Free Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge Page A

years of war under President George W. Bush. And it heralded a more sweeping, long-term campaign that would see the United States intervening to support governments that were combatting locally organized, globally networked extremists, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but around the globe. At the heart of counterinsurgency was political, social, and developmental work, meaning that civilian agencies needed to work more closely with the military and absorb counterinsurgency principles in their planning. The conference packet featured a logo that presented the idea visually: a circle in which the blue silhouette of a soldier is flanked by two bureaucrats, a man in a suit and tie and a woman in a pant suit; they face off against a cartoon insurgent, a shadowy figure holding a Kalashnikov rifle. The circle was bounded by the phrase “United States Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative”; a crest, top and bottom, read “whole of government” and “whole of society.”
    This was more than the usual series of lectures and workshops. It was designed to set the agenda for something quite radical: refashioning the U.S. government around stability operations and nation building. This would be a generation-long effort, something that would require reorganizing the agencies of government around the mission of advising, rebuilding, and sometimes directly administering vulnerable states. Hillen’s co-host, Jeb Nadaner, the deputy secretary of defense for stability operations, ticked off a list of new “capabilities” the U.S. government would require. At the top of the list was a deployable “civilian reserve,” analogous to the military’s reserve system, that could send civilian experts to crisis regions on short notice.
    It was, in short, a call to reform the U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid establishment and place it on a war footing. Nadaner said that this new force, like soldiers, would need to take part in military exercises, and they would need protection in the field. This dedicated cadre of nation builders might even extend outside the federal government: It might include members of state and local government, private-sector experts, even representatives of nongovernmental organizations. “We’re going to need a national movement, if we want to see the civilian reserve develop into the institution it needs to become,” Nadaner said.
    In essence, the counterinsurgents were mobilizing around a vision of a reinvented federal government, a sort of Colonial Office for the twenty-first century. It would have a cadre of skilled development experts and administrators who could work in collapsed states and war zones; a corps of social scientists who could help the military navigate this complex ethnic terrain; a military advisory force that would help build the key security institutions of developing countries. In theory, it would unite the practice of development, defense, and diplomacy. The foundation was now being laid for all three. The next several years would be a test: of whether the United States was equipped for nation building, and if nation building could succeed.
    At that stage, Iraq was still in the throes of a civil war. U.S. assistance had yielded some tenuous successes, including a series of national elections in 2005. Afghanistan had receded from the headlines, but it, too, was beginning to face growing instability as the Taliban regrouped and as guerrillas built a recruiting and organizational base across the border in Pakistan. Even as the United States looked for a smarter approach, the internal dynamics in both countries meant that the nation-building mission would still have to be done under fire.
    * Neumann said he didn’t recall that remark, or any such exchange with Hillen. “He may have clashed with someone in Kabul and it may not have come up to me,” he said. But ferrying officials from Washington around the hinterlands, Neumann added, was