Out of the Mountains Read Online Free Page A

quiet north a provincial governor half-jokingly told the German commander in his area, “The Pashtuns in the south shoot at you, and you give them money. Here we support you, and we get nothing. Who do we have to shoot to get some aid around here?” 12
    This pattern isn’t unique to Afghanistan. In Iraq in 2007 I spent a little time with a reconstruction liaison team (RLT), a specialist team that monitored infrastructure projects. RLTs in Iraq were fielded by Aegis, the British security and consulting firm, by far the most competent and enlightened of the many security companies operating in Iraq—or, indeed, anywhere I’ve worked. Aegis teams worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Each comprised eight people in two vehicles, and always included a mix of Iraqi nationals with expatriate drivers and radio operators. The Iraqis took the lead in consultation with local communities, with the expats hanging back and keeping a low profile. The proof of this low-key approach was in the results: at a time when aggressive, heavily armed security contractors were getting into firefights every day, killing dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians, the Aegis RLTs pulled off more than three hundred successful operations, in the most dangerous parts of Iraq, without ever getting into a firefight, killing a single Iraqi, or losing a team member.
    The RLT leader I was with, a cool and unflappable former German paratrooper, told me of an incident at a forward operating base in northern Iraq. A U.S. Army unit had just rotated into the area and was being mortared from a district that, until then, had been perfectly quiet. Suspecting the insurgents had sent fighters into the area, the Americans were considering a cordon-and-search operation, but first asked the Aegis team to check things out. In their quiet way, with Iraqi team members discreetly engaging the community, the RLT quickly had an answer: the local sheikh ran a construction company, and he’d been promised a contract by the outgoing unit. During the changeover between the two U.S. units, this seemingly minor detail had somehow slipped through the cracks. The new unit, unaware of the commitment, had given the contract to another company, so the sheikh was mortaring the base—in order, he said, to get people’s attention and avenge the injustice.
    Again, mortaring the base might seem like a risky overreaction to a mere contracting glitch. But the sheikh, whatever his feelings toward the coalition, had little choice: failing to avenge the slight would have undermined his authority, making him, his family, and his tribal group less safe. The loss of prestige would have weakened his ability to prevail in local disputes and negotiations, ultimately depriving his group of access to resources—and in a chaotic country with little rule of law and no welfare safety net, that was a potential death sentence. Thus what might look like a minor issue, and in fact was quite minor in itself, had major implications for this local leader and thus, by extension, for the American unit. It would have dishonored the sheikh to take a gentler approach (say, a phone call or a visit to complain to the new unit), since he couldn’t afford to be seen as a supplicant. Prestige was the one essential currency he had, and he had to act to preserve that prestige: he really did have no choice. He hoped the Americans would understand, he told the Aegis team, that it was just business—nothing personal. Sure enough, when the new unit, acting on the RLT’s advice, resolved the contracting issue, the mortaring stopped overnight. 13
    III
    We’ll never know for certain the background to this very minor firefight in Dara-i-Nur, just one of dozens of combat incidents that happened across Afghanistan that day in September 2009. Perhaps my guess, as I pondered the attack on the helicopter ride back to Kabul, was right, and the halfhearted ambush was part of the broader