The Super Stallion shuddered to a halt, and the flight engineer signaled for me to follow. I stepped from the rear ramp, and hot exhaust from the giant CH-53 helicopter washed over me as I walked across the landing zone. I surrendered my helmet and float coat to the crewman, shouldered my rucksack, and followed my fellow passenger, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, to the rear gate of the U.S. embassy, Port-au-Prince.
We picked our way across the landing zone. A few paratroopers of the Eighty-second Airborne Division in soft patrol caps and wraparound shades were guarding the dusty, trash-strewn field. One of the soldiers, sucking impassively on his CamelBak canteen, waved us through to the embassy motor pool. The CH-53 then lifted off, the turbine engines briefly drowning out the jackhammer of the diesel generators inside the compound.
A Winnebago-sized truck with the logo of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was parked behind the high gates, its satellite antenna pointed skyward. Near another outbuilding, military cots were arranged in neat rows, complete with sleeping bags and mosquito netting. Crates of electronic equipment and medical gear were stacked on the gravel. On the inner lawn of the embassy, near a lap pool, was a small encampment where someone had pitched several pup tents, plus a few family-sized shelters. It looked as though someone had raided an outdoors store and dumped the contents on the embassy grounds.
The compound was swarming with uniforms. Some were familiar: Marines in dusty digital-pattern camouflage, Navy personnel in crisp blue utility suits, Army soldiers in combat fatigues. Some were a bit more exotic: Foreign Service officers in Patagonia hiking boots, contractors in 5.11 tactical gear, members of the National Disaster Management Agency in matching blue shirts, khaki cargo pants, and floppy-brimmed hats. Everyone seemed to be moving with brisk purpose.
Just a few weeks earlier, on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake had struck Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The disaster killed over 200,000 Haitians and left the country without a functioning government. Official buildings were demolished, the local police force was paralyzed, and Haiti’s splendid presidential palace, completed during the U.S. military occupation in the early twentieth century, was left in ruins. The quake also had decapitated MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. Hedi Annabi, the Tunisian diplomat who served as special representative of the Secretary-General and as head of the UN mission, was killed, along with his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa of Brazil. Dozens of international peacekeepers, police advisors, and civilian UN staffers died in the collapse of their headquarters.
The seismic shock had knocked out the control tower at Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport and collapsed the north pier of the main port, cutting Port-au-Prince off from the outside world. Within hours of the disaster, however, the airport was up and running: A team from the U.S. Air Force’s Twenty-third Special Tactics Squadron, 720th Special Tactics Group, had flown in to take over air traffic control so that search-and-rescue teams and medical aid could arrive. Within five days of the disaster, the Air Force had directed over six hundred takeoffs and landings on an airstrip that usually saw fewer than half a dozen flights a day.1 The place was now crowded with canvas tents that served as an improvised headquarters for flight operations. Reinforcements arrived quickly. Days after the quake, soldiers of the Eighty-second Airborne Division’s First Squadron, Seventy-third Cavalry Regiment began deploying to Haiti. They set up camp at an abandoned country club near the U.S. embassy.
In the weeks following the disaster, the U.S. force in Haiti and off the coast kept growing. Less than a week after the quake, fourteen hundred U.S. troops were on the ground, with another five thousand offshore. By the end of January, just over two weeks after the disaster, the Haiti earthquake relief mission involved twenty thousand U.S. military personnel, twenty-four ships, and more than 120 aircraft. It was an impressive military surge, but the U.S. mission involved an alphabet soup of civilian agencies as well. The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, sent a Disaster Assistance Response Team for an initial assessment, mobilized search-and-rescue teams from around the country, and held emergency planning meetings with private relief groups and aid contractors. USAID, an autonomous federal agency indirectly overseen by the secretary of state, was designated as the lead agency for organizing the U.S. earthquake relief effort. A crisis-response team from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization was on the scene as well.
The U.S. embassy had become the nerve center for a giant, quasi-military expedition, far removed from the world of traditional diplomacy. Everything here was “expeditionary,” from the Meals-Ready-to-Eat rations and lukewarm bottled water to the bottled bug spray and droning generators. The embassy looked as though it was preparing for a siege: On the street outside, Marines in camouflage uniforms and boonie hats guarded the main entrance with M16 rifles, 12-gauge shotguns, and M249 light machine guns. A perimeter made of wooden traffic barriers and tape marked off an outer perimeter, while Haitians patiently queued up under the relentless midday sun for emergency visas. The scene represented a curious merger between military force and humanitarian aid, a blurring of the traditional lines of development work, diplomacy, and national defense. This was the new face of American foreign policy: armed humanitarianism.
The 2010 Haiti relief mission was a response to a natural disaster, but the massive military operation—and many of its distinct features—grew directly out of the experience gained in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That spring, as the military began a phased withdrawal from Haiti, Army Major General Simeon Trombitas, the commander of Joint Task Force–Haiti, told me that the humanitarian operation, which placed unprecedented emphasis on openness and information sharing with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civilian relief agencies, had been shaped by the lessons of combat. “Due to all of our services’ experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, and working with the populations there, and with other agencies, we’ve developed great relationships working with our own other government agencies and NGOs,” he said. “Here we’ve fine-tuned that, because they are the ones with the assets that deal directly with the people, and we can enhance what they do.”
Still, it was striking to see how completely the military had embraced the humanitarian mission. Shortly after the quake, U.S. Southern Command, the military headquarters overseeing Haiti relief, had set up an online portal for sharing maps, satellite imagery, and other time-sensitive data with civilian aid groups. Within hours of the disaster, the Pentagon released footage of earthquake damage that had been collected by an RQ-4 Global Hawk, a pilotless spy plane. It was an unusual move. Ordinarily, access to images collected by the high-flying drone would be tightly restricted. But the Defense Department declassified the pictures as part of a larger push to share information with nongovernmental organizations and relief groups.
On the ground, the hierarchical, secrecy-bound military adopted a surprising mantra of trust and collaboration. En route to Haiti, I overnighted on the Navy amphibious ship USS Bataan, where I chatted briefly with a Navy Civil Affairs officer, who enthusiastically described how he was working with charities like Oxfam and Médecins sans Frontières. “We’re trying to get to the NGOs and IOs [international organizations] and see how they operate,” he told me. “We see what portals they use, how they operate. The attitude is, we know what we do, but we can learn from them.”
The Haiti mission showed the extent to which the military had absorbed the principles of “soft power.” In fact, that kind of collaboration with civilian agencies and nongovernmental organizations had become almost second nature. Although the Haiti mission was purely humanitarian, the U.S. military saw it as part of the same problem set they encountered in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. “Foreign disaster relief is counterinsurgency, only no one is shooting at you (yet),” wrote Army Major Kelly Webster, chief of plans and regimental executive officer for the Second Brigade Combat Team, Eighty-second Airborne Division, shortly after the relief mission. “Making the mental switch from the former to the latter did not require a major paradigm shift.”2
In other words, that paradigm shift had already occurred. A year and a half earlier, in late 2008, Linton Wells, a former Pentagon chief information officer, told me how he had pushed for military commanders to collaborate more freely with NGOs and aid groups, and not just for disaster response. Haiti, then, was more than an opportunity for the U.S. military to hone its humanitarian skills. It was a chance to prepare for a new kind of warfare, where the traditional lines between development, diplomacy, and military action were blurred. The challenge, Wells later told me in an e-mail, was to “figure out how to institutionalize the approach for the long haul in Haiti, ensure these capabilities (and other prototypes) get fielded rapidly in the next contingency, wherever it may be, and apply comparable approaches to support stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, and to other theaters. Lessons learned from Haiti already are being developed.”
I had first met Wells in early October 2008, when he was escorting reporters and officials around a technology demonstration in the Pentagon’s central courtyard. The scene in many respects mirrored what I saw at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince a year and a half later: A crew of fleece-clad twenty-somethings had erected a hexayurt, the cheap, eco-friendly shelter designed for refugee camps and rock festivals; two young tech-slackers dressed like roadies for a Seattle band circa 1991 were tethering an inflatable satellite dish to the lawn; a ponytailed man in a baseball cap plugged his MacBook into a nearby portable solar-power generator. It looked as though the hippies were invading the place, or so it might have seemed to the Pentagon bureaucrats who retreated to the courtyard to sip Diet Coke, smoke cigarettes, or hunt for cell phone reception.
This, however, was not a prank. It was officially sanctioned by the Defense Department. A colonel with a Special Forces tab inspected a rice cooker powered by a solar mirror; a two-star Army general appraised the hexayurt; Defense Department civilian employees wearing white Pentagon access badges peered at a portable water-purification unit. The demonstration, called STAR-TIDES (for Sustainable Technologies, Accelerated Research—Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support), was organized to showcase new, low-cost tools for humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and postwar reconstruction. The Naval Postgraduate School had chipped in forty thousand dollars to fund the effort; the Joint Capability Technology Demonstrations Office, part of the Pentagon’s Rapid Fielding Directorate, had provided another sixty thousand dollars.
The project was the brainchild of Wells. The former commander of a naval destroyer squadron, Wells looked every inch the retired Navy officer: He wore a regimental tie and round, steel-framed glasses; his gray hair was neatly cut and pomaded, with a side part. But Wells did not speak in the clipped tones of Pentagonese. Rather, he had a loose, professorial style, borrowing lots of buzzwords from the aid and development world. STAR-TIDES, Wells explained, was not some new agency of the Pentagon; their job was not to respond to the next Hurricane Katrina or deliver emergency rations to refugees in Darfur. Rather, the project would be more about “collaboration,” “trust building,” and “social networking” than leading the Army to build yurts during a humanitarian crisis. “We’re not going to be planting a flag in the field and delivering MREs,” he said, referring to Meals-Ready-to-Eat, the military’s packaged rations. “Our job is to connect people who may have solutions.”
At first glance, STAR-TIDES looked like little more than a public relations exercise—an interesting experiment in open-source technology, perhaps, or an advertisement for a kinder, gentler military. For manufacturers of solar power generators and water purification systems, it was a nice promotional boost, a way to reach potential government customers. But this was a radical departure from the standards of a decade earlier. Under the rubric of STAR-TIDES, Wells and his colleagues were trying to get the military to build new alliances and coalitions, not with other militaries, but with nongovernmental organizations, aid workers, diplomats, citizen activists, even the press. The idea was to overcome the uniformed military’s traditional distrust of what they called the “unicorns-and-rainbows” crowd: aid workers, development experts, human-rights advocates. Wells gave a brief example to the reporters. One of his acolytes, Dave Warner, was able to persuade U.S. Central Command, the powerful military headquarters that oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to release a large amount of unclassified satellite imagery of Afghanistan, without restrictions, to nongovernmental organizations that were working on aid and reconstruction projects on the ground. In Wells’s telling, this kind of data could be used for “nonkinetic” (i.e., nonviolent) ends: to win the support of the local population for road building projects.
“One of the roads went through a cemetery,” Wells said. “And so the [Afghan] government proposal was, ‘Well, we’ll just kick the people out and build the road anyway.’ But Dr. Warner’s point with the NGOs was, ‘Let’s not do that, let’s work from the bottom up.’ And so by working with the people in the village, showing them what the value of the road was, eventually the villagers moved their own graves to allow the road to be built. Rather than having the United States being blamed for some sort of sacrilege or violation of some ancient creed, it’s turned out to have been an absolute win-win, because we’ve been willing to drink the three cups of tea, spend the time, and you had something worthwhile to offer.”
This was a parable of sorts: Instead of using force—dropping a bomb, say, on a Taliban safe house or kicking down doors in the middle of the night—the military could collaborate with an NGO to win the support of the local population. It would, in development parlance, be a solution with local buy-in. And the happy villagers, presumably, would not be planting bombs on the new road or ambushing U.S. forces. Wells was also making a deliberate pop-culture reference: Three Cups of Tea is the title of a book by Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who founded a charity to build children’s schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It turns out that the inspirational bestseller also had a cult following within the military: Mortenson had been invited that fall to the Pentagon for a private meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; later that year, he traveled to MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to address senior officials from U.S. Special Operations Command.3 Three Cups of Tea offered a tantalizing vision of the uses of soft power.
Wells’s experiment was getting high-level attention. Among the visitors to the STAR-TIDES demonstration was General William “Kip” Ward, the head of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s newly created geographic command for Africa. AFRICOM itself was branded as an experiment in reorganizing the U.S. military for humanitarian emergencies and conflict prevention; it would be a “hybrid” organization with civilian and military experts on the payroll. A visit by the military’s newest four-star combatant commander was a big deal for the STAR-TIDES organizers.4 More important, the STAR-TIDES scenarios—disaster relief in Central America or the Western Pacific, stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, refugee support in sub-Saharan Africa, disaster response in the United States (euphemistically referred to as “defense support to civil authorities”)—were not plucked out of thin air. They were devised at the request of the combatant commands, the powerful regional headquarters the U.S. military uses to divide the globe into geographic “areas of responsibility.”
STAR-TIDES, then, was not a mere curiosity. Wells and his fellow evangelizers may have been at the further edges of the movement, but they were part of a larger cultural shift within the defense and national security establishment: a consensus that the U.S. military needed to master the arts of diplomacy, learn the language of aid and development, and develop new cultural skills. It was an approach that would fundamentally alter the way that the U.S. government carried out diplomacy and delivered foreign aid. It would also transform the way the United States waged war.
After Wells delivered sound bites to a radio reporter and escorted some more VIPs around the courtyard displays, I asked him what motivated him to launch STAR-TIDES. “I spent sixteen years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” he said. “And frankly, I saw too many young American men and women die, because our government doesn’t do this ‘Wrap up the conflict’ very well, or in some cases avoid them.”
What Wells was saying was the same thing I had been told dozens of times before, in some shape or form, by top officers, ordinary soldiers, and civilian officials: We can get it right. That phrase, variously put, distilled the bitter experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan: winning the war—and losing the peace.*
Just two weeks before the October 2008 STAR-TIDES demonstration, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at National Defense University in Washington. In his speech, he outlined his vision of the new American way of war. “What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign—a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and moderation,” he said. “In the long-term effort against terrorist networks and other extremists, we know that direct military force will continue to have a role. But we also understand that over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory.”6
Military operations, Gates continued, should be subordinate to programs to promote economic development and good governance in places at risk from extremism. And that strategy, he added, would require an effort to “tap the full strength of America and its people”—not just the uniformed military, but civilian agencies, volunteer organizations, and the private sector.
The United States fields the most well-trained, well-funded, and technologically sophisticated fighting force the world has ever seen. But that military was confounded by the complexity of fighting low-tech insurgents in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. For Gates and his allies within the Pentagon, victory over militant extremism depended on mastering the “three cups of tea” approach: digging wells, building schools, and repairing roads. What began in late 2001 as a global war on terror was quietly recast as a campaign of armed social work. And in the process, American foreign policy underwent a tectonic shift.
That shift had its modest beginnings in the post-9/11 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. It accelerated in Iraq, as the United States became mired down in the vicious internal war that followed the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. A series of dramatic, innovative nation-building experiments rescued the Iraq mission from complete failure, but in the process, the military overcompensated. The Pentagon became fixated on soft power as the answer for security problems such as terrorism and insurgency. Military commanders threw billions of dollars at quasi-development schemes in the hopes that a combination of aid money and armed social work would get at the root causes of violence in failing states. And top policymakers launched an initiative to refashion government around the tasks of state building. The short-term lessons drawn from Iraq took on a life of their own, as policymakers and practitioners looked to repeat the experiment on an equally grand scale in Afghanistan.
In a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000, the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, outlined his vision of the U.S. military policy: “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building,” he said. “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have a kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”
In the decade before Bush took office, the United States had been involved in armed humanitarianism, albeit in relatively modest contingencies. In Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia, U.S. troops were committed to peacekeeping operations with limited goals and indeterminate ends, and military theorists and foreign policy thinkers worried that the United States was frittering away military power by playing global beat cop. The conservative argument against nation building was summed up in one neat phrase: Superpowers don’t do windows.* By the time Bush left office, the United States had committed itself to nation building on an epic scale.
This shift toward nation building can be documented in many different ways. One of the starkest ways is cost. Since 2003, Congress has appropriated over $50 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction, at one time considered the largest amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars ever committed to aid and reconstruction in a single country.8 As of summer 2010 the war in Afghanistan has become a nation-building project as ambitious and costly as the reconstruction of Iraq. By mid-2010, the United States had spent approximately $51.5 billion on building the rudiments of a modern state in Afghanistan.9 Those figures were only a fraction of the larger cost of staying on a wartime footing. In the decade that followed September 11, 2001, the Pentagon’s base budget effectively doubled, not including additional funding to cover the cost of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.10 For fiscal year 2011, President Barack Obama requested $733.3 billion in new budget authority for national defense: $548.9 billion for the regular operations of the Defense Department; $159.3 billion for ongoing military operations, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq; and $25.1 billion for defense-related activities by other agencies, including money to support the nuclear weapons complex. The total national defense budget in fiscal year 2001, adjusted for 2010 dollars, was around $375 million. Foreign aid budgets grew dramatically as well. For instance, between 2002 and 2009 the U.S. Agency for International Development spent around $7 billion in Afghanistan.11 That amount roughly equaled USAID’s global operating budget for fiscal year 2001.12
The manpower committed to this mission has also been extraordinary. By the end of his second term, Bush had embarked on a mission to reorganize government for this role, taking the first steps toward creating a standing nation-building corps. The State Department launched an effort to create a cadre of diplomatic first responders who would be on call to respond to humanitarian crises and take on nation-building assignments in war zones. And military planners began thinking in terms of the “long war,” an era of persistent conflict that would require an unceasing cycle of deployments to places deemed vulnerable to violent extremism. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the practice of nation building was manpower-intensive, demanding a heavy U.S. troop presence to police some of the world’s toughest neighborhoods. By mid-2010, troops in Afghanistan outnumbered those in Iraq, and casualties in Afghanistan reached record highs. Nation building is a hard, often risky business. As of this writing, forty-four hundred U.S. troops have died in Iraq. More than eleven hundred have died in Afghanistan. Those numbers do not include contractors and civilians, whose names rarely figure in official casualty tallies.
Weeks after the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, conservative writer Max Boot made a provocative argument in favor of a new kind of American imperialism. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets,” he wrote.13 Implicit in that clever shorthand was a critique: The United States lacked a talented class of colonial administrators capable of refashioning failed states and preparing the local inhabitants for eventual self-rule.
At first glance, it looks as if Boot’s post-9/11 wish has been fulfilled—and that the United States is finally creating the twenty-first-century equivalent of the British Empire’s Colonial Service. Over the 2000–2010 decade, a new class of nation builders has emerged: staffing Provincial Reconstruction Teams in cities in Iraq; constructing roads in rural Afghanistan; or training Kalashnikov-toting soldiers in Timbuktu. From West Africa to Central Asia, the old diplomatic cocktail-party circuit has given way to a new world of fortified outposts, where a new generation of diplomats, soldiers, and private contractors is working at the sharp end of U.S. foreign policy.
This is the world of muddy-boots diplomacy, practiced on a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Civil servants who once trained for peacetime development work now find themselves mediating tribal disputes in remote mountain provinces of Afghanistan. The State Department’s Foreign Service officers find themselves evading roadside bombs—and sometimes returning fire in firefights. Army platoon leaders hand out microgrants to small-business owners in the restless Shia slums of Baghdad. And a new class of expatriate has taken up residence in an archipelago of miniature Green Zones. They live behind concrete blast walls and concertina wire, commute to work in armored trucks, and reside in the ultimate gated communities.
But the shift in many ways has been incomplete. As this book will show, there has been a horrific failure to equip ourselves for success in this mission. The military quickly learned that it was poorly equipped for nation building—lacking cultural knowledge, language skills, and local understanding to do the job right in places like Iraq. Civilian agencies of the U.S. government such as the U.S. State Department and USAID were poorly prepared for the mission as well. In military terms, they had no “expeditionary capability”: They had no deployable reserve, no way to sustain people in the field, and few professional incentives for serving in combat zones. Their budgets were a fraction of the Defense Department’s, and their personnel were stretched thin: The State Department has around sixty-five hundred Foreign Service officers and another five thousand Foreign Service specialists who work overseas; another fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers work for USAID, the Foreign Commercial Service, the Foreign Agricultural Service, and the International Broadcasting Bureau.14 The U.S. Army, including active, reserve, and National Guard components, has an “end strength”—manpower authorized by Congress—of over one million.
The shortage of manpower was a chronic problem for this new enterprise. Sending thousands of civil servants to remote and often dangerous outposts had profound consequences. It was to create the world of the armed humanitarian: a landscape seen through bulletproof glass. An army of private security companies built a lucrative new business ferrying diplomats, civilian aid workers, and contractors around war zones. These hired guns provided bodyguard details, convoy escorts, and camp guards; they provided what the military calls “force protection”; they also created extraordinary distance between the representatives of the U.S. government and the populations they were supposed to help. And the military’s belated attempt to understand the “human terrain” it was operating in inadvertently sharpened the divide between the practitioners of this new foreign policy and the academic specialists whose expertise they sought to tap. This was one way the manpower gap was closed.
Equally problematic, this new mission blurred the lines between military force and humanitarian assistance. Over the course of the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Pentagon took on a greater share of overseas development assistance, work traditionally performed by civilians. In 2006, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international organization that tracks development trends, published a study of U.S. foreign aid. It found that over one fifth of official U.S. development assistance—22 percent, to be exact—flowed through the Defense Department. In 2002, that figure had been less than 6 percent.15 And the 22 percent did not include the “security assistance” dollars the Pentagon committed annually to training and equipping foreign militaries and police forces.16 The U.S. military had become a major player in the development world. And in many places, U.S. military money spent on development far outstripped the budget of traditional aid organizations. The aid workers there didn’t wear Birkenstocks—they wore combat boots.
Despite working diligently to solve the bureaucratic problems of nation building, the new practitioners often came to a late realization: Building an effective state and a functioning civil society is a process that takes decades, often generations. Imposing it from the outside often feeds the perception that the intervening power is an occupier, not a nation builder. And they also faced an unhappy reality: Sometimes, the more you throw money, resources, and talent at a problem, the worse the problem becomes. The massive infusion of resources creates extraordinary opportunities for corruption in states that have weak rule of law and poor traditions of governance. Equally important, they had to confront the fact that the American public has little patience, particularly given the current economic state, for this kind of costly enterprise.
Many books have probed the military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan: memoirs of combat by platoon leaders, brigade commanders, and embedded reporters; searing critiques of military decisionmaking by investigative journalists; self-serving accounts by civilian decisionmakers. But literature on the nation-building experience is almost nonexistent. Reporters who cover war often gravitate to the “bang-bang,” but rarely hang around for the complex development work that follows military action. This book is about the rise of this new class of nation builder, and the experiences, frustrations, and lessons of nation building. It is a tale of courage, idealism, and commitment; it is also one of profligacy, waste, and disillusion. This is the defining experience for a generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners.
Our decade-long affair with nation building was more than a break with the traditional world of diplomacy. For the military, it marked a shift away from fighting and winning conventional wars, as troops were reassigned to a constabulary mission. The military that had won a rapid victory over Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991 and 2003 was now stretched too thin to handle major new emergencies. The military was grasping for a new way to describe this mission: It was something other than war—more a hybrid of police work and development. They settled on the term “stability operations” to describe this kind of approach.
The Pentagon’s embrace of this new strategy can be charted out in a series of official documents. One week before the STAR-TIDES demonstration at the Pentagon, in October 2008, the U.S. Army released Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations. The manual provided the military with a blueprint for rebuilding failed states. And it stated the obvious: Nation building requires a lot of “soft power” and the full participation of the civilian agencies of government if it is to succeed. According to the manual, the United States faced a new era in which “the greatest threats to national security will not come from emerging ambitious states, but from nations unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs and aspirations of their people.”
The manual’s foreword states:
America’s future abroad is unlikely to resemble Afghanistan or Iraq, where we grapple with the burden of nation-building under fire. Instead, we will work through and with the community of nations to defeat insurgency, assist fragile states, and provide vital humanitarian aid to the suffering. Achieving victory will assume new dimensions as we strengthen our ability to generate “soft power” to promote participation in government, spur economic development, and address the root causes of conflict among the disenfranchised populations of the world.
The week the new Army manual was made public, I sat down with Clinton Ancker, the director of the Combined Arms Center Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During his Army career, Ancker had served with an armored cavalry unit in Vietnam and had spent nine years stationed on the border between East and West Germany in the late years of the Cold War. Ancker was also a historian, and he went on to be an intellectual mentor to many of the military officers who were leading battalions and brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had helped lead the drafting of the manual, and he wanted to emphasize an important point. “There’s a very clear message in the manual: that the Army should not be the lead on most of this, but a recognition that in many cases we will be when the operation kicks off,” he told me.
Ancker, like many of his contemporaries, wanted a government that was better organized to carry out this mission, that would require a new kind of approach—neither purely civilian nor wholly military—to handle nation building. “In theory, in the best of all possible worlds, the military would never have to do stability operations because they are fundamentally functions of a government,” he said. “If there is somebody else who is competent and capable of doing these things we would just as soon transition those tasks to them, because every soldier devoted to this is one who is not training for other missions or available for other missions. [But if] no one else can do it, we have to acknowledge that it’s a task and we have to have thought about it ahead of time.”
That manual was just one product of a period of introspection about the failure of the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most famous document of this was Field Manual 3-24, the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps’s counterinsurgency manual, published in December 2006. That book became a surprise bestseller (and one of its authors, General David Petraeus, became a celebrity), but the manual represented only one aspect of the military’s embrace of armed humanitarianism. In November 2005, the Defense Department issued Directive 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction.” It placed stability operations for the first time on a par with offensive or defensive combat. It stated: “Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct and support. They shall be given priority comparable to combat operations and be explicitly addressed and integrated across all DoD activities including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.”17
This dull bureaucratic language obscured a stunning admission: The United States had failed to plan for the postwar occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. The counterinsurgency manual followed one year later, signaling a cultural shift within the land services, the Army and Marine Corps. In October 2007, the U.S. Navy released its “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” a document that, in essence, said that avoiding wars was as important as winning them. In June 2008, an entire section of the 2008 National Defense Strategy, a sort of “statement of purpose” for the Defense Department, was devoted to outlining the importance of working with civilian agencies. “Our forces have stepped up to the task of long-term reconstruction, development and governance,” it read. “The U.S. Armed Forces will need to institutionalize and retain these capabilities, but this is no replacement for civilian involvement and expertise.”
These documents, along with classified documents on development and deployment of forces, all provided guidance for a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy toward nation building. By October 2008, the same month of the STAR-TIDES demonstration, work was nearing completion on a “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency guide that would instruct policymakers on how to plan and respond to future interventions overseas. In parallel, the State Department was taking the first steps toward creating a new Civilian Response Corps, a sort of civilian equivalent to the military reserve that could be called up in an emergency for nation-building missions.
Nation building has also changed Washington. In parallel with the push to refashion government, a new class of theorists, consultants, and advisors set up shop among the think tanks and lobbying offices of downtown Washington and staked their reputations and careers on the nation-building enterprise. This paradigm shift has also created rich new opportunities for the government contracting firms, not only for traditional aid contractors but for defense firms looking to branch out into the stability operations business. Providing manpower, consulting services, and logistics for nation-building projects became a more promising growth business than building warships, helicopters, and tanks.18 Aid contracting first became a big business with the Clinton administration’s push to “reinvent government” in the 1990s. That same privatization dynamic was at work in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but on a much larger scale. The profit motive would often be at odds with the mission.
Wars of choice, such as the Iraq War, may prove the exception in American foreign policy, but the experience of administering Iraq, Afghanistan, and other frontier states will mold a new generation of soldiers, diplomats, and bureaucrats. This new doctrine—still a work in progress—will shape future interventions. Armed nation building fits neatly with new ideas taking hold in international relations. Concepts such as the “responsibility to protect” trump state sovereignty and can pave the way for humanitarian intervention in failing states, or states deemed to be failing. This is a new idea of a just war, a place where liberal interventionists and conservative hawks find common ground.
This embrace of nation building, however, carries serious risks. The more the military focuses on armed social work, the less it will focus on its main mission of fighting and winning wars. The United States may be less ready to respond to new crises because of the enormous drain on our resources posed by the nation-building mission. Sustaining these missions on borrowed money increases our national debt, diverts money from domestic priorities, and hands an enormous burden to the next generation of taxpayers. It threatens to diminish the standing of the United States, because the huge footprint that it requires feeds perceptions that we are an imperial power. It creates more, not less, temptation for the United States to intervene in putative failed states. It sends mixed messages about who we are as a nation, because we interact with the world through our most authoritarian institutions. More worryingly, armed nation building may begin to look like an attractive way to solve domestic problems. This is a noble but flawed undertaking. The tools are important to have, but they must be used judiciously.
This newest generation of nation builders had to learn the hard way, groping for solutions in often difficult circumstances. For guidance, the architects of this new approach looked to the lessons of the Vietnam War, and to the literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial administration. During Vietnam, the U.S. military and civilian agencies of government became heavily involved in what at the time was called the “other war”: a massive civilian-led development campaign. Even though the Vietnam War ended in failure, some of the nation builders offered a new interpretation of the conflict: Many of the unique civil-military experiments in armed social work and reorganizing government had produced successes that, despite the fall of the Saigon government in 1975, could be repeated.
This book revisits some of that history, but it also describes what makes the experience of the past decade distinct from other foreign adventures. This new doctrine was an effort to get past the simplistic “shock and awe” view of American military might, and impose a more nuanced, and culturally sophisticated, way of doing business. Strenuously avoiding civilian casualties would become the prime directive for U.S. troops. And serious thinkers within government would look for ways to make U.S. intervention smarter, smaller, and less intrusive.
Despite this smarter approach, the outcome is not guaranteed. Iraq, as of this writing, is in the grip of a fresh wave of sectarian violence. Despite having stabilized to some extent, the country still could not manage to form a national government half a year after elections in March 2010. Overall violence is down, but the threat of renewed civil war is very real. In Afghanistan, the massive ramping up of U.S. military involvement and a parallel development effort had the perverse effect of enabling rampant corruption that undermined the trust of the Afghan people. U.S. troops, once greeted as liberators by Afghans weary of the Taliban’s medieval rule and a quarter century of civil war, found that their welcome was wearing thin. Local resentment has grown over civilian casualties, and in many parts of the country the Taliban is managing to outgovern the coalition and the Afghan government. The practitioners of foreign policy were rediscovering the fundamental paradox of nation building: The more you help, the less you empower the host government.
This book, then, is an accounting. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru, described this kind of mission as “armed social work.” Poverty alleviation, job creation, and infrastructure development can be noble and altruistic enterprises; these projects are often taken on by self-sacrificing, service-minded people. But good intentions are not enough. As any student of aid and development should know, efforts to aid the developing world have often done more harm than good. To borrow a construct from the economist William Easterly, the U.S. government belongs to the world of the “planners,” the topdown institutions that have consistently failed over five decades and trillions of dollars to find adequate remedies for poverty in the developing world. As they get further into the development business, the U.S. military faces the same dilemma. Underlying the whole enterprise is an assumption, questionable at best, that aid and development money can automatically bring down violence and promote stability in war-torn states.
Ultimately, there needs to be an acknowledgment of the limits to what we can accomplish. Without a reliable partner, the whole thing is doomed to fail. If the government we are helping is hopelessly corrupt, ineffective, and illegitimate, no amount of money or manpower will solve the problem. Building effective states can take decades, and requires a class of people who are committed to it. As experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed, this is not a soldier’s job, yet civilian agencies simply lack the personnel and the expeditionary capability to handle nation building in the world’s most violent neighborhoods. We are still a long way from developing a real cadre of people who can handle this mission, and do it affordably. Furthermore, it’s not primarily a task that can be accomplished by outsiders, be they in or out of uniform. Developing a functioning state and a thriving civil society is a process that has its own internal dynamic. We cannot remake entire societies no matter how much time we give ourselves. We cannot do it, and we can’t afford it.
A few notes on terminology: This book traces the theory and practice of nation building, even in an era when official policy insisted that the term did not apply. The reluctant acceptance of the need to use that term—and the belated acknowledgment of its importance—is part of the story.
I have made a deliberate effort to avoid national-security jargon. In the U.S. military, the term “peacekeeping” has fallen out of fashion. “Stability operations,” sometimes referred to as “Phase IV” or “post-conflict” operations, can apply to missions such as peacekeeping (the preferred phrase is now “peace operations”), disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and counterinsurgency.19 An argument persists about whether counterinsurgency falls under the rubric of stability operations or vice versa—the Army–Marine Corps manual describes counterinsurgency as a combination of offensive, defensive, and stability operations—but those definitions are of greatest concern to a professional military audience.20 While it may offend the purists, I have chosen to use the terms “nation building” and “stability operations” interchangeably.
“Nation building” and “state building” are terms that have very specific meaning for academics and members of the development community. “Nation building” means building a collective political identity around the concept of a culturally unique “nation”; it is quite distinct from the task of designing and building institutions of state. The United States has been deeply involved in both: In Iraq, it tried to nurture and promote a sense of Iraqi national unity that superseded ethnic allegiance, even though certain state institutions were dominated by one group (the Interior Ministry was Shia-dominated, for instance) and parts of the country were pushing for the greatest possible degree of autonomy (Kurdistan wanted a regional government). In Afghanistan, the efforts to build a national army drawn from all of the country’s ethnic groups was at its heart an attempt to promote national unity.
A note on sources: I have tried to depict as accurately as possible the world of the nation builder as I have encountered it. I have watched Army Human Terrain Teams negotiate with neighborhood leaders in Baghdad’s Sadr City; accompanied military doctors to a rural clinic in Mali; observed Special Forces soldiers training the sneaker-clad troops of the Georgian army; and watched State Department diplomats negotiate with provincial leaders in Afghanistan. The ranks are those they held at the time they were interviewed. In addition to my firsthand reporting, I spoke to dozens of veterans of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, regional embassy offices, and Civil Affairs teams; tracked down retired Vietnam-era civilian and military advisors; and interviewed many generals and top civilian officials. Information not drawn from my own interviews, reporting, or observation is cited in the notes.
Many sources agreed to speak to me on the record; others, because of the nature of their work and their respective bureaucratic cultures, have asked to remain unnamed. The State Department, in particular, has a “don’t-rock-the-boat” culture that discourages unscripted interaction with an independent writer and researcher. Nevertheless, many Foreign Service officers and many civil servants, contractors, USAID officers, and serving military personnel agreed to speak candidly to me. They felt the story was too important to remain untold.
* Shortly after taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama employed that phrase himself when he addressed the U.S. military. In an interview with the Pentagon Channel, he said his biggest responsibility to the troops was to ensure he “gets it right,” and that military power alone would not ensure victory in places like Afghanistan. “We are not going to win in Afghanistan or get an acceptable outcome in Afghanistan if we are only depending on our military,” he said.5
* That phrase, originally attributed to the former head of the CIA’s Afghan Task Force, was the title of an influential article by John Hillen, a former Army officer who went on to serve as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs under George W. Bush. The article was cited more often than read: Hillen was making a more nuanced argument about the management of alliances against the backdrop of the conflict in the Balkans. But because of its provocative title, it was often held up as an anti-nation-building screed.7