Armed Humanitarians Read online

  Armed Humanitarians

  The Rise of the Nation Builders

  NATHAN HODGE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Port-au-Prince, February 2010

  Part I: Winning the War, Losing the Peace

  1. Absolute Beginners

  2. The PowerPoint Warrior

  3. “Beat ’em Up and Go Home”

  4. The Other War

  5. Cash as a Weapon

  Part II: History Lessons

  6. The Phoenix Rises

  7. The Accidental Counterinsurgents

  Part III: Theory into Practice

  8. Wingtips on the Ground

  9. Kalashnikovs for Hire

  10. Peace Corps on Steroids

  11. Windshield Ethnographers

  12. Obama’s War

  Conclusion: Foreign Policy Out of Balance

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Note on the Author

  By the same Author

  Imprint

  For Sharon

  PROLOGUE

  Port-au-Prince

  February 2010

  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.”