Armed Humanitarians (37 page)

Much as in Mali, the United States had quietly been providing counterterrorism training to Ugandan troops. In addition, as the
New York Times
later revealed, a team of seventeen advisers and analysts from AFRICOM worked closely with Ugandan officers to plan the offensive. They also provided intelligence, satellite phones, and $1 million in fuel. Despite the U.S. assistance, the operation was botched: Ugandan troops failed to block off the LRA's escape routes, and as the rebel fighters scattered, they embarked on a killing spree in nearby villages. An estimated nine hundred civilians were killed in a wave of massacres and reprisals.
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The quiet, behind-the-scenes intervention in Uganda was a failure.

What was missing from the planning, and the scenarios, was some notion of balance between military and humanitarian capacity. U.S. foreign policy in Africa was quietly being militarized, but there was no parallel effort to beef up traditional aid and development efforts. There seemed to be no discussion within higher-echelon policy circles of trade, direct investment, or encouraging stronger bilateral ties within Africa. The new Africa command created its own internal logic. When the continent was viewed through the lens of preventive security, security became the sole goal.

*
A notable exception was Liberia. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf offered to host AFRICOM headquarters, but as of fall 2010 the command was still based in Stuttgart.

CHAPTER  11

Windshield Ethnographers

On December 6, 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Pete Pierce was having a rough day. He had a meeting scheduled at noon with Hassan Shama, the chairman of the Sadr City District Advisory Council, but when Shama showed up at noon at the Iraqi Army checkpoint outside Forward Operating Base War Eagle, a U.S. outpost at an old police training center on the east side of the Tigris River, the soldiers would not let him to pass. Now Shama was angry: He had been waiting in his car for two hours.

Pierce marched into the office where Andre, one of his interpreters, was sprucing up a black vinyl couch with eau de cologne. “He's been delayed at the checkpoint,” Pierce said, exasperated. “We had to call him and kiss his ass. He was stuck in traffic from ten o'clock to noon, and I promised to buy him lunch.”

It was time for Plan B. Pierce would have to send someone out to the checkpoint to escort Shama on base—and order some kebabs. Fetching Shama fell to Abu Bassam, Pierce's Iraqi-American cultural advisor. “You go out to the checkpoint at two o'clock in your full battle rattle,” he told Abu Bassam. “I'll get Sergeant Knox to go out with you to the checkpoint.”

In civilian life, Pierce was a senior deputy district attorney in Orange County, California; in uniform, he maintained a weary, seen-it-all-before demeanor. In Baghdad, he led Human Terrain Team IZ3, a ten-person team attached to the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division. Pierce and his team were supposed to help the brigade manage its nonlethal operations. They provided cultural advice to the commander; helped the brigade's embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, or e-PRT, allocate reconstruction funds; and identified key local leaders with whom the brigade commander, Colonel John Hort, could meet. It was all part of the Army's belated push for greater cultural awareness, an effort that had received official endorsement with the adoption of the Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual in late 2006. Team IZ3 had recently organized five
iftar
dinners, meals to break the Ramadan fast, with tribal and religious sheikhs, local government officials and security forces, and members of the district advisory councils. It had also organized today's meeting with Shama.

The district advisory councils, referred to by the Americans as DACs, were local government bodies set up by the coalition following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They had no lawmaking power or budget authority; their brief was to provide a form of local representative government. Neighborhood advisory councils, or NACs, selected representatives for the district-level council, and the DACs sent representatives to the Baghdad City Advisory Council. The DACs and the NACs also gave the U.S. presence a form of legitimacy, and provided a valuable interface between the U.S. military and local communities.

As its deputy chairman, Shama was a key player on the Sadr City DAC. Despite military commanders' wariness of Shama—Hort, the brigade commander, described him as initially “very anti-coalition”—Pierce and his teammates had persuaded the Army to work with him. Now things were a bit more cordial, although Shama still had a lot of complaints, particularly about the way the U.S. military was spending aid money inside Sadr City, part of the brigade's area of operations.

Sadr City was one of the most volatile places in Iraq. The densely populated Baghdad district had long been a stronghold for Shia militants, and a dangerous place for U.S. forces. Earlier in that spring of 2008, intense fighting had flared up around Sadr City after the Iraqi government launched an offensive in the southern city of Basra. Elements of Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi militia, designated “special groups” by the U.S. military, responded by using Sadr City as a launching pad for rocket attacks on the Green Zone. U.S. and Iraqi forces then launched a push into Sadr City, braving minefields and fighting street by street to retake the southern quadrant of the low-rise slum. U.S. forces then built a concrete wall along Al Quds Street that was supposed to push insurgent rocket teams beyond the reach of the Green Zone. North of the wall, tag teams of drones and attack helicopters loitered overhead, waiting to spot insurgent rocket and mortar teams. After two months of intense street fighting, the Iraqi government and the Jaish al-Mahdi concluded a truce, and Iraqi troops were able to take up positions inside the rest of Sadr City.

A few months after the ceasefire, a fragile sort of normalcy had returned to the area, and the U.S. military had begun aiming a firehose of development funds at the southern quadrant of Sadr City. In the eleven months since the arrival of the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, in Baghdad in early 2008, the unit had spent around $72 million on public works projects in and around Sadr City. It hired local contractors to pick up trash, clear backed-up sewer lines, and repair downed power lines. On patrols, infantry officers were given “walking-around money.” They were authorized to hand out $2,500 microgrants to jump-start local businesses that had lost inventory during the fighting. Seventy-two million was an astonishing amount of development money to focus on one section of one neighborhood. The United States had spent roughly the same amount on aid to all of Botswana in one year, 2008.

But the “save Sadr City fund” did not end the violence. In June 2008, a bomb was planted outside Shama's office. A group of Americans was meeting with Shama when the bomb detonated. Shama was wounded in the leg; the Americans, who were standing closer to the bomb, unwittingly shielded him from the blast. Four Americans were killed, along with six Iraqis and an Italian interpreter of Iraqi descent.
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Two of the slain Americans were soldiers: Major Dwayne Kelley, a New Jersey state trooper and Army reservist, and Chief Warrant Officer Robert Hammett. Two were civilians: Steven Farley, a State Department contractor from Oklahoma and a member of the e-PRT, and Nicole Suveges, a member of Human Terrain Team IZ3.

When Suveges deployed to Iraq, in April 2008, Team IZ3 was part of an ambitious new experiment by the U.S. military to embed social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Suveges was nearing completion of a Ph.D. in political science at Johns Hopkins University (her dissertation was titled “Markets and Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas and the Deep Play of Political Culture”), and she had worked in Iraq for two years, first as a polling expert and then as an advisor to Multi-National Corps Iraq. According to her colleagues, Suveges had been eager to join a Human Terrain Team; these teams were seen at the time as the cutting edge of counterinsurgency warfare and as the possible salvation of the U.S. military in Iraq.

But by December 2008, the military's program of embedding social scientists was in turmoil. Pierce had seen one member of his team killed, and he was in no mood to take any unnecessary risks. That day's meeting was no exception. When Shama finally reached the meeting two hours later, escorted through the checkpoint by Abu Bassam, the discussion quickly turned to the main item of business, the generators the brigade was installing to bring power to the southern neighborhoods of Sadr City. A major with the brigade's civil-military operations center was planning a trip to show members of the DAC where they were installed, and another IZ3 team member, Ben Rabitor, a young, slightly built social scientist, was enthusiastic about a chance to go out with the military team.

“I'd like to go on this mission!” he piped up.

“We'll see,” Pierce replied drily. “I know you're anxious to get out beyond the wire, Ben, but”—Pierce paused for effect—“I guarantee by the end of your tour, you will never want to go out beyond the wire, okay? You will be all out-wired out!”

Ali Ghatteh, a deputy to Shama, had been listening in through an interpreter. He turned to Rabitor. “If you going to go out, grow out your beard and we are going to put you in a
dishdasha
,” he said, referring to the traditional robe worn by men in Iraq. “And I can show you—I'll keep you safe in my area.”

Rabitor sat up enthusiastically. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing a civilian anthropologist attached to the Army should be doing: blending in with the local community to help oversee a development project that might, if all went to plan, help restore stability to the area. “I'll be like
Iraqeen
!” he said.

Pierce, with the tone of a worried father, turned to Rabitor. “All right, Ben, you ain't doing anything like that while I'm here,” he said.

The military that routed the Taliban in 2001 and decapitated the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a technologically superior force. It possessed overwhelming firepower, precision weaponry, and a global communications network. But this twenty-first-century force had blundered into Iraq and Afghanistan with only minimal understanding of the local cultural landscape. By the fall of 2006, with the adoption of the Army–Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, the U.S. military was in theory taking the first steps toward reemphasizing the importance of cultural knowledge. In practice, these new nation builders were still struggling to understand the cultures they were dealing with in the Middle East and Central Asia. In a keynote address at the 2006 counterinsurgency conference in Washington, Eric Edelman, under secretary of defense for policy and a former ambassador, pointed to an essential new tool the U.S. government needed to deploy if it was to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in future conflicts: anthropology.

“In order to succeed in COIN [counterinsurgency] and stability operations, we must understand the cultures with which we are operating,” he said.

This is actually much more difficult than it sounds. Truly understanding another culture requires more than speaking a language or knowing certain social customs so that we do not offend our hosts. Certainly those things are important. But to truly have an impact, and to do more good than harm, we must understand the social power structures that informally govern societies as well as the internal motivations of the enemy and the people. In short, we need to develop an anthropological approach to understanding our enemies.

In Edelman's telling, ethnographic knowledge was in essence an intelligence tool, although perhaps not of the traditional sort. “Our intelligence processes and education and training systems must adapt to the need to obtain, analyze, and disseminate cultural knowledge,” he said. “And by dissemination, I mean to everyone who needs it. It does no good for the military or anyone else to collect information if they do not share it with their interagency, coalition, private, and non-governmental partners.”

When the can-do culture of the military applied itself to a technical problem, it could produce impressive technical results, particularly when it came to focusing the resources of the massive Pentagon procurement machine. The most dramatic example after September 11, 2001, was the creation of the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, an organization within the Pentagon dedicated to countering the lethal roadside bomb threat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At first, JIEDDO sank a large portion of its funds into technology, paying for myriad technical fixes to protect troops from IEDs. But despite the investment in defensive measures, the number of overall attacks continued to rise. JIEDDO began to shift its focus to stopping insurgent bomb-making cells, small, decentralized, secretive groups of part-time fighters who blended effortlessly into the local population. It was an approach that fused police work with anthropology: understanding the social context in which bomb makers operated, mapping out how they were organized, and learning how they interacted with the local population.

JIEDDO's new approach was presaged by a 2005 article in
Military Review
, the official journal of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, written by Montgomery McFate, a policy fellow at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. In “Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs,” McFate outlined ways that ethnographic knowledge could be applied to combating the problem of roadside bombs. “Because the insurgency is connected to the Sunni tribal system, certain sheiks probably know exactly where these explosives are stored,” she wrote. “The sheiks are vulnerable in two ways: through their love of honor and through their love of money. Although they cannot be pressured to divulge the whereabouts of explosives through appeals to honor, because they see us as infidel adversaries, they are vulnerable to financial rewards. In Iraq, there is an old saying that you cannot buy a tribe, but you can certainly hire one.”
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