Free Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

could apply as easily to Haiti as they could to Iraq.
    Part of the problem was cultural. In January of 2006, Hillen flew out to Iraq for a short fact-finding trip. The brief stay of about five days was frustrating. To get around the country, Hillen had to draw on the old-boy network from his days in the military, hitching rides on helicopters and a C-12 transport plane. He spent one night out in the field with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, commanded by his old friend, Colonel H. R. McMaster. The visit to Iraq cemented Hillen’s views: The 80 percent political side of counterinsurgency was missing from the equation. A traditional mind-set still prevailed: Diplomats should stay inside the Green Zone, while the military conducted its business out in the Red Zone—all of the rest of Iraq. Something had to change. “I only spent two hours in the Green Zone,” he told me. “And it drove the State Department nuts. They were like, ‘What’s the assistant secretary doing out of the Green Zone?’ ”
    Not long after his trip to Iraq, Hillen began planning a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan. He wanted to examine the civilian-military experiment under way in Afghanistan’s provinces, and outlined his plans in an e-mail to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The embassy staff, however, initially opposed Hillen’s plans to travel outside of Kabul, and a chain of e-mail correspondence followed. The argument from Kabul was that Hillen, as the assistant secretary of state, should be spending his time in Kabul with the Afghan ministers of defense or interior, not mucking around in the countryside visiting military units or Provincial Reconstruction Teams. What was there for him to do in Khowst, or in Ghazni, or some other combat outpost in the provinces? Shouldn’t he be spending time meeting his counterparts in the capital?
    As Hillen’s correspondence with the embassy made it clear, a Red Zone–Green Zone mentality still prevailed in the diplomatic corps. When Hillen scrolled down to the bottom of the e-mail chain, he noticed a note appended from Ambassador Ronald Neumann, a tough, salty-tongued Vietnam veteran who had succeeded Zalmay Khalilzad in the ambassador’s post. He had written a note to one of his officers, perhaps not thinking it would find its way back to Hillen. As Hillen recalled, it said: “Tell Assistant Secretary Hillen we’re not his fucking travel agency.” *
    Still, after a few months of persuading, Hillen received the National Security Council’s blessing to begin working on whole-of-government counterinsurgency guidelines. “Which is probably why Dave [Petraeus] cannily pushed it off on me,” Hillen told me. “I mean, why should he get the crap beat out of him in Washington for three months, when I was willing to do it?”
    The governmentwide counterinsurgency conference was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington that September. The agenda read like a roster of luminaries from the counterinsurgency world: An opening panel on counterinsurgency best practices featured David Kilcullen, the Australian military officer who had won a cult following with his “Twenty-Eight Articles,” and Colonel H. R. McMaster, the former commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar. Day 2 featured a keynote address by Petraeus, who was introduced by Sarah Sewall of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
    If the concept of armed nation building was already taking hold within the military, the conference brought the concept to a wider audience: the civilian agencies of the federal government. A briefing paper distributed to participants made the aim of the conference clear: The U.S. government should “reframe the GWOT [global war on terror] as global COIN [counterinsurgency].” That new acronym marked a clear break with the concept that had provided the intellectual framework and justification for five