabul and that someone in the embassy would bother to read them. Neither, it turned out, actually happened, even though one of Mongan’s main responsibilities was keeping tabs on the political situation in Ghazni. Eventually, Mongan had to send e-mail from the PRT commander’s account and call his superiors in Kabul to make sure some of his reports got through to the embassy. Other Foreign Service officers serving on PRTs encountered the same problem.
And then there was the issue of whether the civilians should be armed. Both the military and the State Department were ambivalent. This was, after all, a relatively small and isolated military outpost, and everyone needed to pitch in to provide security. But no one was clear on whether the civilians on the PRT should also carry weapons. Mongan and the other civilian members of the PRT traveled with the military on patrols, sometimes going into the city of Ghazni to meet up with some of the local government officials, sometimes driving out to rural districts. About once a month the PRT members would load up their vehicles and form a convoy for a five-day patrol to some of the more remote areas of the province. Most of the districts were pretty secure, but about four districts were marked red on the map. The PRT commander wanted everyone carrying a weapon whenever they went there.
The embassy did not want Foreign Service officers openly carrying weapons, but maintained something of a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And if having Foreign Service personnel carrying pistols and carbines made State Department officials uneasy, it didn’t please some military commanders either. Mongan once attended a brigade commanders’ conference where a State Department employee arrived with a pistol strapped to his hip, raising a few eyebrows among the military men in the room. Another Foreign Service officer on a PRT showed a bit more chutzpah. Whenever he showed up at the embassy he would leave his pistol in his truck, but he would come walking into the embassy with the empty holster still strapped to his thigh.
Despite the bureaucratic ambiguities, Mongan loved working on the PRT. It was “the best job of my life,” he later told me. He was living at a combat outpost, free of the dull certainties of embassy life; he enjoyed a good working relationship with the other civilians on the team; and his commander had a clear grasp of the mission. He discarded the DCM’s cautious advice, and became closely involved in overseeing local projects. Like Michelle Parker, he discovered that a relatively junior officer had real power on a PRT. As he later recalled, “The embassy tends to have a very conventional outlook. And when they said ‘Don’t try to be a player,’ what they meant is ‘Keep us informed on what’s going on, and don’t try to get involved in it.’ The problem is, of course, most diplomats being diplomats, and not physicists, don’t know what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is. You can’t passively report on something—if you’re in the room, you’re influencing it! And you may as well influence the shit out if it instead of influencing it passively. And there were a couple of times … where I probably got in front of myself. But at a certain point the embassy was willing to trust me to go ahead with what I thought was a good idea.”
Like Parker, he was hooked. But at that point the PRTs were still an obscure experiment in militarizing aid and development.
Despite those first hesitant steps toward creating a cadre of muddy-boots diplomats, there was a sense within the Bush administration that the State Department was still not pulling its weight in nation building. In early 2004, Michael Coulter, a Republican political appointee within the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, had a conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the apparent lack of State Department commitment to the civilian reconstruction mission. The PRTs seemed like a worthwhile experiment, but there were no standard guidelines for how, exactly, they were supposed to do their job, whom they were supposed to report to, and how they fit in with the overall mission.
Coulter later recalled that the discussion got Armitage fired up. He had served three combat tours in Vietnam as a patrol boat officer and advisor to the South Vietnamese navy. Within a week, he instructed Coulter to pack his bags for Afghanistan, where he would be the eyes and ears for Armitage. Armitage’s advice: “Don’t spend a single night in Kabul; hitchhike around the country with our staff.” Coulter’s initial title was “roving PRT person.”
The problem was, getting around Afghanistan was not easy. At that point the State Department still had few people stationed outside Kabul, and the embassy usually depended on the military to ferry its personnel to remote outposts. Even though Coulter was relatively senior, he had a difficult time following Armitage’s directive. Eventually he found a solution. In spring 2004, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Eric Olson, took over as the head of Combined Joint Task Force-76. Coulter was essentially seconded to Olson as a political advisor, and in return, he had authority to hop around the country on military aircraft. It was, to use State Department slang, a classic bureaucratic “drug deal.”
By autumn 2004 the U.S. military wanted to expand the number of PRTs around the country. The plan was to gradually hand over control of PRTs to NATO, starting with the teams in the relatively stable and secure northeastern portions of Afghanistan and then moving around the map counterclockwise. It was part of the exit strategy: As NATO took control, this would presumably free up more U.S. forces that were desperately needed in Iraq. But Coulter discovered that the NATO allies were not always enthusiastic about the PRT mission. In northern Kunduz Province, he found, the Germans were extremely risk-averse. They allowed the Provincial Reconstruction team members to leave the camp only if they could be accompanied by armored ambulances; night patrols were rare; and the Germans were bound by restrictive rules (called “caveats”) that prevented them from taking part in combat unless they were under direct attack. That approach created a security void that insurgents would soon fill.
In early October 2004, I paid a visit to Kunduz, where about 280 German soldiers were stationed along with a handful of U.S. government civilians and about a dozen U.S. soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Scheibe, spokesman for PRT Kunduz, made it eminently clear to me that the Germans were not eager to work outside the wire, emphasizing that basic security was the job of local police. “We are part of ISAF,” Scheibe told me. “Security assistance force.”
But that attitude was problematic. A month earlier, in September 2004, the city of Faizabad, in the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan, had been the scene of a riot. Fired by rumors that local women had been sexually assaulted by foreigners, local men had burned down the offices of two foreign aid agencies in the town, where fifty-five members of the PRT Kunduz had recently established a security contingent. Around a dozen German soldiers were working at the airport when the riots began. Hoping to consolidate his forces, the German commander ordered the team members back to base but they couldn’t get away. When the German troops reached the town, they ran straight into the rioters. “They stopped immediately and saw about a thousand people. The street was full,” Scheibe told me. “And they were not friendly-looking … so [the German soldiers] decided to go back another way.”
After beating an initial retreat, the German commander led a team out to do some reconnoitering. By then the riot was over; it all ended when a local Afghan commander threatened to shoot rioters. Several aid workers were beaten, and they had to be spirited away by UN workers and Global Risk, a private security firm. The Germans were supposed to be responsible for the four northeastern provinces of Afghanistan, generally considered the most secure part of the country. Although they took their own protection very seriously, caveats meant that security in the north would start to unravel. In June 2004, eleven Chinese laborers who were working on a road construction project south of Kunduz were gunned down in their tents. Not long after that, the convoy of Afghanistan’s vice president, Nematullah Shahrani, was hit by a roadside bomb. The night after I left Kunduz, two rockets hit the Kunduz PRT; four soldiers were injured, one seriously.
This new model of militarized aid to Afghanistan, then, was a completely hit-or-miss affair. In early 2003 and 2004, the PRTs were still very much a work in progress, and policymakers were still wrestling with basic questions of how to support this experiment. State Department personnel still had few career incentives for working in isolated military outposts; they were not trained to work in an active combat zone; and once in the field, they were all but forgotten by their parent organizations.
And there was another reason why the reconstruction of Afghanistan would have to wait: The machinery of government was still focused on the war in Iraq. As employees of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Kabul had realized in their 2002 briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, senior leaders in Washington had shifted resources and bureaucratic attention to the Iraq campaign, which was starting to unravel in the face of an accelerating civil war.
The military’s focus in Afghanistan, then, moved away from stability operations. Emphasis shifted to “Find, fix, and finish”: killing the remnants of the Taliban instead of focusing on securing the needs of the population. Troops and resources would be needed for Iraq, and rebuilding Afghanistan was a manpower-intensive business. A civilian official recalled realizing how far the pendulum had swung away from development work during a briefing with Major General Jason Kamiya, who was the chief operational commander in Afghanistan as of March 2005. Kamiya and his staff had paid a visit to central Afghanistan after a severe spring flood, and PRT members had prepared a briefing on relief distribution. Kamiya told the team leader: “I don’t give a fuck about this flood! What are you doing to kill the enemy?”
Kamiya remembered it differently. That remark, he said, was “one hundred eighty degrees from my philosophy.” But he acknowledged that there was sometimes friction among the military command, the PRTs, and the development agencies that led to constant misunderstandings. In PRT briefings, people sometimes misinterpreted his questions about how development projects fit into the larger security picture. “This is Ph.D.-level work,” he said. “You’re just trying to mentor both the military side as well as showing your development partner, who is looking skeptically at someone in uniform, it’s not ‘my way or the highway.’ ”
Afghanistan had started to slip away. Even though the reconstruction effort there was relatively modest in scale, many of the tensions between military and humanitarian missions were already apparent. The entire enterprise seemed chronically short of money, manpower, and time. Equally important, the traditional humanitarian aid community was alarmed by what it saw as a dangerous blurring of the lines, with uniformed soldiers taking on a greater share of development work. Soon, those tensions would become even more pronounced in Iraq, where the U.S. military was beginning to spend much more heavily on infrastructure and governance projects than ever before. In a bid to stop Iraq’s deadly spiral, a key new instrument—cash—would become as important as any weapon system in the arsenal.
* In fact, it would take another two years before USAID’s human resources department would add Afghanistan PRT jobs to the “bid list,” so it was next-to-impossible for a tenured USAID Foreign Service officer to get an assignment to a team. Complicating matters, career USAID Foreign Service officers couldn’t legally report to a personal services contractor, and until 2006, the head of the USAID PRT office in Kabul was a personal services contractor.