I can't stand by and watch Peter Van Buren's account of the PRTs stand

By Stephen Donnelly

Best Defense guest respondent

I was surprised to see Foreign
Policy providing so high a soapbox
for Peter
Van Buren, a State Department Foreign Service Officer who, by his own
admission, "meant
well" during his brief and unproductive jaunt as an Embedded Provincial
Reconstruction Team (EPRT) leader in Iraq in 2009, but, according to him,
caused more damage there than most any other individual I have ever heard of or
witnessed.

Two articles and a blog spotlight in just a few days.

Obviously, Van Buren never got the drift of PRTs, a decisive
and controversial 2007 effort by the State Department's Office of Provincial
Affairs' Director Ambassador Henry Clarke to break through the failed
bureaucracy of top-down US colonial administration programs by forcing
decision-making out to committed civilian reconstruction staff on the ground.
Clarke always knew that the Achilles Heel of PRTs was poor assignments of
unqualified individuals, and that the only defense against the Peter van Burens
was to have many PRTs so that the failures did not pull down the whole mission.

The real Iraq PRT story is not pretty, fraught with
bureaucratic snafus, and involved much waste, fraud, abuse, and war wreckage:
the best laid plans of mice and men seldom survive a powerful IED, regardless
of bravery or the best of intentions! But it is not the story that Peter van
Buren tells which inaccurately paints a very bad light on the entire Foreign
Service, with which he seems very dissatisfied.

The military, as Clarke often explained, had a "do it now"
attitude that compelled each new brigade to launch one "quick hit" program
after another to have Iraqis pick up the trash. The PRTs had to break that mold
by focusing on the real problem: the Iraqis had no system, post-2003, to pick
up their own trash. PRTs had to work across the rotational boundary with Iraqi
counterparties, down to the local and provincial levels, to create permanent
solutions for Iraqis' technical, resource, and administrative problems or we
would be locked in Iraq forever. The real conflict was the damaging one between
U.S. bureaucracy (the Embassy and agencies) and the field, where localized
Iraqi solutions had to be found and nourished.

Clarke's effort echoed the philosophy of former CPA
colleague Ronald Neumann, later serving as Afghan ambassador, that endless
weekly metrics reporting -- the underpinning of Rumsfeld's managerial
philosophy -- always showed the same problems, never solved anything, and
absent a new approach, the only way to improve the metrics was to manipulate
them or fudge the reports.

Of course, none of that was PC for Rumsfeld who, according
to reports from a May 8, 2008 New York
Times article, opined:

The guy who replaced him
is just terrible Neuman. I mean he's a career foreign service officer. He ought
to be running a museum somewhere. That's also off the record. No, he ought to
be assistant to the guy...I wouldn't hire the guy to push a wheelbarrow.

[[BREAK]]

Rumsfeld added that the Pentagon working with other agencies
"was like an elephant talking to a
monkey," acknowledging who really controlled the power, staffing, and
budgets in Iraq, and the interagency conflicts that defined much of the Iraq
and Afghan debacles.

Even within State, the PRT concept in 2007 directly
confronted policy planning director Steven D. Krasner, a leading advocate for
nation-building, who deeply believed in the concept of almost permanent
American neo-colonialism as the answer to failed states -- the implicit CPA
strategy outlined in a January 2008 Harvard
International Review article "Fixing Failed
States: A Cure Worse Than the Disease?"

Bringing in actual senior civilian advisors -- the opposite
of the tried and true "whole of government" strategy where any federal employee
(IRS? DHS?) could do a better job running a water treatment plant
reconstruction than any experienced public works engineer -- threatened to open
even more institutional Pandora's Boxes, especially if many of those civilians
saw local power grabs and influence pressures as something routine to their
field (the regular problem to be overcome) rather than a unique proof of the
corruption and incompetence of the colonials in need of intense and enduring U.S.
oversight.

Decentralization of decision-making, and civilian
engagement, the big "new ideas," were the essential keys to Provincial
Reconstruction Teams -- getting civilians (not military or federal assignees)
out on the ground to figure out what was wrong, what was needed, and to deliver
it with the mantra of empowering Iraqis to do for themselves, and to rapidly
work the U.S. (military) out of the job of micro-managing Iraq from Washington
through short-term assignees.

The risks of decentralization, especially with civilians at
the tip of the spear in dangerous, unstable and corrupt environments, were
many, as Clarke knew from Bosnia, but the only way to escape the devil we
already knew.

One risk that Clarke was abundantly aware of in 2007 was
that a provincial team leader, always an FSO, might be inept, whether at the
larger provincial level teams, as many as one hundred experts, security and
support staff, or in the smaller embedded teams of a dozen or less attached to
military units. That risk, of course, could only be offset by the number of
PRTs, one in each province, their independence of action, and the rolling
assignment process -- if one failed, it would not affect the others, and could
be corrected by reassignment. More important for Clarke and his team, now back
from Baghdad to oversee recruiting, was the selection process -- getting the
right team leaders and advisors on the ground in 2008 was the key, while
recognizing that some might not actually pan out, and some civilians, arriving
in the chaos, might just go home (as some did).

Although not nearly as entertaining as Peter Van Buren's
work, another book, Career
Diplomacy : Life and Work in the US Foreign Service, by Harry W. Kopp and Charles A. Gillespie, seriously explains
the challenges faced by Clarke and the State Department in responding to the
Iraq Mission, not the least of which was the sheer lack of numbers in the State
Department (trained or untrained) to fill the postings needed without harm to
State's overall operating environment.

In December 2007, I sat with the Ambassador and a group of
former OPA/IRMO staff in the coffee shop at Foggy Bottom prior to my deployment
as senior civilian urban planning adviser. They made no bones about the mess I
would find on the ground there, or the need to steel myself from the "this is
the way we do it" bunch. If our small handful of senior civilian advisors was
not fired up every day with serious problem-solving (much of the problems being
U.S. ones) then it was time to move to the next batch of problems.

It was the same message he had given earlier to my whole
Foreign Service Institute class in Alexandria, but with details for my
particular assignment to join Steven Buckler's PRT operating out of Tikrit. The
class was a dozen foreign service officers (all volunteers and no "weenies"
amongst them), and a dozen senior civilians, all past military age but fit and
ready to do what was necessary. None of our civilian cohort were federal
employees, except one from the Federal Highway Administration, the only woman
in our 50-something group, and a very brave and particularly competent one
bound for the Department of Transportation's advisory mission to Iraq's
transportation ministry. The rest of us were all headed for Northern Iraq,
giving up the safety of civilian jobs as city managers, transportation
engineers, utility managers, and planners in Miami Beach, Anaheim, Kansas City,
and Crofton, Maryland for the dangerous sojourn to Mosul, Diyala, Kirkuk, and
Tikrit without any knowledge about hardship pay premiums or vacation schedules.

All of us had called the State Department in May 2007, as
the war raged, after a Washington Post
article indicating that Ambassador Crocker (and Clarke as we learned later)
needed experienced senior civilians; the job descriptions and pay scales were
created afterwards. Surprisingly from this national pool, many of us knew or knew
of each other, having worked as senior staff on related projects or for the
same employers. My transportation engineering partner and I knew each other's
portfolio, and Diyala's senior economic advisor (our provincial next door
neighbor for this assignment) and I had shared the same Gulf Coast employer at
different periods of time.

As explained by Clarke, the plan was simple: each of us had
been picked because of our backgrounds and skills as problem-solvers in our
respective fields; they would teach us what we needed to deploy, and deliver us
to the problems. From there, we were on our own, so learn as much as you can
before hand.

The FSI course we attended in fall 2007 brought the likes of
Phebe Marr, author of The
Modern History of Iraq, who provided us with detailed briefings on the
past and present of what we needed to know (and the obvious reading assignment
of her book), a military colonel to teach us (mostly veterans) the basics of
current military structure, protocol and procedures. Two of our group were Arab
speakers, who supplemented our digital and classroom language course (although
mostly with just the idioms and cuss words that make a language real).

Beyond the classroom, we learned the basics of war zone
first aid, and particularly how to use a tourniquet and all the other parts of
the field kits we would later carry on our military movements. The infamous "Crash
and Bang" tactical driving course taught us the fine points of very rough and
dangerous driving, which, in hindsight, made the death spiral landing into
Baghdad Airport seem rather tame afterwards. We also re-familiarized on
weapons, and had demonstrations on IEDs.

As our group set off for Iraq, all of us felt as very
well-briefed and trained as we could be under the chaotic and fast-track
circumstances, although the parallels to disaster movies like Meteor, where a group of drillers are
rapidly assembled and shot into space to emplace a nuclear device on a meteor
threatening Earth, was not lost on any of us.

Our biggest challenge, as was predicted, was to get out of
Embassy Baghdad and up to our duty stations. Transportation out of Baghdad for
the uninitiated was not easy, as Embassy staff held one mandatory "briefing"
after another as different departments could tell us little but implored us to
report what we found to them (not the guy in the stove-piped office next door).

Finally arriving at the sprawling Contingency Operating Base
Speicher in the first week of January 2008, the lack of resources, planning,
and preparedness was obvious, offset only by the warmth and competence of
Salah-Ad-Din PRT Team Leader Steven Buckler who, like Clarke, was one of the
best examples of the foreign service, dedicated diplomats with a strength in
people, and vast experience in many diverse (and sometime very challenging)
places. The huge Salah-Ad Din PRT, more than one hundred, was hobbled by the
lack of secure movement opportunities, a few brief movements a week to nearby
Tikrit, which Steve had off-set by establishing a series of satellite PRT
offices in Bayji, Balad, Sammara and Tuz Khormatu to get out as far as the
security bubble would let him. Thus, the motto of the PRT: "Outside the Wire."

Mine and my transportation planning advisor partner's
assignment was to rapidly survey public and private infrastructure, and come up
with big fixes as fast as possible that would synchronize U.S. and Iraqi
efforts in and around Salah-Ad-Din (Northern Iraq). A nebulous assignment to do
whatever it is we could to make a difference. Within a week, we had hooked up
with the Division Headquarters staff (MND-North) co-located with us at COB
Speicher. They had their own helicopter and military ground movement resources,
so we could travel the length and breadth of the North without PRT constraints.
Steve also got us in to meet the senior provincial officials, and out to the
satellites to get as far as we could as fast as we could get there.

MND-North, under then-Major General Mark Hertling, made two
engineering battalions available -- if something needed fixing, they could do
some heavy lifting -- essential in provinces where every desk, pencil and
bulldozer had been looted or destroyed. The entire military team joined in our
effort of mapping and assessing the North -- every road and bridge, every
poultry house, oil refining facility, concrete plant, and electrical facility,
and followed that up with lots of unexpected expertises from electrical
engineers to physicists (yes, really important when you are reconstructing
power grids and oil refineries).

By April 2008, General Hertling, using "helicopter
diplomacy" (flying Iraqi ministers up to broken bridges on the Tigris to meet
with local officials at the problem site) had cajoled Iraq's Transportation
Ministry to prioritize reopening the bridges across the Tigris, first with
temporary bridges, then with permanent ones at Mosul, Bayji and Diyala, all
with Iraqi military security bases and checkpoints. Agricultural tracking had
identified each component of the "value chain" assets and stages, from grain
supplies to poultry hatcheries, with priorities on reopening local production
(chickens and tomatoes) instead of big processing plants (the old US way).
Iraqis needed very little training to simply start doing what they used to do,
once bridges and roads reopened access to markets.

Behind us through the PRT was a wealth of expertise; the
second in command of the CDC was our health team lead (there to study cholera
responses firsthand); his military civil affairs equivalent was a skilled
senior hospital administrator from Minneapolis (essential to reopening Salah Ad
Din's hospital system); USDA sent one of its best dry-land farming experts to
help restart small animal and rangeland activities; and, most prominent from
our group was a bold and tireless Rule of Law team, led by a senior Federal
Prosecutor who worked closely with threatened Iraqi judges to, with great
danger to all involved, establish a fledgling system of courts and prisons.

By June 2008, all hands at the PRT, and many at MND-North
were involved in drought relief and cholera prevention with the Iraqi
ministers, provincial staff and medical professionals. Our friend from the Federal
Highway Administration (based in Baghdad) worked closely with the Iraqi
Transportation Ministry and MND-North's military and mapping resources to
develop a complete national transportation map with every bridge mapped,
assessed and identified (by code number) using the Iraqi highway coding
systems.

The Embassy provided no centralized meeting or information
sharing processes between the civilian advisors -- every communication was one
way -- but the MNDs took up the slack through regional conferences, and,
because we had all trained together, we had our own informal networks.

The greatest assets in many respects were our "clients," the
Iraqi ministers, provincial officials, and local residents who were active and
engaged at every level. The Minister of Planning needed maps and air photos to
create regional assessments to plan and allocate Iraqi funds; his critical
agency had access to mountains of planning, budgeting and project resources
desperately needed in the North, so we had much to share, plus, he sent nice
thank you letters to Ambassador Crocker for the assets we were able to make
available to him. These kinds of ministerial relationships helped to bridge
Iraqi funding gaps for essential projects for the provinces, from hospitals in
Samarra to housing projects in Tikrit.

Across all of our activities, the biggest stumbling block to
Iraqi self-governance was the lack of basic maps, studies and information to
allow effective management. No two governors had the same maps of the same
provinces, and many in key positions were constrained from travel. Getting
basic resources like Geographic Information Systems (integrated digital mapping
and resource information) was a critical next step which, in real life, needed
to be done on a national level, and through the ministries. It was also part of
our immediate assigned mission.

By July 2008, our Salah Ad Din planning pair shifted to
Baghdad (with support from our PRT and the Embassy) to coordinate the GIS
effort with USAID/RTI, US military terrain specialists (MNC-I at camp Victory),
National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (in Bethesda & Baghdad), and the
Ministry of Planning and Iraqi Mapping Directorate. A basic Iraq-wide GIS
framework was widely distributed to ministries and provinces in October 2008 following
a large GIS conference at Al Rasheed Hotel (Baghdad).

By September 2008, much of our provincial reconstruction
efforts were coming to conclusion (as was our short-term assignment), but
General Hertling brought us down to talk to the Ambassador about the next big
US problem, the Kurdish disputed boundaries for which our mapping and wide
travel throughout the North was important. At that point, our tour was extended
and we were specially assigned to the United Nations Assistance Mission-Iraq's
Disputed Boundary Team to help where we could in that effort.

Certainly, my planning partner and I accomplished a lot
during our temporary assignment, but it was no different than many of our
senior civilian advisor cohort, working throughout the North. Several were in
EPRTs in Diyala and Mosul. They came with the tools, and put them to use. Some
followed the military into Sadr City in June 2008 (not for the fainthearted).

Beyond our cohort, there were truly remarkable bands of
civilians in other PRTs and EPRTs, rebuilding industry, government and
agriculture in Kirkuk and Anbar, and folks out on the very dangerous streets of
small towns across Iraq, side by side with soldiers, doing important work,
wherever and whenever they could.

Throughout, all of us had one mission -- to turn over
control to Iraqis so that we and our military colleagues could go home leaving
a functional, but far from perfect, Iraq behind.

How much did we waste in stupid project funding? I don't
know that I ever wasted a penny, particularly because much of our efforts were
Iraqi funded, or through sharing of already existing resources (mapping,
assessments). Knowing the role and resources of the Iraqi ministries assured us
that money was really not an effective weapon. Behind us was MG Hertling,
notorious for not wasting Commander's Emergency Funds unless there was a
genuine emergency, and with whom we forced through conditions that no US funds
would be used without Iraqi concurrence to accept and sustain the projects
(that one condition killed off a lot of stupid US projects).

How much waste, fraud, and abuse did we see that was not "in
our lane?"

Plenty. One of SIGIR's biggest prosecutions was the US Army
Corps of Engineer's contract manager for Northern Iraq; like some poorly
managed contract management departments in local US counties and school
systems, he never saw a contract he didn't like, and most -- the schools and
clinics that were never completed and not accepted by the Iraqis -- were a
Gordian knot of "pass along" contracts, shoddy construction, and bloated
budgets. Our main focus was on larger Iraq-funded projects (roads, bridges,
treatment plants, etc...), so we were not completely dependent on our Corps staff
as many PRTs were.

In fact, we routinely saw waste, fraud and abuse, fought it
daily, or just avoided it (by Iraq-funded projects). One big battle, for
example, was between State and Corps of Engineers over their competing $25
million dollar multi-year GIS projects; the only way to stop it was to create
your own (as we all did) and give it to the Iraqis.

One we couldn't avoid was a DoS-funded program for 23
schools in Salah Ad Din that the provincial government did not want. These were
the bureaucratic vampires that seemingly could never be killed -- until a very
good new Corps of Engineers officer rotated in and killed it dead in late 2008
after a US contractor showed up to knock down a crowded 12 room schoolhouse in
Samarra to replace it with a 6 classroom one -- nobody in Samarra wanted to
lose classrooms just to accommodate a silly State Department program with no
rhyme, reason or purpose on the ground (the kind Clarke was working to stop).

Like so many things in Iraq, the Corps of Engineers was
disastrous in one year, and excellent in another. Every rotation is a new year
in this game.

As explained by provincial officials, if we ask for a water
tank, the US gives us a fire truck which we can't maintain (Yes, in Tikrit),
and if we want a school, we will build a good one for $300,000 where we want it
and how we want it. If you build it, it will cost $3 million, be of such poor
quality that we cannot maintain it, and it will be in the wrong place. They had
watched us in every year, and knew what to expect.

Oh, I forgot. The stereotype is that the Iraqis, not the United States,
are corrupt and inept. Well, no more so than the U.S. parties who trained and
appointed them.

How many times did all of us see military and PRT alike
working on projects that were little more than "make-work" projects to help
create much-needed income for the many destitute families (and especially the
widows) in need of any humanitarian resources within the appropriate US role
for post-conflict humanitarian relief?

Plenty, and while some of the efforts may look silly on
paper in a very slanted presentation, they made perfect sense if you were there
and understood what was really happening: women's groups, small business
efforts, trash pickup, canal clearing, etc... That was not waste, fraud or abuse
to anyone confronted with those circumstances. None of us, civilian and
military alike, were unaffected by the destitute war widows and once proud
engineers begging for jobs -- any jobs.

The battles for pure waste, fraud and abuse projects were
nasty, routine, and mostly between U.S. agencies. Management of reconstruction
leaves little to be proud of by any U.S. agency (USAID, DoS, or DoD). All the
civilians and military that actually accomplished things did so by the serious
efforts that Ambassador Clarke had explained from the outset.

Ineptitude was not a norm, but it was around, as was
corruption, but so too was bravery and sacrifice. There were some truly
remarkable and competent FSOs in the mold of Clarke and Buckler (10 percent),
regular folks doing the best they could (80 percent), and, as in any
organization or profession, a small group of very questionable ones not
appropriate for these kinds of assignments (10 percent).

It is ridiculous to compare what a dozen carefully selected
civilian troubleshooter experts were involved with or accomplished with the
reconstruction capabilities of an FSO, with no particular training or exposure
to our professional fields. Our role was to either support them or target
through them.

Beyond the PRTs, nothing "we" accomplished could have
happened without countless FSOs, military and Embassy staff handling the
immense bureaucratic tasks and battles needed to keep us active. There were few
big projects "we" succeeded on without Vinnie Azzarelli, ITAO Chief of Staff,
General Hertling, or MG Mark Zamzow (General Petreaus's adjutant) fighting it
through, or, as with our ministry and UN work, Ambassador Crocker not
approving.

PRTs aside, Embassy Baghdad, given the US role in Iraq, was
a huge endeavor with many FSOs in Baghdad doing their actual professional tasks
-- analysis, administration, reporting, diplomacy.

Was all of this hard for everybody? You bet.

Was it a chaotic mess? You bet.

Did security make all of this much more dangerous and
problematic? Absolutely.

One of our senior advisors, Terry Barnich of Chicago, died
in May 2009 in a car bombing, to the great regret of many of us who worked
closely with him.

Many of us, too, owe our lives to the young soldiers who
died or were severely injured making things safe for us and our projects.

Christopher Warren Lotter, 19 years old, from Chester Heights,
PA, was shot on Dec. 31, 2008, while on patrol to inspect one of our water
treatment plant projects in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Tikrit.
I went to Arlington for his service in January 2009, but didn't want to intrude
on his family, or know what to say, so I watched from the hillside. He's the
soldier I carry in my memory as the symbol for so many more. But how do you
explain all of this to his parents if they asked deeper questions?

Sadly, too, many of our Iraqi provincial colleagues were
killed in the March 2011 attack on Tikrit's provincial headquarters. Political
infighting aside, the friendliness, courtesy, and professionalism of these
folks to their US colleagues left many in the PRT with lasting fond memories
and sadness at their losses.

So much bittersweet, So many mixed emotions. So many tears
and smiles. And then you read the reports of Peter van Buren.

It is just incredible.

Stephen Donnelly,
AICP, is a planning consultant in Crofton, Maryland. He served as Senior Urban
Planning Advisor, Iraq, Department of State (2007-2009).