US forges new approach on aid to Afghans

In practice, civil-affairs soldiers split the role of soldier and humanitarian, fighting when necessary, and then providing the first real-time battlefield information about where help is needed most. "I've cut the word 'coordinate' out of my dictionary, because the NGOs don't want to feel they're being directed by the military," Colonel Maughan says with a smile. "We don't try to point them in any directions. We let them come to their own conclusions."

The civil-affairs units under Maughan's command are relatively compact. There are about 500 civil-affairs soldiers in Afghanistan, out of a total of 8,000 US troops overall. All civil-affairs soldiers in this theater are US Army reservists, selected for their professional experience in the civilian world as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and contractors. The Army has only one active-duty civil-affairs unit; it has been deployed to Iraq.

The results from America's bolder approach to civil-military affairs have thus far been mixed.

In the city of Gardez, near the battlefields of Operation Anaconda, the first PRT team has already helped to rebuild schools for girls and boys, and created sufficient security so that NGOs can feel safe enough to relocate their offices in Gardez itself, instead of commuting from Kabul each day.

In Bamiyan, NGOs complain that US civil-affairs activities there have actually made the security situation worse. Some point to the fact that the same helicopter that brought in the supposedly humanitarian US civil-affairs team was used the same day to ferry out a recently captured pro-Taliban commander.

But aid workers point to other results. In Helmand, two wells built by US civil-affairs forces were sabotaged in January. In Paktia and Wardak provinces, new girls' schools set up by PRTs were burned down. And aid workers themselves have seen an increase in threats and outright violence, from attacks on their vehicles to grenades thrown into NGO compounds.

"This is a new concept, developed by a country to use humanitarian assistance for political and strategic and military goals, and it will be applied in Iraq and other war zones," says Bruno Marques, Afghanistan director for Solidarités, a French aid group that operates in Bamiyan. "What we do here will affect humanitarian assistance in the future. They aren't going to stop what they are doing, so the best we can do is create some guidelines, and tell the military: 'Don't cross that line.' "

Colonel Maughan acknowledges the lines between soldier and aid worker can get blurred in the fog of war. But he says that Afghans, like most people, tend to judge people by their actions, not by their uniforms.

For him, the clearest evidence of this came in the aftermath of the US bombing of a wedding party in Deh Rawood last year. In that incident, faulty intelligence mistakenly led a US AC-130 gunship to attack a family compound in the central province of Oruzgan, killing some 35 civilians, including women and children. "Our civil-affairs units were among the first people there, assessing the damage and the death toll," he says. "Initially the reaction was negative, people were throwing rocks at them. But eventually, after the investigation into the incident, people in civil affairs noticed a much reduced anger. We rebuilt schools in the area, and their attitude changed. Now the civil-affairs [officers] are welcome."

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