Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders

364 Pages·2011·1.97 MB·English

by  Nathan Hodge

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