Armed Humanitarians (41 page)

Nicole Suveges, who was killed in the Sadr City advisory council bombing, would not be the last Human Terrain Team casualty. On November 4, 2008, two Human Terrain Team members, Don Ayala and Paula Loyd, were on a foot patrol in the village of Chehel Gazi, Afghanistan. Loyd, a social scientist, approached Abdul Salam, a local man carrying a fuel jug, and struck up a conversation about the price of gasoline. Without warning, the man doused Loyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire. Soldiers rolled Loyd in a ditch to put out the flames; Abdul Salam was captured and restrained in plastic flexcuffs. When Ayala learned about the extent of Loyd's injuries, he walked over to the Afghan man, still bound at the wrists, and executed him with a pistol shot to the head.

Loyd died of her injuries after two agonizing months in an Army hospital.
30
Ayala pled guilty to the revenge killing; a U.S. District Court judge sentenced him to five years probation and a $12,500 fine.
31
The incident further tarnished the reputation of the program. In February 2009, morale further plummeted after the program's managers suddenly announced a major change. Team members would have to convert from well-compensated contractor status to a less well compensated government employee status, or they would have to resign. The move was supposed to be in response to the agreement struck between the Iraqi and U.S. governments to lift legal immunity for contractors, but it did not sit well with team members. Around one third of the program's deployed workforce quit.

That same spring, Major Ben Connable, a Marine Corps officer, authored a devastating critique of the Human Terrain System in
Military Review
, the same publication that had introduced the concept to a military audience two and a half years earlier. As a foreign area officer, or FAO, Connable understood the military's need to learn about foreign cultures. FAOs were supposed to be the military's resident experts on local cultures; they had language training and advanced degrees in area studies or international relations. But the Human Terrain approach of hiring civilian social scientists on contract had been a disaster, he contended. In the article, “All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System Is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence,” he argued that the military needed to develop its own culturally literate officers in-house. That would further a commonsense aim of remedying the military's devastating lack of cultural knowledge without all the blowback from recruiting anthropologists and other social scientists. Connable asked:

Why is it necessary to create a separate program, costing (at a minimum) tens of millions of dollars, to assign these personnel to the very staffs at which they were trained to serve? What do the Human Terrain Team FAO and CA [Civil Affairs] officers bring to the table that organic FAO and CA officers do not? If HTS can find these qualified officers, why can't the U.S. military services?
32

But boosting the military's cultural I.Q. would have been too logical, and by now the Human Terrain System had taken on a life of its own in the Pentagon bureaucracy. U.S. Africa Command had quietly begun recruiting to staff a new “sociocultural cell” that would be attached to the new regional military headquarters. A “research and risk management firm” called Archimedes Global, Inc., was selected to recruit contractor teams. As the military ramped up its involvement in Afghanistan, the Army quietly moved to expand the program. In June 2009, a $40 million expansion of the program appeared in a story posted by the Thirty-fourth Infantry Division at its Web site—buried in a photo caption.
33

Despite setbacks and failures, and the general inability to find the right people for the job, the U.S. military's embrace of social science showed no sign of diminishing. The approach was seen as the key to fighting a smarter war. But the Human Terrain System ignored a larger problem. The U.S. military was fighting an away game, operating in cultures it didn't understand, in places undergoing violent social change. They were the outsiders. All the anthropological expertise in the world couldn't fix that.

CHAPTER  12

Obama's War

On July 15, 2009, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, boarded a Chinook helicopter bound for Pushghar, a village in Afghanistan's remote Panjshir Valley. Mullen was in Afghanistan as part of a morale-boosting United Service Organizations tour of U.S. bases in the Middle East and Central Asia. Accompanied by Don Shula, an NFL Hall of Famer, and other celebrities, Mullen and his entourage visited Kirkuk, Iraq; Bagram, Afghanistan; and the USS
Ronald Reagan
, deployed in the Persian Gulf. His detour to the Panjshir, however, was not for a meet-and-greet with the troops. The admiral was on a different mission: He was on his way to attend a ribbon-cutting at a girls' school.

The Panjshir girls' school had been opened by Greg Mortenson, author of the bestseller
Three Cups of Tea
and founder of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, which promoted girls' education in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Members of the Panjshir Provincial Reconstruction Team, which was funding a dozen education projects throughout the province, also attended the opening ceremony.
1
The admiral had brought the
New York Times
columnist and globalization theorist Thomas Friedman along for the ride.
2
A visit by the top uniformed officer in the U.S. military to this rural schoolhouse would show how fully the U.S. military had embraced the concept of armed humanitarianism.

The morning of the ceremony, I hitched a ride to the Panjshir with an Army security detail that was providing backup for Mullen's visit. The Panjshir Valley was considered “permissive,” meaning the risk of attack was low. The high-walled valley had been a famous redoubt against both the Soviets and the Taliban, and the tough, warlike Panjshiris took pride in protecting their guests. Nevertheless, the Army dispatched a small security force to the Panjshir to provide backup security for Mullen's visit. The security force, led by Staff Sergeant Gabriel Castillo, would be the “quick reaction force” on hand in case anything went wrong.

The security force rolled out from Bagram Air Base in a convoy of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the behemoth, blast-proof trucks the military had procured in massive numbers to shield troops from roadside bombs.
*
Castillo, a muscular close-protection specialist from El Paso, Texas, gave the security team a short predeparture briefing. At the time, all roads to the Panjshir were considered “green” (relatively safe) but the soldiers were to be on the lookout for possible attackers, particularly when crossing through Kapisa Province, between Bagram and the gateway to the Panjshir. In late May, a Humvee carrying members of the Panjshir Provincial Reconstruction Team had been hit by a suicide car bomber while passing through Kapisa. Four members of the team were killed. It was a reminder that although the mission in the Panjshir Valley was primarily humanitarian, there were still serious risks.

The supersized armored trucks may have been well suited for Iraq's extensive highway network, but they definitely were not designed with Afghanistan's primitive roads in mind. The two-lane highway through the Panjshir was reasonably well paved, but the convoy also had to navigate village streets that were at some points barely wider than the trucks themselves. As the convoy weaved along narrow switchback roads, the MRAP driver leaned on the horn, scattering the occasional flock of fat-tailed sheep or gaggle of children playing in the road. A miscalculation on one of the turns, and the trucks could easily tumble to the bottom of a ravine.

After passing through the main gateway to the valley, the crews removed the barrels of their heavy .50-caliber machine guns. More than anything it was a gesture of trust. Traveling guns-up in the Panjshir would definitely have sent the wrong signal. Nonetheless, the Army lieutenant who was hitching a ride with the team in the back of one of the MRAPs wasn't particularly happy. “I don't like that,” he said. “I just came from Kapisa.”

After a bumpy hour-and-a-half ride, the crew reached their destination. They parked in the motor pool of Forward Operating Base Lion, the small base for the Panjshir PRT, and waited. FOB Lion looked quite different from most military outposts I had seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was not surrounded by intimidating concrete walls or a perimeter of sand-filled HESCO barricades but was quite open and accessible, with just a simple gate and some concertina wire across the entrance. Pickup trucks, not massive armored vehicles, were parked in the motor pool. It was intriguing to see a U.S. base in Afghanistan that didn't look like Fortress America.

The convoy had arrived early; I wandered around the small camp and talked with some of the team members. Matthew Burns, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers representative on the PRT, had come to the valley after stints working in Jalalabad and Kabul. When he first heard about how the PRT operated—driving around in pickups, not living behind walls, he was skeptical, to say the least. “When I first heard about it, no HESCOS, soft-skin vehicles, I didn't want anything to do with it,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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