Armed Humanitarians (28 page)

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.