Sending diplomats and aid experts to Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other war-zone assignments was a good idea, in theory. Civilians had the kind of expertise in governance, state building, and development that few soldiers had. But the State Department and other civilian agencies were even less prepared than the U.S. military for the violent, chaotic situation they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nation building required more manpower than those organizations had on hand, and the larger the mission grew, the more it exposed the shortcomings of the civilian bureaucracy.
It was tough, unglamorous work, and diplomats were being asked to tackle a completely unfamiliar set of problems. Instead of their traditional responsibilities of reporting back to Washington on the high-level goings-on in foreign capitals, they were becoming involved in the complexities of local and provincial administration. They were overseeing water and sewage repair, trash collection, and rural electrification, all while occasionally being shot at.
Diplomatic and government agencies had been involved in administering and rebuilding Iraq since the invasion in 2003, but there was still no comprehensive way to organize and mobilize them. Unlike the military, which had realistic predeployment training and predictable rotation cycles, the civilian bureaucracy had a more haphazard approach to sending employees “downrange.” Military units typically trained together before deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan; by contrast, civilians usually arrived as individual replacements on Provincial Reconstruction Teams or in regional embassy offices. This lack of esprit de corps often created unnecessary friction. It was also a question of training. The State Department offered a rigorous area-studies and language training to diplomats going to traditional embassy assignments, but that kind of specialized preparation was nonexistent for nation-building assignments.
In the summer of 2005, the State Department began planning Provincial Reconstruction Teams for Iraq. The idea was to deploy a Provincial Reconstruction Team in each of Iraq’s eighteen governorates (provinces) as part of a push to extend the central government’s control to Iraq’s regions, something the military desperately wanted. Greg Bates, a retired Marine Corps officer who had worked in Iraq since the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was part of the team recruited by the State Department to help jump-start the effort. Bates had wide civilian and military experience in the Middle East. He had worked in naval intelligence, had served a tour with the CPA as a Foreign Service officer, and had worked as a USAID contractor for a local governance program in Iraq. By his third tour in Iraq, as director of operations for the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, a shortfall in civilian personnel had become glaringly obvious. Multi-National Force Iraq, the U.S.-dominated military command, was “screaming to get civilians back in the provinces,” Bates said.
The aim in Iraq was not to reproduce the Afghanistan experiment. Iraq was much more developed: It had infrastructure, a centralized administration, and a literate population. What it needed most was effective provincial- and national-level government institutions. Planners started work on a new template for civil-military teams in Iraq. Whereas PRT commanders in Afghanistan were almost exclusively military, the Iraq teams would be civilian-led, and they would focus more on governance than on rural development projects. Mentoring Iraqi officials, not building infrastructure, would be the main focus. The catchwords for the program, “capacity building” and “sustainability,” were borrowed from the world of development. The planning team presented their proposal to Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had moved on from Afghanistan to become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in September. The team feared that “reconstruction” in the name might suggest to Iraqis that they would have a giant pot of construction funds at their disposal, but they stuck with PRT, which was by that time familiar to the members of Congress who controlled the purse strings.
Training would be a problem for diplomats and other civilians assigned to this new mission. At that point, diplomats headed to Iraq could expect to go on a three- or five-day security course where they would learn the fundamentals of working in a hostile environment—basic first aid, evasive driving, and weapons handling—but there was no PRT-specific training. No system was in place to ensure proper coordination with the military or to pass on lessons that had been learned in the field. (There would be no formal predeployment training program for PRTs until February 2007, when the Iraq “surge” began.)
Then there was the question of who would provide security. Foreign Service officers, USAID employees, and other civilians assigned to PRTs would require protection while out in the field. The first three teams would be working out of regional embassy offices, so they could rely on private security details provided by Triple Canopy, DynCorp, or Blackwater, the three U.S. security firms that had security contracts with the State Department. But in other provinces, the PRTs would have to be located on forward operating bases, where security and transportation would have to be provided by the military. That would require intricate negotiations between the different bureaucratic tribes in Iraq: the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Multi-National Force Iraq headquarters.
The national coordination center for Iraq PRTs was established at the beginning of October 2005. Around the same time, the U.S. Embassy Baghdad released Baghdad Cable 4045, a coordinated memorandum between the embassy and Multi-National Force Iraq to the State Department headquarters that outlined the PRT program, what it was supposed to accomplish, and how diplomats and the military were directed to do it. By late November, two teams were up and running. The first was in Mosul, the city where Petraeus had made his mark as a military administrator, and the second in Hillah, where Marine Lance Corporal John Guardiano had learned hard lessons about municipal politics in Iraq. A third team was established in Kirkuk by mid-December. But the PRTs were slow to build momentum. Under the original timetable, around fifteen PRTs were supposed to be established by mid-2006. By June 2006 there were only five. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—not a huge fan of the concept, according to those involved in the project—demanded a sixty-day “proof of concept” before allowing the program to move forward.
Rumsfeld’s skepticism came in part from the apparent lack of commitment from civilian agencies to the Iraq mission. Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld associate, told me that Rumsfeld’s objections to the PRTs “were not with the concept itself,” but with the lack of nonmilitary personnel committed to the task:
The goal of the PRTs was exactly what senior military commanders had been asking, even pleading for, since 2003: more interagency support and competence in reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan which were nonsecurity and non-DoD related. The problem with the PRT concept was the commitment (or lack thereof) to staff them with non DoD personnel—State, Agriculture, etc.… Rumsfeld and other senior DoD officials recognized that absent commitments beyond comforting words of assurance, DoD would be carrying the burden for PRTs. And sure enough, that’s what happened, especially in Iraq, when many PRTs had dozens of uniformed personnel and no more than a few civilians.
By February 2006, plans were finally in the works to roll out the rest of the teams, including an Italian-led team and a British-led team. But many issues were still unresolved. In June of 2006, James Jeffrey, a senior advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, conceded that there was friction between the military and the diplomatic corps over coordinating aid and reconstruction efforts at the regional level. Each PRT had up to one hundred personnel, so establishing more contingents would involve major security demands and put additional strain on military resources.
“The military would like to see thousands of civilians throughout the country and that would require tens of thousands of folks securing them,” Jeffrey told reporters at a breakfast in Washington. “That’s a very big issue. It would be either billions of dollars and huge numbers of PSDs [personal security details] running around the country, and that’s already a political and security problem, or it would require a lot of troops.”
Planners faced another problem: Civilian agencies had a hard time finding people willing to serve in Iraq. Once again, the military would plug the gap, providing much of the manpower.
Iraq’s deadly downward spiral continued through 2006. That spring, Congress appointed the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel of ten Beltway worthies charged with assessing the situation in Iraq. The panel, chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, reached a depressingly obvious conclusion: U.S. troops were overstretched and Iraq was engulfed in civil war. With one hundred Americans dying every month and the war reaching a “burn rate” of $2 billion a week, there seemed to be no clear exit. That November, the American public, wearying of violent headlines from Iraq, handed a defeat to the Republican Party in the midterm elections, and the Democratic Party gained control of both the House and Senate. After the crushing electoral loss, President George W. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Robert Gates, a national security veteran who had served as director of Central Intelligence under Bush’s father, was announced as Rumsfeld’s replacement.
Rumsfeld’s dismissal was the first real acknowledgment by the administration of the severity of the Iraq situation. Early in the war, officials had been relentlessly upbeat, even as postinvasion casualties climbed. Even the word “insurgent” was verboten. In Rumsfeld’s lexicon, the insurgents were “dead-enders,” isolated Ba’athist regime holdouts, and assorted criminals. “The reason I don’t use the phrase ‘guerrilla war’ is because there isn’t one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world,” he had said in late June 2003. Iraq had “looters, criminals, remnants of the Ba’athist regime, foreign terrorists who came in to assist and try to harm the coalition forces, and those influenced by Iran,” but “that … doesn’t make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance.”1 He was still saying this two and a half years later.
Even after General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, broke with the party line the following month to describe the situation in Iraq as a “classical guerrilla-type campaign,” the secretary of defense clung to his “freedom is untidy” interpretation of events in Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice even floated an absurd comparison between postwar Germany and present-day Iraq, suggesting early on that the attacks in Iraq were reminiscent of the few isolated cases of postwar violence by Nazi saboteurs. That mendacious retelling of history was quietly dropped as casualties mounted.
The United States needed a radically different approach. The Iraq Study Group recommended a traditional “diplomatic offensive” that would force Iraq’s neighbors to broker reconciliation within Iraq. U.S. forces should scale back to a supporting role; combat forces should begin a withdrawal from Iraq. The report concluded that it was time for a “responsible transition,” but President Bush opted for a different course. On January 10, 2007, he announced a “new way forward” for Iraq, a “surge” of five additional brigade combat teams to Iraq—a total of more than twenty thousand additional troops, with the main effort focused on securing the Iraqi capital. It was a break with a strategy of gradual disengagement. General George Casey, who had assumed the top command in Iraq in June 2004, had concentrated his efforts on handing off provinces to Iraqi control and confining U.S. troops to megabases away from population centers. That would all change. As part of the surge, U.S. forces would move to small combat outposts in residential neighborhoods, where they would work to expand security, block by block. To seal the deal, Bush selected a new top commander, General David Petraeus, the godfather of the counterinsurgency movement. Ryan Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer and fluent Arabic speaker, was named as Petraeus’s civilian counterpart; he replaced Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
The surge plan was influenced in part by “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” a paper authored by Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and retired General Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff. The paper had been put forward by AEI in part as a response to the Iraq Study Group’s report. It was rolled out at a December 2006 event at AEI’s headquarters and then at a January event attended by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. The AEI report foreshadowed some aspects of the plan that Bush adopted, and the new Iraq strategy was also shaped by the newly adopted counterinsurgency manual. The new doctrine was not presented as Iraq-specific—it was supposed to be a generic guide for U.S. forces supporting a “host nation” government involved in battling an insurgency—but it was very much written with Iraq in mind. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who was heavily involved in crafting the document, called it “a manual on how to win in Iraq.”
The counterinsurgency manual was meant in part to force a rethink of the military’s fixation on “force protection,” the fortress mentality that kept U.S. troops hunkered behind the walls of large, fortified bases. It featured a series of thought-provoking “paradoxes” that would encourage commanders to think more carefully about the application of lethal force and about preventing civilian harm:
Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be
Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is
Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction
Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot
These sounded like politically correct talking points, or a clever way of selling counterinsurgency to the public, but they had a very real aim: collecting intelligence. If U.S. forces relied on blunt tools such as airstrikes or artillery, killed civilians at checkpoints, and generally kept everyone back one hundred meters from their convoys, as signs on their vehicles warned, they would never collect any meaningful information about the insurgency. A key appendix on using social network analysis and other intelligence tools drove the point home: In many respects the campaign would resemble policing a beat, as the military patrolled an area and mapped out and identified the insurgent networks and how they operated.
The field manual devoted an entire chapter to “unity of effort,” the bureaucratic term for tightly integrating development work, diplomacy, and military operations. The Departments of State, Justice, and Treasury would all have to send representatives to work and live with the military and provide advice on governance, law enforcement, and finance. USAID would also have to subordinate its development programs to counterinsurgency strategy. The focal point of the development agency’s efforts in Iraq was the Community Stabilization Program, a massive jobs and public-works program for Iraq. The program was supposed to keep young (fighting-age) Iraqi men away from the insurgency by putting them to work or enrolling them in vocational programs. The tab for the Community Stabilization Program was a whopping $644 million, more than the agency allocated to the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund and the Development Assistance account for all of Asia and the Near East in fiscal year 2005. The contract was controversial. Many established nongovernmental organizations were skeptical that such an ambitious program could be managed effectively (Mercy Corps, a major U.S. nonprofit, declined to bid on the project for that reason). There was also concern that the program was too overtly tied to counterinsurgency aims, rather than development goals, and was a textbook example of how military operations and development work had become intermingled. International Relief and Development, a large, well-established USAID implementing partner, won the contract.
The surge also required a parallel diplomatic effort, a doubling of the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and civilians serving outside the Green Zone. Those new teams, called “embedded” or e-PRTs because they would be attached directly to brigade combat teams or regimental combat teams, were to be a key piece of the new Iraq strategy. They were supposed to streamline military operations and civilian reconstruction efforts, which in the past had often been badly coordinated. They were civilian-led by design (in Afghanistan, PRTs were led by military officers).
Unfortunately this civilian surge got off to a rough start, and the State Department was slow to fill billets on the new Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Further complicating matters, the Pentagon and the State Department could not agree on lines of responsibility, staffing plans, and objectives for PRTs. According to a House Armed Services Committee report, the State Department did not plan on “backfilling” these positions until the end of September 2008, when the military surge would already be winding down.2
On October 25, 2007, Harry Thomas, director-general of the Foreign Service, sent out an announcement to staffers informing them that the State Department had decided to begin “directed assignments” to fill an anticipated shortfall of 48 diplomats in Iraq. Around 250 Foreign Service officers received an e-mail informing them that they had been selected as qualified for the posts. If enough of them did not step forward, some of them would be ordered to Iraq. In theory, Foreign Service officers were supposed to be available for worldwide deployment. Refuse an assignment, and you had to resign your commission. But this was the first time since the Vietnam War that the State Department had contemplated ordering diplomats to serve in war zones.3
The following week, State Department management held a “town hall” forum at its Foggy Bottom headquarters whose purpose was to explain the decision to order Foreign Service officers to Iraq to make up for the lack of volunteers. The meeting turned into a bitter confrontation between diplomats and their senior management. One diplomat, Jack Croddy, seemed barely able to contain his rage as he took his turn at the microphone. Standing before the hundreds of diplomats assembled in the State Department’s main auditorium, the gray-haired senior Foreign Service officer’s face flushed and his voice quavered: “Incoming is coming in every day, rockets are hitting the Green Zone. So if you forced-assign people, that is really shifting the terms of what we are all about. It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it.”4
A wave of sustained applause swept through the auditorium. News accounts of the acrimonious town hall forum further bolstered a perception within the military that Foreign Service officers were elitists who refused to perform their duty while those in uniform made all the sacrifices. Many diplomats had served in harm’s way since September 11, 2001, and the State Department did eventually find volunteers to fill the positions. Still, the damage to the reputation of the Foreign Service was lasting. In an open letter to colleagues posted on the State Department’s Web site, John Matel, a career Foreign Service officer serving as the head of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq’s Anbar Province, fretted that the Marines he served alongside would think of the government civilians as “wimps and weenies” because of the furor. “I personally dislike the whole idea of forced assignments, but we do have to do our jobs,” he wrote.
We signed up to be worldwide available. All of us volunteered for this kind of work and we have enjoyed a pretty sweet lifestyle most of our careers. I will not repeat what the Marines say when I bring up this subject. I tell them that most FSOs are not wimps and weenies. I will not share this article [about the town hall meeting] with them and I hope they do not see it. How could I explain this wailing and gnashing of teeth? I just tried to explain it to one of my PRT members, a reserve [lieutenant colonel] called up to serve in Iraq. She asked me if all FSOs would get the R&R, extra pay etc. and if it was our job to do things like this. When I answered in the affirmative, she just rolled her eyes.5
Ted Andrews, a veteran Foreign Service officer, was on vacation in Florence with his wife in October 2007 when he picked up a copy of the International Herald-Tribune and spotted an article about the contentious town hall meeting at the State Department. He turned to his wife and drily remarked, “I wonder where I’m going.”
Andrews didn’t consider himself much of an adrenaline junkie. He was enjoying a peaceful diplomatic assignment in Brussels with his family, and he had no plans to volunteer to go into a war zone. Reading about the town hall tirade by Foreign Service officers, however, helped change his mind. A few weeks later, he signed up for a State Department billet on an embedded PRT in Iraq. “I don’t want to sound like a great patriot,” he told me the following December, as he neared the end of his tour in Baghdad, “but I didn’t like the press. It made the State Department look pretty ridiculous—the people who were so vocally and openly complaining. And also the head of our personnel department is someone I really admire, and he was going out there and beating the drum for this. He’s not a fool, so I said, ‘All right, we’ll go, because we’ve got one boy next year going to college.’ ” Pausing briefly, Andrews added, “I don’t want to sound flippant. I thought it would be—it wouldn’t be appropriate to say fun—I thought it would be really interesting sort of work.” (Andrews’s understatement was deliberate. Several of his colleagues, including a member of the PRT, were killed in the bombing of the Sadr City District Advisory Council in June of that year.)
Andrews was not a stranger to conflict; he had previously worked in Somalia, and he was posted to Kenya at the time of the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi. But until the “town hall” fiasco, he hadn’t been particularly eager to volunteer to go to Iraq. The Foreign Service did offer sweeteners for serving on a PRT: They allowed families to stay at whatever post the diplomat was already assigned to, sparing them a disruptive move back to the United States. That meant children could stay in school, and they wouldn’t have to move for just one year or thirteen months. The State Department also offered generous leave packages. During their year-long deployment, diplomats serving on PRTs could take three long R&R breaks or two long R&Rs and three shorter breaks. It added up to a total of about two months of leave. By contrast, a typical Army tour in Iraq during the surge was fifteen months.
But Andrews’s training for Iraq was abbreviated at best. The position he put in for was scheduled to begin in April; then the start date was moved up to March. Prior to deployment, he went through a five-day security course refresher, a version of the “crash and bang” course taught in West Virginia to teach basic survival skills for assignments to dangerous places. The first three days included intensive first aid; the training also featured a familiarization course on improvised explosive devices, the main threat in Iraq. The trainers showed gruesome videos of roadside bombs going off to remind trainees of how serious the dangers were. It was like a wartime version of the classroom scare movies they show in driver’s education: If diplomats were riding along in a military vehicle, it was as much their job as it was a soldier’s to stay alert and look out for a possible attack.
The diplomats also received a brief overview of weapons handling. It wasn’t particularly intensive training. They took turns firing pistols, and learned the difference between the 9mm weapons carried by diplomatic security and the ones used by the military. Trainers also familiarized them with the ubiquitous AK-47, so they could recognize its distinctive sound, and the M4 carbine, the Army’s standard carbine. Then they drove through a course where they saw simulated ambushes and roadside bomb attacks. The whole thing was sobering, but brief. Many people finished the course at noon on a Friday and flew out of Dulles International Airport to the Middle East at nine that night.
Diplomats assigned to PRTs were also supposed to get specific training in the United States on how the teams operated. Andrews never got around to that, because of the rush to get diplomats to the field during the surge. Likewise, he never had the chance to attend a mandatory orientation for e-PRT team members that was supposed to be held in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces inside Baghdad’s International Zone (also called the Green Zone). Andrews was originally scheduled to arrive on Easter Sunday, 2008, the day that insurgents unleashed a barrage of rocket and mortar fire on the IZ. The indirect-fire attacks continued for several more weeks. Andrews was sent instead to Camp Taji, a large base north of Baghdad, where he began his assignment with the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, which was responsible for the volatile Baghdad neighborhoods of Sadr City and Adhamiya.
“I’ve never taken the orientation class,” Andrews said with a laugh. “They have an orientation for us, three days in the IZ at the palace, at the head office for the PRTs. I never took it, because there were all the rockets, and they said, don’t come here.” He continued with a chuckle. “I came straight to … Taji, and started working around. I learned everything on the job!”
Part of the job was to provide a civilian face for the brigade’s “engagements” with local politicians and local business leaders in discussions about Civil Affairs projects. They were also there to provide some guidance and advice to local district councils. Living on a base, wearing body armor, and riding in military convoys was physically taxing: The middle-aged diplomat shed around twenty pounds during his deployment. And he had learned that progress in Iraq would be slow. “They’re not going to have a ‘victory-over-terrorism day,’ ” he said. “Just one day you’re going to realize, we’ve gone six months without a big incident. And that’s what normalcy will be.”
The military took the lead in almost everything related to reconstruction. The e-PRT didn’t have transport of its own, so Andrews and his colleagues had to hitch rides around the brigade’s area of operations on military convoys. In briefings for the press or meetings with local dignitaries, the brigade commander was clearly in charge, although Andrews or another civilian was often at his elbow to provide some quiet advice. Andrews’s case was somewhat extreme, but it reflected the general lack of training and preparation the State Department gave to diplomats, more than five years into the Iraq War. A picture Andrews kept on the wall of his office slyly underscored the absurdity of the situation. It showed a wrecked vehicle in the tank graveyard at Taji. On the rusting hulk someone had spray-painted DAD— STUCK IN IRAQ—SEND MONEY.
When Petraeus took command in Iraq, he selected a team of experts, called the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, that was tasked with creating a unified civil-military plan for the country. It was to combine all the elements of nation building: economic development, intelligence gathering, and security measures. Petraeus also invited David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert, to serve as his personal counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq. Kilcullen arrived in early 2007, and over the next year he traveled throughout the theater, serving as a sort of roving emissary for Petraeus. His role was to be an evangelizer for counterinsurgency “best practices,” hammering home the basic principles of protecting the population, promoting development, and breaking the cycle of violence. It was an unusual choice to bring in a foreigner to tell the U.S. military how to do its job. In some respects, Kilcullen was reprising the role of Sir Robert Thompson, the Malaya counterinsurgency expert who had provided expert advice (and prescient warnings) to the U.S. military during the Vietnam war: a smart, articulate outsider who could tell the military what they did not want to hear.
In the small clique of counterinsurgency theorists, Kilcullen was a star. A reserve lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, he had been seconded to State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism as an expert on guerrilla warfare.6 His exotic résumé read like a document from another era. He had made use of the Australian Army’s generous leave to conduct field work in West Java for a doctoral dissertation on Indonesian insurgent groups. As a soldier he had taught tactics at the British School of Infantry; served on peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and Bougainville; and worked as a military advisor to the Indonesian Special Forces.7 He had also worked in several countries of the Middle East. Perhaps most famously, he negotiated a ceasefire after a border clash between Australian troops and the Indonesian army, police, and militia in October 1999, during the UN-mandated intervention in East Timor.8 The incident occurred in the town of Motaain, close to the border with Indonesian West Timor. The Indonesian army was using an old Dutch map that showed Motaain west of the border; the UN’s map, printed in Indonesia, showed Motaain in the east.9 Television footage shot at the time showed Kilcullen crossing Motaain Bridge in the open, with his hands up, to meet with his Indonesian counterparts, compare maps, and broker a ceasefire.10
Kilcullen had also participated in the drafting of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. But his participation at the Fort Leavenworth counterinsurgency seminar in February 2006 was interrupted by an urgent phone call. There had been a bombing at the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. Kilcullen needed to get to Iraq as quickly as possible. What Kilcullen found on this trip to Iraq was dispiriting: The U.S. military had been slow to respond to the accelerating internal war. On a visit to the deputy of Muwaffak al Rubai’e, Iraq’s national security advisor, Kilcullen noted the disconnect as U.S. military briefers delivered an eye-glazing, acronym-laden PowerPoint presentation filled with “metrics” detailing the latest trends in Iraq. The American briefers were focusing mostly on their recent raids against insurgent groups and ignoring the impact that the burgeoning civil war was having on the population. “[I]t took approximately four and a half months, from the Samarra bombing until mid-July 2006, for these slides to begin reflecting what the Iraqi political staff (who worked less than 50 yards from the briefing room but were not allowed into it) had told me the very week of the bombing: that Samarra was a disaster that fundamentally and irrevocably altered the nature of the war,” Kilcullen wrote.11
Iraq’s violent civil war continued for the rest of the year. In parallel, Kilcullen and his allies within the national security bureaucracy started working on a way to salvage the situation and get the rest of the government more fully involved in the mission. By late 2006, counterinsurgency was all the rage within military circles, even as commanders on the ground were still trying to get a grip on its practice. The same could not be said for the civilian side of government—even if, as theory held, civilian-led nation building was the most important part of a counterinsurgency campaign.
Shortly after the September 2006 U.S. government counterinsurgency conference in Washington, Kilcullen and a few others within the State Department started working on a new interagency counterinsurgency guide, a handbook for civilian policymakers that was supposed to drive home the importance of nation building. A less-than-subtle agenda was at work: If the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual was supposed to push the uniformed military to embrace “soft power,” the new guide was supposed to get diplomats, aid officials, and other civilians to get in touch with their hard-power military side.
But the new document needed to be more than just a Cliff’s Notes version of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine. The new guide was a manual on how to win Iraq, but it wasn’t necessarily going to help in Afghanistan or in any other future contingency. It focused heavily on twentieth-century Maoist-style insurgencies, rather than on the sophisticated, globally connected insurgencies the U.S. government was expected to face in the future. Kilcullen wanted a document that took a more contemporary view of the problem. More important, he wanted to force policymakers to think about a larger issue: when—and when not—to intervene. Kilcullen made little effort to conceal the fact that he viewed the decision to invade Iraq as a grave strategic mistake, and he wanted to make clear that aiding a government involved in counterinsurgency did not have to require deploying a large, conventional U.S. military force. The counterinsurgents once again reached for historical precedent. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, one of the models for the eponymous character in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, was sent as an expert advisor to the Philippine leader Ramon Magsaysay during the Communist-dominated Hukbalahap rebellion. The United States supported El Salvador’s counterinsurgency with a limited number of military advisors in the 1980s. This new document studied the problems of intervention, and showed when and how to intervene.
The first draft of the document ran to around two hundred pages. That was too long for the kinds of busy senior policymakers—cabinet members, National Security Council staffers, presidential envoys—that Kilcullen and the counterinsurgents wanted to reach. It needed to be fifty pages, tops, with a crisp executive summary. Kilcullen decided to refocus the document. Just two weeks after the near revolt at the State Department over news of the directed assignments, Kilcullen hosted a workshop in a rented conference room at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. Representatives of over half a dozen government agencies and from think tanks, academia, the media, and several foreign embassies participated. Kilcullen, who only recently had returned from Iraq, tried to relay the gravity of the situation to the attendees. “This doctrine that we’re looking at here actually saves lives,” he said.
During his recent tour in Iraq, Kilcullen had traversed the violent landscape, visiting e-PRTs, brigade commanders, and Iraqi officials in a frenetic effort to reinforce the basic principles of counterinsurgency: unity of effort, civilian and military cooperation. “To fix that, we had to sit out in the field with these e-PRTs, work out their problems, and identify what’s going on,” he said.
And it’s easy to say that, but doing that involves transiting areas. We lost aircraft trying to get out to e-PRTs … We had a Humvee crew drown in their vehicle when they were hit by an IED getting out to the e-PRT to talk about their command and control structure. Moving through ambush after ambush to deal with little problems that could have been solved in a handbook written a thousand miles away that just didn’t come in time. So we had to be out there doing it—and eventually losing people to snipers and to IEDs and so on to make this thing work.
The effort carried a price, he grimly concluded. “I reckon conservatively we lost about a dozen people because we didn’t have a doctrine,” he said.
As Kilcullen concluded, the manual was supposed to spell out the roles of civilian and military agencies that would be involved in these sorts of interventions for the foreseeable future: “It’s so that you don’t hunker down in some building with people shooting at you and some full colonel saying, ‘What are you supposed to be doing here?’ and we certainly don’t need to lose people trying to get out and explain stuff that people should already know.”
This new document was just one part of the solution. The civilian agencies of government needed to be more “expeditionary”—more military, better able to deploy on short notice, practiced in cooperating with the military, ready to work in war zones. The U.S. military has a deep bench: In addition to an active-duty force, it has an extensive reserve system that it can call on in a crisis. During the Cold War, the National Guard and the reserves were standing by for “the big one” if war broke out with the Soviet Union. In the post-9/11 era, the military drew heavily on reserves, especially Army National Guard units, to support rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The system worked, despite the strain of repeated deployments. But the diplomatic corps and the civilian agencies of government had no civilian equivalent. Absent a large reserve, nation-building missions would continue to depend heavily on civilian contractors who could deploy to a crisis zone on short notice.
With the creation of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in August 2004 the State Department took the first tentative steps toward building a more “expeditionary” diplomatic corps. The new office, known as S/CRS (S stands for State Department’s Office of the Secretary), was supposed to be the home for a new kind of diplomat, “muddy-boots” Foreign Service officers and civil servants who would work outside the walls of the traditional embassy and focus on working in conflict and postconflict environments. It was a direct response to the failures in Iraq, where the diplomatic corps had been slow to mobilize for the reconstruction. In theory, members of the new office would be the diplomatic equivalent of Special Forces teams, ready to parachute into remote, often hostile, places with minimal support to prevent a localized conflict from becoming a regional crisis.
The creation of the new office was exciting news for adventurous young diplomats like John Mongan; Mongan learned about S/CRS as he was preparing to deploy to a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. Mongan needed a new assignment after his one-year tour, so he approached the new office, submitted a résumé, and made a point of keeping in touch with them while he was in the field. It sounded like a perfect fit. Mongan wanted a job that would allow him to keep working in trouble spots, instead of rotating back to a routine management job in Foggy Bottom. He turned down other State Department jobs, having gotten a promise from the new head of S/CRS that he would have a place within the new organization. But when Mongan began his job, at S/CRS in August 2005, he learned that he would not be returning to the field anytime soon. His first task at S/CRS was to write up a recruiting paper so they could begin filling the first fifteen one-year positions for something called the Active Response Corps, or ARC, which would form the core of the new civilian reserve. In other words, S/CRS had not even begun staffing its first diplomatic crisis-response team.
In its first year of existence, S/CRS invested in building a Washington office but put little money into training, which was essential if the State Department wanted to have bureaucrats standing by for deployment. To work in these war zones, they would need hostile environment training and language skills; they would have to be adept at negotiating with local warlords, nongovernmental organizations, and military officers; and they would need to take part in training exercises. Part of the problem was managerial. Secretary of State Colin Powell founded S/CRS shortly before he left the administration, so the initiative foundered without high-level backing. And in January 2006, his successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, launched “transformational diplomacy,” a broader effort to put the State Department on a war footing by shifting more assignments within the Foreign Service from coveted embassy slots in Europe to posts in the developing world. In parallel, Rice restructured USAID, folding its planning staff into the State Department and elevating the USAID administrator to a rank equivalent to that of deputy secretary of state. Although the move stopped short of merging USAID completely with State, it further marginalized an organization that should have played a key role in fixing failed states.
The first test of the Active Response Corps was in Sudan’s Darfur region. In May 2006, the Darfur Peace Agreement, signed in Abuja, Nigeria, brought a fragile accord between the Khartoum government and one of Darfur’s rebel factions. S/CRS sent Eythan Sontag, one of the eleven officers of the Active Response Corps, and Keith Mines to help implement the peace agreement by persuading other rebel groups to join the peace process. Mines was now stationed in Ottawa as a political officer and had volunteered for duty as a standby officer. The ARC team had to scout a location for a modest, fortified headquarters on the outskirts of El Fasher; hire a small local staff of drivers, custodians, and interpreters; and set up a remote office using a Very Small Aperture Terminal, a satellite Internet connection.12 Both Sontag and Mines were former Army officers, and they gravitated to work in crisis zones. The government needed more than just a self-selected group of civil servants and diplomats standing by to be international first responders, but at that point the Active Response Corps had a full-time staff of only a dozen people.
ARC’s deployment to Darfur, then, was a trial run of something much more ambitious. Just a few weeks after announcing the Iraq surge, in his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush proposed a dramatic initiative, the creation of a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps: “Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.”
In theory, the CRC would be a sort of supersized Peace Corps, stacked with experts in nation building. It would be a complex, three-tiered organization, built in stages. The first stage would comprise active and standby components drawn from government ranks. The active component, around 250 strong, would be trained to deploy within forty-eight hours. The standby corps, about 2,000 individuals drawn from around eight federal agencies, would be available to respond within thirty days of a crisis. The second stage, creating the reserve component, would be a much more ambitious, long-term project. It would be drawn from a roster of citizens in all walks of life who were willing to serve as temporary U.S. government employees in support of overseas reconstruction and stabilization operations: civil engineers, agricultural experts, city managers, public health officials, police officers, corrections officials. They would provide the boots on the ground and the expertise that the government simply did not have.
Officials within S/CRS acknowledged that this stage would be easier said than done. How would reservists be paid? What would happen if they were injured or killed on the job? Would they be considered full government employees, or would they be glorified temps? None of the details were clear, and there were thorny legal issues that would have to be resolved. When military reservists are called up, their employers are required by law to release them and rehire them when their service is complete. If a volunteer for the Civilian Response Corps were not offered similar legal protection, they would have little incentive to leave their jobs and deploy to a war zone or a postconflict environment.
The biggest problem, however, was the budget. If the goal was to have a real “whole of government” nation-building team—a true twenty-first-century Colonial Office—it would need full funding from Congress. Without money to cover the cost of salaries, buy war-zone survival equipment, and develop a training program, the whole thing would be an exercise in paper shuffling.
In its brief existence S/CRS managed to lure some motivated and talented people. Beverli DeWalt, a member of the Civilian Response Corps, Active component, joined the Foreign Service in November 2003 and served her first tour in Islamabad as a consular officer. She spoke Urdu, a key language, and had served at the U.S. mission to NATO in Brussels as a political officer specializing in Iraq and civil-military issues. In 2008, she worked at the U.S. embassy in Pristina to help pave the way for Kosovo’s declaration of independence. That same year, she served for about six months as a political, governance, and women’s issues advisor at the Kapisa and Parwan Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan. In short, she was the kind of person who was a natural fit with the new kind of diplomacy.
But this new breed of diplomatic first responder was not a natural fit with the culture of the State Department, in which everything revolved around the embassy hierarchy. They were still bureaucratic orphans. And the deployment cycle for active-duty members of the Civilian Response Corps was a strain; they often spent six months in the field, then six months back at home. Back-to-back rotations were difficult for the military, but at least the troops could rely on an extensive support network for their families back at home. It was an imperfect system, but the expectation of spending time in the field was built into the system, part of the normal cycle of deployment. The Civilian Response Corps did not have that infrastructure. Unlike regular diplomatic assignments, their postings to the field were “unaccompanied,” meaning that their spouses, if they had them, could not go with them. It made for a less than ideal social life, and was a major disincentive for joining the State Department’s nation-building force.
I asked DeWalt if she had a family. “Mom and Dad,” she said quietly. “A sister.” Was anyone else in the small group at S/CRS married? Did they have children?
“Let me go through this,” she said. “The director does, but he doesn’t really deploy much.” Ticking off the rest of the group on her fingers, she continued, “Single, single, single—sensing a theme here?—married with one kid. The majority are single.”
S/CRS’s corps of diplomatic first responders was the exception: Most diplomats were still being posted to dangerous places without much thought or preparation. James Hunter was the first Foreign Service officer stationed to the Asadabad PRT, a remote firebase in a high-walled mountain valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, not far from the Pakistan border. Hunter was the lone PRT civilian at the outpost, where a contingent of sixty-seven American troops, a mix of regular Army and Special Forces, and later Marines, defended the base. Fortunately, the military scrapped plans to withdraw some of the soldiers guarding the base. Otherwise, maintaining Americans in each guard position—a necessity, since the base was ten miles from the border with Pakistan—would have taken up all the time of everyone on the base, Hunter included. The small fort was under attack on average at least once a week. One night they could even observe the Taliban fighters coming down on the opposite side of the valley, setting up mortars to fire at the base. Hunter grew accustomed to the distinctive sound of incoming 107mm rockets whistling across the valley. A few even flew right over his position. It sounded just like in the movies.
Out in Asadabad, Hunter felt as if he was at the very end of the line. As far as the embassy in Kabul was concerned, “We fell off the face of the earth.” He had to send in reporting cables, minus the sensitive information, by Hotmail account: The embassy had not yet arranged for secure communication with Kabul. Still, Hunter threw himself into his work, compiling detailed biographical files on the major tribal players and local officials in Kunar and Nuristan provinces. By the time he left his “bio files” extended to about 350 pages; the document provided the U.S. mission with key insights into the “human terrain” of this part of Afghanistan.
Still, it was a job that required skills that were not remotely part of Foreign Service training. The PRT worked with people from the Korengal Valley, a densely forested river valley in Kunar Province that was home to a proud, insular tribal community that offered a haven for insurgents. A convoy traveling through the valley in the spring of 2005 hit an ambush. The column of vehicles was stuck on the road while gunfire cracked overhead. At one point, Hunter borrowed an M4 carbine from the driver, climbed out of the truck, and began returning fire—firing aimed shots, just as he had been trained to do in the military. “I didn’t spray and pray,” he recalled.
During the hour-long fight, Hunter also helped hand up ammo to the turret gunner in the Humvee who was sweeping insurgent positions with his machine gun. His actions sent a message to the soldiers that the lone civilian could also handle himself in a firefight, although he knew that many of his colleagues back at the embassy in Kabul would prefer that he never pick up a weapon. Hunter was not one to overdramatize: Later he self-deprecatingly said, “It sounds a lot more dramatic than it felt like at the time. And my role was a minor one.”
The incident drove home how the diplomatic service was quietly becoming more militarized. It also underscored a lingering gap. The State Department and other civilian agencies were struggling to find enough personnel to support the nation-building effort, and the military was stretched thin. That gap would be filled by another force: an army of contract hires.