Armed Humanitarians Read Online Free

make a fact-finding trip to Torkham, the main customs station on the highway between Peshawar and Jalalabad. Having senior officials on board helped him line up the helicopter flight, and they could drop Parker off in Jalalabad. After rising at the crack of dawn, going down to the airport, and waiting for liftoff, Parker weighed the situation: It was her first job after graduate school; it was her first trip on a helicopter. As the helicopter lifted off, Parker breathed in: Okay, welcome to your new job .
    The flight was stunning. The chopper wound through the jutting canyons of the Kabul Gorge, passed over the sparkling reservoir behind the Surobi Dam, and then dropped low, hugging the plains of Nangarhar Province, until it arrived at the Jalalabad PRT’s camp. The USAID team touched down at a primitive landing zone, by a swampy area behind the PRT site.
    At the landing zone, Parker and the USAID team were met by an Army Civil Affairs major. Here’s a strapping young lad , she thought to herself with a laugh. And then it started to sink in: She would be living alone on a military base with all of these young men, many of whom were barely old enough to buy beer. The soldiers unloaded Parker’s gear, and then, after grabbing a quick breakfast, the entire team walked over to a convoy of pickup trucks and SUVs for the two-hour ride to the border.
    Another major was standing by the trucks with an enormous plug of chew in his mouth. He sized up Parker, a Georgia native with the looks of a hometown sweetheart, strapped into body armor and ready for the journey.
    â€œSo,” he drawled with an exaggerated southern accent, “You a Republican or Democrat?”
    â€œHow about undecided?” Parker shot back.
    â€œI’ll take it, you’re hired!” the officer said approvingly. “I think we just got an upgrade in AID people.”
    When Parker arrived in Nangarhar Province, the Provincial Reconstruction Teams were still a novelty. Parker had first heard of them just a few months before, when she was finishing a graduate degree at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. An instructor had suggested that she research a paper on this new experiment; aside from a critique written by Barbara Stapleton, then of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an alliance of charity organizations, there almost was no literature on the subject. So Parker went straight to the source: She began lining up interviews with people in the Pentagon who were involved with setting up the PRTs. She couldn’t get an appointment with Joseph Collins, so she arranged an interview with Dave des Roches, a gregarious West Point graduate who worked on Collins’s staff and had worked behind the scenes to set up the first PRTs. Parker interviewed des Roches at a bar.
    She also paid a call on the Afghanistan desk at USAID. After she concluded her interview, the official she was interviewing made her a recruitment pitch. Parker had already worked on a USAID project in Nepal; she was finishing graduate school; and she probably knew more about PRTs than anyone else right now. Did she want to apply for a job?
    At the time, tenured USAID officers had few incentives to work and live on a military outpost on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Culturally speaking, the USAID bureaucracy primarily viewed itself as an altruistic organization, not an arm of the U.S. national security establishment. Volunteering for this quasi-military duty was not a career-enhancing move. What’s more, USAID tenure and promotion boards weren’t quite sure how to review or evaluate someone who had served on a PRT: It didn’t fit the traditional job description for a USAID worker, and very few volunteers came forward within the bureaucracy in the early days of the PRTs. *
    Consequently the agency had to turn to contractors such as Parker. USAID had a mechanism, called a personal services contract,