Special Ops tackle aid mission

One European agency protests that soldiers are wearing civilian clothes, though government agencies say that dispensing of uniforms makes it easier for them to take team members out for tea. "The uniform is a barrier, and we know that the level of interaction we have with relief agencies and the UN is far better than in Bosnia or Kosovo [where uniforms were worn]," says Field, who first called UN and other groups to a meeting in October at Central Command in Tampa.

"What we did at Centcom was ground-breaking," she says. But while the military said it wanted to enable the agencies, it didn't get very far at first. The only requests were for quick extraction possibilities in the case of trouble, or guarding convoys. "That is still in their minds from Somalia," says Field, who dispatched convoy guards in Somalia.

This is not necessarily a hearts-and-minds campaign, though. Such operations were tried in Vietnam - and failed. The Soviets did the same thing - running clinics and feeding Afghans when they occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.

Instead, the Pentagon here is applying military capabilities to civilian problems at a time when the usual agencies are just getting to their feet - to prevent the need for any future military operations.

Such plans have been in the works long before Sept. 11 sparked the Afghan war. Captain Curt, who will only provide his first name, runs the team in Herat. To learn how to deal with relief workers, journalists, and locals, he was given five months of regional training, six months of Arabic, and one month of civil affairs training. "That school prepared us, along with the mistakes we made in the past," says Captain Curt, who sports a short goatee and Oakley sunglasses. "This is the same stuff we do in peacetime, with the add-on of a little more risk in the environment."

That means that teams like his are sometimes called in to escort officials from the US Agency for International Development, who might otherwise not be able to assess certain areas. To support the Kabul government, they also fly Afghan officials to problem areas.

"We go to the ministries and ask what their priorities are," says Major Mike, an engineer wearing a woolen Panjshiri hat on a survey in Herat. "We're trying to empower the Afghans to do the work."

Major Mike points out officials from the irrigation and rural develop ministries sitting on the Ariana flight, just in front of his seat. The CJCMOTF paid for their tickets, and they are requesting $3,800 to travel to former Soviet republics to buy parts for their broken fleet of drill and pumping equipment.

"You can't slap a US drill head on a Soviet drill," Mike says. The technological gap is almost as deep as the culture gap, in one of the poorest nations on earth. "We whip out our satellite phones, and they don't have any phone at all," he says.

Projects are small by relief standards - normally $5,000 to $90,000. The entire budget for the CJCMOTF is just $2 million. "There have been certain frustrations," says Field, who helped pull together this unit from Special Operations groups at Ft. Bragg, NC. "In many ways, civil-military work is still foreign to people who make up general staffs. Most of them are war-fighters."

For those deployed in the further reaches of Afghanistan, bantering with their interpreters and grappling with the turf wars that can afflict normal relief agencies, there are few doubts about the significance of their work.

"We will write up a long-term plan, to keep coming back, to make sure the projects are still working. That is one of the lessons we have learned," says Warmack. "We will probably be the last US military unit to leave Afghanistan."

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