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which basically allowed USAID to beef up its foreign service by hiring individual contractors. The PSCs, as they were called, worked directly for USAID. They held temporary positions within the civil service, but they had none of the long-term benefits that USAID personnel enjoyed. Within the caste system of USAID, they were temporary hires, bureaucratic second-class citizens.
    These shake-and-bake USAID officers were not an easy fit with the military culture, either. Parker’s predecessor had clashed with the military members of the Jalalabad team. As a former Marine officer, he was unimpressed by what he saw as sloppy soldiering by the Army reservists and National Guard soldiers on the outpost. He reprimanded them for discipline infractions such as failing to arm their weapons when they went “outside the wire.” For their part the troops resented being dressed down by an aid worker. When Parker arrived at the Jalalabad base, she was unsure how she would fit in, both as a civilian and as a woman.
    Parker’s first day on the job was not easy. Before the drive to Torkham, the security team held a predeparture briefing, which was routine before a military convoy. The PRT had never had a civilian female team member, and they were unsure how the conservative, male-dominated Pashtun community of Torkham would respond to her presence. “Michelle, if you feel at all uncomfortable, let us know and we’ll sweep you into the car,” said one of the members of the security team.
    And Parker had to adjust to military culture as well. As she climbed inside the truck, she found her boots on the top of some odd black box in the passenger compartment. “What’s that?” she asked. One of her colleagues silenced her: their interpreter was in the car. He was a local hire and had no security clearance. You had to be careful not to talk about the equipment in front of them. It was her first encounter with what the military calls OPSEC (operational security): keeping a lid on classified information, keeping operational plans closely held, not revealing sensitive information about equipment or intelligence collection capabilities. OPSEC was not a phrase that was usually employed in aid and development circles.
    They arrived at Torkham. Sure enough, Parker found herself the lone woman at the meeting with local leaders on the electrification project. Everyone seemed to be staring. She was uncomfortable, and her headscarf kept slipping off, but she didn’t want to show any fear. She kept her composure, and the meetings, about an electrification project and a government proposal to move the border post, went without a hitch. On the ride back to Jalalabad, she reviewed her first day on the job: the insane helicopter ride from Kabul, the gorgeous ride down to the Khyber Pass. Not a bad first day of work. She was hooked.
    Parker was a natural for the role: As a woman she felt no peer pressure, no need to fit in with the “band of brothers” culture of the military. She would never be part of the boys’ club. For her, as a strong, independent woman, living alone on a military base, it was liberating to be outside the group. There was no need to pander. She could do her job without feeling as though she had to toe the military’s line.
    More important, she could be a player. For a relatively junior civil servant, she wielded a significant amount of power. In addition to the “quick impact” funds at her disposal, she ended up working behind the scenes to start a road project that would link the homelands of the remote Shinwari tribe, in the Shinwar District of Nangarhar Province, with Highway 1, the main road that linked the region with the capital. Constructing the road was an important political move that helped placate the tribal leadership and improved the aid workers’ relations with the provincial government. Parker had a fair degree of autonomy, serious resources, and a heavily