Armed Humanitarians (25 page)

Another item stacked up on the display table:
In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
, an insider's account of Iraq's burgeoning civil war by Nir Rosen, a young American journalist and fluent speaker of Arabic who had managed to report from inside Iraqi cities that had come under the control of the insurgency. In some military circles Rosen was regarded with suspicion for his willingness to report from the other side, but the popularity of the book suggested that there was an intellectual curiosity about the internal dynamics of Iraq's sectarian conflict.

Through the late summer and early fall of 2006, Fort Leavenworth hosted a procession of journalists to introduce both U.S. and overseas audiences to the main tenets of the counterinsurgency manual. Visiting media could meet the rising stars of the counterinsurgency community, including Colonel Peter Mansoor, who had grasped the basics of armed nation building during a tour as brigade commander in Baghdad. They could visit the Center for Army Lessons Learned, where the service engaged in institutional self-scrutiny. As icing on the cake, they could sit down with the general for the “Engine of Change” briefing, a PowerPoint presentation delivered personally by Petraeus. It was a conscious effort to sell the new doctrine, but also an opportunity to explain to a military audience what kinds of skills the Army wanted to master. I was reporting for
Jane's Defence Weekly
, the U.K.-based military magazine;
Jane's
reached a key audience for the U.S. military, professional military readers in both the United States and other NATO countries.

Petraeus met me in his office, which had dark wood paneling and leather chairs and was festooned with martial awards and memorabilia. Like the general's uniform, replete with a serious array of badges, patches, and tabs, it bespoke an impressive military career. During our hour-long conversation, the soft-spoken general favored the politically correct language of nation building and diplomacy, emphasizing the military's need to master a new set of “soft” skills: language and culture. Within the Army, Petraeus said, there was “a pretty big realization that if you want to be good at this kind of stuff … if you want to operate effectively in a different culture, then you've got to understand the nuances of that culture, you've got to be sensitive to the various aspects of that culture, that specific culture. Not the Arabic culture writ large, but the Iraqi Arabic culture.”

It was a realization of a hard lesson. The mission in Iraq would require a nuanced understanding of politics, ethnicity, and religion at the local level. U.S. troops would have to overcome their ignorance of local language. Producing a large cadre of fluent Arabic speakers seemed a tall order for the military, but, Petraeus said,

You certainly ought to have a survival level of that language. It's something like you recall in the NATO days, it was
Gateway to German
, or
Gateway to Italian
. Every American soldier had to go through this in the first two or three weeks that he or she was in theater. And that turned out to be useful, in fact all of us can still parrot our phrases, you know, “
Wo ist der Bahnhof?
” and all that other stuff. But you took stuff away from that that was really important. We sought to do that.

The new battlefield, Petraeus said, was no longer the blue team (the good guys) squaring off against the red team (the bad guys). He recalled the moment when he stood atop a Humvee outside Najaf in 2003 and realized that there were a lot more civilians on the battlefield than there ever were at the National Training Center. The business of nation building required patience, and the counterinsurgent needed to serve as a public ambassador for the mission. That meant explaining the mission to, and engaging with, the press. “It's not optional to deal with the [press], just like it's not optional to deal with the civilian population,” he said. “It's not optional to work with local leaders. It's not optional to do nation building. You've got to do all of those, or you will not succeed at the National Training Center, and you will certainly not succeed in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

It was more than just an overhaul of training that Petraeus and the counterinsurgents wanted to impose on the Army. They wanted to develop a new generation of officers and soldiers who were comfortable with the chores of nation building, men and women who were willing to immerse themselves in foreign cultures, and who were as skilled at managing reconstruction funds as they were in sending tank rounds downrange. That would require a shift in the way that the military selected people for promotion. In colonial militaries such as the British Army, serving with “indigenous” or “native” forces was traditionally a prestigious assignment. In the U.S. Army, volunteering to serve on a Military Transition Team—the thankless, often dangerous job of mentoring Iraqi military units or training Afghan police forces—was still largely viewed as a professional dead end. It was in many respects a repeat of the Vietnam War, when the path to rapid advancement was having an assignment to a line unit, not a job as a district or a province advisor. And after Vietnam, those kinds of advisory jobs were largely relegated to Special Forces. Petraeus wanted to make sure that an advisory tour was no longer a bar to professional advancement.

Advisors, he said, needed to be given priority for “branch-qualifying” jobs. They needed to be given preference for promotion to important leadership jobs: a battalion command or an operations officer or executive officer in a brigade.

We want to make sure that if someone volunteers to be a MiTT or a SPTT—a Military Transition Team member or a Special Police Training Team member or leader—that they are then rewarded for that. And in all the traditional ways that we reward people: They get their share of decorations and promotions and selection for command and everything else. So we have to insure that our personnel system, the Human Resources Command, rewards them by then giving them follow-on assignments that insure their upward trajectory.

But, Petraeus added, a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq would require a serious nonmilitary component. “Some of these are national issues. And I think the State Department is starting to look at the overall national government response to conduct of counterinsurgency.”

Later that month the State Department would be holding a conference on the subject, and he would be making a presentation. What Petraeus seemed to be driving at—although he was careful not to step “outside of his lane” as a general officer—was that the United States might need an increase in the size of the diplomatic corps. “It'd be interesting to ask what the size is of the Foreign Service officer community in the State Department,” he said. “Far be it from me [to say]. I think people should ask: What is the capacity?”

And, Petraeus added: “I think you might want to go see the assistant secretary for pol-mil”—John Hillen, who was preparing the ground for the counterinsurgents in Washington.

John Hillen, the head of the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, got the phone call from Petraeus in early 2006. The general was just back from Iraq, and he needed a favor. Hillen knew Petraeus from Army circles—not especially well, but they had a mutual friend in Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the influential armor officer who had made waves with
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
, the newly popular book on counterinsurgency. Hillen and Nagl had been friends for two decades: They shared the same supervisor at Oxford University, where Nagl was a Rhodes Scholar and where both men earned doctorates. They had known each other as young lieutenants in the Army and had both served in the first Gulf War.

During Operation Desert Storm, Hillen was the senior scout platoon leader for then Captain H. R. McMaster, who commanded Eagle Troop of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Battle of 73 Easting, a tank duel with the Iraqi Republican Guard in late February 1991.
8
McMaster's Abrams tank and Hillen's Bradley fighting vehicle were within fifty meters of each other during the fight, which led to the destruction of over one hundred Iraqi armored vehicles and the decimation of a Republican Guard brigade. As their careers advanced, Hillen and McMaster stayed in touch: They were all part of a relatively small circle of Army officers with Ph.D.s who all knew one another, at least by reputation, and who tracked one another's professional rise.

Petraeus was part of that circle as well: He had completed a Ph.D. at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. “I'm sitting here writing this field manual, and it's great, I got Nagl, I got all the right people,” Petraeus said. “And we have reaffirmed the age-old counterinsurgency tenet: Eighty percent is political, twenty percent is military.”

“Great,” Hillen laughed. “You reinvented the wheel.”

The two men were sharing an insider's joke: That 80 percent political, 20 percent military formula was, at least within progressive military circles, a piece of accepted wisdom, a formula borrowed from David Galula. The irony was not lost on Petraeus.

“I'm sitting around here, Ranger Hillen, and I'm looking at all uniforms,” he said. “And I'm writing a book that says eighty percent is a nonuniformed task. What's wrong with this picture? Where's the rest of the government?”

Petraeus was slowly coming around to a larger point. The new counterinsurgency manual was intended for the Army and the Marine Corps; the general wanted someone to evangelize the concept throughout the rest of the government. The military desperately needed civilian support, and Petraeus needed a point person in Washington to help organize a governmentwide conference that would introduce the gospel of counterinsurgency to a wider government audience.

“That's a good point,” Hillen said. The reason for Petraeus's phone call was starting to dawn on him. “Do you have anybody in mind?”

“You're the point person for the rest of the government,” Petraeus said. Petraeus and his team were planning to roll out the new counterinsurgency manual early in the fall, and they wanted to capture the maximum attention of the Beltway policymaking elite. The governmentwide counterinsurgency conference—advertised as “jointly sponsored” by the State Department and the Pentagon, although the Defense Department would provide most of the funds for the event—would be their coming-out party.

Hillen's first thought was,
Shit, well that's not what my bureau does.
(The National Security Council, part of the Executive Office of the President, is supposed to be the main forum for coordinating national security issues at the senior level.) And Hillen's second thought as the phone conversation unfolded was that everything that he had accomplished thus far during his tenure had been done outside the traditional budget authority of the State Department. For instance, Hillen had helped push through the Section 1206 program, also known as “Global Train and Equip.” Foreign military assistance—providing equipment and technical support to foreign militaries—was traditionally overseen by the State Department, but Section 1206 of the Fiscal Year 2006 defense budget gave the Defense Department authority to do the job (referred to as “building the military capacity of partner nations”). For instance, Section 1206 funds helped Pakistan acquire helicopters, spare parts, and night-vision equipment so it could combat Islamic militants in its tribal areas and do it quickly. To critics it represented the steady erosion of the State Department's traditional diplomatic activities and the accumulation of even more power by the Defense Department. But the military liked Section 1206 funding. It was faster and easier than the traditional security assistance programs that required a lot of cumbersome oversight and took years to execute. Section 1207 authority, another new mechanism, allowed the secretary of defense to transfer funds to the State Department so they could provide civilian stabilization and reconstruction assistance. Those funds were used to train local police capacity in Haiti's Cité Soleil and clear unexploded ordnance in Lebanon. In Colombia, the State Department and the Pentagon used Section 1207 to fund health and education programs in areas recently won back from guerrillas.
9

In essence, Sections 1206 and 1207 quietly expanded the foreign policy powers of the Pentagon under the banner of “interagency cooperation.” But Hillen had pushed for it, along with his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As a former soldier, he was the ideal advocate for pushing what was essentially a military agenda, raising consciousness within the larger civilian bureaucracy about “their” role in counterinsurgency. It would require a plan of action, training, and—most important—money. Petraeus promised to help come up with the funds for the conference, and he brought in Jeb Nadaner, deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, as cosponsor. Hillen was energized, and he started work on organizing the conference.

The conference, Hillen told me, was “the first step” toward creating a new consensus in Washington, a push to reorganize the foreign policy apparatus around the tasks of nation building. It succeeded in recasting the conversation about national security, and the mission of the twenty-first-century diplomatic service. “That's the basic genesis: a phone call from Petraeus to me at my desk, and a willingness to just jump out there and try this,” Hillen said.

Within Washington, however, Hillen ran into bureaucratic resistance in his attempt to build a “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency approach. For one, he faced questions from the National Security Council, which in theory was supposed to coordinate the “interagency” issues that cut across government departments. Not long after he started organizing, Hillen received a call from the NSC; his efforts had prompted “a lot of concern” about a potential bureaucratic land grab by the military. Part of the problem was conceptual: Since September 11, 2001, U.S. foreign policy had been reorganized around the response to terrorism, not insurgency. The State Department had a counterterrorism office that was focused on a much narrower set of problems: tracking, finding, and combatting transnational Islamic terror groups. The counterinsurgents were talking about something bigger. They were framing the problem in terms of nation building. And the set of tools they wanted to develop could apply as easily to Haiti as they could to Iraq.